It wasn’t your typical retirement party. Then again, Linda Mengel and James Harris aren’t your typical teachers. 

Two weeks ago, more than 300 parents, teachers and students packed the Jefferson Elementary School auditorium to honor Mengel, a 63-year-old Hawaiian with an infectious smile and gentle touch with children, and Harris, 61, an understated Southern Californian with a wry sense of humor and surprising ability to inspire.  

“I was overwhelmed,” said Harris, a fifth-grade teacher. “It was really nice.” 

The May 30 retirement party wasn’t the only one in the district. Harris and Mengel are just two of 23 Berkeley teachers who will spend their last day in the classroom Friday when the school year ends. 

“We’re going to miss them dearly,” said Berkeley Federation of Teachers President Barry Fike, of the group of retirees. “They’ve all provided such a wealth of experience and wisdom to the district and their colleagues.” 

Jefferson principal Betty Delaney said Mengel and Harris each brought their own gifts to the classroom. 

“[Mengel’s] sensitivity to children and their needs will be missed,” she said, and Harris “pushes children to recognize that they have a responsibility for their education.” 

Harris, a 36-year veteran of the Berkeley Unified School District, grew up in the Pasadena suburb of Temple City, the son of a nurse and a post office worker. After graduating from Arizona State University, where he spent several summers working with troubled youth, he moved to Berkeley with his wife, Veronica, in 1967 and began work as a substitute teacher at Longfellow Elementary School. Two weeks into the school year, a teacher fled to Canada to avoid the draft and Harris had a full-time job. 

At the time, the Berkeley Unified School District was still a year away from becoming the first district in the nation to voluntarily integrate its largely segregated schools, and Longfellow’s students were all black. As a teacher, Harris said he tried to shield his pupils from the psychological strains of segregation. 

“I didn’t want them to think they couldn’t do what everyone else could do,” said Harris. “I always wanted to keep expectations high.” 

In 1968, Harris moved to Lincoln Elementary School, later Malcolm X, where he would remain for 28 years, with a one-year hiatus in New Hampshire. 

Harris remembers the first year of desegregation in Berkeley as an exciting time. 

“It was a big experiment,” he said. “No one knew what would happen, but there was a lot of togetherness.” 

In 1972, Veronica gave birth to the couple’s only child, Scott, and five years later, the young family moved to New Hampshire for a change of pace. But, after a short time in the Granite State, the Harrises found that their new community hadn’t quite caught up with the liberal social currents that had swept through Berkeley a decade earlier. 

“We ran into a time warp,” Harris said. “They were about 10 years behind.” 

The couple, strapped for cash, bought an old school bus and horse trailer, packed them with furniture, and headed west—but not before some good-natured neighbors scrawled “Dirty Hippies” and “Berkeley or Bust” on the side of the aging bus.  

Harris returned to Malcolm X in time for the 1978-1979 school year. There, he found Lorenzo Franklin, a bright boy with a temper who was being raised by his great-grandmother in South Berkeley. Now 34, Franklin said his teacher disarmed him with jokes about his short fuse, taught him the importance of an education and took extraordinary steps outside the classroom to get him on the right track. 

“The things he did away from the school are what have stuck with me for 25 years,” said Franklin, who still lives in the Bay Area and has kept in touch with Harris. “He would take me to his place. He would take me to A’s games. He would take me to his son’s soccer games. He really made me feel a part of him, a part of his family. 

“I can’t say enough about this man,” Franklin added. “I only hope that I can reach someone the way Mr. Harris reached me.” 

Harris touched the lives of many other students through his annual Shakespeare productions, which he began in 1985 at Malcolm X and continued at Jefferson Elementary. 

“Since it’s basically a foreign language to all the kids, it made the playing field even for all the kids—high achieving and low achieving,” he said. “Kids who were shy became another character and they were fantastic.” 

Last year, Harris’ son Scott joined him at Jefferson as a kindergarten teacher. 

“He actually tried to talk me out of being a teacher, but I think he was a good role model,” said the junior Harris. “I’ll stop by his classroom from time to time. It’s been really fun working with him.”  

Mengel, a third-grade teacher, taught with Harris for a year at Lincoln in 1968-1969 before reuniting with him seven years ago at Jefferson, where the two teach in adjacent classrooms. 

Mengel, the daughter of a policeman and a postmaster, grew up in Hawaii. In 1957, Mengel left the island to attend Pomona College in Claremont and wound up at the nearby Claremont Graduate School of Education. 

“I didn’t want to go into education,” she said. “But I was widowed at the time and I had to find something to do.” 

Mengel lasted two weeks in her first teaching job, after following the advice of a free-wheeling professor who recommended that she allow students to “express themselves.” 

“I let them express themselves and they ran all over,” she said, with a chuckle. “I called in sick and never went back.” 

After a stint working at UC Berkeley’s School of Optometry, Mengel, who has two daughters, fell back into teaching, accepting a job at Berkeley’s now-defunct Franklin Elementary School in 1964. “In the old days, we had a lot of fun,” said Mengel. “It was an honor to teach in Berkeley.” 

After 20 years at Lincoln, Jefferson and Longfellow elementary schools in Berkeley, Mengel moved in 1989 to Jefferson, where she is perhaps best known for her annual Hawaiian cultural celebration. Every spring, she decks out a couple dozen students in grass skirts, colorful headdresses and red ukuleles, teaching them island songs and dances. 

Parents say the Hawaiian event is just one of many ways Mengel connects with her students and makes learning fun. 

“Not only does she teach the three R’s, but she teaches way beyond that—she teaches to the whole child,” said Allison Murray, whose son and daughter have had Mengel as a teacher. 

Both Mengel and Harris plan to remain part of the Jefferson School community in their retirement. Harris plans to volunteer at the school, possibly reviving his Shakespeare program. Mengel hopes to continue working with Jefferson students as an occasional substitute teacher, when she’s not traveling with her two sisters, who live in Hawaii.  

Mengel said she may also return to the school to teach the kids how to strum on the ukulele and sway in a grass skirt.  

“When you’re a teacher, you can see how [students] grow throughout the year and develop a sense of self,” she said. “I’ll miss that.” 

FRIDAY, JUNE 13 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft at Telegraph.wibberkeley@ 

yahoo.com 548-6310. 

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

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART the second Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m. 

SATURDAY, JUNE 14 

City of Berkeley Summer Aquatics Program Register from 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. at the West Campus Pool, 2100 Browning St. at Addison or at the Willard Pool, 2701 Telegraph, at Derby, or call 981-SWIM. 

Berkeley Special Education Parents Network End of Year Potluck and Gathering at 3 p.m. at San Pablo Park, Russell St. at Park. Wheel- 

chair accessible. For more information call 428-1131.  

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour, “McCreary-Greer House, The Berkeley City Club, and Environs,” 

led by Paul Grunland, 10 a.m. $5 members, $10 non-members. For reservations call 848-0181. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc 

The Global War on Terror and Its Impact on the Philippines with Romeo Capulong, a human rights attorney in the Philippines, at 5:30 p.m. in Booth Memorial Auditorium, Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley. Sponsored by the Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines. 415-244-9734. 

Free Lead-Safe Painting and Remodeling Class Learn how to detect and remedy lead hazards in your older home from 9 to 11 a.m. at the Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program Training Center, 1017 22nd Ave., Suite #110, Oakland. For information or to register, call 567-8280. 

Kids’ Garden Club: Aroma- 

tic Plants For children age 7 to 12, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Til- 

den Nature Area. Cost is $5 for Berkeley residents, $7 for non-residents. 525-2233, tnarea@ebparks.org 

Solo Sierrans Sunset Walk Meet at 6 p.m. behind Chevy's Restaurant, at the “Public Shore” sign, for an hour’s walk through the Emeryville Marina. Optional dinner after walk. For more information call 234-8949. 

Celebration of 30 Years of Curbside Recycling at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center St. at Martin Luther King, Jr. Way from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. www.ecologycenter.org 

Gaia and the Sacred: Religion, Science, and Ethics 

A conference exploring the ways in which religion, ethics, and the sciences shape our understanding of who we are. Keynote address by Carol P. Christ on her new book, “She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World.” From 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, 2451 Ridge Rd. To register contact Christopher Evans 649-2560 or trees@gtu.edu 

Open House for the Acu- 

puncture and Integrative Medicine College for pro- 

spective students and neighbors. For more information and to register, please call Taj Moore, 666-8248, or info@aic-berkeley.edu 

SUNDAY, JUNE 15 

Juneteenth Celebration on Adeline Street between Ashby and Alcatraz. Two stages for music, food vendors, arts and crafts, and jazz in the Black Repertory Theater. 655-8008. 

Father's Day Campfire 

from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Tilden Park. Bring hot dogs, buns, marshmallows and join us for songs and stories around the fire. Dress for possible fog. Walk uphill to the campfire circle. Disabled accessible, call for transportation. 525-2233. www.eb 

parks.org 

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk, facilitated by singer/ 

songwriter/activist Margie Adam, at 2 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. Join a growing number of people who have found that walking the laby- 

rinth, individually and in community, offers a powerful way to ground and focus healing and peace and justice work in the world. Free. Wheelchair accessible. Sponsored by the East Bay Labyrinth Project. 526-7377. 

Solo Sierrans Trip to Green Gulch Farm Zen Center Meet at El Cerrito Plaza BART Station, east side, at 8:30 a.m. We will attend a 10:15 lecture at the Zen  

Center, then walk to Muir Beach and back. Vegetarian buffet lunch is served at 12:45 for $8. Deadline for carpool reservations is June 13, call Marie at 658-3124 or Therese at 841-5493. 

Practices of Tibetan Yoga, with Kum Nye Instructors Charaka Jurgens and Donna Morton, at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Place. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, JUNE 16 

Teaching About Africa and the African Diaspora A two-day institute, sponsored by the Center for African Stu- 

dies, UC Berkeley, for K-12 and college educators and librarians. Topics include Misconceptions and Stereo- 

types; Islam in Africa; Colonialism; Comparative Political Systems; Cultural Contributions of People of African Descent; and Literature. Cost is $40 for one day, or $50 for both days. Registration required, fee waivers available. Call 642-8338. amma@uclink.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley Gray Panthers Homeowners Support Group on heaters and options for heating your home, at 3 p.m. in the Grey Panthers Office, 1403 Addison St. 548-9696. 

Berkeley CopWatch meets at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Vol- 

unteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, JUNE 17 

Discussion on “The Role and Value of Myth,” open to all from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut at Rose. Cost is $1, bring light snacks or drinks to share. 527-5332. 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 525-3565. www. 

berkeleycameraclub.org 

Community Food Mapping Workshop from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Learn about an innovative mapping project that engages local residents in analyzing food needs. Held on the UC Berkeley campus. Cost is $50, limited scholarships available. tori@food 

security.org 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18 

South Berkeley Mural Project Community members in South Berkeley are coming together to create a neighborhood mural on the side of the Grove Liquor Store on the corner of Ashby Ave and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Meetings are held every Wednesday night at 7 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios at 1923 Ashby Ave. For further information on ways to get involved please call 644-2204.  

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Ave. $90 cash prizes. Cost is $7 at the door, $5 with student i.d. 841-2082. 

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

For information on the classes call 848-5143. 527-5332. 

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

Beginning Everyday Photo- 

graphy, five weekly meetings on Fridays, from 7 to 9 p.m. in Room 110 of Albany High School. Cost is $32. For information call 559-6580. 

ONGOING 

Figure Drawing Workshop 

Saturdays, from 9 a.m. to noon, starting June 14. This class is designed to sharpen your observation skills and enhance your drawings. Bring your own dry drawing tools and good paper. In- 

structor is Carol Brighton. Cost is $150 for four sessions. Contact the Berkeley Art Center to sign up, 644-6893. 

Marine Biology Classes for students ages 10 to 13, from Tues., June 17 to Fri., June 27, 9:30 a.m. to noon at the Shorebird Nature Center, 160 University Ave., at the Marina. Cost is $90 for eight days of classes. For information call 644-8623. www.cityofberkeley.info/marina  

Educators Academy: Project WILD and Project Aquatic WILD Tues., June 14 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Tilden Na- 

ture Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $45 for Berkeley residents and $51 for non-residents. Insects and Crawling Creatures Tues., June 24 - Thurs., June 26, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Registration is required. Cost is $100 for Berkeley residents, $110 for non-residents. Financial assistance is available for both courses. For information 636-1684. tnarea@ebparks.org 

The Bay Area Shakespeare Camp for children 7-13 years of age, in a series of five, 2-week sessions beginning June 16 and ending August 22. John Hinkel Park, South- 

ampton Place at Arlington Ave. The cost is $340 per session. After-care is also provided for a fee. Scholar- 

ships are available; call 981-5150 for details. To register for the camp, or for more information, please call 415-422-2222, or 800-978-PLAY. 

Alameda County Hazardous Waste Drop-Off from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. June 12 - 14 at Alameda County Household Hazardous Waste, 2100 E. 7th St., Oakland. For information on what can and cannot be dropped off, please call 1-877-STOPWASTE or visit stopwaste.org/fsrecycle.  

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee Meeting Monday, June 16, at 

2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St., Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 

981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

City Council meets Tuesday, June 17, at 5 p.m., for a Special Workshop on the Budget, and at 7 p.m. for a Public Hearing on the Budget, in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/citycouncil 

School Board meets Wednesday June 18, at 7:30 p.m., in the City Council Chambers. Queen Graham 644-6147 or Mark Coplan 644-6320. 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Monday, June 16, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche, 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wednesday, June 18, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Katherine O’Connor, 981-6601. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/humane 

Commission on Aging 

meets Wednesday, June 18, 

meets at 1:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Lisa Ploss, 981-5200. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/aging 

Commission on Labor meets Wednesday, June 18, at 6:30 p.m., at Berkeley Work- 

Source, 1950 Addison St., Suite 105. Delfina M. Geiken, 644-6085. www.ci.ber- 

keley.ca.us/commissions/labor 

Human Welfare and Com- 

munity Action Commission meets Wednesday, June 18, at 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.ber- 

keley.ca.us/commissions/welfare 

Design Review Committee meets Thursday, June 19, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Anne Burns, 981-7415. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/designreview  

Transportation Commission  

meets Thursday, June 19, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Peter Hillier, 981-7000. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/transportation

TASK FORCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Sharon Hudson’s June 10-12 commentary piece regarding the Task Force on Permitting chides me for not wanting to protect the rights of future Berkeleyans to a good urban environment. 

It was just a passing exchange, but in commenting on her call for consideration of “unborn stakeholders” I said in a humorous vein that I didn’t want voices from the grave telling me, inter alia, I couldn’t go to Woodstock, or we couldn’t have had the sixties. 

I hope Berkeleyans in 2050 have a good urban environment, but I want them to decide how high they want their buildings at that time, just as I want us to decide how we want our buildings we build now. I don’t have the hubris to speak for the unborn, in a country where they can speak for themselves in due time. 

I thank her for her kind observation that I realize there are at least two sides to every issue. Like most mediators, I actually think there are probably four or five sides to most issues. This includes her own views about the Task Force issues. 

Victor Herbert 

• 

DISTRESSING LANGUAGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was distressed by the commentary piece authored by Art Goldberg in your June 6-9 edition. I understand disagreement, even very heated disagreement. And I have participated in my share of that. But to call any city employee, however much one disagrees with him, a “duplicitous insect” is stomach turning. The personally degrading insults in the piece do not further the exchange of ideas and do not encourage discussion. I suppose that language says more about the one who writes it than the one he is so childishly describing. 

But more than that, I am dismayed that the Planet would print such personally offensive language in the commentary part of the paper. There is no disclaimer regarding the views expressed in the section. Nothing like, “These commentary pieces are personal opinions and do not reflect the views of the editors.” So I am left to believe that the Planet stands behind the opinions expressed. Otherwise, I would think I would find such a hit piece in the Letters to the Editor, along with all the other personal opinions expressed by members of our community. 

Even so, thank you for all your efforts to bring us a local paper again. 

Anna de Leon 

• 

OUTRAGED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In reference to the recent sentencing of drug kingpin Ed Rosenthal, it is obvious that he is immune to the Supreme Court ruling that marijuana has not been accepted for medical use in the United States, and that it is not a legal defense. Justice did not prevail; it completely failed, leaving all of us who support sound drug policy outraged.  For the sake of our children’s future, we need answers now. 

How could Ed Rosenthal, who should have received a mandatory minimum of five years, get a downward departure of sentencing guidelines to one day, which he never served? How could a downward departure be considered because Judge Charles Breyer felt Rosenthal genuinely believed what he was doing was not against the law? Perhaps Judge Breyer needs to read Mr. Rosenthal’s book, “Marijuana: The Law and You, a Guide to Minimizing Legal Consequences.” It must only be a coincidence that the book is designed “to keep you out or get you out of trouble.” The back cover of his book claims that it has “saved people thousands of years of jail time.”  

It is well documented how legalization advocates make a mockery of even their own “medical” use arguments, including Mr. Rosenthal, who has said: “I have to be honest. There is another reason why ... I do use marijuana ... only in foreign countries, outside the three-mile limit and all that ... And that is because I like to get high!” This blatant facade of Mr. Rosenthal’s certainly belies Judge Breyer’s perception of reality. 

Judge Charles Breyer has done us a grave injustice by his contempt for federal guidelines and abuse of power, an injustice that will sacrifice the health and well-being of our children, and for that I will not stand. Instead of just say “no,” Mr. Breyer reinforces just say “go.” It seems as though he does not take the law seriously, but rather like a game: Don’t go directly to jail, do pass go and do collect 200 children to demoralize. This travesty should be investigated immediately. Criminals do not need another loophole, nor do our children need to be exposed to another drug dealer flaunting federal law. 

Calvina L. Fay 

St. Petersburg, Fla.  

• 

BE OF THE PEOPLE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have been so disappointed with the sell-out of The East Bay Express. I am now looking to you to take its place. Be of the people, decent, liberal, fair, ecological, interesting, artistic. Try not to put in too many ads. Try to avoid sex ads—I know they “sell” and you might have to do it ... but try to keep it to a minimum. 

Jeff and Paulina Miner 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you so much for the lovely picture of the Berkeley City Club pool in your June 10-12 edition. The BCC pool was named “Best Lap Pool in the East Bay” by the readers of the East Bay Express (2002), and there’s room here for you! Become a member of the Berkeley City Club and swim in the beautiful pool, dine in the elegant dining room, and enjoy all of the member benefits.  

The Berkeley City Club and the Landmark Heritage Foundation host free public tours of this extraordinary Berkeley landmark the fourth Sunday of every month (except December) from 1 to 4 p.m. Visitors will enjoy seeing Miss Morgan’s unique architectural features—beautiful vaulted ceilings, a fanciful fireplace, leaded glass windows, a variety of decorative rosettes—that create this very special “little castle.”  

This beautiful building hosts many community group meetings, overnight hotel guests, weddings and other social events as well as being “a home away from home” for members. For details about membership or other BCC services, please take a tour or call the BCC at 510-848-7800.  

Established as a separate nonprofit corporation in 1965, the Landmark Heritage Foundation is dedicated to the preservation of this landmark and the promotion of the legacy of Julia Morgan. Gifts to the Foundation are fully tax deductible. For tour information, call the LHF office at 510-883-9710 or e-mail lhfjmorgan@earthlink.net. 

Mary Breunig, President 

Landmark Heritage Foundation 

FRIDAY, JUNE 13 

CHILDREN 

“Little Nut Brown Hare” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “King of Kings” at 7:30 p.m., Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 for members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon Series, “Racial Profiling and Counter-Terrorism” with Jack Glasser, Ph.D., Professor, Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley. Luncheon 11:45 a.m. $11.50 - $12.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations 526-2925, 665-9020. 

“Unbound and Under Covers” Experiments in visual writing at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Karen X. Tulchinsky returns with the Rabinovitch family in her new book, “Love and Other Ruins,” at 7:30 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books, 398 Co- 

lusa St., Kensington. 559-9184. 

Andrea Siegel talks about the father-daughter bond in her new book, “Snapshots From the Heart,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com  

Gayle Brandeis, winner of the Bellwether Prize, reads from her novel, “The Book of Dead Birds,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. She will be introduced by Maxine Hong Kingston. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Latin Jazz Legacy Series, with Mark Levine and the Latin Tinge, Eddie and Mad Duran. Panel at 7:30 p.m., performance at 8:30 p.m., at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12 in advance, $15 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Symphony Orchestra performs Brahms, Benoit/ 

Beintus, and Nodaira at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall. Tickets are $10-$45. 841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org 

Jazzschool Students’ Spring Recital at 6 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Admission is free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

María Bermúdez y Sonidos Gitanos perform flamenco at 8 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $32 for adults, $29 for children under 12, students and seniors. 925-798-1300. 

Groundation, reggae classics with band originals, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Taos Hum, Club Dub and The Spindles perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

SoVoSó, jazz-inflected a cappella, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Inspect Her Gadget, Spag, Second Opinion, Solamente, Resilience, The Peels perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Jim Ryan’s Forward Energy with Eddie Gale and Marco Eneidi, jazz at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. 649-8744. www. 

thejazzhouse.org 

SATURDAY, JUNE 14 

CHILDREN 

Celebrate Father’s Day and Flag Day with readings of “What Dads Can Do” and “The Starry, Stripy Blanket” at 11 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861.  

FILM 

“Dersu Uzala,” a film by Akira Kurosawa about a military explorer who meets and befriends a hunter in the unmapped forests of Siberia, at 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheel- 

chair accessible. All events are free. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org  

Nicholas Ray: “Bitter Vic- 

tory” at 4:30 and 8:50 p.m. and “The Savage Innocents” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhythm and Muse Poetry reading at the Berkeley Art Center. Open mic sign-up at 6:30 p.m., reading at 7 p.m. 1275 Walnut St., between Eunice & Rose Sts. Admis- 

sion is free. 527-9753 or 569-5364. 

Daniel Glick discusses life as a single father in “Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Freight’s 35th Anniversary Concert with Phil Marsh, and members of the Clean- 

liness and Godliness Skiffle Band, East Bay Sharks, Darryl Henriques, Marc Silber and others at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Tickets are $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

La Peña Celebrates its 28th Anniversary with Bobi Céspedes, Cuban singer, percus- 

sionist and Yoruba Lucumi priestess, at 8 and 10 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Ensemble 6-4-2 presents “A Musical Offering from Berlin to Paris: Virtuoso Sonatas of Bach, Leclair, Marais, Telemann” on period instruments at 8 p.m. at St. Alban's Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington St., Albany. Tickets are $15, $12 for seniors and students. 415-242-4348. 

Flamenco Fever with Yaelisa accompanied by singers Antonio Malena and Mateo Solea. Dinner Show at 7 p.m., $49-$67; Wine and Tapas Show at 9:45 p.m. $20-$37. Café de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. 843-0662. www.cafedelapaz.net 

Jewish Soulfolk with Ira Scott English and Hebrew songs for the whole community at 8 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut Ave., between Vine and Rose. The concert will end with a short Havdalah service. 848-0237. 

Adam Lane’s Full Throttle Orchestra with Avram Fefer performs at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $6-$15 sliding scale. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.org 

Transmission Trio, avant groove at 9 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $7. 644-2204. 

O-Maya performs a blend of Latin music and hip-hop at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ash- 

kenaz.com 

Calamity and Main, The Cowlicks, and Richard Marsh perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Phenomenauts, D. S. B., Assault, From Ashes Rise, Black Lung Patriots perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., Cost is $5, $1 if wearing prom clothes! 525-9926. 

Gil Chun’s “Bay Area Follies” A variety dance program including tap, ballroom and ethnic dances at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church at 2727 College Ave. Cost is $9, $6 for seniors. 526-8474. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 15 

FILM 

Douglas Sirk: “There is Always Tomorrow” at 5:30 p.m., at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

25 Years of Women’s Poetry, a celebration reading of “A Fierce Brightness” with Re- 

becca Gordon, Merle Woo and others at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Joseph McElroy reads from his new book, “Actress in the House,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Gallery Talk on The Painted Tales of India, with Lee Patterson, at 3 p.m. in Gallery D of the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Patti Smith and Her Band in Concert in Appreciation of the Anti-War Movement from 1 to 4 p.m. in the MLK, Jr. Park. Donations requested. Sponsored by KPFA, Slim’s, ANSWER Coalition, Middle East Children’s Alli- 

ance, and Code Pink. 415-821-6565. 

African Drum Workshop, held every Sunday with Wade Peterson. Beginners at 11 a.m., experienced at 12:30 p.m., at The Jazz House. Cost is $15-$25, advanced registration is encouraged. 533-5111. 

Pacific Mozart performs a cappella jazz and pop at 5 p.m. at the Crowden School, 1475 Rose St. Tickets are $20 general, $15 seniors and students, available from 415-705-0848. www.pacificmozart.org 

Kalajali: Dances of India at  

2 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $25 front rows, $12 general seating, available from 925-798-1300. www.juliamorgan.org 

Country Joe McDonald, Berkeley’s world-renowned troubador, performs at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

John Shiurba and Good For Cows perform at 8:15 p.m. at The Jazz House. Admission is free, donations welcome. 649-8744. www.thejazz- 

house.org 

E.W. Wainwright and the African Roots of Jazz at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Tickets are $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 16 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Express with Kirk Lumpkin at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave., near University Ave. 231-5910. 

Khaled Hosseini reads from “The Kite Runner,” the first novel about contemporary Afghanistan to be written in English, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Subhankar Banerjee will show slides and introduce his book on the endangered wilderness, “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

David White will read from his new book “The Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Context,” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2467 Telegraph Ave. 849-2133. www.moesbooks.com 

TUESDAY, JUNE 17 

FILM 

The Inquiring Camera: “Meditations on Revolution” at 7:30 p.m at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lillian Rubin, Ph.D., gives insights into what makes therapy work, in her new book, “The Man with the Beautiful Voice, and More Stories from the Other Side of the Couch,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, a discussion with Marie Arana, editor-in-chief of The Washington Post Book World; Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and Berkeley resident; and Mark Danner, professor at UCB’s Graduate School of Journal- 

ism, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Francine Ward dicusses her new book, “Esteemable Acts,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Berkeley Summer Poetry 

7 to 9 p.m. at the Mediterranean Cafe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. Free, open mic, poetry, prose, short fiction, amateur and advanced artists welcome. 549-1128. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Fling Ding: All Wrecked Up and Bluegrass Intentions at  

8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Bang performs at 9:30 p.m.  

at The Starry Plough. Cost  

is $7. 841-2082. www.starry 

ploughpub.com 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18 

FILM 

I Found it at the Movies: “About a Girl,” works by Julie Zando and Joan Baderman at 7:30 p.m. at the Paci- 

fic Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Unbound and Under Covers” Experiments in visual writing, with Suzanne Stein, at 7 p.m. Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Steve Jones, British science writer and host of a popular BBC series, reads from “Y: The Descent of Man”at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Ariel Gore discusses her memoir “Atlas of the Human Heart,” on travelling through Asia and Europe as a teen-ager, at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Brown Fist Collective at Café Poetry at La Peña Cultural Center. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Sarman Apt Russell reads from “An Obsession with Butterflies” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Courtableu at 8:30 p.m. with a Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Brian Gore and Dusan Bogdanovic, acoustic guitar masters, perform at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

THURSDAY, JUNE 19 

FILM 

Peter Watkins: “The Jour- 

ney,” episodes 1-6, at 6 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Michael Hirsh, a senior editor in Newsweek’s Washing- 

ton bureau, discusses his new book “At War With Our- 

selves: Why America is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.black 

oakbooks.com 

Patricia Unterman presents her updated and revised “The San Francisco Food Lover’s Guide”at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Guided Tour of “Everything Matters: Paul Kos” at 5:30 p.m. at The Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu  

Joel Kovel, former Green Party candidate for President discusses his latest book, “The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?” at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $5-$10 sliding scale. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Lauralee Summer reads from her memoir, “Learning Joy from Dogs Without Collars,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 

845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

William C. Miller discusses his new thriller, “Long Pig,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Verbal Tea, an evening of original poetry with David Ari, Ed Aust, and Terence Keane, at 8 p.m. at The 1923 Teahouse, 1923 Ashby at MLK. Cost is $5-$10 sliding scale. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert Downtown with the Spirit of ‘29 Dixieland Jazz, a Berkeley tradition since 1982, at the Berkeley BART Station. Seating available. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 549-2230. 

John Keawe, Hawaiian slack key guitar and vocals, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

Odessa Chen, vocalist with classical and indie influences, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $6-$15 sliding scale. 649-8744. www.thejazz- 

house.org 

Steve Poltz performs at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

AT THE THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, “The Bacchae,” directed by David Stein. Euripedes’ play about Dionysus and his revenge against a hateful king. Sat. and Sun., June 21 through July 6, at 5:30 p.m., outdoors in John Hinkle Park, off The Arlington at Southampton Ave and Somerset Place. Free admission. 525-1620. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Aurora Theater Company, “Thérèse Raquin,” by Emile Zola, directed by Tom Ross. A sinister tale set among the lower classes in nineteenth-century Parisian society. Runs June 20 to July 27, at 2081 Addison St. Tickets are $32 and $34. 843-4822.  

www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Repertory Theater, 

“The Guys,” by Anne Nelson, directed by Robert Egan. May 21 – July 5, Tues. - Sun., call for starting times. $10 - $54. The Roda Theater, 2016 Addison St. 647-2918. 647-2949.www.berkeleyrep.org 

California Shakespeare Festival runs May 28 to October 22. Performances this year will be Julius Caesar, Arms and the Man, Measure for Measure, and Much Ado About Nothing. Please call for dates and times. The Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org  

Central Works Theater Ensemble, “The Wyrd Sisters” directed by Jan Zvaifler. June 13 - July 13,  

Thurs. - Sat. at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $8-$20 sliding scale. For reservations and information call 558-1381. 

Shotgun Players presents 

“under milk wood” by Dylan Thomas at Eighth Street Studio, 2525 8th St., May 24 through June 21, Thurs. - Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 7 p.m. Tickets are $18 adults, $12 children and seniors, $10 on Thursdays. 704-8210. www.shotgunplayers.org

On the corner of San Pablo Avenue and Virginia Street in West Berkeley, a small yellow light flashes, day and night. Beneath it are the words “School,” and “Speed Limit 25 When Children Are Present.” But no one seems to pay much attention to the signs anymore. The City of Franklin Elementary School—which patterned itself after a small metropolis—has been closed for a year and the kids are long gone. 

Now, the Berkeley Unified School District is planning to move its Adult School, which provides English as a Second Language, dance, literature and financial planning courses to more than 1,300 students per day, from a beleaguered building on University Avenue to the Franklin site in time for the 2004-2005 school year. 

A growing group of about 40 neighborhood residents, who packed a community meeting on the proposed move Monday night, are concerned that the flood of adult students will create parking and traffic problems. Some say it may slow the progress of a rundown neighborhood that, in recent years, has seen crackhouses and cheap furniture stores give way to upscale food shops and a greater sense of cohesion and identity. 

“I’m worried that the improvement of the neighborhood ... might sort of stall,” said James Day, a Kains Street resident. “Each issue involved, whether it be traffic, economic development, noise, security, is too close to call. And if it’s too close to call, it’s not worth taking a risk with a neighborhood that is so close to reaching stability.” 

But school officials say the traffic impact will be minimal and argue that the Adult School will bring a new vitality to the neighborhood. 

“A vibrant, active education center is far superior to a vacant lot,” said Board of Education Director John Selawsky. 

Some neighbors and local businessmen say they have no objection to the plan, which is scheduled to go before the Board of Education Aug. 20. 

“It wouldn’t bother me,” said Jerry Koehler, owner of Koehler’s Auto Body on San Pablo Avenue, across from the Franklin site. “It’s too bad it’s sitting there vacant.” He added that the students might even provide a boost to local merchants. 

Neighbors of the Adult School, which sits five blocks from Franklin at 1222 University Ave., say they don’t want the facility to move. The Adult School’s constant foot traffic has warded off crime, they say, and moving it will expose the area to shady dealings. 

“We’re going to have dark alleyways,” said neighbor Connie McCullah, who has vowed to fight the move. 

The district plans to renovate the University Avenue building after the move, and then shift its maintenance and administrative operations to the site. 

Maintenance is currently housed in a seismically suspect building on Oregon Street and administration is based at Old City Hall on Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. The district rents its central office space from the city for $1 per year, but the lease runs out in 2009, and the city wants the historic structure back. 

Superintendent Michele Lawrence said the district is also considering a number of other functions that could sit alongside administration and maintenance at the University Avenue site. A professional development center for teachers, a new home for the district’s Independent Study program and “opportunity” classes for its most troubled students are all possibilities, she said. 

McCullah objects to the idea of large maintenance trucks and disruptive students in the neighborhood. But residents say they are most upset that the district, which has met repeatedly with the Franklin neighbors, is not planning to meet with University Avenue residents until July, just a month before the vote. 

“They’ve done absolutely nothing here,” said Lois O’Connell, administrator of the Strawberry Creek Lodge, an affordable housing complex that serves 163 seniors, many of whom take courses at the Adult School. “We’re a little angry.” 

O’Connell said many of her tenants will not be able to make the trip to the new Adult School site. 

City Councilmember Linda Maio, whose district includes the Franklin building, said she would prefer to keep the Adult School where it is, but understands the district’s planned move. “I just don’t see very many options the district has,” she said. 

Maio praised Lawrence for agreeing, at the Monday night meeting, to a small neighborhood advisory group which will meet with the district’s Oakland-based architect, Hardison Kamatsu Ivelich & Tucker, on the school’s renovation.

In light of the resignation of our new high school principal, Ms. Patty Christa, we the undersigned community representatives are sending this open letter to our school community to identify what we believe to be an opportunity for us all. We continue to believe that the success or failure of our schools to educate children cannot rest at the feet of any one individual in this district. We are in support of establishing a community approach to education and utilizing the candid assessment made by Ms. Christa as our catalyst for change. 

We are stepping forward to be actively engaged in doing this work. This commitment must be based on integrity, open and honest dialogue and the willingness to grapple with the difficult questions that have plagued this district. With these guiding principles in mind, we urge our superintendent and School Board to do the following. 

• Call Ms. Christa immediately to ask under what terms would she be willing to reconsider. 

• Convene a broad-based community group, facilitated by a professional, to lay Ms. Christa’s assessment on the table and have that be the beginning of an in-depth dialogue regarding the challenges at the high school and in the district. 

• If Ms. Christa is unwilling to return, we must convene a national principal search process, created, established and guided by a broad representation of administrators, teachers, parents and students. 

• Recognize, articulate and develop an immediate plan for resolving current challenges as identified in Ms. Christa’s assessment, the 2001 WASC report and those in the Diversity Project 2000 report. 

• Be prepared to implement solutions to resolve the most pressing challenges prior to the beginning of the 2003-2004 school year. 

In essence, we are asking that a community of individuals come together and do similar work as did the Small Schools Advisory Committee (SSAC). We must create and establish guiding principles for our high school and district. Highlighting the SSAC’s work was the School Board’s unanimous vote to adopt the proposal to move forward with school reform at Berkeley High School. It is more important now than ever that we come together as a community. 

Our students and school system cannot continue without strong leadership. An interim principal has not had the authority to create stability at the high school, so therefore we believe that the solution our superintendent offered in her letters is not suitable, i.e., “I have had conversations with the other finalists and discussions with retired administrators about possible short-term or long-term assignments.” We’ve waited too long to go back to an interim situation and our students have stated their desire very clearly in the Jacket: “Berkeley High needs someone who is committed to the job.” 

We are asking that the superintendent and School Board contact us ASAP so that we can establish this group and get our work accomplished.  

Sincerely: 

Parents of Children of African Descent: Michael D. Miller, Marissa Saunders, Gina Wolley, Irma Parker, Kathryn A. Burroughs, Barbara Coleman, Simone Young, Raychelle Lee, Vicki Davis, Valerie Yerger, Gwynn Easter, Sam Frankle. Berkeley Organizing Congregations for Action: Father George Crespin, Liz Fuentes, Emma Fuentes, Michiko Murillo. Latinos Unidos: Santiago Casal, Beatriz Leyva-Cutler. Concerned Citizens for Equitable and Excellent Schools: Felicia Woytak. The Multicultural Institute: Rigoberto Caloca-Rivas, executive director. Communications Arts and Sciences (BHS): Rick Ayers, Lori Berlin, Deni Blustein, Stuart Lord, T.T. Nhu, Tom Miller, Elna Brunckhorst, Lyn Berry, Les Millett, Kathy Ruiz, Susana Witte, Ralph Nelson, Ankhasanamen Stone, Kimberly Nutting, Mercedes Ruiz, Kalima Rose. EBAYC-RISE: Adriana Betti. UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education: Jean Yonemura Wing. Community Members: Iris Starr, Hugo Lucero.

South Berkeley residents fighting to stop the construction of a three-story, mixed-use development on Shattuck Avenue scored a victory Tuesday night. 

City Council ordered the Planning Department to stop construction of the project pending an investigation into allegations that developer Ching “Christina” Sun made false claims on a building permit application. 

Sun’s project involves demolishing the first-story basement area, jacking up the second-story dwelling unit to the third story, rebuilding the first story as a 1,500-square-foot retail space, and adding a new second story, bringing the total size of the residential area to about 3,000 square feet. The stop work order was posted on the property around 8 a.m. Thursday. 

Neighbors of the 3045 Shattuck Ave. property have pressured the city for three months to issue a stop-work order on the project and schedule a public hearing. They argued that the development violates design review standards for the neighborhood, illegally seeks to convert a single-family dwelling unit into a group accommodation and doesn’t have the proper amount of rear yard space.  

Despite mounting pressure from neighbors—who have spoken out during several City Council meetings, collected more than 150 signatures of residents opposing the project and created a Web site detailing the reasons for their opposition—the city attorney’s office and Planning Department have, until this week, insisted that the city has no grounds to stop the project. 

The crucial bit of evidence that seemed to turn things around is a copy of a rental agreement between Daniel Adkins and Sun, which was obtained recently by neighbor Jennifer Elrod. According to the document, Adkins agreed to rent out a room in Sun’s 3045 Shattuck property from August 1, 2001, to July 31, 2002. Adkins, a graduate student who now lives in North Berkeley, told the Berkeley Daily Planet that Sun had rented to three other people in the building under separate leases during the same period.  

Project opponents say these revelations prove what they have suspected all along: that Sun gave false information on a May 2002 zoning permit application, in which she wrote that her Shattuck Avenue property was a single-family dwelling unit and would remain one after she completed renovation of the property.  

“If the city finds that she falsified information on the application, that is enough to invalidate the application,” said Rena Rickles, a land-use attorney representing the neighbors. “She will have to start the process all over again.” 

Neighbors have argued that Sun plans to convert the single-family dwelling unit into a group-living accommodation, which is defined in the zoning ordinance as “a building or portion of a building designed for or accommodating Residential Use by persons not living together as a Household.” The definition of a household, according to the city’s ordinance and established by case law, consists of two or more people living together and sharing the same lease. 

Chapter 23E.52.030 of the zoning ordinance states that a group living accommodation in the commercial southside area district, where the project is situated, requires a use permit and public hearing. 

At the May 20 City Council meeting, City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque said the city could not stop construction of the project based on these claims alone and said the city could intervene only if Sun attempted to enter into separate leases with tenants, indicating that the structure was not being used as a single-family dwelling unit, which is defined as a building occupied exclusively by one household. 

Project opponents say they now have their smoking gun. And City Council, which has anguished over finding a reason to stop a project that the Planning Department has staunchly defended despite the staff errors, technical irregularities and legal ambiguities involved, seemed relieved to have found a way to accommodate the neighbors’ request without risking a lawsuit by the developer. Councilmember Kriss Worthington, whose motion to stop work pending further investigation was passed unanimously by the council, put it this way: “If she lied on her application, it doesn’t matter how many mistakes staff made. We can throw the application out. It solves the whole problem. ” 

Sun defended herself in an interview shortly after the stop-work order was posted. She said the building had been rented out to a single family for 10 years before she began renting it out to students. She said that it’s “common practice” in the neighborhood to rent out rooms to four or more tenants separately and added in a faxed memo that “when the house was leased to four people, it [was] shared by a household. The tenants ... shared water and PG&E and cable.” 

Sun said she signed a deed restriction that requires that the unit remain a single-family dwelling unit. “That is my plan,” she said, adding that she will move into the house when it’s completed and run a business downstairs. 

“I’ve put my life savings into this and now I have contractors that I still have to pay while this is delayed,” she said. “And what will happen to the project if not finished? If it’s abandoned, it will look ugly. They are creating a neighborhood that is filled with fear and accusation. Why don’t they want to work together to build the community? Instead, I have to hear about all these things from a reporter. Why don’t they ever come and talk with me?” 

With construction halted, some neighbors now say they are willing to do just that. Robert Lauriston, who lives nearby on Woolsey Street, said he has contacted a mediator that neighborhood groups and developers used to resolve conflict over the 2076 Ashby project. “We are ready to mediate any time she is,” he said. “It will be better for everyone to come to an acceptable compromise.” 

The city attorney and Planning Department plan to report to City Council at the June 17 meeting on the group living accommodation issue. 

For more than a year the attention of the American people has been diverted from the deteriorating conditions at home and directed toward terrorism and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. While many are celebrating the “success” abroad, comparatively little attention has been paid to the economic problems brewing at home. 

Osama bin Laden is reportedly still very much alive and on the run, and Afghanistan is still in lawless ruin despite the well-deserved ouster of the Taliban. Billions of U.S. dollars have already been spent on the “War on Terrorism” and the continued search for bin Laden. Before the war 50 percent of the federal discretionary budget was spent on the military. To fund the war, the president asked for and received $79.5 billion from Congress. The money spent so far is equivalent to $31.4 billion per month, or $7.2 billion a week, and those numbers don’t even include homeland security.  

The $7.2 billion spent every week on military funding could provide child care for 1.2 million children of working families for one year. The economic stimulus from providing child care for 1.2 million children for one year could generate approximately $50 billion that could be recycled into the American economy. We’ve all seen what happens when working families do not have access to child care; the costs of health care, social services and criminal justice go way up. These combined costs will add up to billions over our lifetimes. 

The Bush administration has been extremely successful at diverting the attention of the American people and the media to the “victory” in Iraq. Most Americans at the same time are not aware that our federal deficit is approaching $300 billion; the entire budget for the federal government is $1.7 trillion. The combined deficit for all 50 states is $169 billion and some states have had to take extreme measures. The kindergarten through 12th-grade school year has already ended in the state of Oregon because the state cannot afford to send its children to school. 

Currently, the state of California is facing a budget deficit that is unheard of. A year and a half ago we had a $4.6 billion surplus and, according to Governor Davis’ May 2003 revision of the budget, we are facing a deficit that is approaching $40 billion. The U.S. dollar is at a three-year low against the Euro and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 23 percent. We are facing the highest rate of unemployment since the Eisenhower administration. Even Wall Street wizard and billionaire Warren Buffet thinks the president’s plan to stop taxing dividends is bad for the economy.  

CalPERS, California’s public employee retirement system and the largest retirement system in the world, lost more than $1.8 billion last year, primarily in the stock market. As any other employer, the state of California is responsible both for closing the funding gap and paying its employees’ retirement benefits. CalPERS is not a singular case; retirement systems across the country have lost similar amounts in the last year as a result of the slowdown in the stock market. Employers are responsible for making up those losses and to do so they are dipping into their general funds. These additional non-expected expenditures are affecting needed programs or delaying essential business investment. 

The effects of the budget shortfall at the federal level do more than just trickle down to state and local government. California receives 30 percent, or about $50.6 billion, of its operating budget from the federal government. Forty-five percent of California’s revenues come from personal income tax, which economic forecasters proclaim will be depressed for the next several years. On the local level, Alameda County receives half of its budget from the federal government and the state of California. When the federal government has a cold, local government has pneumonia.  

Local government is struggling to serve its people with one hand tied behind its back and no hope of relief in sight. California’s population will continue to grow and, at least for the foreseeable future, the federal and state government will not be equipped to serve all of these residents. The people on the front lines—those who suffer in lean economic times and those who serve them—are the last ones whose voices are heard. There is no media embedded in county hospitals or in the homes of families who have to choose between food, housing and getting to work. The slow death of a senior citizen on a fixed-income is not as eye catching as a $1 million tank tearing through the desert in search of weapons of mass destruction. The only weapons of mass destruction in plain sight are those here at home: a growing prison population, an escalating and fruitless war on drugs, the outrageous cost of prescription drugs for senior citizens and the lack of basic, comprehensive health care for working people are all among the factors that are tarnishing the nation and our Golden State. 

The job market will continue to be depressed if businesses continue to leave the state and the region because the infrastructure necessary for business to prosper does not exist. What is enticing about poorly maintained and understaffed schools, crumbling roads and inefficient government? It is easy to proclaim the biggest tax cuts in history, but apparently, it is even harder to make the difficult decisions that will help our state and country to prosper. Will the biggest tax cut in history matter when children can’t read or someone dies waiting for service at an emergency room?  

President Bush, Washington, D.C., and the media are looking in the deserts of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, but they don’t seem to see that the weapons of mass destruction are here all around us and in full view. 

Keith Carson is the Alameda County Supervisor, 5th District. 

No one who participated in this year’s Senior Streak at Berkeley High School will be punished because the school administration was unable to recognize anyone involved. 

Several administrators were present for Monday’s streak—and some even videotaped the event in an attempt to identify streakers—but no seniors were immediately caught and the video proved inconclusive. 

Dean Meg Matan, who is in charge of discipline for seniors, said the use of body paint, masks and other head coverings made it difficult to recognize individuals. In past years, many streakers ran without masks, but increased threats of disciplinary action—including suspension and exclusion from Friday’s graduation ceremony—led almost all of this year’s streakers to disguise their identities. 

“They hid their faces pretty well,” Berkeley High co-principal Mary Ann Valles said. “It was nearly impossible to figure out who each person was.” 

Seniors who did streak celebrated after learning that they had escaped punishment. 

“It serves them right,” one streaker said. “They shouldn’t have been threatening to punish us anyway.” 

“I’m glad I didn’t get caught,” another added. “I didn’t tell my parents that I did it, and I don’t think they would have been very happy if I had gotten suspended.” 

The number of streakers this year decreased significantly from past years. Streak organizers said they tried to allay fears by encouraging the use of masks and body paint, but conceded that the administration most likely convinced some students not to run. 

“[Co-principal Laura] Leventer probably scared off a few,” one streaker said. “I think we ended up getting about 25 or 30 people less than last year.” 

Valles and Leventer are both leaving after this year, and so policy regarding streaking could change before next spring. Dean Matan said she’d like to see community service replace suspension as the primary consequence for such pranks. 

If you have been following the city’s budget process, you have been appalled at the bad news. For next year, there will be bureaucratic belt-tightening, programmatic budget cuts, increased parking fines, increased general service fees, increased property-based service fees and a brand new fee for landlords to cover rental housing safety inspections. For subsequent years, the picture is much, much worse—big service cuts, big staff cuts and substantial fee and tax increases. 

Throughout this process, the city manager and his staff have done an excellent job of explaining various scenarios and rationales for budget cuts and revenue increases. However, they, along with other well-meaning civic participants, are burdened by inherited blinders which limit vision as to what is necessary and appropriate in these difficult times. There is an elephant, or at least a cow, in the room, which they do not see. 

The giant animal that has been outside of their vision is Berkeley’s Rent Stabilization Board. While almost every other city department and function has been microscopically examined for efficiencies and effectiveness, the Rent Board has gotten a free pass. Not only has it eluded all discussion and review, but, in city budget documents, the day-to-day work of the Rent Board has not even been described in any detail, so that a cost-benefit determination and performance audit is all but impossible. 

Here is what we do know about the Rent Board. It has 22.30 FTEs—that is, there are more than 22 full-time workers on hand to implement its mandate and operations. In comparison, the Police Review Commission has only four FTEs and a budget of about $350,000. The budget of the Rent Board is more than $2.7 million, and there are indications that, given its way with landlord fees, this budget will increase to almost $3 million over the next few years. 

One well may ask—what do these 22 staff people actually do on a day-to-day basis? If the Rent Board mission is mainly to regulate rents overall and respond to specific tenant questions and complaints, do they really need 22 staff people, various consultants and almost $3 million to accomplish this?  

Alternatively, if their mission (as stated in the city manager’s budget documents) is also “to ensure compliance with legal obligations relating to rental housing ... and to advance the housing policies of the city with regard to low- and fixed-income persons, minorities, students, disabled and the aged,” then why is the Rent Board budget not available for the myriad of city housing programs that actually perform these functions and are now paid for by the General Fund, including the Housing Trust Fund, the Rental Housing Safety Program, the First Time Homebuyers Program and the various housing advocacy programs that the city funds through nonprofit providers. 

Fellow residents, let’s get real. The Rent Board bureaucracy, as it now stands, appears to be a bloated relic cow from another era that is getting fatter and fatter while the rest of us get leaner. It overregulates a shrinking number of housing units and spends vast resources on petty disputes, while leaving the real job of housing creation, housing safety and land use resolution to others, who are scrambling for money that the Rent Board is simply handed.  

There is no reason, aside from blinders, sentimentality, political correctness and a fear of change not to subject the Rent Board budget and operations to the same type of review to which all city operations are being subject. Who knows, we may find that we have an extra million or two dollars available to fund our real housing programs and also to save some of our swimming pools, youth centers and public safety services. 

Barbara Gilbert is an occasional contributor to the Planet’s Commentary Page.

UC Berkeley administrators and professors welcomed the selection of UC San Diego Chancellor Robert Dynes Wednesday as the 18th president of the University of California. But some students, on the left and right of the political spectrum, raised concerns about Dynes’ position on UC Regent Ward Connerly’s controversial Racial Privacy Initiative. 

The initiative, which will go before California voters in March 2004, would prevent state and local government from collecting data on race. Supporters say the ballot measure marks a step toward a color-blind society, but opponents say it would block vital research and erase any evidence of racial discrimination in public health, housing and education. 

A small group of UC Berkeley students at the Dynes press conference Wednesday criticized the new president for delaying his own objection to the Racial Privacy Initiative until the UC Board of Regents opposed the initiative last month. 

Cintya Molina, external vice president for the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly, said Dynes should have followed UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl’s lead and voiced his opposition earlier. The delay, she argued, represented a lack of leadership on “social justice” issues. 

“He waited a long time,” Molina said. 

Dynes said he did not want to take a public position on the Racial Privacy Initiative until the board, the university’s governing body, signaled its opposition. 

“Of course I did not take a position until the university took a position because I felt that it was appropriate for the university to stand together,” Dynes said. “Now that the university has taken a position, I am unequivocally supportive of the university’s decision.” 

Dynes’ opposition to the initiative did not sit well with conservative students. 

“Affirmative action is illegal in this state, and in my eyes anyone who opposes the Racial Privacy Initiative wants to see affirmative action reinstated,” said Ben Barron of UC Berkeley’s College Republicans. 

University officials suggested Wednesday that other UC chancellors were among the 300-plus candidates vying to replace retiring UC President Richard Atkinson. UCLA’s Albert Carnesale, UC Santa Cruz’s M.R.C. Greenwood and UC Santa Barbara’s Henry Yang were among those rumored to be in the running. But UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl did not compete for the job, according to UC Berkeley spokesman Marie Felde. 

“Chancellor Berdahl took himself out of the running from the beginning,” she said. “He was not interested.” 

Berdahl, in a statement, had hardy praise for Dynes. “This is a great appointment,” he said. “I’ve worked with him, I know him well, and I respect him enormously.” 

The UC Berkeley chancellor expressed confidence that Dynes would not overstep his bounds as system-wide president. “He has been a chancellor within the system who knows and respects the importance of allowing campuses a high degree of autonomy,” Berdahl said. 

UC Berkeley geophysicist Raymond Jeanloz called Dynes, a physicist with expertise in semiconductors and superconductors, an “inspiration.” He said Dynes’ decision to continue work as a scientist, even after accepting the job as UC San Diego chancellor in 1996, was “remarkable” and would garner the respect of faculty. 

“As someone in the trenches, I can only deeply appreciate someone who is still in touch with the trenches,” Jeanloz said. 

Jeanloz, who served with Dynes on a number of panels overseeing three UC-managed national laboratories, including the Los Alamos weapons lab, said the new president has the right temperament for the job. 

“He’s blunt, hard-driving, very energetic and has a whimsical side to him,” Jeanloz said. “He can be quite humorous.” 

Dynes, raised in the Canadian city of London, Ontario, spent 22 years as a physicist at AT&T Bell Laboratories before taking a job as a physics professor at UC San Diego in 1991. 

He inherits one of the most prestigious public universities in the country, and will have a bully pulpit on national education issues. Atkinson, his predecessor, used his position to push for changes in the SAT test. 

Dynes, who is married to UC San Diego physics professor Frances Dynes Hellman, will take the helm in the midst of a statewide budget crisis which threatens to chop $300 million from the university’s $13 billion budget.  

The new president will also decide if UC should bid for a contract to manage Los Alamos, which it has operated since World War II. A series of accounting scandals at the lab in recent months prompted the federal government to call for competitive bids to run the lab.

UC Berkeley paleoanthropologist Tim White and a team of researchers reported this week that the fossils they found in eastern Ethiopia in 1997 are the oldest known remains of near-modern humans. 

The discovery of three 160,000-year-old skulls, reported in the June 12 edition of the journal Nature, fills a major gap in the fossil record between pre-human ancestors, known as Homo erectus, and modern humans, or Homo sapiens.  

It also bolsters the theory that human beings originated in Africa and spread throughout the world. The European Neanderthal, this argument holds, is a relatively insignificant cousin who went extinct before significantly impacting human development.  

“These fossils show that near-humans had evolved in Africa long before the European Neanderthals disappeared,” said UC Berkeley biologist F. Clark Howell, who served on the research team, in an article on the university’s Web site. “They thereby demonstrate conclusively that there was never a Neanderthal stage in human evolution.” 

The team discovered the Ethiopian site on Nov. 16, 1997, near the village of Herto. White first noticed stone tools and the fossil skull of a butchered hippopotamus. 

“These were people using a sophisticated stone technology,” White said, in the Web article. “Using chipped hand axes and other stone tools, they were butchering carcasses of large mammals like hippos and buffalo.” 

Researchers returned to the site 11 days later and discovered the most complete of the two adult skulls the team would find. The team also unearthed a child’s skull and fragments of seven other skulls. 

An artist’s rendering of how one of the adults may have appeared is strikingly similar to the modern human. 

“We can now see what our direct ancestors looked like,” said White. 

—David Scharfenberg 

In the latest chapter of the struggle to define West Berkeley, the Planning Commission held a public workshop on proposed zoning amendments that would restrict office development and protect light industry and arts and crafts studios. 

About 150 people attended the Wednesday workshop, which sought public input on 12 recommendations made by a Planning Commission sub-committee. The recommendations include calls for an inventory of industrial property uses, that proposed office development meet higher standards before use permits are granted and that guidelines in the West Berkeley Plan be more thoroughly shifted into the city’s zoning ordinance. 

The meeting room in the North Berkeley Senior Center was filled to capacity with artists, craftspeople, manufacturers, property owners, architects, office developers and West Berkeley home owners. Of the people who spoke, many were concerned that additional office restrictions would create an economic backlash. Others said they felt unprotected against real estate market forces that could entice property owners to evict small businesses and craft studios in favor of office-oriented businesses, which can pay up to three times as much in rent. 

Industrial designer Darrell deTienne said the zoning ordinance should allow as much economic flexibility as possible to accommodate a constantly changing business environment. 

“We’re going down a slippery slope,” deTienne said about the sub-committee’s recommendations. “Over-regulation is a problem and social engineering is a problem.” 

Clover Catskill, who runs Wildcat Dance Studio in the Sawtooth Building, said the West Berkeley dance scene is already in need of space and that office conversation threatens what little space there is. 

“There is a fairly lively dance community in west Berkeley,” Catskill said. “We need a huge amount of square footage and there isn’t a whole lot of available space. If we lose what we have, there’s nowhere else in the Bay Area for us to go.” 

Richard Brooks, a two-year Berkeley resident who works in San Francisco, said high residential property values result in mostly white collar workers moving to Berkeley. He said the city should encourage office development to provide non-commute jobs for new property owners.  

“To live here, you have to make a lot of money and right now those jobs are in San Francisco,” he said.  

Painter Caitlin Mitchell Dayton, who has a live-work space in the Nexus Building at 2701 Eighth street said she’s seen studio space dry up in the 17 years she has lived and worked in west Berkeley.  

“It used to seem to be easier to find a little space where you could work in West Berkeley,” she said. “When San Francisco artists lost their places, they would come here to find a new space, now they go to East Oakland or Richmond.” 

The West Berkeley Plan was adopted by the City Council in 1993. The plan was the result of eight years of weekly meetings attended by West Berkeley stakeholders, many of whom spoke at Wednesday’s workshop. 

The plan was meant to guide development and, ideally, many of its guidelines were to become city policy or adopted into the zoning ordinance. 

Primarily at issue is the Mixed Use -Light Industrial District, also known as the MULI. The district covers approximately 60 blocks in West Berkeley and stretches between the city’s northern and southern borders. 

The MULI is characterized by a wide variety of land uses including arts and crafts studios, wineries, manufacturing, offices, warehouses and laboratories. 

Three planning commissioners are concerned that office development in West Berkeley will overwhelm light industry and change the district’s character. Chair Zelda Bronstein, Vice Chair Gene Poschman and Commissioner John Curl compiled a report, released in March, that contends the West Berkeley Plan has not been fully adopted into city policy or the zoning ordinance. They argue the result is the endangerment of blue collar jobs and arts and crafts studios by widespread office development. 

“The West Berkeley Plan represents an effort to protect the most diverse, most creative and in some ways the most vibrant part of Berkeley,” Bronstein said. “That diversity can only be maintained by public policy. If you go by only by market forces that essential part of the city will be destroyed.” 

However, a memorandum written by Planning Commissioner Harry Pollack and distributed at Tuesday’s workshop, counters that the sub-committee’s report mis-characterizes the goals of the West Berkeley Plan.  

According to Pollack’s memorandum, the sub-committee report inaccurately characterizes office development as “undesirable” and that the report lacks data about potential tax revenue impacts from restrictive zoning designed to protect arts and crafts uses. 

“We have to be very careful what we do in West Berkeley,” he said. “West Berkeley in many ways is the city’s economic engine and we shouldn’t mess with it unless we’re sure we’re improving it and not harming it.” 

The Planning Commission will discuss their next steps at its June 25th meeting at the North Berkeley Senior Center at 7 p.m. 

Stopping to chat with an old friend or lingering over coffee after lunch soon could mean a stiffer fine for those parked on Berkeley streets. 

Next Tuesday City Council will consider raising all parking fines by 40 percent. That means a few extra minutes at the meter could cost drivers $32. Nearly all of the city’s 135 parking penalties will be affected by the increase. 

Last Tuesday the council considered a recommendation by the city manager to raise fines by 30 percent. But the council delayed voting on the recommendation after Mayor Tom Bates submitted a last-minute proposal to increase fines by 40 percent, which he said would keep Berkeley’s parking penalties in line with other Bay Area cities such as Oakland and San Francisco.  

“The city has so few ways of raising revenue,” Bates said. “If we’re going to fund services, we have to do something.” 

The city issues about 240,000 tickets a year, which generates about $3 million in revenue after expenses. The fine increases would raise another $2 million annually, according to the city manager’s report. The additional revenue will go toward offsetting next year’s $4.7 million deficit. The city plans to make up the remaining $2.7 million by continuing its selective hiring freeze and through restrictions on city expenditures. 

The council is holding a public hearing on the budget Tuesday and will adopt next year’s budget the following week, on June 24. 

Bates’ recommendation appeared to have wide support on the council, although City Councilmember Betty Olds objected to meter fine increases.  

“I understand raising fines at red zones, yellow zones and fire hydrants,” she said. “But you have not committed a crime, for heaven’s sake, if you stay an extra 10 minutes at a restaurant.” 

She added that higher fines would send some shoppers to Albany where fines are not so steep.  

On Wednesday afternoon in downtown Berkeley, reactions were mixed. 

“To increase parking penalties by so much seems a little harsh,” said UC Berkeley student Elizabeth Nava. 

YMCA Executive Director Fran Gallati said he’s worried about what increased parking fines might do to downtown businesses. “Raising fines does not create a friendly business environment,” he said. “It’s a dilemma.” 

Tim Barnard, owner of the restaurant Top Dog on Center Street, wasn’t bothered by the increased fines. He said he would like the city to crack down on business owners and employees who park their cars at metered spaces and avoid fines by wiping off parking enforcement chalk markings. 

City Council is expected to vote on the higher parking fines during its June 17 meeting. During the same meeting the council will hold a public hearing on matters related to the budget. The meeting will be at 7 p.m. in Old City Hall at 2134 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.  

The California Arts Council handed out only 26 cash prizes this year to recognize exemplary California artists and the competition was fierce. When the winners were announced last week Berkeley residents Lia Cook, Mildred Howard, Nancy Selvin, Sharon Siskin, and Dean Smith each won a $4,567 fellowship. Christel Dillbohner of Kensington and Karen Kersten of Oakland also won fellowships.  

“The Arts Council recognizes the enormous value that arts and culture have in our daily lives,” said Arts Council Chair Barbara George. “By supporting these creative individuals, we are able to validate their artistic vision and further encourage their imaginations to make great things happen in California. These artists are among the best natural resources in California." 

The 11-member California Arts Council awards fellowships annually, rotating among four disciplines: literature, visual arts, performing arts, and media arts and new genre. This year, the Artists Fellowships were given to the visual arts. To be eligible, the selected artists must have demonstrated previous professional experience and artistic excellence for at least 10 years and be judged “exemplary” on a statewide basis by a panel of their peers. 

“I think the recognition by your peers is really tremendous,” said Nancy Selvin, a West Berkeley-based ceramic artist who has lived here since the mid-60s. “It really validates what you're doing. It really says, ‘keep going. You're doing a great job.’ I think that's the real significance of it. And it's always a boost to your career anytime you get any kind of an honor. People take notice. That's always a benefit.” 

Mildred Howard creates mixed media and installation works. Next week she’s leaving for a show of her work in New York. For more than five decades she’s made her home and art studio in South Berkeley. 

“I'm really grateful to get it,” Howard said. “It's not a lot of money but I'm glad to get it. Especially when the economy is doing so bad and they cut the budget of the California Arts Council.” 

Howard, who installed her site-specific installation piece “Blue Bridge” over Fillmore Street in San Francisco's Jazz Preservation District last week, said she doesn't know how she will spend her award money.  

“It'll do part of a project, I don't know what,” Howard said. “Maybe it'll go into the general budget of being an artist, keep things alive for another month or less.” 

As the mother of a new baby girl, Karen Kersten, a sculptor based in Oakland, knows exactly how she'll spend her fellowship.  

“I work with toxic materials,” Kersten said. “I can't just work when the baby's sleeping and then pick her up when she wakes.”  

Kersten intends to spend some of her fellowship money on a sitter while she works on her art. She also says the honor has boosted her confidence and encouraged her to keep working. 

“My work [which ranges in size from as small as four inches to as large as 22 feet] is not salable, especially in San Francisco. It's too large and odd and difficult. This will keep me from feeling limited.” 

That sense of freedom moved other winners as well. 

“You take more risks when you have a little more money on hand,” said Selvin. “You can experiment. You can hire somebody to help you a little bit. It all goes back into the work.” 

Lia Cook, a textile artist based in Central Berkeley, plans to use her award to enhance her weaving equipment. Utilizing photographs as a starting point Cook creates enormous weavings that have much in common with both modern paintings and medieval tapestries.  

“I like equipment,” Cook said. “That's where I like to spend my money. I already have committed to the widening of [my] loom so it's good. I'll be able to work bigger which is what I want to do because I like what happens to some of these things when they get really, really big. It changes them. Things that start out as little pieces of snapshots blow up and become something totally new.” 

None of the award winners claimed they were living on easy street. All of them said making ends meet as an artist was perhaps their most difficult task and that the cost of studio space was the most troublesome of expenses. 

“It's only recent that space has become expensive,” noted Selvin. “Historically it's been fairly affordable, so there's a lot of artists here, and a lot of very, very good artists. Now you have do other things. You work as a teacher. You work at the Cheese Board. A lot of male artists I know work at construction. You have to find a way to support what you do. It's very important that you support your art, your art doesn’t really support you. Emotionally it does, but you have to support your art."  

The Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA) presents Summer Noon Concerts 2003, a unique series of nine free concerts, Thursdays at noon in June & July, beginning June 5th. From Rhythm & Blues to Brazilian capoeira, these concerts at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza (Shattuck Ave. at Center St.) are a showcase of the culturally rich performing arts in Berkeley. This outdoor summer celebration of Berkeley-based musicians & dancers is just a small sampling of the performing arts happening nightly in clubs, cafes, schools, theaters and concert halls in Downtown Berkeley. 

On Thursday, June 5th, our concert series opens with Rhonda Benin and Soulful Strut performing some of the best in R & B, with a splash of jazz and a solid helping of the blues. Soulful Strut appears regularly at many Bay Area nightspots such Enricos Sidewalk Café and Restaurant. 

On Thursday, July 31st, our concert series closes with SoVoSó, a highly visual and imaginative a capella ensemble that sings a compelling mix of jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, world, pop, and improvisational music. The ensemble is made up of former members of Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra, and McFerrin says, “SoVoSó is tight, soulful, and a whole lotta fun.” 

This event is easily accessible by transit and there is one hour free parking daily from 9 am to 5 pm in Center Street Garage. Seating will be available. 

For a complete schedule of entertainers for the Downtown Berkeley Summer Noon Concerts 2003 visit the Downtown Berkeley Association website at www.downtownberkeley.org! 

The Berkeley Skate Park, quiet for months after toxics were found at the site, filled again with skaters this past weekend. 

The West Berkeley park opened Saturday without much ceremony after a six-month closure due to the discovery of the carcinogen hexavalent chromium, or chrome 6, in the basins of the park’s skate bowls.  

The concrete facility has been cleaned and city officials said they are convinced the contaminated water plume below the park will not infiltrate the park’s skate bowls during the dry weather months, according to a press release from the Department of Parks and Waterfront. 

The park was heavily used over the weekend, said Lisa Caronna, director of the Department of Parks and Waterfront. “It was a little quiet on Saturday when we opened the park, but as word got out usage was back to normal on Sunday,” she said.  

The chrome 6 plume is about four blocks long and three blocks wide. The source of the contamination is an engraving shop about three blocks east of the skate park, which is located at 5th and Harrison streets. 

The city recently approved $55,000 to contract with a Geomatrix Consultants Inc., a geotechnical consulting firm, to determine how contaminated water penetrated the skate bowls after the city went to great expense to avoid such an occurrence. 

“We intend to make the park as safe as possible,” Caronna said. “The city still feels like this is one of the best designed parks in the Bay Area and our goal is to maximize use of the facility in a way that is safe for all users no matter how big or how small.” 

Contamination problems have plagued the skate park since its excavation in November 1991. Groundwater pooled in the bottom of the nine-foot-deep bowls as they were dug. The water tested positive for chrome 6 and construction was halted while the city pumped out the groundwater, stored it in tanks, treated and then appropriately disposed of it. 

In addition, a park redesign was required to prevent future invasions of contaminated water. The mitigation sent the cost of the park from $380,000 soaring to $850,000. 

The park opened to rave reviews from local skate boarding magazines in September 2002. But four months later, the city discovered low levels of chrome 6 in the bowls after a severe rainstorm. The park was immediately closed.

From the large ceramic sun adorning the façade of her home-studio to the naked sculptures that border the stairs and driveway, to the full-blown sculpture garden and that blossoms in the backyard, it's clear Kit Skeoch is not one to restrain her impulses. 

While the 46-year-old started out more than 20 years ago as a dance ethnologist, performance artist, instructor and artist's model, for the past six years sculpture and painting have consumed her passions.  

From life-size to knee-high, Skeoch's Sticky Fingers Sculpture Garden and Studio on Curtis Street is peopled with hundreds of expressive nude figures of men and women lying languidly, slouching indolently and everywhere expressing the deeply sensuous nature of the human heart. 

Skeoch opens her home studio and garden, free to the public, every Sunday afternoon from June through October. She teaches figurative art classes year round for a modest fee.  

It was as an artist's model that she first experienced the power of sculpture. 

“The first time I was a model for a sculpture class, I thought, 'Oh my god, I want to do this!',” Skeoch recalled. “But it took me ten years before I actually did.” 

Shortly after taking a sculpture class from Tebby George at Fort Mason in San Francisco, Skeoch decided to open her backyard studio to other like-minded artists. Her years of experience as an artist's model made it easy for her to arrange the logistics and her long career in dance and dance instruction drove her passion for helping others find the beauty in the human figure. 

"We started the group in '97," she said. "It's a working situation. People come who have never sculpted before in their life. What I do with first timers is I just put them next to me. My belief, totally, is that anybody could sculpt because you have this wonderful model in front of you and what you do is you just look at that model and you try to imitate what you see. And then the model turns and you imitate again. Eventually, doing the process over and over again, you get a three-dimensional figure." 

A typical class is made up of eight to 14 artists, mostly women, working side by side.  

"We always have a model and there's a lot of other people working with you, at different levels," she said. "People come from all different backgrounds. Some people are professional artists, some are just coming because they love it and have a passion to do it. When somebody starts I always say, 'Come sit next to me,' so they're more comfortable but everybody's working in their own way, and batting around ideas. What I really try to do is encourage people to find their own style. Some teachers would encourage you to make (a classic, representational figure). If somebody wants to do really realistic work I can guide them, but what we really try to do here is encourage the creative space for people. It's a very loving group and they really help each other. People usually get very comfortable quickly." 

This time of year the garden gallery blooms with flowers and sculptures. Wooden bells clack gently in the background as the wind rustles through the foliage. Skeoch smiles quickly and offers everyone a hug. 

"When I moved into this neighborhood [in 1986] it was a crack neighborhood and we still have some remnants of that. I was very naïve about crack. I was like, 'No. I'm going to be safe here,' and I have been." Skeoch said.  

"I have to say, the drug thing is sad. I see it now. When I see people that are troubled I know now. The neighborhood is one of these neighborhoods that keeps changing. It used to have a lot of African-Americans. To my sadness those are the people who’ve been pushed out. We still have a very diverse neighborhood, which I love, but more and more homeowners are buying in the neighborhood." 

Her neighbors don't seem to have a problem with her numerous nudes. While several of her sculptures were stolen from her porch last Christmas, that hasn't dampened Skeoch's enthusiasm. 

"I think the human body is one of the most magnificent things. One of the wonderful things in working with the figure is you get to see so many different bodies. In a way it demystifies the whole mystery of us."  

Skeoch whispered conspiratorially, "What do we look like naked?" Laughing, she continued, "Some people would really not want to have all these naked people around but I love it and I wouldn't change it. I love seeing the body move. I try in my work to capture movement. Even when the person is sitting still.  

"I guess the question is, 'why not all the naked people?' Why not all the nude figures? Why not? Definitely we live in a culture where all the naked stuff is hard for people. I could project tons of things on to that, like the fear of their own bodies or whatever but again it's my passion. I don't know where the whole thing with the figure happened but it happened early on when I was modeling for a sculpture class. I want to do this! This is what I want to do." 

Kit Skeoch's Web site: http://www.clerestory.com/kitskeoch/.

TUESDAY, JUNE 10 

Forest Legislation and Actions, a discussion of current bills in Sacramento, sponsored by the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters at 7:30 p.m. at the Rockridge Library, 5366 College Ave., Oakland. 548-3133. 

Hiking the San Francisco Bay Area, slides and talk with author Linda Hamilton at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going 

Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. at Rose. 843-3533.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 525-3565. www.ber 

keleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. B. K. Bose will speak on Yoga for Health at 10:30 a.m. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11 

World Travel: Why SARS, the Economy and War Shouldn’t Keep You at Home, a panel discussion with Bay Area travel specialists at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. at Rose. 843-3533. 

Wilderness Weekends: Camping and Backpacking in the Bay Area and Beyond with Matt Heid, author of “101 Hikes in Northern California,” at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140.  

THURSDAY, JUNE 12 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market Opens on North Shattuck 

from 2 to 6 p.m. in the Elephant Pharmacy parking lot, 1607 Shattuck Ave., at Cedar, and continuing every Thursday. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Our Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, with Ann Fagan Ginger, on the new McCar- 

thyism that is sweeping the country, at 7 p.m. at the Friends’ Meetinghouse at the corner of Vine and Walnut Sts. Free, wheelchair accessible. 705-7314. 

Lawyers in the Library, at 6 p.m. in the South Branch, 1901 Russell St. 981-6260. 

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers meet at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave. Fly tying demonstration at 6:30 p.m., dinner at 7 p.m., meeting begins at 7:30 p.m. rorlando@uclink4.berkeley.edu  

FRIDAY, JUNE 13 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berke- 

ley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 

548-6310, 845-1143. 

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

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART the second Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m. 

SATURDAY, JUNE 14 

City of Berkeley Summer Aquatics Program Register from 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. at the West Campus Pool, 2100 Browning St. at Addison and at the Willard pool, 2701 Telegraph, at Derby, or call 981-5150. 

Berkeley Special Education Parents Network End of Year Potluck and Gathering at 3 p.m. at San Pablo Park, Russell St. at Park. Wheel- 

chair accessible. For more information call 428-1131.  

Free Lead-Safe Painting and Remodeling Class Learn how to detect and remedy lead hazards and conduct lead-safe renovations for your older home from 9 to 11 a.m. at the Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program Training Center, 1017 22nd Ave., Suite #110, Oakland. For information or to register, call 567-8280. 

Kids’ Garden Club: Aroma- 

tic Plants For children age 7 to 12, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Til- 

den Nature Area. Cost is $5 for Berkeley residents, $7 for non-residents. 525-2233, tnarea@ebparks.org 

Celebration of 30 Years of Curbside Recycling at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center St. at Martin Luther King, Jr. Way from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour, “McCreary-Greer House, The Berkeley City Club, and Environs,” 

led by Paul Grunland, 10 a.m. $5 members, $10 non-members. For reservations call 848-0181. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc 

Gaia and the Sacred: Religion, Science, and Ethics 

A one-day conference ex- 

ploring the ways in which religion, ethics, and the sciences shape our understanding of who we are. Keynote address by Carol P. Christ on her forthcoming book, “She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World.” From 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, 2451 Ridge Rd. To register contact Christopher Evans at 649-2560 or trees@gtu.edu 

Open House for the Acu- 

puncture and Integrative Medicine College for pro- 

spective students and neighbors. Learn about our Mas- 

ters of Science in Oriental Medicine program. Please register by June 10. For more information and to register, please call Taj Moore, 666-8248, or info@aic-berkeley.edu 

SUNDAY, JUNE 15 

Juneteenth Celebration on Adeline Street between Ashby and Alcatraz. Two stages for live entertainment, food vendors, arts and crafts, and jazz in the Black Reper- 

tory Theater. 655-8008. 

Father's Day Campfire 

from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Tilden Park. Bring your hot dogs, buns, marshmallows and join us for songs and stories around the fire. Dress for possible fog. Walk uphill to the campfire circle. Disabled accessible, call for transportation. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk, facilitated by singer/ 

songwriter/activist Margie Adam, at 2 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. Join a growing number of people who have found that walking the laby- 

rinth, individually and in community, offers a powerful way to ground and focus healing and peace and justice work in the world. Free. Wheelchair accessible. Sponsored by the East Bay Labyrinth Project. 526-7377. 

Tibetan Yoga, Kum Nye Instructors Charaka Jurgens and Donna Morton on “Practices of Tibetan Yoga,” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Place. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, JUNE 16 

Teaching About Africa and the African Diaspora A two-day institute, sponsored by the Center for African Stu- 

dies, UC Berkeley, for K-12 and college educators and librarians. Topics include Misconceptions and Stereo- 

types; Islam in Africa; Colonialism; Comparative Political Systems; Cultural Contributions of People of African Descent; Social Movements; and Literature. Cost is $40 for one day, or $50 for both days. Registration required, but fee waivers are available. Call 642-8338 or e-mail amma@uclink.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley Gray Panthers Homeowners Support Group on heaters and options for heating your home, at 3 p.m. in the Grey Panthers Office, 1403 Addison St. 548-9696. 

Berkeley CopWatch meets at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Vol- 

unteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING 

Figure Drawing Workshop 

Saturdays, from 9 a.m. to noon, starting June 14. This class is designed to sharpen your observation skills and enhance your drawings. Bring your own dry drawing tools and good paper. In- 

structor is Carol Brighton. Cost is $150 for four sessions. Contact the Berkeley Art Center to sign up, 644-6893. 

Marine Biology Classes for students ages 10 to 13, from Tues., June 17 to Fri., June 27, 9:30 a.m. to noon at the Shorebird Nature Center, 160 University Ave., at the Marina. Cost is $90 for eight days of classes. For information call 644-8623. www.cityofberkeley.info/marina  

Educators Academy: Project WILD and Project Aquatic WILD Tues., June 14 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Tilden Na- 

ture Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $45 for Berkeley residents and $51 for non-residents. Insects and Crawling Creatures Tues., June 24 - Thurs., June 26, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Registration is required. Cost is $100 for Berkeley residents, $110 for non-residents. Financial assistance for both courses. For information 636-1684. tnarea@ebparks.org 

The Bay Area Shakespeare Camp for children 7-13 years of age, in a series of five, 2-week sessions beginning June 16 and ending August 22. John Hinkel Park, South- 

ampton Place at Arlington Ave. The cost is $340 per session. After-care is also provided for a fee. Scholar- 

ships are available; call 981-5150 for details. To register for the camp, or for more information, please call 415-422-2222, or 800-978-PLAY. 

Alameda County Hazardous Waste Drop-Off from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. June 12 - 14 at Alameda County Household Hazardous Waste, 2100 E. 7th St., Oakland. For information on what can and cannot be dropped off, please call 1-877-STOPWASTE or visit stopwaste.org/fsrecycle.  

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tuesday, June 10, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers. Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Council Agenda Committee Meeting Monday, June 16, at 

2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St., Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 

981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Two-by-Two Meeting A bi-monthly meeting of City and School District elected and appointed officials to discuss problems of common concern, Thursday, June 12, at 12:30 p.m., in the Redwood Room, 6th floor, 2180 Milvia St. 644-6147. 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board Individual Rent Adjustment/Annual General Adjustment Committee meets Wednesday, June 11, at 5:30 p.m., at 2001 Center Street, 2nd Floor, Law Library. Regular Board meeting Monday, June 16, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche, 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Commission on Disability  

meets Wednesday, June 11, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Paul Church, 981-6342. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/commissions/disability 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets  

Thursday, June 12, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation 

Community Health Commission meets Thursday, June 12 at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/health 

Homeless Commission meets Wednesday, June 11, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Workshop on the Protection of Arts and Crafts Uses in West Berkeley at the Planning Commission, Wednesday, June 11, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission 

meets Wednesday, June 11, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Barbara Attard, 981-4950. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/policereview 

Waterfront Commission 

meets Wednesday, June 11, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti. 644-6376 ext. 224. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/waterfront 

Zoning Adjustments Board 

meets Thursday, June 12, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/zoning

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 

• 

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. 

• 

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 

• 

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 

• 

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 

• 

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

ACCI Gallery, “Midstream” 

A photography exhibition of artists Alex Ambrose, Bar- 

bara Bobes, Dafna Kory, and Catherine Stone. Exhibition runs until June 24. Gallery hours are Mon. - Thurs. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Fri. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. acciart@aol. 

com, www.accigallery.com 

Addison Street Windows, “The Color of Sound” 

Paintings, prints, and mixed media art about music, by Eve Donovan, through June 27, 2018 Addison St. 658-0585. 

Albany Community Center Arts Foyer Gallery, “Many Faces of the Middle East” 

Photographs by Ed Kinney, through July 11. Gallery hours are 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. 1249 Marin Ave., Albany. 524-9283. 

Alta Bates Community Gallery, “Hot Flash Glass” An exibition by eight Bay Area artists, through June 20. “The Whole Story,” handmade paper art by Linda Lemon, through June 21. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., daily. 2450 Ashby Ave. 548-7333. 

The Ames Gallery, “Conversations with Myself” Works by Barry Simons. Paintings and collages incorporating the artist’s original poetry. By appointment or chance. Exhibition runs until August 15. 2661 Cedar St. 845-4949. www.amesgallery.com  

Art of Living Center, “Watercolors” by William Webb. Exhibitions runs until July 18, Tues., Wed., Sat., noon - 5 p.m., Fri. 1 - 5 p.m. 2905 Shattuck Ave. 848-3736. 

Bancroft Library, 

“Then and Now” Student photographs of the Berkeley Campus,from the late 1800s to the present, through July 18. Mon. - Fri. 9 a.m - 5 p.m., Sat. 1 - 5 p.m. 642-3781. 

Berkeley Art Center, “Un- 

bound and Under Covers,” 

Visual writing: spoken word performances and book exhibition from June 13 to July 27. Curated by Jaime Robles. Work and performance by Indigo Som, Meredith Stricker, Dale Going and Marie Carbone, Susan King and Lisa Kokin. Berkeley Art Center in Live Oak Park, 1275 Walnut St. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org  

Berkeley Art Museum,  

“The Black Panthers 1968” Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, Free exhibition runs until June 29. “Far Away-Nearby” The 33rd Annual UC Berkeley Masters of Fine Art Graduate Exhibition, through July 28. Roger Ballen, “Photographs” May 12 - August 15. “Everything Matters: Paul Klos, A Retrospective” April 2 - July 20. “A Brush with Truth,” 13th c. Chinese ink paintings, “Haboku,” Japanese landscape paintings, through June 29. Fred Wilson’s “Aftermath,” selected objects on war and conflict from the museum’s collection, through July 20. “Turning Corners,” an exhibition of five centuries of innovative art, through the summer of 2004. The UC Berkeley Art Museum is open Wed. - Sun., 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. Admission $8, free to UC staff, faculty and students, and free for general public the first Thurs. of every month, 2626 Bancroft Way, 642-0808.                   www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley Historical Society, “Focus on Berkeley”  

A photography exhibit by the Berkeley Camera Club, Berkeley High School students and community photographers in celebration of the City’s 125th Anniversary. Exhibition runs until Sept. 13. Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St. Sponsored by the Berkeley Historical Society. 848-0181.  

Graduate Theological Union Library, “Hand-crafted Books by Bay Area Artists,” Zea Morwitz, Mary Eubank, Nance O'Banion, Ted Purves, Susanne Cockrell, Karen Sjoholm, and Lisa Kokin. Each book is accompanied by a statement addressing the issues and process involved in the creation of the work. Exhibition runs until Sept. 30. 2400 Ridge Rd. 649-2541. 

Kala Art Institute, “Water World” Photograph-based images of water by a diverse group of artists. Photography, digital imaging and video reveal perspectives on the ways we see and think about water. Exhibition runs until June 21. 1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977. www.kala.org  

Lawrence Hall of Science,  

“Lego Ocean Adventure” 

The underwater world comes to life through role play and hands-on activities. Children learn how people eat, sleep, and work while living underwater as well as how scientists explore the ocean depths using unmanned rovers. Runs until Sept. 7. 

“K'NEXtech” Technology meets your imagination--without stumbling blocks. Construct models from colorful K'NEX pieces, which snap easily together, of whatever you can imagine. Or just examine the amazing K'NEX sculptures built by professional designers all made with more than half a million K'NEX pieces. Runs from May 24 to Sept. 14. Law- 

rence Hall of Science is open 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Cost is $8 for adults, $6 for youth 5-18, seniors and disabled, $4 for children 3-4, free for children under 3. Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive, above the UC Campus. 643-5961. www.lawrencehall- 

ofscience.org 

A New Leaf Gallery, “Four Elements of Sculpture Fire, Air, Water and Earth,” from  

June 7 to August 31. Call for exhibit opening hours and regular gallery hours. 1286 Gilman St. 527-7621. www.sculpturesite.com 

Phoebe S. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, “Photographs from the Great Age of Exploration, 1865-1915,” through March 2004. “A Century of Collecting” Exploring the variety of art and culture across the globe from ancient times to the present. Gallery hours are Wed. - Sat., 10 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Sun., noon - 4 p.m. Cost is $2 for adults, $.50 for children, free for museum members, UC students, staff and faculty, free to the public on Thurs. Kroeber Hall, UC Campus. 643-7648. http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/outreach 

Photolab Gallery, “Images from the Ballroom Series” by Andy Stewart Black and white photographs on exhibit from June 7 to July 19. Gallery hours are Mon. - Fri. 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., sat. 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Reception for the Artist, June 14, 6 to 8 p.m. 2235 Fifth St. 644-1400. www.photolaboratory.com  

Gallery 1450, “Permutations,” Michele Pred’s sculptures using confiscated airport items, at 1450 4th St. Exhibition runs until June 12. Gallery hours are Fri. and Sat. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and by appointment. 526-2695. 

Red Oak Realty Gallery, Prints by Barbara de Groot. Exhibition runs until July 26. 1891 Solano Ave. 848-3965. 

Regional Parks Botanic Gardens Visitors Center, “Closeup Photographs of Wildflowers,” by Maggie Ely. Visitors center is located at the intersection of Wildcat Canyon and South Park Drive. 

Thelma Harris Art Gallery, “Hopes and Dreams and Spring” Paintings by Bernie Casey, through June 30. Gallery hours are Tues. - Fri. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat., noon to 5 p.m. 5940 College Ave., Oakland, 654-0443. 

Traywick Gallery, “Osmotica” Works by Linda Mieko Allen. Exhibition runs until June 21. Gallery hours are  

Wed. - Sat., 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. 1316 Tenth St. 527-1214. www.traywick.com 

Women’s Cancer Resource Center Gallery, “Painted Blessings” Painted breast castings by Bibiana Lai. Exhibition runs until July 3. 5741 Telegraph Ave. 601-

In the latest high-level shake-up at Berkeley High School, newly appointed principal Patricia Christa abruptly resigned Thursday, stunning parents, teachers and administrators. 

“It’s pretty devastating news,” said Joan Edelstein, president of the Berkeley High School Parent Teacher Student Association. “As one of the parents said, it feels like Berkeley High has been sucker-punched again.” 

Christa’s resignation came just eight days after high school co-principals Mary Ann Valles and Laura Leventer announced their resignations, effective at the end of the school year. Valles and Leventer had been slated to serve as vice principals under Christa next year. 

Valles refused to comment on Christa’s resignation, saying that any statement on the matter had to come from the superintendent’s office. 

The rapid-fire resignations have raised questions about the stability of the troubled, 3,000-student high school, which is preparing for a major reform effort that would place half its students in a series of schools-within-a-school by the 2005-2006 school year. 

Christa did not return calls for comment, but Superintendent Michele Lawrence said the erstwhile principal felt overwhelmed by the challenges at Berkeley High and bombarded by parents and staff who focused on all the problems at the school. 

“To immediately tell her about all the warts and not the beauty marks is unfair,” said Lawrence. 

Christa, officially named principal May 7, swept into town pledging to bring much-needed stability to Berkeley High, which has seen four administrations in the last six years. 

“To me, it’s a travesty that principals have left,” Christa told the Daily Planet last month. “That’s absurd.” 

Christa will return to her current job as director of educational services for the Newark Unified School District. Lawrence said she has no timeline for filling the vacancy. 

“I’m moving with deliberate speed,” Lawrence said. “But this will not force me to make a quick decision. I’m not going to put anybody in there just because we don’t have someone.” 

Lawrence said she is talking with other finalists from this spring’s principal search. She has also contacted retired administrators around the state who might fill in as temporary or long-term replacements. 

Students said they were not surprised by Christa’s decision, given the sprawling high school’s history of rapid turnover at the top. 

“We’ve had a billion principals,” said 15-year-old sophomore Rhiannon Mariani. 

The changes at Berkeley High come just weeks after all three of Berkeley’s associate superintendents announced that they will resign at the end of the school year, two to take jobs as superintendents elsewhere. In a cost-saving measure, the cash-strapped district has only replaced one of the administrators, Associate Superintendent of Business and Operations Jerry Kurr. Eric Smith is the new business chief. 

Lawrence cautioned against reading too much into the parade of resignations, arguing that leadership changes are common in public education, particularly in high-stress urban school districts.  

Joe Jones, assistant executive director of the Association of California School Administrators, said the game of musical chairs often picks up during budget crises. Veteran administrators with hefty salaries often retire to save their districts money, he said, opening up a host of positions around the state. 

“I’m not sure that Berkeley is in a unique situation,” he said. 

But Berkeley High history teacher Annie Johnston said the district will suffer from the loss of so many experienced administrators. 

“These connections to what has gone on before are all gone,” she said. “Many, many mistakes are going to be made.” 

Johnston raised particular concern about the shift to “small schools” at Berkeley High, worrying that it could be “severely impacted” by the shake-up in the principal’s office. 

Lawrence said she has concerns about the small schools transition, the development of next year’s class schedule, the hiring and assigning of teachers, and the success of this year’s summer school program. 

Board of Education Director Shirley Issel said the resignation is particularly difficult for staff to stomach at the end of the year. 

“It’s sad, because the school year’s ending and the kids are graduating and you’re separating from the organization without leadership and there are unknowns,” she said. 

Berkeley High librarian Ellie Goldstein-Erickson said staff was particularly struck by Christa’s passion for education. 

“She impressed me as someone with a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm,” she said. “It seemed to be contagious.” 

But parents said constant problems with everything from scheduling to student safety to the “achievement gap” separating white and Asian students from blacks and Hispanics are enough to scare off any administrator. 

“The problems at that school seem so endemic, that you just can’t imagine someone coming in to fix it,” said Stephen DeGange, the parent of a senior and coach of the Berkeley High junior varsity baseball team. “I think your best bet is to just level it and start over.”

On April 7, the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) informed local residents of Superintendent Michelle Lawrence’s desire to move the Berkeley Adult School from its University Avenue location to the currently vacant Franklin School. The district wants the School Board to approve the move in July and begin construction in September 2003.  

The proposed move received mixed response from neighbors who are still trying to digest the district’s rationale and the impact of the proposed move. But Franklin cannot, and should not, remain vacant. So, regardless of what kind of facility eventually goes there, our community’s concern is that the change be well thought out and integrated into our neighborhood.  

Clearly, if implemented, this multi-million-dollar Adult School move will have a huge impact on the quiet neighborhood surrounding Franklin. The district’s figures show that 1,340 new people will be entering our community every day, including 455 evening students whose classes won’t end until 9:30 p.m. In a part of town where parks and recreational areas are sparse, the district intends to pave over at least one-half the Franklin playground for parking—eliminating ball fields, basketball courts and a track.  

The daily influx of people, the long hours of operation and amount of activity associated with the Adult School will have a significant impact on recreational space, local traffic circulation, parking, noise, litter and security for the Franklin neighborhood. Residents want to make sure that careful and thoughtful plans are instituted to address the additional stresses the neighborhood will undergo. 

The good news is that all the stakeholders are in good communication over the proposed Franklin change. The district, with Superintendent Lawrence and School Board members in attendance, have organized several well-attended community meetings to make their case and hear neighborhood concerns. Individual School Board members have also been meeting with community activists. City Councilmember Linda Maio has taken a leadership position from the beginning and her office continues to work vigorously with all parties. And both the Franklin neighbors and the current Adult School neighbors (many of whom want the Adult School to remain at its present location) are mobilized and actively engaging the process.  

The bad news is the law appears to make BUSD a power unto themselves, virtually exempt from any of the traditional city review processes normally required before making a move of this scale. (Does anyone familiar with Berkeley’s permitting process believe a comparably sized shopping development or housing complex would be approved and break ground five months after announcing its intentions?) Yet, the district can seemingly make whatever unilateral decisions they want, essentially without review or recourse, and the city can do little beyond reviewing parking and traffic mitigations.  

There is a better way to serve the community, the city and the school district. It’s a collaborative approach, where we work in partnership to determine what Franklin should become and how best to integrate it into our neighborhood. But we can’t do that by merely offering our observations and comments and then looking in from the outside as the district exercises all the power, as is the current model. We must be an integral part of that process, working together to determine the best course for all.  

Here are two concrete steps that would help. First, open all district planning and design meetings to our neighborhood site committee and city representatives and make us an integral part of the planning process. Second, take the time to do careful, accurate and thoughtful traffic, parking, public transportation, recreation and other relevant studies. The few months lost while careful planning takes place are insignificant compared to long-term benefits gained by embracing community and city involvement in a full analysis of the proposed changes and their ramifications.  

The stakeholders are currently in good communication and, I believe, there is sufficient good will to make this approach succeed. Let’s take it to the next level and implement a truly cooperative decision-making system that includes all the key players. The alternative is to leave all the decision-making power in the district’s hands. That’s not a process designed to make the best community-wide decisions and inevitably will create resentment toward BUSD at a time when they need our good will as much as we need for them to succeed. 

Change is in the wind with the Berkeley Unified School District. This proposed move is the first of many that the district will be making at several sites over the next few years, when the Berkeley Adult School, the administrative center and maintenance yards, the Oregon campus and other schools currently operating in the district will likely change. Let’s make the proposed Franklin development the model for how we can work together for the good of all parties in the future.  

Paul Shain is a Berkeley resident and Franklin School neighbor.

TUESDAY, JUNE 10 

FILM 

The Inquiring Camera: “Confessions of a Sociopath” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sherman Alexie, chronicler of the Native American experience, presents “Ten Little Indians” at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are free with the purchase of the book, available in both Cody’s Bookstores. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Cynthia Kaufman addresses the growing number of people who are unhappy with the status quo in her new book “Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Deborah Day explains the use of poetry to educate in her book “Mindful Messages: Healing Thoughts for the Hip Hop Descendants from the Motherland” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sol Americano and The Mara Connection, in a benefit performance for the Center for Educational Research and Development at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jimmy Bruno, John Palme and Carol Denney offer an evening of song artistry at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freight-andsalvage.org 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11 

FILM 

I Found it at the Movies: “All the Hitchcock You Can Repeat” at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Scoop Nisker returns at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freight-andsalvage.org 

Kevin Sweeny discusses his new book “Father Figures: A Boy Goes Searching” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Bridget Connelly discusses her memoir, “Forgetting Ireland,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Laila Halaby, daughter of a Jordanian and an American, discusses the difficulty of growing up in two cultures in her new novel, “West of the Jordan,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

peAktimes, a performance project mixing today’s news with experimental music and dance at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $5-$10 sliding scale. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.org 

NC Blues Connection at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Already Dead, Astral Realm, Puddingstone, Scribe perform punk and rock at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Juan Diego Flórez, tenor, performs at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

La Peña Recital with students from Rafael Manriquez’s Latin American Music Ensembles and Josh Jones’ Latin Jazz Ensembles at 7 p.m. at La Pena Cultural Center. Cost is $8. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

THURSDAY, JUNE 12 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “We Can’t Go Home Again” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Target Iraq: What the News Media is not Telling You” with Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $7. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Isabel Allende describes her exile from her homeland in her new book, “My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Noah Levine discusses his transformation from a skateboarding punk in Santa Cruz in his memoir, “Dharma Punx,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert Downtown with the Lynn Bobby Band at the Berkeley BART Station. Seating available. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Assoc. 549-2230. 

Jackie Greene, folk and blues prodigy, performs at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jesse Legé with Sauce Piquante at 8:30 p.m., with a Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Hannah Marcus, The Obli- 

vion Seeker and Ultra Lash at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

FRIDAY, JUNE 13 

CHILDREN 

“Little Nut Brown Hare” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “King of Kings” at 7:30 p.m., Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon Series, “Racial Profiling and Counter-Terrorism” with Jack Glasser, Ph.D., Professor, Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley. Luncheon 11:45 a.m. $11.50 - $12.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations 526-2925, 665-9020. 

“Unbound and Under Covers” Experiments in visual writing, at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Karen X. Tulchinsky returns with the Rabinovitch family in her new book “Love and Other Ruins,” at 7:30 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books, 398 Co- 

lusa St., Kensington. 559-9184. 

Andrea Siegel talks about the father-daughter bond in her new book “Snapshots From the Heart” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com  

Gayle Brandeis, winner of the Bellwether Prize reads from her novel “The Book of Dead Birds” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. She will be introduced by Maxine Hong Kingston. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Latin Jazz Legacy Series, with Mark Levine and the Latin Tinge, Eddie and Mad Duran. Panel at 7:30 p.m., performance at 8:30 p.m., at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12 in advance, $15 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Symphony Orchestra performs Brahms, Benoit/ 

Beintus, and Nodaira at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall. Tickets are $10-$45. 841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org 

Jazzschool Students’ Spring Recital at 6 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Admission is free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

María Bermúdez y Sonidos Gitanos perform flamenco at 8 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $32 for adults, $29 for children under 12, students and seniors. 925-798-1300. 

Groundation, reggae classics with band originals, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Taos Hum, Club Dub and The Spindles perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

SoVoSó, jazz-inflected a cappella, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Inspect Her Gadget, Spag, Second Opinion, Solamente, Resilience, The Peels perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Jim Ryan’s Forward Energy with Eddie Gale and Marco Eneidi, jazz at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.org 

SATURDAY, JUNE 14 

CHILDREN 

Celebrate Father’s Day and Flag Day with readings of “What Dads Can Do” and “The Starry, Stripy Blanket” at 11 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861.  

FILM 

“Dersu Uzala,” a film by Akira Kurosawa about a military explorer who meets and befriends a hunter in the unmapped forests of Siberia, at 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheel- 

chair accessible. All events are free. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org  

Nicholas Ray: “Bitter Victory” at 4:30 and 8:50 p.m. and “The Savage Innocents” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The Global War on Terror and Its Impact on the Philippines with Romeo Capulong, a human rights attorney in the Philippines, at 5:30 p.m. in Booth Memorial Auditorium, Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley. Sponsored by the Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines. 415-244-9734. 

Rhythm and Muse Poetry reading at the Berkeley Art Center. Open mic sign-up at 6:30 p.m., reading at 7 p.m. 1275 Walnut St., between Eunice & Rose Sts. Admis- 

sion is free. 527-9753 or 569-5364. 

Daniel Glick discusses life as a single father in “Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Freight’s 35th Anniversary Concert with Phil Marsh, and members of the Clean- 

liness and Godliness Skiffle Band, East Bay Sharks, Darryl Henriques, Marc Silber and others at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Tickets are $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

La Peña Celebrates its 28th Anniversary with Bobi Céspedes, Cuban singer, percus- 

sionist and Yoruba Lucumi priestess, at 8 and 10 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Ensemble 6-4-2 presents “A Musical Offering from Berlin to Paris: Virtuoso Sonatas of Bach, Leclair, Marais, Telemann” on period instruments at 8 p.m. at St. Alban's Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington St., Albany. Tickets are $15, $12 for seniors and students. 415-242-4348. 

Flamenco Fever with Yaelisa accompanied by singers Antonio Malena and Mateo Solea. Dinner Show at 7 p.m., $49-$67; Wine and Tapas Show at 9:45 p.m. $20-$37. Café de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. 843-0662. www.cafedelapaz.net 

Jewish Soulfolk with Ira Scott English and Hebrew songs for the whole community at 8 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut Ave., between Vine and Rose. The concert will end with a short Havdalah service. 848-0237. 

Adam Lane’s Full Throttle Orchestra with Avram Fefer performs at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $6-$15 sliding scale. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.org 

Transmission Trio, avant groove at 9 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $7. 644-2204. 

O-Maya performs a blend of Latin music and hip-hop at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Calamity and Main, The Cowlicks, and Richard Marsh perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Phenomenauts, D. S. B., Assault, From Ashes Rise, Black Lung Patriots perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5, $1 if wearing prom clothes! 525-9926. 

Gil Chun’s “Bay Area Follies” A variety dance program including tap, ballroom and ethnic dances at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church at 2727 College Ave. Cost is $9, $6 for seniors. 526-8474. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 15 

FILM 

Douglas Sirk: “There is Always Tomorrow” at 5:30 p.m., at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

25 Years of Women’s Poetry, a celebration reading of “A Fierce Brightness” with Re- 

becca Gordon, Merle Woo and others at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Joseph McElroy reads from his new book, “Actress in the House,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Gallery Talk on The Painted Tales of India, with Lee Patterson, at 3 p.m. in Gallery D of the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Patti Smith and Her Band in Concert in Appreciation of the Anti-War Movement from 1 to 4 p.m. in the MLK, Jr. Park. Donations requested. Sponsored by KPFA, Slim’s, ANSWER Coalition, Middle East Children’s Alli- 

ance, and Code Pink. 415-821-6565. 

African Drum Workshop, held every Sunday with Wade Peterson. Beginners at 11 a.m., experienced at 12:30 p.m., at The Jazz House. Cost is $15-425, and advan- 

ced registration is encouraged. 533-5111. 

Pacific Mozart performs a cappella jazz and pop at 5 p.m. at the Crowden School, 1475 Rose St. Tickets are $20 general, $15 seniors and students available from 415-705-0848. www.pacificmozart.org 

Kalajali: Dances of India at 2 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $25 front rows, $12 general seating, available from 925-798-1300. www.juliamorgan.org 

Country Joe McDonald, Berkeley’s world-renowned troubador, performs at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

John Shiurba and Good For Cows perform at 8:15 p.m. at The Jazz House. Admission is free, donations welcome. 649-8744. www.thejazz- 

house.org 

E.W. Wainwright and the African Roots of Jazz at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Tickets are $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 16 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Express with Kirk Lumpkin at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave., near University Ave. 

Khaled Hosseini reads from “The Kite Runner,” the first novel about contemporary Afghanistan to be written in English, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Subhankar Banerjee will show slides and introduce his book on the endangered wilderness, “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

David White will read from his new book “The Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Context,” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2467 Telegraph Ave. 849-2133. www.moesbooks.com 

AT THE THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, “The Bacchae” 

Euripedes’ play about Dionysus and his revenge against a hateful king. Directed by David Stein. At 5:30 p.m., outdoors in John Hinkle Park, off The Arlington at Southampton Ave and Somerset Place. Performan- 

ces Sat. and Sun., June 21 through July 6. Free admission. 525-1620. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Aurora Theater Company, “Thérèse Raquin,” by Emile Zola, directed by Tom Ross. A sinister tale set among the lower classes in nineteenth-century Parisian society. Runs June 20 to July 27, at 2081 Addison St. Tickets are $32 and $34. 843-4822.  

www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Repertory Theater, 

“The Guys,” by Anne Nelson, directed by Robert Egan. May 21 – July 5, Tues - Sun call for starting times. $10 - $54. The Roda Theater, 2016 Addison St. 647-2918. 647-2949. (888) 4BRTTIX  

www.berkeleyrep.org 

California Shakespeare Festival runs May 28 to October 22. Performances this year will be Julius Caesar, Arms and the Man, Measure for Measure, and Much Ado About Nothing. Please call for performance dates and times. The Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org  

Central Works Theater Ensemble, “The Wyrd Sisters” directed by Jan Zvaifler. June 13 - July 13, Thurs. - Sat at 8 p.m. and Sun at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $8-$20 sliding scale. For reservations and information call 558-1381. 

Shotgun Players presents 

“under milk wood” by Dylan Thomas at Eighth Street Studio, 2525 8th St., May 24 through June 21, Thurs. - Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 7 p.m. No performance May 25. Tickets are $18 adults, $12 children and seniors, $10 on Thursdays. 704-8210. www.shotgunplayers.org

Bus transfers, discount cards and student passes may be eliminated because of AC Transit’s projected budget deficit of $40 million. 

In two public hearings on Thursday, June 11, the AC Transit Board of Directors will listen to community response to the planned changes, which could take effect as early as September. The hearings, which were advertised with brochures and posters on all AC Transit lines, will be held at the Scottish Rite Center at 1547 Lakeside Dr. in Oakland at 3 and 6 p.m. 

At the hearings, bus riders will be asked to consider two options to increase fare revenue. The first proposal would reduce regular cash fares to $1 from $1.50, but would eliminate all bus-to-bus transfers and discount passes. The second option would retain the $1.50 fare and maintain monthly discount passes for seniors and disabled riders only. Both options eliminate the pilot program that provides free passes to low-income secondary school students. 

AC Transit spokesman Mike Mills said the company chose to reduce discounts instead of increasing basic cash fares. 

“The cash fare, at $1.50, is already at a level that is relatively high compared to other transit organizations,” Mills said. “But the discounts, in many cases, are substantial, and eliminating them would bring in considerably more revenue. Ideally we’d like to keep everything, but with the budget deficit we need to find ways to increase revenue.” 

The second part of the plan cuts operating expenses by reducing services. The proposal calls for the elimination of up to 20 bus lines and reduced frequency, hours of operation, and/or coverage area of as many as 25 additional lines. 

Mills said that AC Transit general managers decided on the basis of ridership which lines could be reduced while affecting the smallest number of people. 

“It is a relatively nominal number of passengers that this would hurt; a small percentage of our 230,000 riders per day,” Mills said. “But those small changes combined with the other changes will allow us to cut $15 million for the next fiscal year.” 

AC Transit managers emphasized that the fare changes and service reductions were the last resort in their cost-cutting moves. Although the company raised fares two years ago, more recent steps have included laying off workers, imposing a hiring freeze, deferring capital projects and spending financial reserves. 

“Internal cost-cutting actions, up until now, largely have not affected many passengers,” said AC Transit general manager Rick Fernandez. 

Many bus riders said they would no longer ride the bus if discount passes and transfers were eliminated. Kaaren Bock, who rides the 51, 40 and 43 bus lines, said more than half of the passengers she spoke to while handing out fliers told her they would find other methods of transportation. 

“I use the 31-day pass every month to go to work,” said Mark Cinsert, a passenger on the 43 bus line in downtown Berkeley. “Eliminating that would almost double my transportation costs, so I would most likely create a carpool instead. They’re not going to increase fare revenue if they lose lots of riders.” 

Steve Geller, president of the Bus Riders Union, a public transit advocacy organization, said the service reductions and fare changes are necessary because of the operating deficit. 

“Increasing fares is never popular, and nobody likes the prospect of increasing the already high sales tax,” Geller said. “But if the East Bay wants bus service, the money has to come from somewhere.”

The mayor’s Task Force on Permitting and Development has been meeting every two weeks since Feb. 28 to “investigate options for improving and rationalizing the permitting process, while continuing to guarantee appropriate public input.” Although many task force members are much more interested in shortening the process than in “improving” either the process or the resulting developments, and are even contemptuous of “public input,” a persistent audience of citizen observers reminds them that the public cannot be wholly ignored. I am pleased to report that the task force’s early NIMBY-bashing has gradually dissipated, and an excellent discussion of public input occurred, for the first time, on June 6. 

The task force has 14 members. Eight are planners, developers, builders or architects, all of whom have some personal, philosophical or professional interest in making things easy for developers and commercial interests. Only two or three members (notably Bart Seldon of West Berkeley) effectively represent the interests of citizens affected by development projects. Victor Herbert, a mediator of neighbor-to-neighbor development conflicts, also realizes that there are at least two sides to every issue, although even he seems to have a very limited definition of the stakeholders in the development process; for example, he told me that he does not believe that the process needs to protect the rights of future Berkeleyans to a good urban environment. I disagree.  

The mayor did not appoint Berkeley’s most active neighborhood supporters to the task force, ostensibly because the city attorney felt it necessary to prohibit discussion of current projects. I find this argument unconvincing: Ex parte rules in Berkeley certainly make any intelligent discussion of planning problems difficult, but many neighborhood representatives outside this forum are making useful contributions to the development discussion despite Berkeley’s unique and onerous gag rule. On the task force as elsewhere, the primary effect of the gag rule is not to protect fair process, but to prevent exposure of the rampant misbehavior in the Planning Department and city attorney’s office.  

On the other hand, the task force contains many active developers, supposedly because they can draw on past experiences unrelated to current projects. But since the chair of the task force is also the sitting chair of the Zoning Adjustments Board, and since mayoral staff also attend the task force, even though these are all good and ethical people, socializing on the task force itself facilitates relationships between these developers and city staff and decision makers.  

Like me, about 50 percent of Berkeleyans are renters. As a group, renters are at the most risk of being negatively impacted by poor developments, both as neighbors and inhabitants of poorly designed rental projects. Renters in Berkeley greatly outnumber developers and even potential single-family project applicants, and have every legal and moral right to protect their neighborhoods and quality of life. Nonetheless, all members of the task force are homeowners, which accounts for one of its main obsessions: grumpy neighbors. 

Grumpy neighbors—in fact, almost all neighbors—are nitpicking troublemakers who have the temerity to try to defend their own property, neighborhoods and quality-of-life by keeping always-considerate, reasonable landowners from doing exactly what they want with their own property. Some task force members, especially ex-Councilmembers Polly Armstrong and Nancy Skinner, have expressed the opinion that groups of grumpy neighbors—no matter how large and united—are vocal minorities standing in opposition to some hypothetical “silent majority.” Since this assumption is irreconcilable with any democratic process, let’s hope our current councilmembers don’t believe this. 

The task force divided development issues into three categories: single-family residential (neighbor-to-neighbor) issues; commercial use permits, and new large-scale developments. Although it was wise to start with residential developments because they are the least complex, it understandably took time for the task force to find its sea legs, and now there are only two meetings left to discuss large developments. It will be interesting to see what they can do in this time.  

I believe the task force should have spent its first meetings laying the philosophical foundations for their process recommendations—in particular, deciding who the stakeholders are and how they should be represented—which could then have been applied to all three types of developments. They did not. The consequence of this omission, as well as lack of time, has so far been a piecemeal orientation aimed at rectifying superficial zoning quirks and inconveniences encountered by various task force members and people they know. But, as member Seldon pointed out: “Anecdotes do not make good policy.” Although task force discussions have revealed major underlying factors that make development problems inevitable (such as planning staff and budget problems, ubiquitous lack of parking and dispute over Berkeley’s urban environmental vision), the task force is not empowered or able to grapple with most of these issues, which are at the very heart of Berkeley’s development conflicts. Even the most brilliant task force could not make these problems go away, so resolving them is still up to the citizens of Berkeley.  

Sharon Hudson is a resident of Berkeley.

City Council may raise most parking fines by 30 percent Tuesday in an effort to offset next year’s $4.7 million budget deficit. 

The parking fine increases are expected to raise an extra $2 million for the city’s general fund. The remainder of the deficit is being made up by a city hiring freeze and restricted spending policies on expenditures such as travel and cell phones. 

The city issues approximately 240,000 tickets annually, generating about $6.5 million in parking citation revenue. The annual cost of parking enforcement staff and administration is roughly $3.5 million.  

According to a report by the City Manager’s Office, the new parking fines will be comparable to other Bay Area municipalities. For example, if the council approves the increases, parking meter violations will jump from $23 to $30, equal to Oakland’s fine. San Francisco is currently considering a $5 increase to $35 in most areas and $40 downtown.  

Nearly all of Berkeley’s 135 parking fines are included in the proposed hike. Those that will remain unchanged include $275 fines for disabled zone violations and $250 fines for bus zone violations. 

Library Tax Increase Proposal 

Berkeley Public Library officials plan to ask City Council to increase the library tax by 36 percent. The request will be made during a 5 p.m. special meeting Tuesday.  

The council will vote on the increased library tax when it votes on the city’s overall budget on June 17. 

According to the Library Tax Act, the city can raise the library tax according to two revenue streams, the Consumer Price Index, which is about 3 percent a year, or the California Personal Income Growth Index, about 4 percent a year. In recent years the library hasn’t increased the tax by the full amount it was entitled to and now wants to retroactively raise the tax.  

“We think of the money very much as a banking account,” Library Director Jackie Griffin said. “You don’t take out all of it because you don’t need it. You save it for a rainy day, and if ever the library was facing a rainy day, it’s now.” 

The tax increase will raise total library revenues from $11.2 million to $14.5 million, which will allow the library to maintain operation hours, update materials and pay for $650,000 in increased employee benefit costs due to union contracts the city recently negotiated.  

According to Jorge Garcia, chair of the Board of Library Trustees, library officials have struggled to keep costs down since opening the renovated and expanded Main Library. “We have experienced a 65 percent increase in usage in a library that’s twice as big as it used to be, with the same number of staff,” he said. 

Commute Store Closing 

The City Council is also scheduled to vote on paying UC Berkeley $129,000 to cover administration costs of the Berkeley TRiP Commute Store, which is closing its doors on June 27.  

The city and UC Berkeley opened the store in 1987 with the aim of reducing traffic congestion through increased access to public transportation and ridesharing. 

TRiP sold more than 110,000 transit tickets and fielded more than 50,000 ride sharing inquiries a year.  

According to city staff, the store was losing money and it was no longer feasible to keep it open in the face of expected state budget cuts.  

City transportation planners said the city is considering placing a transit pass vending machine in City Hall. The machine would distribute both BART and AC Transit passes.  

For information about obtaining transit passes contact AC Transit at (510) 891-4700 or visit their Web site at www.actransit.org. Or Call BART at (510) 464-7133 or visit their Web site at www.bart.gov/.

City Councilmember Dona Spring has sponsored a recommendation to name June 17 Charles Betcher Day in honor of the retired hospital administrator’s indefatigable work on city and county commissions and committees. 

City Council likely will approve the recommendation during Tuesday’s meeting. 

Betcher, 82, serves on a long list of government advisory bodies. He is vice chair of the Commission on Aging, vice chair on the Commission on Disability and vice chair of the Paratransit Alameda County Committee. 

He also co-chairs the Gray Panthers of Berkeley and is president of the Bus Riders Union of the East Bay. He is the immediate past president of the United Seniors and former chair of the Transportation Commission.  

“The commission system in Berkeley is beautiful,” Betcher said. “It’s a fine system that encourages citizens, especially low-income citizens, to participate in city government.” 

Berkeley is renowned for the number of commissions that advise city departments and City Council. Berkeley has 48 commissions. 

“Charlie Betcher is an unsung hero,” Spring said. “He’s done such fantastic work for so many years. He’s a real dynamo and has always managed to get along with everyone.” 

Due to term limits, Betcher will resign from both the Commission on Aging and the Commission on Disability next year. He said he might ask to be appointed to other city commissions. 

“You know, I haven’t even thought about it yet,” he said. “I am pleased and honored to work on the city’s commissions but mostly I serve on them because I have a short attention span and unless I’m doing something different all the time I get bored.”

Despite administrative threats of disciplinary action, an estimated 35 Berkeley High School seniors took part in the annual “Senior Streak” on Monday. 

Almost as soon as the bell rang at 11:32 a.m. to signal the end of third period and the beginning of lunch, seniors in nothing but tennis shoes, masks and body paint ran across the Berkeley High courtyard as friends stood cheering and snapping photographs. The students ran out the gate on Allston Way and escaped in a set of getaway cars driven by classmates. 

“That was great,” one junior who plans to participate in the streak next year said on Monday afternoon. “I really love seeing these fun traditions.” 

Berkeley High administrators said previously they would suspend any identifiable students. But though several witnessed Monday’s streak, it was not immediately clear how many students had been recognized. 

In a series of memos addressed to the senior class in past weeks, Berkeley High co-principals Laura Leventer and Mary Ann Valles urged students to keep their clothes on while on campus or risk losing the privilege of walking the stage at the school’s graduation ceremony Friday. 

“It is completely inappropriate, in a year of serious budget crisis, for us to focus our time, staff resources and money cleaning up after or monitoring such events,” the principals wrote in a letter dated June 2. “Participants will be subject to consequences including suspension, expulsion, financial remuneration and/or exclusion from senior prom.” 

Because the streak happened after the prom, which took place on Saturday night, streak participants ran without fear of missing that senior year tradition. Streak organizers said they made the choice to hold the streak this week instead of last so as not to risk being barred from the prom. 

Some students who chose not to streak said their choice had nothing to do with the threatened consequences. 

“I fully support the people who [did] run,” said one senior girl. “I just don’t feel comfortable running naked in front of my 900 closest friends.” 

Several of the students who did streak said the threats of disciplinary action did not deter them from participating. 

“The point of doing it is that the administration doesn’t like it,” said one streaker who declined to be named. “We’re not doing it because they like it. It’s a prank to make the students happy and the administrators mad.” 

Another senior said she was glad she had participated in the yearly tradition. “It’s a way to say good-bye,” she said.

The battle between preservationists and would-be housing developers over the fate of a 19th-century Victorian home at 2526 Durant Ave. is expected to heat up in the next few weeks, as the city puts the final touches on the project’s environmental impact report (EIR) and considers whether to issue a permit allowing developers to replace the historical Ellen Blood house with a 31,000-square-foot, five-story development that will include two retail establishments and 44 units of housing. 

On Thursday, the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) will consider whether the final EIR, which was released in April 2003, is adequate. State law mandates that local entities approve an EIR for any project that threatens to significantly impact a historical resource, so that they can examine solutions that may mitigate such impacts. 

The Blood House, a two-story structure built in 1891 that is now being used for office space, was designated a city structure of merit in September 1999. Among the reasons for the designation are the building’s Queen Anne style decor—characterized by textured shingles, curved and turned woodwork, lattice brackets and patterned masonry—and its status as one of only a handful of 19th-century buildings on the historic College Homestead tract, a Southside neighborhood developed at the turn of the last century. The house is located in the Telegraph Avenue commercial district near Bowditch Street between two other structures of merit, the Beau Sky Hotel and the Albra Apartments. 

Preservationists have taken issue with the EIR’s position that the Blood House, although a historic resource as defined by the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, has lost its historic integrity due to extensive alteration, including the paving over of its original garden and the replacement of its original exterior with cement plaster. 

One such preservationist is Sally Sachs, former president of the board of directors of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. In a letter commenting on the draft EIR, Sachs said the EIR’s authors, in pointing to the alterations to the building’s exterior, “establish a ridiculously low threshold of historic significance.” 

Despite the EIR’s half-hearted defense of the Blood House as a historic resource, its final conclusion on the matter may make it tougher for developers to go through with their plans. The EIR concludes that the project’s proposal to demolish or remove the Blood House constitutes a significant impact that cannot be mitigated. That means that in order for developers to carry out plans to destroy or relocate the Blood House, they will have to convince the ZAB and City Council to craft and approve a Statement of Overriding Considerations, which lists reasons why the development should proceed despite harm to a historic resource. 

“In this particular case,” said Greg Powell, senior planner and Landmarks Preservation Commission staff person, “the city may find that the need to produce our fair share of housing [in the region] outweighs the benefit of preserving a historic structure.” 

The Statement of Overriding Considerations must be approved if the city decides to issue a use permit for the project, and both City Council and the ZAB must approve it. 

Blood House defenders and the house owner say they are hoping for a win-win situation. Carrie Olson, a Landmarks Preservation commissioner, said she hopes the property owners, the Ruegg & Ellsworth company, will voluntarily decide to make a good faith effort to move the house, which she describes as huge and “beautiful inside” despite its stucco exterior. “The notion of putting a notice on it for several months in hopes that someone will come forward is not good enough,” she said. “We need to ask for concrete solutions, such as contacting property owners of the vacant lots around Berkeley to see if they would be interested in taking the house.”

About 650 seniors will cross the stage Friday at Berkeley High School’s graduation ceremony. 

“It’s a very accomplished group of young men and women and we’re very proud to see them move off to their next level of learning,” said Berkeley High School co-principal Mary Ann Valles. 

The ceremony will take place at UC Berkeley’s Greek Theater at 5:30 p.m. and will last about three hours, with male students in red gowns and female students sporting gold. 

Senior Andy Turner, who serves as student representative on Berkeley’s Board of Education, will be one of three featured speakers. Students David Chernicoff and Shelly Therrence will also speak. 

Various students are also expected to sing, read poetry and play music at the ceremony. As of Monday, graduation organizers were trying to line up a performance by the high school’s Afro-Haitian dance class. 

Berkeley High, as always, will have no valedictorian. 

“All of the children are first in the class,” said school district spokesman Mark Coplan. 

Each graduating senior received 10 tickets to distribute to family and friends, who can enter the Greek Theatre beginning at 4 p.m. Friday. Limited disabled seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. 

Parking is limited and high school officials are encouraging families to carpool. For more information, call Berkeley High’s events coordinator Ivery McKnight-Johnson at 644-8990.

While Berkeley is noted nationally, even internationally, for its turn-of-the-20th-century architects such as Bernard Maybeck and their creative and innovative residential designs, Berkeley also has a large number of house types that could simply be referred to as common.  

After the electric streetcar was introduced in Berkeley in 1891, and then consolidated and expanded in 1903, the streets along the routes and within walking distance of a streetcar stop were subdivided for homes. Martin Luther King, Jr. Way (formerly Grove Street) was the site of the earliest electric street car, and today is lined with two- to three-story houses called “Classic Boxes.”  

Inspired by the Classic-styled architecture of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the Classic Box was so popular that streetcar suburbs across the United States and Canada were soon filled with them. They are quintessentially North American and were built from Key West, Fla., to Vancouver, BC, with little regard for climate or location. These two-story houses are noteworthy for their rectangular shape, square, hipped or pyramidal roof (often with a single dormer in the center), closed eaves and covered entry porch.  

Early examples of these houses had Classical detailing such as engaged Ionic or Corinthian columns at the corners or free-standing columns supporting the entrance porches. Sometimes there were dentils under the eaves or a three-part Palladian-styled window. There are numerous variations on the theme, some large and designed by architects, others copied from design books. The style is referred to by several different names: Classic Revival, Edwardian, Neo-colonial Revival, Classic Box and in the Midwest the American foursquare.  

In Berkeley and Oakland there are many fine examples of the more elaborately decorated variations because the style was popular here between 1895 and 1910.  

As a housing type, the Classic Box is substantial and has a flexible floor plan easily adapted to contemporary life styles. Many have been converted to duplexes, and some to commercial uses such as restaurants like Chez Panisse.  

However, just because a house is ordinary does not mean that the building may not have interesting associations. For example, this house was built in 1903 for retired Army Officer John T. Morrison, his wife, Henrietta, and their daughter, May. Morrison fought Geronimo in the late 1800s and served on the Berkeley Town Council. Before moving here the family had lived on Addison Street. May Morrison graduated from Berkeley High School in 1895 and the University of California in 1914. She was an accomplished painter and teacher who is listed in several anthologies of California painters. The Morrison House is located at 2532 Benvenue Ave. and was designated a Berkeley Landmark, Structure of Merit in 1990.  

Susan Cerny is author of the book “Berkeley Landmarks” and writes this in conjunction with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.

My baby, just a mere speck of a thing, a child smaller than most honest housecats, has, in the space of a few brief, non-ambulatory months, managed to acquire enough crap that we’re on the verge of being forced to move our queen-bed onto the balcony. I’m not exactly sure where the stuff comes from, but I do know that it just keeps coming. We’ve got more blankets than an Arctic rescue team, most of them handmade with love. We try to cycle them over the sleeping baby for photo-ops, and we can usually get about 40 good snaps before she wakes up and makes it clear that it’s 90 degrees in her room, she’s already wearing three hand-embroidered onesies and she didn’t want a blanket in the first place. The baby herself could still fit quite comfortably inside my left snowboot, but she’s got an entire steamer chest full of blocks and toys and stuffed animals all eagerly awaiting their call to active duty. 

Since it seems pretty clear that the baby isn’t going to mend her acquisitive ways, my wife and I have realized that it’s up to us. Goodwill beckons; we’re making piles. 

But the truth is, we need everything. Nothing is nonessential or we wouldn’t have it in the first place. During a younger, more obsessive-compulsive stage in her life, Shona collected miniature pencil-sharpeners, and, honestly, how could we give those up? Suppose due to Homeland Insecurity they need to hold the LSAT in our living room? Thank God we’d be prepared for the legions of dully graphited legal wannabes. 

A friend gave me a piece of petrified lava from Rwanda. It’s really just a crumbling bit of black rock, poised to leap off a shelf at the slightest hint of earthquake, but I’m afraid the people at Goodwill won’t appreciate it for the geographo-culturo-significant relic it really is. Also, I worry that giving away anything that comes from Rwanda will leave me open to charges of historical insensitivity. Into the pile it goes, I suppose. But, for the record, my position on genocide: anti, staunchly anti. 

The closets are the true front lines in the clutter wars. My closet at least. Shona carefully considered every item on her rack and declared each one to be essential. It’s true, she did wear that Scheherazade half-shirt one New Year’s last millennium, and if she ever wants to reprise her third-grade figure skating championship (a double-lutz to the strains of Bolero!) she’ll definitely need the yellow polka-dotted mini-tard. Fair enough. Who am I to question haute couture?  

So into my closet I go. Since I’ve worn the same thing (free T-shirts, shorts, jeans when I go to San Francisco) since junior high, I can’t really cull anything due to its having fallen out of style. An article of clothing has to have fully served out its life to merit relegation to the pile. But when exactly is a T-shirt no longer a T-shirt? Ah, this is the way of Zen, grasshopper; we must await the answer mindfully. All of the items on my shelf have holes for arms, a bigger one where a neck might conceivably go. Many even still have near-legible logos for races I never ran and charity events I didn’t attend. Thus, they are all still shirts. 

A significant impediment to adding something to the pile is the myth of home repair. I probably have 40 shirts and 10 pairs of jeans that I save “in case I ever have to do some painting.” Of course, I live in a rental and avail myself of the tenant-landlord relationship every time the faucet leaks, but I still need a full stable of work clothes in case the landlord decides to leave me the building after he dies. 

The ownership of work clothes puts me on a slippery slope. Every few weeks my good clothes get dirty and the work clothes get elevated to frontline status, thereby redefining the center to the point that I now consider a two-year-old magenta Eddie Bauer T-shirt to be formal wear by virtue of the fact that it has a pocket, no logo and no visible stains (provided that it’s tucked in. Way, way in). 

But here’s the real stumbling block: The thought that Goodwill might actually accept my rejects makes me unutterably sad. Being panhandled up and down Shattuck every day doesn’t pierce my cold, cold heart, but the notion that somebody might be in bad enough shape to actually purchase castoffs from someone with no discernible taste and a very low hygiene threshold is enough to make me start handing out twenties.  

And so I say: Oh hell with it. There are just too many reasons why we need to hold on to every last shred of junk. Goodwill is out, my stuff is in and the baby’s going up for adoption so we can have her closet back. It’s a solution that’s simple, crisp and tidy, just like my apartment used to be. Wash hands, declare victory. Next problem? 

Zac Unger, a Berkeley resident, is an Oakland firefighter.

Berkeley High School will soon have its first full public address system. Younger-Wunar, Inc. last month won the contract to install speakers this summer.  

The plan calls for speakers in every building that lacks public address capabilities with the exception of the Old Gym and portable classrooms. Each classroom in the C-Building and the buildings currently being constructed will also be wired. 

District spokesman Mark Coplan said the system will run out of the main administrative offices. It will enable staff to read the daily bulletin and will alert students during emergency situations. 

“When we had a blackout this year people had to go from classroom to classroom to give information,” Coplan said. “This will allow us to reach everybody.” 

The school district will pay the $145,000 contract with funding from measure A and B, which allocated money for facilities projects specifically. 

Next year the school will broadcast school-related information on cable television channel 25, which operates out of the high school’s G-Building, allowing parents and community members to get information from off-campus.

For many years, people driving up Rose Street toward the delights of North Shattuck have habitually averted their eyes while passing Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, an unmistakable “old landmark” that looked more like a minimum-security prison than a place of enlightenment for boys and girls. To be sure, some wonderful things were happening behind the dingy facade, a special one being the school’s organic vegetable garden sponsored by the famous restaurateur Alice Waters. But from the street, the dark brown—unbreakable—plastic windows and shabby stucco walls symbolized perfectly a prevailing Dickensian squalor. 

But now, suddenly, like a butterfly out of a cocoon, King Jr. Middle School, courtesy of a splendid paint job, handsome new windows and a nice new roof, has graduated cum laude into architecture. We can appreciate as if for the first time the informal L-shaped classroom wings wrapping around the high southeast corner of that much loved recreational site of track, park, swim center and tennis courts. We can admire again the angled corner at Rose and Grant, dramatized by the garden-enclosing entrance-block with its two little gated pavilions. And we can remember, to be fair, that this friendly, informal design is still, essentially, William C. Hays’ Garfield Jr. High, circa 1920. 

Go and see this remarkable transformation, for color cannot be adequately described in words. Enough to say here that the two main body-colors, cream with a touch of orange for the walls and joyous rose-pink for special features such as the entrance pavilions, are balanced, or given the requisite public dignity by the remarkable windows, each framed in very dark blue. The delicate green mullions and charming red openable casements couldn’t possibly be more different from the brown celluloid horrors they have replaced. 

Perhaps the boldest color touch, and certainly a novel one, is the red-and-gray-striped cornice that crowns the flat-roofed classroom wings, relating them to the lid of Spanish tile on the single-story entrance buildings. Here, the handsome new mix of yellow and orange tile was selected with the expert help of Gladding McBean, a building products firm famous for its historical restoration work. 

Round the back or north side, where the school reads as a mishmash of big brutal additions best described as Poor Man’s Bauhaus, the new colors do a lot to pull everything together, particularly the bold rose-and-deep-blue treatment of the auditorium’s back entrance—a playful note seldom struck in a public building. 

Credit for this heartening transformation must be given primarily to the architectural firm of Baker Vilar of Emeryville and to their color adviser, Karl Kardel, famous hereabouts for his novel, somber-hued buildings such as the North Berkeley Library. 

This spirited rescue of a lost landmark sets a splendid standard for the grand site’s future enhancement. The sea of portables that chokes the ex-playground area is already scheduled to be removed, while the long-term plan includes a new dining commons in the vicinity of that big wood gazebo just above the public park, a heady opportunity indeed for some talented designer. Another opportunity for transforming a shabby, well-nigh forgotten structure into lively architecture lies in the school gym, located in the playground’s northeast corner, just above the running track. Designed by Masten and Hurd, respected Bay Area architects, around 1955, this potentially attractive unsentimental building could be a rewarding project, its skylights and painted-over windows replaced and its long blank walls and industrial roof-shapes dramatized by, again, good color. 

Lastly, but not yet on a firm list, there is the critical question of landscape design. Not only does the reborn King Jr. Middle School itself deserve a verdant setting, but bold tree-planting could pull this whole public site together, visually reducing the separation between school-playground (harsh) and public park (pretty). An inspired beginning exists in the grand sycamores lining Hopkins, in the giant eucalyptus of the park and in the hedge of pines above the track. On the Rose Street side, a handful of deodar cedar suggests the scale and character of future planting.

The Berkeley Board of Education unanimously approved a plan last Wednesday to shift half of Berkeley High students into small schools by the 2005-2006 school year, but raised questions about whether the school will be able to make the switch amid changes in leadership. 

In recent weeks, the school district has announced the hiring of a new Berkeley High principal, Patricia Christa, and the resignation of Berkeley High’s two co-principals, Laura Leventer and Mary Ann Valles, who were slated to serve as vice principals under Christa next year. On Friday, Christa resigned, leaving a question mark at the school’s top job. 

“I think it’s always a concern,” said Superintendent Michele Lawrence last week before she knew of Christa’s resignation. “There’s so much fluidity in public [education] right now and keeping administrators, and Berkeley is not the easiest place to work.” 

The small schools vote, which was widely expected, came four weeks after the board reviewed a draft of the policy and provided mostly favorable reviews. 

The policy calls for racially diverse, relatively autonomous small schools of 200 to 520 students. It also sets parameters on admissions and evaluation of the success of each school. 

The policy ends with a three-page small schools application that calls on parents, teachers and staff to set goals for achievement, community building and student leadership, among other categories. 

The new Berkeley High principal, whoever it will be, the superintendent and the school board must approve each application. 

School board Director Shirley Issel raised concerns about generating enough applications to meet the goal of placing half the high school in small schools by 2005-2006, but the board was generally supportive of the policy. 

“This is very exciting,” said board president Joaquin Rivera. 

The policy was the work of the Small School Advisory Committee—a group of parents, teachers and union officials who have been meeting since fall 2002. 

Last year the board approved a shift to wall-to-wall small schools, but Lawrence said she scaled down the proposal out of concern that it would hurt students who are thriving in the larger high school.

More than 200 Berkeley High School students received certificates of excellence from Mayor Tom Bates Tuesday, June 3, in the seventh annual student recognition ceremony. 

The tradition, begun in 1996 by former Mayor Shirley Dean, honors students who have demonstrated outstanding leadership, citizenship or perseverance.  

Recognized students were nominated by any Berkeley High teacher, many of whom were present at the ceremony. 

The students, along with their parents, siblings and friends, easily filled the tent set up in the courtyard of the Radisson Hotel at the Berkeley Marina, leaving much of the crowd standing outside. In his opening address, Bates said he was overwhelmed by the turnout. 

The Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble’s trio opened the evening.  

After a brief welcome from Bates, keynote speaker John Sasaki took the stage. Sasaki, a KTVU reporter and 1985 Berkeley High graduate, drew on his experiences from Berkeley High, especially his performances in school plays and role as a founding member of the school’s men’s lacrosse program.  

“When you add my acting and my leadership and my general obnoxiousness as a student, you get a fairly successful news reporter,” Sasaki said. “You all have found a niche yourselves, and that is something to be admired and honored.” 

Sasaki encouraged the students to continue to pursue activities they have passion for, no matter where those activities might lead them. 

“Very few successful people dislike what they do,” he said, citing actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, football star Jerry Rice and Bates as examples. 

Unlike in past years, students did not walk to the stage to accept their awards due to space constraints; they instead waved acknowledgment from their seats when their names were called.

Weekend Bank Robbery 

Around noon on Saturday, a man walked into the Mechanics Bank at 2301 Shattuck Ave. and handed a note to the teller. 

The teller handed the man an undisclosed amount of money, which he stuffed into a bag before fleeing eastbound on Bancroft Way. He was last seen going south on Fulton Street on foot.  

The suspect is described as a Hispanic male in his mid-twenties. He is about 5 feet, 6 inches tall and weighs about 150 pounds. He wore a black beanie, black sunglasses and a checkered, flannel shirt and blue jeans. He also had a dark birthmark on one cheek. The suspect did not display a weapon during the robbery. 

Anyone with information about the suspect is asked to call the Berkeley Police Department’s robbery detail at (510) 981-5742. 

Armed robber steals goods 

On Sunday around 10 a.m., the store manager of the University Avenue Andronicos began following a man who was acting suspiciously. The manager told police the man was putting handfuls of items into his hand basket until it was “overflowing.”  

The manager called for store security, but before they arrived the suspect asked the manager if he was a security guard. When the manager said he wasn’t the man proceeded to leave the store.  

The manager asked if he was going to pay for the goods and the man lifted his shirt to expose a handgun tucked into his belt. The man put his hand on the gun handle and the manager let him leave the store. According to the manager, the suspect got away with between $300 and $400. 

Hate Incident 

According to the director of the Pacific Center, a gay, lesbian and bisexual community center at 2712 Telegraph Ave., an unidentified person came into the center between 1:40 and 3:15 p.m., turned over a table and taped a handwritten note to the wall. The note read: “Gay youth are a bunch of stuck-up rotten bitches that should be strung out with Columbine.” 

Berkeley police are asking anyone with information to contact the hate crimes division at (510) 981-5900.

A county school board member has charged that someone sent out an email under his name which he didn’t write. 

Alameda County education officials admitted that a staff member tampered with Board member Ernest Avellar’s e-mail account in January. 

Avellar who represents Hayward and Union City, sent an e-mail to staff and constituents on the morning of Jan. 15, summarizing the Jan. 14 board meeting and criticizing County Superintendent Sheila Jordan. Later that day, a retraction of Avellar’s e-mail was sent out under his name. 

But Avellar said he didn’t send it. 

“This is identity theft,” said Avellar, who has long clashed with Jordan. 

“It’s hardly identity theft,” Jordan said. “It was a mistake.” 

Jordan said an unnamed staffer retracted the e-mail out of concern that it improperly used the county’s resources to make a political statement. 

Still, Jordan, who said she was not involved, acknowledged that the retraction was wrong. Her chief human resources officer, Rick Minnis, issued a written apology to Avellar Jan. 17. 

Avellar was a majority member of a former 4-3 split on the board that frequently clashed with Jordan in a bitter, personal feud that lost steam last year when new elections gave Jordan’s supporters a 5-2 edge. 

Avellar and fellow board member Gay Plair Cobb have continued to butt heads with Jordan and placed a series of long-standing grievances on the board’s Tuesday night agenda. Included was a censure of Jordan for the e-mail tampering. 

The meeting adjourned before Avellar’s and Cobb’s items came before the board, but Jordan said they will appear on the June 25 agenda. 

The Alameda County Office of Education has broad jurisdiction over 18 school districts in the county and runs a series of county schools for troubled youth.

Neighbors of a mixed-use project at 3045 Shattuck Ave. haven’t given up their fight for a public hearing. 

South Berkeley residents opposed to the project are expected to wave placards, present a petition of signatures, and speak out during the public comment period in an attempt to convince city council to stop construction of the project and schedule a public hearing on the grounds that the project fails to provide the necessary rear yard space. 

In a May 23 letter to senior planner Debra Sanderson, project opponent Rob Lauriston argues that developer Christina Sun’s plan to pave over the rear yard for parking conflicts with the city’s zoning ordinance, which requires that projects provide 15 feet of rear yard space. Planning staff has said that part of the ordinance is a “drafting error” that resulted from the rewrite of the ordinance in 1999. City manager Weldon Rucker’s response to the claim will be introduced as an information item at the meeting and can be found on the city’s website.

Toward the end of April, soon after the fall of Baghdad, I was in Tilden Park on a rare dry Saturday watching hostilities of a different kind. The black-headed grosbeaks were back from their wintering grounds in western Mexico and setting up territories for the nesting season. All the grosbeaks I saw were males; the females might have been due in a second wave, or may just have been staying out of sight. 

Intense song-duels were in progress all along the trail to Jewel Lake. The grosbeak’s is one of the songs I have to relearn every spring: robin-like, but slower and more deliberate. Just off the boardwalk section of the trail, two males were vying for a bent-over willow that looked like prime real estate. From nearby perches in the same small tree, they sang vehemently at each other. One would chase its competitor off, then both would return and start up again, oblivious to my presence a few feet away. 

The grosbeaks were just one set of voices in the chorus. All around, other returning migrants—warbling vireos, Wilson’s warblers—had joined the year-round residents like song sparrows and juncos. Even the Anna’s hummingbirds were belting out their scratchy, squeaky excuse for a song. Dozens of birds broadcasting: “I’m a grosbeak (or finch, or towhee); I’m a real stud, and I have this amazing nest site staked out.” 

Which is of course to anthropomorphize a bit. Birdsong is a multifunctional thing. Whole books have been devoted to its esthetics alone. Listen to a Swainson’s thrush bouncing its voice off the caves above Wildcat Creek in late spring; does it sound as good to a female thrush us it does to us? 

Ornithologists used to assume song was pretty much hardwired: every male bird leaves the egg with the “right” song in its genes. That may be true for some species, but not across the board. 

Many birds have to learn their songs, and there’s an optimal window for learning. The late Luis Baptista, curator of birds and mammals at the California Academy of Sciences, is responsible for much of what we know about that process. He found that some birds have local song traditions—dialects, in a way. To a discerning ear, a white-crowned sparrow from Golden Gate Park will sound different than one from Tilden Park, as will a bird from across the hills in Orinda. 

We’re also learning what female birds listen for; how they judge the contestants. They’re attuned to the right kind of male, of course; differences in song can keep closely related species from hybridizing. And experiments have shown that some females, like Mae West, prefer a male with a big vocabulary. Western marsh wrens can run through a repertoire of 200 or more song types, and females seem attracted to those with the most variety. This may be what has driven the evolution of song mimicry in mockingbirds and their relatives. 

Recent research by Stephen Nowicki and William Searcy on song sparrows, a common species in the Bay Area and across most of North America, has also shown that mate choice reflects how well a male has learned the local dialect. That seems counterintuitive when you think about the bird’s history. Song sparrows are sedentary in the extreme, never wandering more than a few miles from their birthplaces. Females rarely encounter a male singing an unfamiliar song. So what’s the point of their selectivity? 

It turns out that a male’s ability to deliver the right version of the song reflects his general fitness. Nowicki and Searcy reduced the food intake of captive-reared male song sparrows during the critical song-acquisition stage. They grew up physically normal but never mastered the local song dialect, despite exposure to appropriate models. And they had no luck at all with the females. Song-dialect fidelity appears to be one of the cues females use to determine if males have the right genetic stuff. 

I have no idea whether this also holds for black-headed grosbeaks . But it’s possible that any females present that Saturday in Tilden Park were keeping score of those dueling males’ mastery of Tildenese.

The Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA) presents Summer Noon Concerts 2003, a unique series of nine free concerts, Thursdays at noon in June & July, beginning June 5th. From Rhythm & Blues to Brazilian capoeira, these concerts at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza (Shattuck Ave. at Center St.) are a showcase of the culturally rich performing arts in Berkeley. This outdoor summer celebration of Berkeley-based musicians & dancers is just a small sampling of the performing arts happening nightly in clubs, cafes, schools, theaters and concert halls in Downtown Berkeley. 

On Thursday, June 5th, our concert series opens with Rhonda Benin and Soulful Strut performing some of the best in R & B, with a splash of jazz and a solid helping of the blues. Soulful Strut appears regularly at many Bay Area nightspots such Enricos Sidewalk Café and Restaurant. 

On Thursday, July 31st, our concert series closes with SoVoSó, a highly visual and imaginative a capella ensemble that sings a compelling mix of jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, world, pop, and improvisational music. The ensemble is made up of former members of Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra, and McFerrin says, “SoVoSó is tight, soulful, and a whole lotta fun.” 

This event is easily accessible by transit and there is one hour free parking daily from 9 am to 5 pm in Center Street Garage. Seating will be available. 

For a complete schedule of entertainers for the Downtown Berkeley Summer Noon Concerts 2003 visit the Downtown Berkeley Association website at "http://www.downtownberkeley.org."www.downtownberkeley.org."

The press secretary for Jerry Brown says that the Mayor is backtracking from his stated goal of replacing the tenants and the resident performing arts companies at the Alice Arts Center with his Oakland School of the Arts.  

Or, perhaps more correctly, it seems as if the mayor may not have the five votes needed on City Council to break up one of the best city-owned cultural arts programs in the country.  

Or, even more correctly, the tenants and resident performing arts companies have let it be known that if they are going to be evicted from the Alice Arts Center in downtown Oakland it will not be easy, not without a drawn-out political fight that will surely spill out into most of the City Council’s districts.  

At least, that’s the sense you get after this week’s City Council Life Enrichment Committee meeting, and after the council’s Community and Economic Development (CEDA) meeting late last month.  

Two weeks ago, several hundred Alice Arts Center supporters marched in the midday heat from the center down to Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of City Hall, holding an hour-long carnavál in the plaza circle while the CEDA members inside tried to do their work and ignore the seductive rhythm of the drums. Some folks in the committee audience indicated their desire to go outside and dance, or, at least, watch. At Life Enrichment this week, the Alice Arts folks brought their drums, but their speakers took the mike and hit all the right notes. Ten years ago, the city made a pact with the performing arts companies: If the artists provided classes and services to the Oakland community, the artists would have a permanent home at Alice Arts. The artists lived up to their end of the bargain; why couldn’t Oakland live up to its? Alice Arts was making Oakland famous in performing arts communities throughout this country and in many other places around the world. Why mess with that? While parts of Oakland have experienced an epidemic of youth violence, the arts center has been a consistent haven for youth training and positive development. The performing arts companies were not opposed to the arts school, but if the center was not big enough for the two programs, why should the successful community programs be displaced and scattered in favor of the unproven newcomers? Good points, all.  

Dennis Power, director of museum services, reports to Life Enrichment on the conflict between the longtime center participants and the school. No offense to Mr. Power, who runs a pretty good museum, but in the crazyworld structure of Oakland government, the most lively community program in the city gets tossed about the bureaucracy until eventually ending up overseen by the guy who looks after our dead artifacts. “The principal concern at this time,” Power reports, “is how to accommodate the growth of the school [for the arts].” He is pointedly corrected by one of the Alice Arts folk. The principal concern is how to preserve the successful Alice Arts resident performing arts programs, they reply. It’s all a matter of priorities.  

Councilmember Nancy Nadel introduces a resolution in support of the arts companies and the tenants. If it passes at the July 15 council meeting it would be a direct and public rebuff to Jerry Brown, something this council has been reluctant to do. 

But Alice Arts Center may be different, and if he loses the fight to kick out the tenants and the resident performing arts companies, Jerry Brown has himself to blame, and himself only. This was a dumb fight to take on. At the mayor’s direction, the city put more than a million and a half dollars into the renovation of the arts center basement, to make it accommodable (if that’s a word) for the chartered Oakland School For The Arts. Brown has suggested that the performing arts companies could be relocated to the long-abandoned and rundown storefront area of the Fox Theater building, but has offered no suggestion as to how, in these lean-budget times, the city could come up with the money to make those storefronts habitable. Incredible. Two years ago, when the money was available, the mayor could have taken that million and a half and fixed up those same Fox Theater storefronts for the purpose of the Arts School, and by now we would have had both a continuingly successful Alice Arts Center program and a great start on the much-needed uptown development, with no conflict between the two.  

The mayor, having tumbled into this tarbaby and unable to find a way to unstick, falls back on his favorite defense: trashing Oakland. His target is the largely faceless tenants of the 74 single-room, upper-floor, live-in units. 

“They’ve had people hanging out there. When you have young children taking dance classes, you have to be careful about the people you have running around there,” Mr. Brown is quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, managing to hit, simultaneously, those subliminal hot-buttons of race and molestation. “You can make an argument [that the Alice Arts upstairs tenants] are not compatible with dance studios and kids.” 

Without offering any data to back those contentions up, the mayor comes off sounding awfully sleazy, don’t you think? That is one of the reasons the tenants and the performing arts company folks are winning the public relations battle on this one.  

You can make an argument about anything. You can make an argument that pigs have wings. 

Making an argument don’t make it so.  

UC Berkeley paleoanthropologist Tim White and a team of researchers reported this week that the fossils they found in eastern Ethiopia in 1997 are the oldest known remains of near-modern humans. 

The discovery of three 160,000-year-old skulls, reported in the June 12 edition of the journal Nature, fills a major gap in the fossil record between pre-human ancestors, known as Homo erectus, and modern humans, or Homo sapiens.  

It also bolsters the theory that human beings originated in Africa and spread throughout the world. The European Neanderthal, this argument holds, is a relatively insignificant cousin who went extinct before significantly impacting human development.  

“These fossils show that near-humans had evolved in Africa long before the European Neanderthals disappeared,” said UC Berkeley biologist F. Clark Howell, who served on the research team, in an article on the university’s Web site. “They thereby demonstrate conclusively that there was never a Neanderthal stage in human evolution.” 

The team discovered the Ethiopian site on Nov. 16, 1997, near the village of Herto. White first noticed stone tools and the fossil skull of a butchered hippopotamus. 

“These were people using a sophisticated stone technology,” White said, in the Web article. “Using chipped hand axes and other stone tools, they were butchering carcasses of large mammals like hippos and buffalo.” 

Researchers returned to the site 11 days later and discovered the most complete of the two adult skulls the team would find. The team also unearthed a child’s skull and fragments of seven other skulls. 

An artist’s rendering of how one of the adults may have appeared is strikingly similar to the modern human. 

“We can now see what our direct ancestors looked like,” said White. 

—David Scharfenberg 

Gov. Gray Davis’ plan to soften the blow to public schools by $700 million next year will have little effect on the Berkeley Unified School District, the district’s top budget official said last week. 

“We take some pluses and we take some minuses,” said Associate Superintendent of Business and Operations Eric Smith, who made a presentation on the governor’s proposal before the Board of Education Wednesday night. “Overall, it’s going to be a wash.” 

Smith said the district will continue with plans to cut about 70 to 100 teaching positions and will not reverse other recently approved cuts, including the elimination of two high school guidance counselors and a jump in some ninth-grade class sizes. 

In fact, with a district-wide projected deficit of $3 million next year, parents, teachers and students can expect a new package of heavy cuts as early as this fall, Smith said. 

Davis announced the $700 million relief package last month as part of the May revision to his annual budget, but is still calling for a $1.5 billion overall cut to public schools next year. 

Berkeley Schools Superintendent Michele Lawrence said a proposed 41 percent cut in state funding for instructional materials would mean fewer new books, and reductions in summer school funding could lead to consolidation of individual elementary school programs into a few “hubs.” 

Cuts in after-school funding would touch all but four of the district’s 14 elementary and middle schools, added Associate Superintendent of Educational Service Christine Lim. The district has not yet determined how, exactly, the reductions will affect each program. 

Lawrence said a proposed 67 percent cut in state funding for maintenance should not hit Berkeley as hard as other districts. In 2000, local voters approved an estimated $48 million in parcel taxes, over 12 years, to fund school maintenance. 

Davis’ $1.5 billion in K-12 cuts are part of a larger budget package, including a half-percentage point jump in the sales tax and an increase in vehicle license fees, that seeks to erase a $38.2 billion state shortfall. 

The state Senate and Assembly, controlled by Democrats, have passed budgets similar to the Davis plan and leaders of the two houses are meeting in conference committee to iron out their differences. 

But California state law requires a two-thirds vote to pass a budget and Republicans have vowed to block the tax and fee increases at the heart of the Senate and Assembly proposals. 

State Assemblywoman Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) said education could face further cuts if Republicans remain stubborn on taxes. 

“Our schools are all being held hostage at this point,” she said. 

But if Republicans succeed in blocking tax hikes, said Jodie Day, chief of staff for State Sen. Bob Margett (R-Diamond Bar), the GOP will not seek further cuts in the public schools. 

“Education is a priority for both parties,” she said. “Education doesn’t have a political affiliation.” 

The state has a June 30 deadline to pass a final budget, but has gone well beyond the deadline in years past. 

In recent press reports, legislators in both the Democratic and Republican parties, unable to reach an agreement, have suggested that they may pass a budget that is balanced on paper, but pushes the tough decisions on taxes and cuts into next year. 

Davis’ January budget proposal called for across-the-board cuts to all state-funded education programs. But, after lobbying from education leaders, the governor took a more targeted approach, chopping heavily from some programs while preserving funding in others. 

Despite the cuts to maintenance, books, summer school and after school programs, Smith said the new approach, on the whole, favors Berkeley. 

“A lot of the targeted cuts that were identified are things we don’t have,” he said. “So we were sort of spared the sword.” 

Kevin Gordon, executive director of the California Association of School Business Officials, said the public schools fared well in the governor’s May budget revision. Given that the state’s projected deficit jumped from a January estimate of $34.6 billion to a May forecast of $38.2 billion, most observers expected more cuts for K-12 education. 

“The real good news in the budget is things didn’t get worse,” Gordon said. 

But Robert Manwaring, K-12 director for the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office in Sacramento, said public education still took a significant hit and is not yet out of the woods. 

“It’s probably one of many difficult years,” he said, noting that the governor’s proposal includes $2.4 billion in deferred payments to school districts that may not be repaid, in full, until 2006-2007.