The state Legislature’s failure to pass a budget on time is creating short-term financial headaches for public and private agencies in Berkeley and could lead to the temporary closure of a local community college and the elimination of vital health care services if the stalemate lingers into the fall, according to education and health care officials. 

“This is a bad situation,” said Shirley Fogarino, spokesperson for Berkeley’s Vista Community College, who warned that the school may have to close its doors in September or October. 

Late budgets are nothing new in Sacramento. This year marks the 17th time in 26 years that the June 30 deadline has come and gone without a final budget. But a May ruling by the State Supreme Court has upped the ante—preventing the state from making a host of interim payments while the Legislature gets its act together. 

Under the court ruling, the state cannot make a $200 million monthly payment to California community colleges due in late July and can make only partial payments to K-12 education. In addition, trial courts and certain health care programs will face delayed checks, Cal Grants for college students will be withheld and the University of California will receive funding for payroll expenses alone.  

The state will reimburse the funding for all programs when the Legislature passes a final budget, but education and health care advocates say they will feel the pinch in the meantime. 

Karen Grimsich, executive director of Alzheimer’s Services of the East Bay, said her agency stands to lose $12,500 monthly payment from the state during the budget crisis—a delay the program cannot afford. 

“You can’t take a break from having Alzheimer’s,” she said. 

Grimsich said the center, which serves about 100 clients at facilities in Berkeley and Hayward, also faces delays from city and county officials who are waiting for state dollars before doling out funds. 

“All of that is slowing down,” said Grimsich, estimating that 20 percent of her $2 million budget may be affected. “Everyone is frozen.” 

The economic downturn has already hurt Alzheimer’s Services, she said, cutting gifts from private foundations. With a shrinking budget, the agency shortened its hours and laid off three staffers in April and is planning to refinance its building. But even with the cuts, the center faces a $40,000 to $50,000 deficit. 

“We’re going to get right down to the wire now running out of cash,” said Grimsich, who warned that the program could be forced to close in the fall if the state’s budget crisis lingers. 

David Dowell, associate vice chancellor for budget and finance for the Peralta Community College District, which oversees Vista in Berkeley and three other schools in the East Bay, said the district stands to take a $3 million hit this month when the state ends its $200 million monthly payment to community colleges across the state. 

Dowell said Peralta can tap a $5 million reserve and $36 million in bond money to get through October, but will run into trouble if the stalemate in Sacramento bleeds into the late-fall. 

“We’re better off than a lot of districts because we happen to have more reserves,” he said. “Some will close their doors in September.” 

Peralta, anticipating heavy cuts when the state passes a final budget, has already chopped $11 million from its $87 million budget and plans to cut 10 percent of its classes system-wide in the fall, putting dozens of part-time instructors out of work. Vista, in particular, is laying the groundwork for a 25 percent to 30 percent cut in courses, according to Fogarino. 

The University of California is in better shape. Their faculty and staff are considered state employees and must be paid. The court, however, has ruled that the state must revert to paying most of its employees minimum wage with no budget in place.  

State Controller Steve Westly originally balked at enforcing the minimum wage provision, arguing that it was too complicated to reconfigure the payroll system. But he said last week that he would make the shift by late August or September. 

“That is certainly a concern, but it’s a concern for late in the summer,” said UC spokesperson Brad Hayward. 

In the meantime, UC will not receive funding for non-payroll expenses, shutting off the dollars it uses to pay vendors. But Hayward said the university’s payments to vendors typically lag a couple of months behind services. So in July and August, the university will be paying its May and June bills with last year’s money. However, if the crisis lingers into late-August, Hayward said, it would “certainly be a problem.” 

Hayward said UC should also be able to handle delayed payments for Cal Grants in the short term. Faced with a similar crisis last year, the university stepped in to bridge the gap for UC Berkeley students, who start school in August. UC hopes to do the same this year, Hayward said, but could run into trouble in late September when classes begin at its other eight campuses, which are on the quarter system. 

Eric Smith, associate superintendent of business and operations for the Berkeley Unified School District, said the delayed payments should only affect about 10 percent of the school budget. The district will make up the shortfall by borrowing dollars from a number of its special funds to buttress its general fund. State law allows the district to pursue this strategy for 120 days, Smith said.

FRIDAY, JULY 4 

Independence Day, City of Berkeley Offices Closed 

Pools are open! Come swim at your neigborhood pool. Willard Pool, Telegraph at Derby, 1 - 4 p.m.; King Pool, Hopkins at Colusa, 1 - 4 p.m.; and West Campus Pool, Brow- 

ning at Addison, 1:30 - 4 p.m. For more Berkeley Aquatics information call 981-5150.  

July 4 at the Berkeley Marina, sponsored by the City of Berkeley. Free celebration from noon to 10 p.m. with two stages for live music, arts and crafts, free sailboat rides, bicycle parade at 7 p.m. and a fireworks show at 9:30 p.m. “Operation Kidprint,” a program of the Berkeley Police Department will provide parents with their children’s fingerprints at no cost. Valet bicycle parking available free of charge. Personal fireworks and alcohol are forbidden. Cars must be in by 7 p.m., and will not be permitted out until after 10 p.m. 981-7000. 

Evening Canoe Outing with Save the Bay Celebrate the 4th away from the crowds, paddling through Oakland’s serene Arrowhead Marsh, from 7 to 10 p.m. Cost is $25 for STB members, $30 for non-members. To register or for more information call 542-9261. www.savesfbay.org 

World One Festival, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. in Cerrito Park, El Cerrito. Music includes classical Indian dance, global fusion, bluegrass, reggae, capoeira, roots, and African. Sponsored by the City of El Cerrito, and 88.1 KeCg 97.7. For information contact  

worldone@worldoneradio.org 

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

SATURDAY, JULY 5 

Living House Construct a trellis for a garden and plant beans that will climb up and bring shade. From 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Free. Wheelchair accessible. 525-2233.  

Sick Plant Clinic UC Botanical Garden experts diagnose your plant woes from 9 a.m. to noon at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755. www.mip.berkeley.edu/garden 

Rattlers! Learn abut the only poisonous snake in the park and meet its very common harmless mimic. Bring the whole family. From 1 to 3 p..m. at Tilden Nature Area. Free. Wheelchair accessible. 525-2233.  

SUNDAY, JULY 6 

War Tax Resistance Information and Gathering Find out ways to respond to the use of our tax dollars for the military, from 4 to 6 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. 843-9877.  

Butterfly Count Our native plant garden is blooming. Learn to identify the local species to add to our butterfly list. From 1 to 3 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Free. 525-2233.  

Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Culture from 3 to 5 p.m. and Betty Cook on “Maps to Enlightenment” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JULY 7 

Berkeley Biodiesel Cooperative Orientation for those interested in making biodiesel welcome, at 7:30 p.m. Call for location, 594-4000 ext. 777. biobauerx@hotmail.com 

Berkeley CopWatch meets at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, JULY 8 

Bamboo Building, a class on using timber bamboo in construction, and proper tool usage and joinery, with Darrel DeBoer, at 7 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $35. For information call 525-7610.  

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

WEDNESDAY, JULY 9 

Twilight Tour: Off the Beaten Path, a walk through some of the more unusual and less-known parts of the Garden with horticulturist Judith Finn, at 5:30 p.m. at the UC Botannical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. www.mip.berkeley.edu/garden 

South Berkeley Mural Project Join neighbors to create a mural on the side of the Grove Liquor Store on the corner of Ashby Ave. and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, at 7 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios at 1923 Ashby Ave. For further information on ways to get involved please call 644-2204. 

THURSDAY, JULY 10 

The City of Berkeley Young Adult Project Annual Community-Wide Picnic from  

10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Grove Playground located at 1730 Oregon Street. All youth are invited to participate. Group Games at 10 a.m., lunch and prize drawing at noon, KMEL Radio Station Dance Contest for 10-14 year-olds and Magic Show at 1 p.m. 

Norman E. Borlaug, Nobel Prize winner and founder of the “Green Revolution,” will speak on “60 Years of Fighting Hunger,” at 7:30 p.m. in 145 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley. 643-4200. 

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers meets at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave. at 7:30 p.m. For information contact rorlando@uclink4. 

berkeley.edu  

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

ONGOING 

National HIV Testing Month The City of Berkeley offers free HIV testing, drop in on Satur- 

days from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and Wednesdays 6 to 8:30 p.m., during July, at 830 University Ave. at 6th St. For other days and times call the HIV Testing Information Line at 981-5380.  

Summer Fun Camps for Children and Teens, from age five and up are offered at Berkeley recreation centers and include such activities as arts and crafts, swimming and tennis lessons, yoga, organized sports and games, and field trips. The Summer Fun Camp Program runs through August 22, Mon. - Fri., 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The fee, including lunch and snack, is $77 per week for Berkeley residents. Applications for the camps can be picked up at the Camps Office, located at 2016 Center St., or can be mailed upon request. 981-5150. 

Echo Lake Youth Camp for ages 6 - 12 at Echo Lake, near South Lake Tahoe. One week sessions are offered between July 7 and August 22. Cost is $235 per session. For registration information please visit the Camps Office at 2016 Center St., or call 981-5150. 

Free Quit Smoking Class on six Monday evenings, from 6 to 8 p.m., starting July 14th, at the South Berkeley Senior Center. To register or for more information contact the Berkeley Tobacco Prevention Program, 981-5330 or QuitNow@ci.berkeley.ca.us 

Bay Area Technology Education Collaborative, a community non-profit offers low-cost training in Computer Information Technology. Free orientation on July 9, classes start July 14. For information call 451-7300, ext. 604. www.baytec.org 

Summer Science Weeks: Mammals and Birds Pick apart an owl pellet, prepare a mammal baby announcement, and discover your home range. For ages 9 to 12 years. Monday, July 14 – Friday, July 18 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m, at Tilden Nature Area. Cost is $150 for Berkeley residents, $166 for non-residents. Financial assistance is available for low-income families. Registration required. For information call 636-1684.  

Free Energy Conservation Retrofits for Berkeley Residents CA Youth Energy Services (CYES) is a nonprofit sponsored by the City of Ber- 

keley that trains and employs high school students to provide conservation retrofits. Work includes weatherstripping, replacing lightbulbs with CFLs, cleaning refrigerator coils, replacing faucet aerators and showerheads with low-flow devices, installing earthquake preparedness measures, and a comprehensive audit. Available to home owners and renters.Call for an appointment. 428-2357. 

www.risingsunenergy.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Monday, July 7, 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, July 8, at 7 p.m. in City Council hambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

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

Peace and Justice Commission meets Monday, July 7, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Manuel Hector, 981-5510. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/peaceandjustice 

Youth Commission meets Monday, July 7, at 6:30 p.m., at 1730 Oregon St. Philip Harper-Cotton, 981-6670. ww.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/youth 

Commission on Disability meets Wednesday, July 9, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Paul Church, 981-6342. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/disability 

Homeless Commission meets Wednesday, July 9, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/homeless 

Planning Commission meets Wednesday, July 9, 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, July 9, 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, July 9, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti. 644-6376 ext. 224. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/waterfront 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thursday, July 10, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Thursday, July 10, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. Nabil Al-Hadithy, 981-7461. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/environmentaladvisory 

Community Health Commission meets Thursday, July 10 at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/health 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thursday, July 10, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Oscar Sung, 981-5410. ww.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/housing 

Public Works Commission meets Thursday, July 10, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jeff Egeberg, 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/publicworks 

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thursday, July 10, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/zoning

Just after we took on the job of resurrecting the Berkeley Daily Planet, Mayor-elect Tom Bates got some bad publicity for trashing copies of the Daily Californian which endorsed his opponent. Wags opined that if he’d recycled them instead, it would have been less shocking to Berkeley. Friends suggested to us that the first edition of the revived Planet should be headlined “Steal This Paper,” homage (for those of you too young to remember) to yippie Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book.” The idea made us laugh, but we didn’t use it. 

It’s funny to think that you can steal something free, but it’s actually illegal to take more than your share of copies of free papers. This law was enacted to prevent recyclers from taking papers from news racks and selling them as waste paper. It hasn’t stopped the practice, but it’s slowed it down. 

People still, unfortunately, steal newspapers when they disagree with their content. Recently, copies of the Daily Cal were snatched, probably because the snatchers thought that a news story had been reported in a racist way. We sympathize, but it’s just a bad idea to try to suppress speech you disagree with. The best antidote to speech you don’t like is more speech. Rather that stealing those papers, the critics should have written to the Daily Cal, or to other publications if the Daily Cal rejected their letters, explaining exactly why the coverage seemed racist, and what the alternative should have been. That way, everyone learns something. 

Which brings us to the crisis du jour. When the last two issues of the Daily Planet went on the stands, last Tuesday and Friday, we received early morning calls from concerned readers saying there were no copies at their regular pickup points at nine in the morning. Copies are dropped early on publication day, and they usually take at least a day to disappear into the hands of readers. We’d love to believe that we’ve had a sudden and dramatic surge in readership, but we don’t really think that’s the case. 

Last Friday, one reported empty box was near Andronico’s on University, close to the building project at 1392 University which was pictured on the front page of that edition. Maybe the construction workers took a bunch of copies home to show to their families. On Tuesday, eight boxes on North Shattuck were cleaned out by 9:30 a.m. Each had been filled with at least a hundred copies a couple of hours before. There’s no easy explanation for this loss. 

There are two obvious possibilities. First, someone could be stealing newspapers to sell for recycling. It does seem odd, though, that the other free papers in the same locations were still there after the Planet disappeared. The other possibility is more disheartening. Maybe the editorial content rubbed someone the wrong way. But it is completely unnecessary to destroy copies of the Planet to express a different point of view. The opinion pages are always open to dissent. We love dissent. Controversy sells papers. 

We haven’t reported this problem to the police, because we think they probably have better things to do. But we would like to enlist the help of our loyal readers, particularly the early risers among you. Please call the Planet office, 841-5600, if you see anyone taking lots of papers out of boxes. A couple of our distributors do pick up copies for re-distribution from boxes, so you shouldn’t assume that the person you see doing this is a thief. Just give us a description, and we’ll check it out. And of course call us when any box is empty for any reason, and we’ll get it re-filled. 

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, this is the Planet’s Fourth of July editorial. We’ve always liked the free speech part of the patriotic ideology, even though it’s honored more often in the breach than in the observance. Increasingly, protecting free speech is everyone’s job—we certainly can’t rely on the Bush government to do it for us. So please help the Planet keep information flowing. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Planet. 

FRIDAY, JULY 4 

FILM 

“Gridlock” Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth play addicts fighting bureaucracy to get help, at 8:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, a reading room, library and community center at 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. Free, sponsored by N.E.E.D. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tropical Vibrations, Harry Best and Shabang perform a mix of Caribbean styles at 9 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

SixFourTwo and My Hero perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Celebrate END Dependence Day in collaboration with Underground Railroad and Brown Fist Collective at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568.  

www.lapena.org 

Mimi Fox Trio performs at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

S.T.F.U., Critical Unit, Dead Fall, D.F.A., Strung Up perfrom 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. 

SATURDAY, JULY 5 

FILM 

“War Game” a British docu- 

drama on the horrific possibilities of an atomic holocaust, at 8:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, a reading room, library and community center in South Berkeley located at 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. All events are free. 540-0751.  

www.thelonghaul.org  

Aki Kaurismäki: “Crime and Punishment” at 5 and 8:45 p.m. and “Hamlet Goes Business” 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 

Bay Area Poets Coalition holds an open reading from 3 to 5 p.m., at the West Branch Berkeley Public Library, 1125 University Ave. Free. For information call 527-9905.  

poetalk@aol.com 

Aphrodite Jones reads from her new book, “Red Zone,” about the San Francisco dog-mauling case, at 5:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Celebrate END Dependence day in collaboration with Underground Railroad and Brown Fist Collective at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Benefit for Lynn Morris with Peter Rowan, True Blue and Earl Brothers at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $18.50 advance, $19.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Vince Black with Root Awakening perform socially conscious reggae classics at 9:30 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Noche Flamenca from Madrid performs at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus at 8 p.m. Tickets are $42. 642-9988.  

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Pernice Brothers, Warren Zanes and Heavenly States perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Collective Amnesia at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

The Cost, From Monument to Masses, Red Light Sting, 1905, The Cinema Eye 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. 

SUNDAY, JULY 6 

FILM 

Aki Kaurismäki: “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” at 5:30 p.m. and “Hamlet Goes Business” at 7:10 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 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s with G. P. Skratz and Summer Brenner at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Noche Flamenca from Madrid performs at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus at 7 p.m. Tickets are $42. 642-9988.  

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Teka brings an evening of Hungarian music and dance to Ashkenaz, at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $12. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

MONDAY, JULY 7 

FILM 

“Unprecedented,” a documentary about how the 2000 Presidential Election was manipulated to ignore the actual vote and allow five U.S. Supreme Court Justices to appoint George Bush to the White House, at 3 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free. Sponsored by the Berkeley Peace Vigil. Information about the documentary is available at www.unprecedented.org  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Christopher Moore reads from “Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Bob Levin discusses how communal-living cartoonists provoked the ire of Disney in his new book, “The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Underground,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

www.blackoakbooks.com 

Last Word Poetry, featuring Kirk Lumpkin and Mary Rudge, at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Bookstore, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Poetry Express, open mic night, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sassafras, Shotgun’s 11th Anniversary Spendalicious Silent Auction Family Reunion and Supperganza. Come have dinner, enjoy live music and support the Shotgun Players, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are sliding scale $11-$111. For reservations call Kimberly 704-8210 ext. 317.  

Bandworks Student Recital, featuring rock, blues and pop at 7:30 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $4. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

TUESDAY, JULY 8 

FILM 

Sarunas Bartas: “Corridor” 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 

Terry and Stevie Halbert  

discuss their new book “Expedition America: A National Park Odyssey,” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. at Rose. 843-3533.  

www.easygoing.com 

Ksenija Soster Olmer, Sande Smith and Inez Hollander Lake, authors of “A Cup of Comfort for Mothers and Daughters” will read at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861.  

Berkeley Summer Poetry with Danielle Willis at 7 p.m. at Mediterranean Cafe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. For more information contact lucifersmuse@hotmail.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Grupa Maistori performs traditional Bulgarian village music at 9 p.m., with a dance lesson with Joe Kaloyanides Graziosi at 7:30 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Mimi Fox Solo Guitar at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

All Strings Considered, hammer dulcimer virtuosos Jamie Janover and Michael Masley with bassists Michael Manring and Jim Prescott, 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 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 9 

FILM 

Excess of Evil: “The Devils” 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 

Labor Fest 10th Anniversary Celebration, “From Piers to Plantations, a Union in Hawaii” by Ian Ruskin. The story of Harry Bridges in Hawaii. Japanese labor songs by Tanbaka Tetsuro. At 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org For more information about the film call 415-642-8066. www.labornet.net 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Heidi Julavits talks about her novel, “The Effect of Living Backwards,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Jim Paul reads from his new novel, “Elsewhere in the Land of Parrots,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Café Poetry and open mic hosted by Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Donation requested. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7, $5 with student i.d. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Chris and Cassie Webster with Scott Nygaard, sister harmony with guitar, 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 

Tangria Jazz Group presents a free evening of jazz and literature at 7 p.m. at The Jazz House. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Astash and Shabaz present an evening of qwaali-sufi-world music, at 9 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jules Broussard and Ned Boynton at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

THURSDAY, JULY 10 

FILM 

Aki Kaurismäki: “Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana” at 7:30 p.m. and “Drifting Clouds” at 8:50 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 

Guided Tour of “Paul Kos: Everything Matters” at 12:15 p.m. at The Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu  

Melanie Bellah reflects on the death of a child in “Abby and Her Sisters: A Memoir,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Vanishing Tribes of Burma/Myanmar slide show and talk with Philip Hassrick, co-founder of Lost Frontiers, at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop and Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. at Rose. 843-3533. www.easygoing.com 

Merle Updike Davis reads from her memoir and history of social work, “Ties Across Time,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Lesbians Across the Country Project, slide presentation and talk with the photographer Angela Dawn, at 7 p.m. at Boadecia's Books 398 Colusa Ave., Kensington. 559-9184. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert Downtown with the Charles Wheal Band performing a mix of Chicago, Texas and West Coast blues, at the Berkeley BART Station. Seating available. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 549-2230. 

Bandworks Student Recital, featuring rock, blues and pop at 7:30 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $4. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Chus Alonzo’s Potingue Ensemble performs contemporary Flamenco and Latin Music at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10 in advance, $12 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Trailer Park Troubadours, folkabilly originals, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advan- 

ce, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Leslie Helpert and Reorchestra perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Keni el Lebrijano Flamenco Guitar at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

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., through July 6, at 5:30 p.m., outdoors in John Hinkle Park, off The Arlington at Southampton Ave. and Somerset Place. Free. 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 through 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. Through 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 through 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. Through July 27, Thurs. - Sat. at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 5 p.m. No performance July 4 or 24. At the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $8-$20 sliding scale. For reservations call 558-1381. 

foolsFury, “Attempts on her Life,” by Martin Crimp, directed by Ben Yalom, July 11, 12, 18 and 19 at 8 p.m. at LaVal’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid at Hearst. Tickets are $20 general, $15 students and seniors.  

1-866-GOT-FURY.  

www.foolsfury.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

ACCI Gallery, “Barococo” ceramics by Tony Natsoulas. Exhibition runs until July 14. 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, “Windows” An all-media exhibit by San Francisco Women Artists, July 10 through August 11. 2018 Addison St. 658-0585. For information on the artists call 524-8538.  

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. 

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  

Berkeley Art Center, “Unbound and Under Covers,” Visual writing: spoken word performances and book exhibition runs 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 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.  

Kala Art Institute, Kala Fellowship Exhibition, Part I The Kala Fellowships are awarded annually to eight innovative arts working in printmaking, book arts, video and digital media. Part I features the work of May Chan, Taro Hattori, Amanda Knowles and Andrew Mamo. Runs until July 31. Call for gallery hours.1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977. www.kala.org  

A New Leaf Gallery, “Four Elements of Sculpture: Fire, Air, Water and Earth,” Exhibition runs to August 31. 1286 Gilman St. Call for gallery hours. 527-7621.  

www.sculpturesite.com 

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

www.photolaboratory.com  

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

Slater/Marinoff & Co., “All Animal Art” Forty photographers and artists have donated works to help fund the spay-neuter and food costs of the Milo Foundation’s work in finding new homes for abandoned dogs and cats. Exhibition runs until August 31. Hours are Mon. - Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sun. 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. 1823 Fourth St. 548-2001.

On the south end of People’s Park, California indigenous plants meld with living sculptures, dinosaur tracks and Andean potatoes due to the work of a group of volunteer gardeners. 

“A mix of people brings a mix of types of plants and gardens,” said Richard List, a professional landscaper who now devotes much of his time to working in People’s Park. “It’s so like People’s Park to have this hodgepodge of stuff going on.” 

List spends most mornings planting seeds and flowers as well as researching the plants that are already in the park. He has been working at the People’s Park garden off and on since 1989, and prides himself on knowing about many of the “botanical oddities” in the area, including a rare species of Andean potato that he found growing there. 

One of the problems the gardeners face comes in the park’s role as the only non-fenced community garden in Berkeley. Although the park officially closes at 10 each night, people walk through at all hours, and the volunteers have seen their tools stolen and their plants smashed. 

In response, gardener Dana Merryday has begun to paint the gardening tools that sit out at night. The front of the group’s wheelbarrow reads “It’s bad karma to steal!” a message that Merryday said should discourage people from walking off with the wheelbarrow. 

“As they’re walking away they have to read that,” he said. “It just kind of stares up at you.” 

But for the most part, Merryday and List emphasized, the garden is well-respected. Anyone can sow their own plot of land at the park, and the understanding among community members is that the fruit and vegetables are available to everyone. 

While Merryday focuses on the food gardens, List puts the bulk of his energy into more creative endeavors. After reading a book about fossilized dinosaur tracks, he used a shovel to create prints all around the park’s paths. Each track is anatomically correct for a specific type of dinosaur, List said. 

“The kids love it,” he said. 

List is also working on a variety of “living sculptures,” which he describes as pieces of art made out of living things. His first piece for People’s Park is a giant heart elevated from the ground with a mound of dirt and filled in with small flowers. 

UC Berkeley oversees maintenance of the Park. The university buys many of the plants for the gardens and provides custodial services to spruce up the area. 

One of the latest projects implemented in the park with university support is the Peace Garden. The area, a circle eight feet across, was transformed a few months ago into a flower patch with large pieces of a tree trunk outlining a peace sign on the ground. The project was begun with help from a group called Roots of Peace, whose primary goal is to transform land scarred by land mines into agricultural areas. 

“They wanted to do a garden in People’s Park because of what it stands for,” Merryday said. 

The next group project is to renovate the dilapidated play area to make the park more kid-friendly. Merryday and gardener Terry Compost are working with UC Berkeley to secure funding to improve the existing play structures and purchase more equipment. 

“We want to make the park a fun, safe place for everyone,” Merryday said.

The man police pulled from the bay at the Berkeley Marina early Monday morning was severely beaten, not shot as originally believed, and still recovering from severe head injuries at Oakland’s Highland Hospital Thursday afternoon, police said. 

The victim, identified by friends as Scott Roberts, is a lifelong Berkeley resident who has made his mark as a drummer in local bands and as producer and arranger with hip-hop stars like Snoop Doggy Dogg, E-40 and C-Bo. 

“He’s been my friend ever since he was a child and we’re all very sad this has happened to him,” said Bobi Cespedes, a local Afro-Cuban musician who was planning to take Roberts on tour this week as a drummer with her band. “He’s very mellow. He’s a great person and I can’t imagine who would have done this to him.” 

According to press accounts, some friends have speculated that Roberts, known as “One Drop Scott” in the music world, was assaulted in a dispute over a woman. But Cespedes and another friend, producer Greg Landau, said they had no idea why he was attacked. 

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Mary Kusmiss said the department was not prepared to make any statement on a motive in the assault and had not identified any suspects. But detectives, she said, “have some leads.” 

Police responded Monday to a 2:40 a.m. report of gunshots at the Marina and found the 42-year-old Roberts neck deep in the water near the public boat launch, “conscious but non-responsive,” Kusmiss said. 

The report of gun fire, mixed with Roberts’ severe injuries, led to an initial press release that inaccurately labeled the musician the victim of gunshot wounds, Kusmiss said. 

The attack, Kusmiss said, was particularly “brutal,” but police cannot say for sure what the weapon may have been. “It was certainly some hard object, but whether it was a bat or a pipe, we don’t know,” she said. 

After police officers administered first aid, paramedics took Roberts to Highland Hospital. As of Thursday afternoon, Kusmiss said, he had been taken off ventilation. 

Roberts was the leader of a popular 1980’s East Bay funk band called Freaky Executives and also played in a steel drum group called Spirit of Pan, according to Landau. 

But “One Drop Scott” has enjoyed his greatest success as a hip-hop producer. “He’s one of the top rap producers on the West Coast,” said Landau. 

Roberts, he said, has been able to bring his background in world music to his work as a hip-hop impresario. 

“He’s a really creative, very generous, very giving person,” said Landau.

FREEMAN MEMORIAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Special thanks to Angela Rowen and the Daily Planet for covering the memorial for Kevin Freeman. It might interest readers to know that before the memorial march in People’s Park, UC Police Officer Vargas “detained” a marcher who was discreetly applying body paint in a circle of trees and bushes, although no complaint had been lodged by any park user. 

Vargas became agitated when park users approached to witness the “detention” and called for back-up. She stated that “things would go worse” for the detainee if those utilizing their right to observe did not leave. The witnesses, who continued to exercise their right to observe, recorded her curiously prejudiced lecture to the detainee. 

It goes without saying that alcohol-related illnesses should not be a jail or death sentence for homeless people; drinking problems on frat row are treated differently. But it is not simply the absence of a detoxification center which is the problem. Berkeley and University of California police are routinely detaining, harassing and jailing people who are different or who are ill. Until our politicians re-direct those priorities, tragedies such as Kevin Freeman’s are simply a matter of time. 

Carol Denney 

• 

MISREPRESENTATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Judging by the editorial “More Light, Less Heat Needed,” attacking Hank Resnik and Livable Berkeley, his suspicion of bias may be on target. 

The editorial misrepresents “smart growth” in order to discredit it. No smart growth adherent has suggested, as the editorial implies, that “building a thousand high rises in Berkeley will prevent McMansions in Fairfield.” Rather, smart growth is advocated on democratic, environmental and economic grounds. 

Smart growth means concentrations of homes and activities so they are mutually accessible by foot. People pay sums that I can barely imagine to live in such places, San Francisco, Paris, London, Boston, to name a few. As tourists, we envy them. 

Low-density zoning that prevents cities like Berkeley from moving in this direction is social engineering by fiat. It forces us to use our cars to move from one activity to another. 

A byproduct of smart growth is attractive transit service for longer trips. Residents drive less. They consume less energy and require less infrastructure. Economic and environmental advantages result. 

Whether or not smart growth occurs in Berkeley, some people who dislike change will move away. Some did following the political shifts of the 1960s. Their homes were not abandoned. Other people moved in. The city flourished. 

Concentrations of activity at nodes along major arteries can bring a more vibrant Berkeley. The Daily Planet would serve us better by exploring the possible shape and benefits of that growth than by prognosticating imminent demise. 

Healthy cities evolve. Our region is on a long-term growth trend in population and economic activity. Berkeley cannot be the “static city,” unaffected by what is going on around it. 

Robert R. Piper, Ph.D. 

• 

SENIOR SERVICES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Berkeley City Council watchers note the diminishing regard for the weal of Berkeley seniors, attributable not just to budget-cutting. The latest is taxi scrip abuse. 

It has been the practice of Berkeley Paratransit Services (based in the Housing Department) periodically to mail (no over-the-counter service) forms containing the latest pricing information and an application, to be returned by mail with payment. The senior citizen can then only wait for the mail carrier. Clearly, this exchange process requires an allocation of at least a month and staff supervision. 

The current scrip period began July 1. Recipients needed confidence in receipt by mid-June. It is difficult to schedule appointments with specialized health services; it is costly to have to cancel them. Phone calls are counterproductive, viz the senior citizen who reports phoning at about 2:30 p.m. on a Monday to be told by taped response that “We only answer the phone on Mondays between 1 and 4 p.m.” 

It would be different if taxi scrip were a mere nicety in our lives. Many Berkeley seniors, like myself (low-income, without family) depend on taxi scrip for transportation to and from health-related services. Most low-income seniors are women.  

I am aware of seniors in Council Districts 2 and 4 who became alarmed by mid-June and contacted their councilmembers. Some desperately mailed in checks without current application forms and information.  

I also alerted the Commission on Aging, Senior Services and the Housing Department. My June 26 attempt to reach the city manager and mayor presumably resulted in a phone message the following afternoon from a Housing Department peacemaker. He compounded a bad situation with the news that the taxi scrip person wasn’t there that day, acknowledged that they could “do better” and misinformed by declaring that in the meantime “East Bay Paratransit [a service for disabled persons, requiring advance scheduling and processing into their computer] is also available.” He concluded with the useless, bureaucratic, “If you have any questions, blah blah.” 

Helen Rippier Wheeler 

• 

TAMED CAPITALISM? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his letter of June 27, Randy Silverman states that regulations have “tamed the savage tendencies of laissez-faire capitalism.” The United States has never practiced laissez-faire, so what has been tamed is really the privileges and subsidies that government has granted to special interests.  

But wait a minute, politicians are still getting funds from the moneyed interests and awarding them special privileges. Now I’m confused—just what is it that has been tamed? 

Fred Foldvary 

• 

EMBRACE UNION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The following letter, dated June 19, was addressed to Glenn and Diane Yasuda, owners of Berkeley Bowl: 

I write to encourage you to embrace the union drive at your store, Berkeley Bowl. As a loyal customer, a citizen of Berkeley, a member of Berkeley’s Commission on Labor, a union steward, president of a union chapter and statewide union and Green Party activist, all of these perspectives would embrace unionism at the Bowl. 

I would like to share with you a less-than-mainstream perspective on unionism. It’s unfortunate that our culture lends so little support for what is basically a medium to ensure fairness and justice in the workplace. It seems ironic that as a society we tout so loudly and often how we live in a free country, yet we tolerate the very opposite when it comes to carrying over the cornerstones of this freedom-speech and assembly-into the workplace. For far too many United Statesians, the minute they walk through the door of their workplace they are second-class citizens. 

There can be many benefits to having a union in your workplace. A union contract lays out rules for both parties to follow. A well-written contract can preclude many workplace conflicts and create an atmosphere of fairness. A contract between management and workers can clarify who gets paid what and how an employee can develop their careers with the company. This promotes loyalty and long-term employment that can reduce turnover and save operating costs in the long run. 

Unionism does not have to be antagonistic. I would be saddened to see this type of relationship between management and employees at the Bowl. I have worked hard to maintain a working relationship with the Human Resources Department at SFSU and they have acted on many of my recommendations to head off problems before they become grievances. They realize the value a well-functioning union chapter can add to the workplace. But just like any democratic institution, it only works as well as the people involved, on both sides, and their commitment to a better workplace for all. 

I don’t think I need to remind you that by law your employees have the right to organize. Your official position is supposed to be one of neutrality. Already I hear rumors that you have taken seemingly oppositional steps giving the appearance you are trying to resist. If this is true, I hope this letter can convey to you what a mistake it would be to continue along that path. Personally I promote your store whenever I can. I want to see your good reputation remain for everyone’s sake. 

Like I said, I am a loyal customer and want to keep shopping there. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance. 

Russell Kilday-Hicks 

• 

UNLUCKY OWNERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Excellent letter from Mr. Koenigshofer (Daily Planet, June 27-30). He asks how many of the Rent Board members live in rent-controlled units. While most apartments in Berkeley (excepting new construction) are under rent control, only a fraction are incredible deals, namely those occupied by long-term tenants who got in when the getting was good. Many are large, handsome apartments for which the total price is less than most students pay to share a room. These apartments are very expensive for their unlucky owners. Despite the Rent Board’s complete disregard for fairness, providing housing costs money, especially in Berkeley’s anti-landlord, tax- and fee-crazed climate.  

Why should an unfortunate owner be forced to play a parental role in perpetuity to a tenant who might be rich or poor, kind or insufferable, but who is definitely not a family member? 

I hope that Rent Board Commissioner Kavanagh, in his next predictable rebuttal, will reveal whether he happens to enjoy one of these incredible deals. 

Judy Johnston 

• 

CLEAN AIR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The air we befoul gets in us all, whether we drive, drive a lot, drive a little, or go carless. Air pollution along with other toxics gets in us. 

With the Bush administration taking creative writing lessons in editing EPA reports, we may have to resort to penning our own letters to our automobile manufacturer (and to all automobile manufacturers) requesting more greenhouse gas emission-less vehicles. Technologies exist “on-the-shelf” now that would markedly improve the fuel efficiency of almost all light trucks, SUVs and standard automobiles, if only the auto industry would prioritize their use. And the savings in reduced fuel prices would, on average, more than triple the cost of using available underutilized fuel efficiency technologies. 

The Sierra Club, the Natural Resource Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Rainforest Action Network and Global Exchange all have automobile fuel efficiency campaigns under way accessible from their Web sites. And, automobile manufacturer mailing addresses can be obtained from the Consumer Resource Handbook at http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/.  

We can have hulked-up station wagons on steriods (SUVs) along with greater energy independence and cleaner air, but we need to push the auto industry into being more environmentally responsible if we want to breathe cleaner air and free ourselves from dependence on limited foreign oil resources. 

Recent social and environmental histories suggest that now, perhaps more than ever, is the time to begin a comprehensive renewable energy program state by state, nationally and globally. 

The cost of a postage stamp seems like a good neg-entropic investment down the asphalt toward better energy efficiency and a healthier, more life-sustaining environment. 

In addition to requesting more efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles, you may want to ask that autos be fitted with interior air handling systems that permit the occupants to turn off polluted exterior air from being sucked into the vehicle during urban commutes when the air conditioner, fan or heater are running. 

Clean air is patriotic! It’s healthy. It’s peaceful. 

Rand Knox 

San Rafael

The state jobless rate for teens has climbed to 19.8 percent, the highest in a decade, and those looking for jobs this summer are finding that even the low-level job market, usually open to students, has been saturated by adults. 

“I need to make money to pay for college, but I can’t find a job anywhere,” said Samantha Robinson, 17, of Berkeley. “Even McDonald’s wasn’t looking for teenagers.” 

The weak summer job market for students is a function of the economy nationwide. The U.S. unemployment rate for working adults hit 6.4 percent during June, a peak not seen since April 1994. And because jobs are so limited, adults with more education and experience seek lower and entry-level positions—at restaurants, retail stores and offices—leaving few choices for teens. 

“It’s definitely a paramount concern,” said Juanita McMullen, program director of YouthWorks, a city of Berkeley-sponsored organization that matches students with jobs. “We are always in search of special projects that will allow us to put more kids to work.” 

YouthWorks, which aims to find jobs for 300 to 400 teenagers each year, secured work for 310 students this summer, mostly in community organizations that receive city funding. 

“The best thing is when community groups can take two or three students,” McMullen said. “That’s when we celebrate.” 

But YouthWorks has had its share of problems attributable to the economic downturn as well. State funding for such programs has decreased, and McMullen said she can no longer count on the federal government to compensate. 

Meanwhile, students not enrolled in YouthWorks programs are having an even tougher time finding work for the summer months. Teens4Hire.com, a Web site that posts help wanted ads from businesses across the country, reported the results of a May survey that revealed that 51 percent of business owners that had once hired teenagers would no longer do so. 

“I’d like to help the kids out, but when there are more qualified adults coming to me looking for a job, I’m going to go with them,” said one downtown Berkeley storeowner who wished to remain anonymous. 

High school senior Robinson knows that sentiment well. She dropped off close to 50 resumes but only heard back from one company. That company then decided to hire someone else. 

Robinson said at the beginning of her job search she was picky about the type of work and level of pay, but now she is much less discriminating. “It’s frustrating when you apply at every store on a certain street and don’t get a single call back,” she said. “It’s not that I’m not trying.” 

Teens4Hire executive director Renee Ward offered 10 tips for teenagers to increase their odds of finding a job. She emphasized earning good grades in school, being aggressive in seeking work and following up after submitting applications. 

“Employers are impressed when teens take initiative,” Ward said. “They need to know you are serious.” 

At the same time, Ward said that teens should consider other alternatives to working for pay.  

“Millions of teens who wanted to work in 2002 could not find jobs and so far 2003 is looking worse,” she said. “If you can afford to ... attend summer school or volunteer. This experience will look great on your application next year.” 

McMullen emphasized that programs like YouthWorks are the best way for students to find summer work. 

“Without a hub operation many kids just don’t know where to look,” she said. “It is increasingly relevant to have a public agency for work information.” 

But 16-year-old Matt Sumper said lack of information was not his problem in finding a job. 

“More information packets were not going to help me get hired,” he said. “Businesses just want people that are more qualified than I am, but I can’t get the qualifications without someone giving me a job.”

Arleen Goodwin and Joan Kloehn founded the small Berkeley nonprofit Senior Medi-Benefits in the mid-eighties hoping to assist seniors with the paperwork generated by illness, so that people whose medical bills and insurance claims were piling up would get some help. People assumed that such nightmares would slowly recede as health providers joined networks with interconnected billing, and more claims would be submitted electronically. 

Most people know what happened next. Hospitals, clinics and insurance companies merged, changed names, disappeared or issued ever-changing plans every year. Premiums doubled, then tripled, deductibles and “out of pocket” minimums skyrocketed. Seniors would be sent a letter saying their insurance companies no longer offered coverage, and the scramble would begin anew for ever more expensive health insurance. 

One elderly couple who bought supplemental insurance from a friendly salesperson, thinking to find a way to cover the gap between Medicare’s coverage and their actual costs, had the friendly young man call a month later explaining with apologies that his company’s plan was no longer offered. 

In the meantime, the sizeable bulge in the population of elderly citizens grew as inexorably as insurance premiums, and more and more families now face the difficulties of trying to plan for long-term care. 

Enter Arleen and Joan, joined by their new associate Matt Olesen, who work as a team to help with Medi-Cal eligibility on behalf of families whose savings have dwindled as medical and nursing home costs rise. Senior Medi-Benefits’ work on behalf of California families is making a difference family by family as well as reforming systemic county-wide mistakes. 

“Many families have had their applications wrongly denied,” states Arleen. “We battle for an individual application, but we also work cooperatively with the state to make sure the eligibility workers at the county level understand people’s rights.” 

Discharge planners sometimes help with long-term care applications, as lawyers sometimes do. The discharge workers are overworked and underpaid; lawyers are overworked and ... expensive. Berkeley’s own Senior Medi-Benefits is the only nonprofit working with families on a case-by-case basis, step by step, until an application is finally approved. 

“Many families don’t know whether they have to sell the house, how much money is too much, and they’re afraid to ask,” says Joan. “We’re not the government, not the state. We’re the place you can call to get the facts when you need them.” 

Two commendations from the city hang on Senior Medi-Benefits’ walls. But the real thanks are from the families who’ve saved thousands of dollars by getting appropriate counseling before their assets are gone.  

Health issues may never simplify, as co-founders Arleen and Joan once hoped, but it is certain their 17-year-old nonprofit will battle on, family by family and issue by issue, to make sure seniors get the assistance they need.  

Senior Medi-Benefits’ number is (510) 420-0550, and online at www.seniormedi-benefits.org. 

Carol Denney, a Berkeley resident, is the coordinator of medical claims for Senior Medi-Benefits.

A divinity student at Berkeley’s Pacific School of Religion (PSR) was crowned Miss California last weekend, winning $12,000 and a trip to the storied Miss America pageant. 

Nicole Lamarche, 24, had twice been the first runner-up in state pageants—she finished second to Jennifer Glover, Miss Contra Costa County, in last year’s Miss California pageant and as an undergraduate student in Arizona came in second in that pageant two years ago. 

“Once I made finals this year I was just waiting for them to say ‘First runner-up: Nicole Lamarche,’” she said. “I was so used to it.” 

But the third time proved to be the charm for Lamarche, who is entering her third year at PSR and is seeking ordination in the United Church of Christ. 

Lamarche won the competition with a combination of her vocal performance, her photogenic qualities and her interview. 

Lamarche won the overall interview competition, scoring big points with judges for her answers about topics such as affirmative action, gay marriage and the conflict in the Middle East. The interview was worth 40 percent of the overall score, giving Lamarche the points needed to beat Miss Hollywood, Erynn Lewis, who came in second. 

A platform that stemmed from personal experience helped Lamarche secure the title as well. She spoke about making college a realistic option for all students by making it affordable, an issue close to her heart because neither of her parents earned a bachelor’s degree. 

“There are so many options out there now, especially in California,” Lamarche said. “Keeping college affordable can help to motivate ‘at-risk’ kids.” 

Lamarche qualified for the state pageant by winning the title of Miss San Francisco, the regional competition that covers San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda and Berkeley. That pageant, which attracted about 15 competitors this year, requires no qualifier or entry fee in hopes of making the pageant scene more accessible. 

As the first Miss San Francisco to win the Miss California title in 50 years, Lamarche has a reputation to live up to. Miss San Francisco 1954, Lee Ann Meriwether, went on to win Miss America and then maintain an acting career highlighted by her role as Catwoman in the 1966 movie “Batman.” 

But no matter how much success Lamarche has in pageants, she says her career ambition will not change. Although she will postpone her third year of seminary, she is committed to completing her degree so she can be ordained. 

“It’s really important to me to finish the Master’s of Divinity so I can become a minister in the church,” she said. 

Though Lamarche’s seminary friends at first found her participation in beauty pageants “a bit strange,” they have since realized the benefits it can have. 

“They’ve seen what it’s done for me,” Lamarche said. “It forced me to be comfortable in my own skin, and plus it’s paid for a bunch of my education.” 

Now, Lamarche’s focus will turn to the Miss America pageant, which will be held in Atlantic City, N.J., in September. She has relocated from her Berkeley home to San Diego, where her days are spent working with makeup artists, wardrobe consultants, voice instructors and personal trainers to prepare her for the competition. 

“There’s a lot of shopping involved,” she laughed. 

In early September, Lamarche will fly to Washington, D.C., to meet the other Miss America competitors for a few days of sightseeing. From there, the group will travel to Atlantic City, where they will begin interviews and preliminary rounds of the pageant. Although most Americans see only one night of Miss America competition, the pageant begins two weeks prior to the Sept. 20 television broadcast. 

“I know there’s another competition out there, but I’m so excited just to have won Miss California that I can’t see much past that right now,” Lamarche said. “But I don’t expect to win. It will just be a great experience.”

For more than 10 years, I have been proud to be employed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Although I know that some in the community object to some of the lab’s actions, I have generally been pleased with the lab’s activities over the past decade, have enjoyed my time there, and I know that our research has been top-notch.  

Unfortunately, the lab, in conjunction with UC Berkeley, has just begun the environmental impact report (EIR) process for a project that—if built as planned—will completely bury a small creek and fill most of its valley, in order to build a parking lot. In fact, although LBNL wants the parking lot, that’s not the main motivation: really, they just need a place to dump more than 2,000 truckloads of dirt that will be generated by excavating for a new building, and disposing of it on-site will save them a lot of money and a lot of hassle. Where can you dump 2,000 truckloads of dirt? In a valley. It doesn’t seem to bother them that the valley is a thriving creek corridor that includes several coast live oaks, supports lots of bird life and is threaded with paths made by the lab’s black-tailed deer. In short, the project will: 

• Completely bury about 300 linear feet of open creek (a tributary of Strawberry Creek); 

• Result in the removal of coast live oaks and other important riparian vegetation; 

• Actually fill in (i.e. bury) a riparian corridor with 2,000 truckloads’ worth of of dirt; 

• Cut away an extremely steep slope for building construction—an inappropriate building site—thus generating the dirt fill in the first place, and 

• Construct a new parking lot, thereby actively promoting more vehicle use, traffic and air pollution. 

I’m very familiar with this particular creek, having noticed it many times on my daily bike ride home from the lab. When the weather conditions are right, a steady flow of cool air pours down the valley, creating a noticeable local cool zone. Because the valley opens onto the road at a hairpin curve that holds drivers’ attention, most employees have probably never noticed this steep-sided valley and its seasonal creek ... but I have, and I don’t want to see it destroyed. In fact, I’ll quit rather than be a part of an organization that will fill in a creek. I love my job and colleagues, but LBNL cannot be allowed to act so irresponsibly. 

More information on the project is available at the lab’s Web site, http://www.lbl.gov/Community/env-rev-docs.html, where you want the June 16 “notice of preparation.” Most of the other documents there are for another project. (Note: This project is not the nano-technology foundry building, but rather a different building proposal.) 

To add to the problems, the building site itself is a poor choice: it contains a grove of coast live oaks, and is very steep—that’s why so many truckloads of dirt need to be excavated.  

If LBNL committed to cleaning up and re-using sites currently available for building (i.e. not new open space), this project would be unnecessary. 

At this point, the lab is “scoping” the EIR. That is, they’re figuring out what should be included. It’s vital that they consider reasonable alternative sites. It’s also important to immediately show the lab that they are going to face substantial opposition to this ridiculously anti-environmental proposal, so that they consider alternatives before becoming totally committed to it. Filling in a creek to build a parking lot should not be allowed. Please, take a stand. 

Dr. Phillip N. Price, a Berkeley resident, works as a scientist in the environmental energy technologies division of LBNL. 

Despite signing a new contract that provides University of California lecturers with pay hikes and increased job security, some instructors are still feeling vulnerable and undervalued by a system that caters to tenured and tenure-track professors.  

“I don’t know that we’ve eliminated the status as second-class citizens. In fact, I don’t think we have,” said Alan Karras, a UC Berkeley lecturer in world history and political economy who helped negotiate the contract, which was announced Monday. “But it’s changing slowly.” 

Lecturers, who make up about 12 percent of the university’s faculty, teach about a quarter of the classes on UC’s nine campuses, freeing up tenure-track professors to pursue research and other duties. For years, they have complained that they shoulder a heavier workload than professors, while enjoying fewer rights and inferior pay. 

Average salary for a lecturer with less than six years experience is currently $43,000, according to UC figures, and average salary for a lecturer with more than six years experience is $51,200. That compares to a $63,700 annual salary for the average tenure-track assistant professor and $109,200 for the typical tenured professor.  

UC spokesperson Paul Schwartz said the university pays professors more because they have research, publishing and public service responsibilities that lecturers do not. 

The new lecturers’ contract, approved by the instructors this week, provides modest pay increases for all instructors. But the most significant gain comes in minimum pay. Lecturers with less than six years experience will make no less than $37,000 by 2005 under the new contract, up about $10,000 from the current floor. Instructors with more than six years experience, also known as “post-six” lecturers, will receive a minimum of $41,700.  

The deal, which runs through 2006, also provides lecturers with professional development funding, greater leeway in pursuing research grants and a “continuing appointment” for post-six lecturers, meaning they will no longer have to re-apply for their jobs every three years. 

“For the first time, we’re being recognized as professionals rather than vendors,” said Kevin Roddy, a UC Davis lecturer in medieval studies and president of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers, which represents UC’s roughly 2,600 lecturers. 

Despite the gains, some lecturers said the union did not win adequate protections for pre-six instructors, who account for three out of every four lecturers.  

“It leaves the vast majority of us just as vulnerable to the whims of management,” said UC Irvine lecturer Andrew Tonkovich, who heads the Irvine branch of the union. 

Lecturers have long contended that the university routinely fires instructors before they reach post-six status in order to save money, a process know as “churning.” Schwartz said the university has never fired lecturers for economic reasons and notes that the new contract includes explicit anti-churning language. 

Still, Schwartz said, the anti-churning provision doesn’t change the fundamental status of the lecturer. 

“The lecturer role is not meant to be a permanent position,” he said. 

According to Roddy, the university began hiring lecturers in the 1950s, when the G.I. Bill helped swell the student ranks. The first lecturers, he said, taught for brief periods, filling in for a professor on sabbatical, for example. 

“We were considered truly temporary,” he said. “[But] slowly, these people started getting hired at a regular rate, year after year.” 

Still, the university required lecturers to leave after six to eight years, so as not to threaten tenured professors. That changed in the mid-1980s when the lecturers formed a union and negotiated a contract that provided for a performance review after six years, with a three-year job renewal for those who scored well. 

“At the time, that was considered a major breakthrough,” Roddy said. 

But pay began to lag in the late-1990s, charges of churning surfaced and many felt they were simply invisible on campus. 

“People didn’t even know who we were—even faculty,” said Kathryn Klar, a UC Berkeley lecturer in Celtic Studies who has taught for 23 years. 

Klar said things began to change last year when lecturers, two years into a three-year contract battle, made headlines—staging an August strike at UC Berkeley and an October strike at four other UC campuses. 

“I think the university had to come out publicly and say we actually do something valuable for them,” she said. 

Schwartz defended the university’s treatment of lecturers. 

“UC has a history of offering its lecturers benefits and wages that are virtually unmatched,” he said. “This contract is in keeping with that.” 

The strikes, he added, had no impact on the university’s bargaining position. 

“If you look at the history of the proposals that both sides made, I think you’d find that the contract was pretty much in line with what we’d been offering [all along],” he said. 

Tonkovich said the university was, indeed, able to block many of the lecturers’ demands, including job security for pre-six instructors, significant pay hikes for any lecturers making more than the minimum and a reduction in workloads. 

The lecturers, he said, still have a battle ahead of them if they are to win true respect. 

“I don’t want to let the university off the hook with the core problems,” Tonkovich said. 

This is the second in a three-part series on Berkeley’s housing boom. The final installment will be published next Friday. 

Berkeley’s current housing boom is mostly producing smaller market-rate units that will be occupied primarily by young professionals and students, producing little in terms of affordable family housing. 

Between May 2001 and May 2003, the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) approved 17 housing projects with a total of 930 units. Two of the 17 approved projects, at 2517 Sacramento and at 2575 San Pablo, are senior housing projects; all of the units are affordable to seniors who are classified as “low” or “very low” income. These two projects together would add 67 units of affordable housing to Berkeley’s housing stock.  

Fourteen of the remaining 15 projects are market-rate projects, but also include the affordable “inclusionary” units required by the Inclusionary Housing Requirements of Berkeley’s zoning ordinance. Under these requirements, a fifth of the units in any housing project must have rents that are affordable to households whose income is at most 81 percent of the area median income.  

However, when Section 8 subsidies are available, as is the case now, 10 percent of the units have to be affordable at the 81 percent level and another 10 percent have to be affordable at 50 percent or 60 percent of the area median income for Section 8 tenants. In this case, the developer receives rents approximating fair market value for the Section 8 units. 

It has become common over the past few years for developers to take advantage of the Section 8 provision and to agree to provide an equal number of units affordable to low and very low income households. 

When a developer agrees to make a tenth of the units affordable to households at half of the area median income, they also become eligible for a density bonus, which entitles them to build 25 percent more housing units along with other concessions. When these units are Section 8 units, a developer can get a density bonus while collecting from the government and the tenant together the equivalent of market rent.  

The 15 market-rate projects in Berkeley include 870 units—166 of these are affordable to low or very low income households. An additional 44 units are in a group-living project on Bancroft Avenue near the UC Berkeley campus with a 120 beds in dorm units for students.  

How much is affordable? 

A quarter of the housing units approved by the ZAB since May 2001 are below-market units affordable to low- and very low-income households. Five percent are group living units. The remaining 70 percent are market rate units affordable to people with higher incomes. 

Of the 17 projects, 15 consist of rentals, while two developers are proposing to build condominium units. The new market rate rental housing that is being built in Berkeley is not affordable to a majority of current Berkeley residents, especially many current tenants. 

Government housing programs operate on the assumption that people can afford to pay 30 percent of their gross (before-tax) income on rent. Paying more than 30 percent is clearly more of a hardship for lower- and middle-income families than for those with higher incomes. 

For example, three vacant two-bedroom units in the Gaia Building in Downtown Berkeley recently listed on the Panoramic Interests Web site have rents ranging from $2,275 to $2,675 a month. Using the 30 percent standard, these rents are affordable to households with incomes of $91,000 to $107,000. 

Rents for two-bedroom units available this summer in other Panoramic Interests buildings listed on their Web site, including one scheduled to open this summer, range from $1,650 to $1,975. These rents are affordable to people with incomes between $66,000 to $79,500. 

Who can afford the new housing? 

According to the 2000 Census, the median household income in Berkeley in 1999 was $44,485. However, there is a large gap between the median income of tenant households ($27,341) and homeowner households ($80,324). In Berkeley west of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and south of Cedar Street, an area made up of south, west and central Berkeley, the median income of tenant households ranged from $25,122 to $35,392, depending on the specific census tract.  

Tenant incomes are higher in north Berkeley and the Berkeley hills. Incomes have most likely increased somewhat throughout the city since the Census data was collected, but are typically still well below what would be necessary to afford the market rate one- or two-bedroom units now being approved and built in Berkeley. 

In fact, many current Berkeley tenants can be classified as low and very low income. A 1998 survey of tenants in rent controlled units found that a third of non-student tenant households were very low income while another 19.6 percent were low income. 

Even with rent control, about a third of Berkeley’s tenants were paying over half their income in rent. Since 1998, when the survey was done, median rents for two-bedroom apartments in Berkeley have risen sharply. The median market rent for a two-bedroom unit in 2002 was $1,600.  

Rental units that have not been vacant since the passage of the Costa-Hawkins vacancy de-control law in 1995 have substantially lower rents, but the number of these units is shrinking. 

Families left out 

Lower income families with more than one child face a particularly difficult situation. They require larger units, but few affordable large units are being produced. Families need space, but only families with higher incomes can afford the cost in Berkeley.  

The 17 projects approved by ZAB since May 2001, with 930 units total, include only four three-bedroom units. Both affordable housing projects approved in that two-year period are for seniors. 

Funds from the Housing Trust Fund were allocated for 17 affordable housing projects by nonprofit developers with a total of 217 units and 35 beds during fiscal years 1999 through 2002. Most of these projects are for seniors or people with disabilities or special needs.  

Nonprofit housing developer Affordable Housing Associates got approval before May 2001 for a 27-unit affordable housing project at 1719-23 University that will include eight 3-bedroom units. 

Resources for Community Development (RCD) together with Equity Community Builders, has been selected as the developer for the city of Berkeley’s Oxford Street surface parking lot. The planned mixed-use project will include approximately 90 apartments, a majority of them below-market units. The plan calls includes 28 three-bedroom units and one four-bedroom. If built as planned this would be the largest amount of affordable family-oriented housing built in Berkeley for many years. 

Rob Wrenn has lived in Berkeley for the last 21 years and is member of Berkeley’s Planning Commission.

When Erick Mikiten, the architect who designed the recently opened Adeline Street Apartments, set out for the Bay Area in the late 1980s to attend UC Berkeley’s graduate school for architecture, he didn’t count on the scramble ahead of him. 

He arrived a month before classes were to begin, believing that would give him enough time to find an apartment among the list given to him by the University’s housing department. But Mikiten, disabled due to a congenital disease that weakens the bones, learned quickly that the housing environment was different here than in his previous home in Texas. 

“Affordable housing was hard to find,” he said. “But affordable housing that was also accessible to the disabled was virtually impossible.” 

Mikiten finally did find a place—only days before the semester started—through a program by the city of Oakland that gave landlords money to remodel units to make them wheelchair accessible. But the place he landed—a studio that was converted from a basement—was far from ideal. The ceilings were a mere 6 feet 7 inches high and the floor area only about 400 square feet. On top of that, the unusual subterranean set-up meant the grade came up to four feet of the exterior wall, causing rain to leak into the apartment during most of the rainy season. 

“It was very oppressive,” said Mikiten, who continued to look for another apartment during the four years he lived in the Oakland unit. “I really learned how architecture makes a big difference.” 

Perhaps that experience is one of the things that has driven Mikiten, now an architect based in Emeryville, to develop some of the most innovative disabled housing developments in the nation. One of those projects is the newly opened Adeline Street Apartments, a 19-unit building that provides ground-floor retail and housing for a few dozen physically disabled people and their families. The residents were chosen by lottery from a list of hundreds of other Section 8 applicants. 

Aesthetically, the building rises above many built for this type of population. The exterior consists of cement board over gold bricks and tile, making for a durable facade, and includes deep overhangs and wood brackets at the eaves. The residential portion—the top two floors of the building—feels like an oasis from the urban grit found on the South Berkeley commercial corridor below. Large windows inside the units and the use of exterior walkways instead of enclosed hallways adds natural light, air and views of the bay and the eastern hills. A terrace on the second floor provides a community space, and planter boxes and pots filled with herbs including rosemary and sage—all placed at a low level—give residents an opportunity to garden. 

Mikiten said his experience living in his small Oakland studio inspired his design of the building’s two studio apartments, which have higher ceilings and larger windows than the rest of the units. “I wanted to make sure the studios didn’t get stuck in some corner,” he said. “Typically, architects will shove them into a little section to plug up a hole somewhere. I wanted to make sure that wasn’t the case here, because it’s so much harder to live in studios anyway. They’re so small and much more limiting.” 

Dan Sawislak, executive director of Resources for Community Development, the nonprofit housing developer of the project, said the development exemplifies the trend away from federally funded high rises, where same-size units are stacked onto each other, to smaller, community-friendly accommodations that get funding form a variety or sources. 

“Before, low-income housing buildings were not built to last,” he said. “There was a lot of concern about the materials being cheap. With this project, we used durable, sustainable materials, because we want to make sure we’re here for at least 50 years.” 

Donnaye Leonard-Jones and her partner moved out of their North Oakland apartment after being attacked and threatened because of their sexual orientation. The two had been homeless for about a year—living in shelters and in their car —before getting the Adeline Street apartment in March. Leonard-Jones, who suffers from lupus and fibromyalgia, listed the building’s more practical features: a garbage chute located on each floor, plenty of hand rails along the walkways and inside the units, lever door handles, door knobs and light switches that are wheelchair-level, bathroom mirrors that slant down, and kitchen and bathroom sinks that are open to allow wheelchairs to go underneath. 

Leonard-Jones lives with her partner, Leatha, on the third floor, which gives them a view of the bay. She said she pays $260 a month for the two-bedroom apartment. Tenants’ rent is generally a third of their income. 

“I like the views,” Leonard-Jones said. “I can see the sunrise and sunset.” She added that one of the best things about her new home is its location. “It’s close to everything—to both Children’s Hospital and Alta Bates, to Berkeley Bowl, to the pharmacy. It’s also close to free food and services provided by the two churches and drop-in centers in the area. You can catch a bus that takes you anywhere you need to go, and the BART’s just right there.” 

The project’s location is precisely what makes it a favorite of city planners and developers. Although it was difficult to convert the L-shaped lot into a uniquely designed housing project that accommodated many different sizes of units, the result is an infill housing development that brings economic activity to an area that many say is in dire need of revitalization. 

“This is a sort of a natural corridor to get reinvigorated by development of this scale,” Mikiten said, adding that he believes this development has sparked more renovation in the neighborhood. He has already been signed on to design facade and interior improvements to a building occupied by A Better Way, located on the same block as the Adeline Street Apartments on the corner of Fairview Street. 

“There are a lot of places around here that can be developed,” he added “They’re just spread out along the corridor.”

Despite pleas from riders not to cut bus lines, the AC Transit board of directors voted Wednesday to reduce or eliminate service on 74 lines throughout the East Bay, a plan that includes scaling back Berkeley’s 17 line. 

The approved plan was a tamer version of the original proposal, which called for as many as 150 lines to reduce coverage or service times, or be eliminated all together. The transit organization, which faces a $40 million budget deficit, chose to cut fewer lines based on community response at a public hearing last month. 

At that hearing, most bus riders said they would prefer to pay higher fares if it meant being able to keep more lines. 

The number of lines affected by the new plan surprised many. Sources close to the board of directors had suggested in recent weeks that fewer than 50 lines would be affected, and said the 17 line would be saved because it was among the more heavily frequented lines listed in the original proposal. 

The new plan eliminates about 680 hours of service daily—about 11 percent of the total daily offerings, allowing AC Transit to save $12.5 million. 

The question of fare changes will come before the board of directors after another public hearing on Wednesday, July 16. At that hearing, riders will consider fare hikes to cut additional money and balance the budget. AC Transit public information officer Mike Mills said the organization is looking to come up with $6 million through fare increases and elimination of discount passes. 

“There will be some more tough choices, because although the service reductions take care of a lot of money, we still need to increase revenue,” Mills said.

“Let me get this straight,” said my brother, leaning across the table and looking at me with a bit of interest for the first time in 42 years. “When you go to New York City you stay with a kid you taught in fourth grade? Have I got that right?” 

I had stopped in Philadelphia to have lunch with my brother before traveling on to Manhattan. Now I wondered if I’d made a mistake. “Yes,” I answered. “You got a problem with it?” 

He leaned back in his chair and motioned the waiter to refill his wine glass. 

“No,” he said. “Of course not. I just think it’s odd that you would be friends with someone who you taught when she was nine or ten. I mean, you must be thirty years older than her, right?” 

“Twenty,” I said. “Only twenty.” 

“Yes,” he continued. “Twenty. Don’t you think it’s strange that you’ve stayed in contact with her and that now she’s your friend?” 

I paused before answering. “No. Her mother and I were friends first and then a friendship just naturally developed with Amy. Even when I moved to California, we kept in touch.” Now I wondered if there might be something wrong with me.  

“So, what do you do when you visit her in New York?” 

“Not much,” I answered. “It takes half an hour just to walk up the steps to her flat. She lives in an old tenement building on the Lower East Side. Her bathtub is in her kitchen. There’s no elevator, no air conditioning, no closet and no view unless you count the smokestacks of Con Edison.”  

“Sounds awful,” said my brother. He stopped peering at me and studied the dessert menu. “And what does Amy do for a living?”  

“She’s a lawyer,” I said. “She makes more in one year than I make in five. She wears expensive pantsuits to work and tight jeans and spiked high-heeled shoes on the weekends. She knows all the trendiest restaurants in Manhattan.”  

I thought back twenty years ago to when Amy was a curious, outgoing, three-foot-tall, freckle-faced redhead. Now she towers over me, especially when she wears her pointy Pradas. I see her at least twice a year, on my bi-annual visits to the East Coast. She’s the one I call when I need a place to stay after a late night or early morning flight. She can afford to live in a better neighborhood and in a place with an enclosed shower, but she prefers the excitement and bohemia of the Lower East Side. When I stay with Amy I feel cool myself, even though I am 51 years old and wear relaxed fit jeans.  

“You need tighter pants,” Amy said when I arrived at her apartment on Monday. “Something that shows off your butt.” She was lying on the floor, pulling on her jeans. They were so tight, that when she stood up she could barely breathe. “Like these,” she said, turning to show me her backside, encased in the stretched denim.  

“I don’t think so,” I said. 

“And you need heels.” She’d frowned at my feet, encased in old running shoes. “And no fleece,” she added, fingering my vest. 

“No fleece?” I asked. “I don’t own anything but fleece. I live in Northern California. We wear fleece.” 

“I know,” said Amy. “Why do you think I never moved there?” 

“Because of fleece?” 

“Yes, fleece.” She slung a big black leather purse over her shoulder. She reached out and patted the top of my head affectionately. “Come on, let’s go.” I followed her out the door of her apartment. She strode down the hallway, the click of her heels echoing up and down the ancient stairwell. I was quiet and contemplative in my sneakers, fleece vest and relaxed fit jeans. Our roles were reversed. I was the student and Amy was my teacher. There was no doubt that Amy was hipper than I. But I was the one in the most comfortable shoes and pants.

Since the wave of shootings that began in mid-June, Berkeley police have been working with community members to try to track down suspects in the recent shootings, with neighbors providing anonymous tips to the department’s violence suppression team. 

One spin-off of that collaboration happened on Friday, June 27. At about 5:15 p.m., police attempted to make a traffic stop on a Chevy Lumina at 58th and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. The driver failed to yield and the driver, a young male who police say has some outstanding Oakland warrants, bolted from the car at around 54th and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and got away. 

A short chase ensued around this location, with the suspect running a block east onto Dover street near 54th. Police sealed off the block and searched for the man, but he could not be found. A woman who was in the car was arrested. 

A neighbor who lives at 54th and Dover said she saw police with their guns drawn, and believed they were looking for the suspect in the backyard of a neighbor who lives across the street. The woman, who did not want to give her name, said she has lived in her house on 54th street for 40 years and that incidents of violence in her neighborhood have skyrocketed in the past year. 

“I haven’t seen this kind of violence since the early 1980’s during the crack epidemic,” she said, adding that if police really wanted to solve the problems of violence in her neighborhood they would crack down on the open drug dealing. 

“There’s a liquor store down the street where they sell drugs openly, like, inside the store,” she said. “Neighbors have complained. I have repeatedly complained to police, but it doesn’t stop.”

If you were anywhere near Oakland City Hall this week—or near a news broadcast, for that matter—it was impossible to miss the buzz around the abrupt firing of City Manager Robert Bobb, and the just-as-sudden, simultaneous resignation (supposedly for personal reasons) of Parks And Recreation Director Harry Edwards. 

Except for those who believe that the two men left of their own accord, the questions being most asked by most people were:  

Why did Mayor Brown fire the top-ranking official in his administration? Why now? And, what’s next? 

Damned if I know.  

Relying upon the mayor himself for an explanation only spreads the confusion. On Channel 2 Brown was saying that philosophical differences in the way the city needed to be run caused him to let Bobb go. An hour later, Channel 4 showed a clip from the same press conference, in which Brown said he was cutting staff to deal with the city’s budget shortfall. 

Some people might accuse the mayor of disingenuousness in such contradictory statements—if not outright lying—but I’m not so sure. To be able to lie, one must have a spot somewhere in his brain where the actual truth is reposited. Because Brown seems to arrive at decisions in such a Byzantine way, it is entirely possible that he may have misplaced the actual reasons why he got rid of Bobb in the first place.  

In such cases, Brown seems to be using his rambling conversations as a way to figure the thing out himself. He appears sometimes to talk until he comes up with a reason that sounds, well, reasonable both to himself and his listeners and, if he does not get the desired reaction, then he talks on until another reason comes to mind. In such a situation, truth, if it happens to occur at all, may be an unintended byproduct. 

It is entirely possible that the mayor woke up one morning, four and a half years into his administration, and suddenly felt it necessary to surround himself with his own people. That’s where the “why now?” question is most appropriate. With the exception of Jacques Barzaghi, the mayor has appeared entirely uninterested in staffing City Hall with Brown loyalists. You can find an Ignacio De La Fuente contingent, a John Russo contingent and an (exceptionally large and influential) Don Perata contingent in city government. Bobb himself seems to have brought half his top staff with him when he came out from Virginia. But Jerry has seen fit to make do with borrowing close staff members from the city’s other power brokers. 

City Councilmembers Larry Reid and Desley Brooks think they know the reason for the shakeup: noting that both Bobb and Edwards are black, Reid and Brooks cite racism. Reid was particularly incensed. “Jerry sees the African-American community as irrelevant and shows us disrespect,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. Which is probably true, though it is difficult to see how that makes Oakland’s African-American community substantially different from much of the rest of Oakland. 

So is Jerry Brown an anti-black racist? 

Well, certainly, the Mayor has taken advantage of anti-black racism. There was always that subliminal message in his original mayoral campaign of the white savior come to rescue poor Oakland from a corrupt and incompetent black political establishment. True, you can find no quotes of Brown saying that the goal in his first year as mayor was to break the back of black political power. However, when newspapers reported that assertion (“Jerry Brown shakes up Oakland’s black political establishment,” headline, Salon.com, June 1999, and, “Brown’s election in this birthplace of the Black Panthers has a further significance: it may signal the waning of Oakland’s counterproductive race politics. In voting for Brown, black Oaklanders decisively rejected a black political establishment they saw as arrogant and incompetent,” City Journal, autumn 1999), you can also find no quotes from Brown stating a belief that the use of the term “black” political establishment in such context might be inappropriate. 

Does that mean that Brown believes that he, because he is a white man, is better than every black person on earth? No, I pretty much doubt he believes that. 

If, on the other hand, you’re asking if Jerry Brown believes that because he was born Jerry Brown, he is on a higher plane than most other people on earth, I’d have to say that this is distinctly within the realm of possibility. 

I’m not sure whether this is better or worse. Just different. 

Anyway, back to the Bobb/Edwards thing.  

As for Mr. Edwards, one can only wonder why it took so long for him to wear out his welcome. Edwards’ hiring came during Jerry Brown’s infamous search-to-find-well-known-and-well-qualified-African-Americans-to-put-in-positions-for-which-they-were-not-actually-qualified period. That was the period in which Brown recruited Maya Angelou and Angela Davis for Oakland’s head librarian position, presumably on the theory that one who has written a book must therefore know where to place them back on the shelf.  

Edwards, with no known administrative experience and no stated work background in either parks or recreation, was picked as administrator of Oakland’s parks and recreation department. That he failed, miserably, is hardly a surprise. That he lasted three years while failing miserably is, at the very least, a tribute to a remarkable, long-running display of stubbornness and tenacity in the face of disaster ... either on Edwards’ part, or Brown’s, or both. 

Bobb is another issue altogether. At the very least, he demonstrated that he was interested in actually running Oakland, which put him light years ahead of his boss. Who comes in as his replacement, and what marching orders that replacement gets from Jerry Brown, will go a long ways toward determining the real reasons for the mayor’s City Hall shakeup. Or, on the other hand, it might not. 

With Jerry Brown, unfortunately, one never knows. Maybe not even Jerry Brown.  

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is an Oakland resident.

The south wall of the Grove Liquor Store on the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Ashby Avenue will soon serve as an artistic representation of South Berkeley—a collaboration between neighborhood activists and nearby Epic Arts Studio. 

The effort began more than a year ago when local resident Eve Cowan decided to create a mural at the site., enlisting the help of Epic Arts staff members. Now the studio provides space for meetings, financial sponsorship, and administrative and legal help for the project. 

The art studio, located at 1923 Ashby Ave., sets out to “build community partnerships, mobilize local artists, produce cultural events, and develop resources and facilities which support greater education, production and participation in the arts,” according to the group’s mission statement. 

In producing the mural, called “South Berkeley Shines,” they hope to beautify the neighborhood and encourage community participation. 

“It was a perfect match,” said Epic Arts director of development Tanya Hurd. 

The mural will display scenes from the neighborhood including the Thai Buddhist Temple, the South Berkeley Community Garden, the South Berkeley Library, La Peña Café and the Black Repertory Theater. Several local artists will work together on the project, with each using a different type of paint for their part of the collage. 

For now, Epic Arts staff members and area activists are finishing the plans for the mural and soliciting donations to fund the project. The core group, which involves eight neighbors, meets every week with other interested participants to work on specific tasks to make the mural a reality. 

Grove Liquor Store has a donation jar on their front counter, and mural organizers are also gathering leftover paint from people’s homes. 

“The response has been incredible,” Hurd said. “People have been dropping 

five dollar bills saying ‘if I give more, will it happen quicker?’” 

Hurd said that with an additional $200, the team should have enough financial support to at least begin the project. 

Now, the main obstacle for the mural organizers is gaining a permit for their artwork. Because the wall for the mural faces Ashby Avenue—which is California State Highway 13—the California Department of Transportation must approve the project. Hurd said she has made several attempts to contact CalTrans, but that she has not had a response. Nonetheless, Hurd said the group hopes to begin painting the wall later this month. 

“I think it’s good that they’re going to make it a more beautiful area,” neighbor Shelly Harper said. “We could use something that reminds us that South Berkeley does indeed shine.”

Hong Kong—An hour before the anti-government rally in Causeway Bay, a district crammed with elegant Japanese department stores, boutiques and clubs, I was having dim sum with friends. They were all dressed in black, the color of protest on July 1, the sixth anniversary of Hong Kong's Handover to mainland China.  

“Why are you wearing orange?” asked Joey, the ringleader of this band of protesters, all of them hip young Cantonese from the advertising, publicity or film industries.  

“Cause I'm not a fashionista,” I replied to her, avoiding a minefield—the issue of the censorship that's expected if the government passes the security bill known as Article 23.  

After devastating the shrimp buns and leaving a mess of noodles, our tall, stunningly attractive field commandante—dressed in combat khakis topped by a torn, chrome-studded black T-shirt—led her troops to the top of a double-decker tram. The alleys and overhead walkways on this bright, sweltering afternoon were crawling with the battalions of the night, a rolling black tide of anger. To me, the symbolism was unfortunate. It didn't remind me of democratic protest, but of Mussolini-era fascist militancy.  

The silent, black sea swelled over the streets of the Wanchai district. Only the effigies of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, Financial Secretary Anthony Leung, and Security Chief Regina Ip—hanging by their necks—drew snickers from the crowd.  

The humorless mood was in stark contrast to the protest marches of my younger days, when students chanted and embraced the cause of the downtrodden, love, sex and rock 'n' roll in a dizzy fusion of compassion and passion.  

This crowd was vastly different from the radically democratic American students who stormed Chicago's Democratic Convention in 1968, or the Red Guards waving Mao's little red book. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Nicaragua's Sandinistas, the Right, not the Left, has led the really effective demonstrations that have taken down governments around the world—from Gdansk, Poland, to Timosoara, Romania, and Moscow.  

Sadly, the more appropriate analogy for this huge protest is Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922, the coming to power of the fascist Black Shirts.  

Rome in the Roaring '20s and Hong Kong of the third millennium may seem eons apart, but there are similarities. In many ways, Hong Kong is actually more Catholic than Italy after the latter's secularist reforms known as the Risorgimento. An ally of the ultraconservative Opus Dei movement that has tried to depose Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Hong Kong's Bishop Joseph Zen is the spiritual center of the protest. Hundreds of thousands heeded his call, if only because they were educated in Hong Kong's Catholic schools, the legacy of a British colonial establishment that never bothered to organize public education.  

Mussolini-style fascism was the combined muscle of the "little guys," small-time property owners and professionals who envied the capitalist plutocrats and feared the leftist labor unions. Most of the Hong Kong marchers may be unfortunate, but they are not the downtrodden. Hundreds of small businesses are going bankrupt every month here, and free-falling property prices have clobbered professionals who own more than two apartments. Put together all the "little guys" of Hong Kong and you get more than half a million protesters.  

The marchers vented all their fury on Tung, a former shipping tycoon, and Leung, a onetime banker with Citibank and Chase. The Handover six years ago cemented an alliance between the mainland bureaucrats with the local tycoons and multinational corporations. No venom was aimed at the labor left, mainly because there's not much left of it after the flight of factories from the city to the mainland. China's new prime minister Wen Jiabao came for this Handover anniversary to sign a free-trade pact to benefit Hong Kong industry. But businessmen and labor leaders alike admit the tariff reductions are too little, too late.  

The labor unions marked Handover Day with a pro-China soccer fair in on the opposite end of Victoria Park. Some 200 listless workers were scattered among the red banners in the vast concrete playing field—too few for a Venezuelan-style street battle with the black-clad marchers.  

Rally organizers admit most of the turnout was not against the Beijing-backed security measures or the city's nearly 9 percent unemployment rate. Few people are suggesting that the paternalistic Tung is autocratic or evil, in the way of a Berlusconi or a Saddam. If there is a single complaint against the Tung administration in the wake of the SARS epidemic, it's that government officials are incompetent bunglers.  

Incompetence—therein lies the main grudge that swept the Fascists into office in Italy. Mussolini got the trains to run on time, and that is exactly what these half a million protesters want: a government bureaucracy that operates as efficiently as a Swiss watch, at least between the hours of 9 and 5.  

The marchers’ “Down With Tung” slogan clearly spelled out their goal: not a mere revision of security laws but the downfall of the Tung government. The new Black Shirts are aiming for a coup that will propel them into power and onto a confrontation course with the communist mainland. Though Marx may be rolling in his grave, Mussolini would be proud.  

The one sure guarantee against any threat to civil liberties hidden in the small print of Article 23 is that the current government will be too ineffective to carry it out. The real danger for Hong Kongers—as the Italians discovered to their dismay by the 1940s—is that they just might get the government they desire.  

Yoici Shimatsu (yoishimatsu@yahoo.com) is a freelance journalist based in Hong Kong and former editor of The Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo.

A North Berkeley resident who wants to stop the city’s plan to install cell phone antenna on the roof of Starbucks Cafe is badgering the city to take down the mock antennae that have been erected on top of the building. 

Shahram Shahruz, one of a dozen residents who successfully pressured the city in April to hold off on the deal with Sprint Wireless until a public hearing could be held on the matter, first noticed what appeared to be antennae on top of the North Shattuck building on June 22. He promptly shot off an e-mail to Mayor Tom Bates, councilmembers and some planning department officers demanding to know what was going on. 

Phil Kamlarz, interim planning director, responded via e-mail that city planning staff had said that the structures were “mock antenna” and were not transmitting. The structures, which resemble two chimneys, are located on top of 1600 Shattuck Avenue. When the Daily Planet inquired about the mock antenna, land use manager Mark Rhoades said putting up mock structures is pretty common practice. 

“The zoning board and the council have had a consistent practice of asking for the applicant to put up a mock-up of the project,” he said. “In most instances this takes the form of story poles for residential additions. The city believes it’s a good idea for the decision-making process for the council members and the public to see what this will look like and to determine whether or not that aspect of it is consistent with the city’s telecommunications ordinance.” 

But Shahruz, who lives 100 feet from the proposed site of the new antenna, said he doesn’t buy the city’s line. He said he believes the city put the mock antennae up as a way to undercut the neighbors’ potential challenges to the plan. “One reason to deny the permit is to say it is a visible blight or eyesore,” Shahruz told the Planet. “If the city puts it up there and if no one complains then they can say ‘look, no one is complaining—it’s not an eyesore.’” 

Shahruz and other nearby residents say they are concerned that the real antennae Sprint plans to install will emit harmful radiation. But, since the city has said it cannot reject an antenna installation application based on health reasons due to federal law, Shahruz and other opponents will attempt to fight the plan based on claims that the antennae will impede views. They will also challenge Sprint’s claims that more cell phone service is needed in that area. The hearing is scheduled for Sept. 16. 

“I tend to believe the city has set its mind to grant a permit to Sprint,” Shahruz wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Planet. “The whole hearing will be a sham.” 

Shahruz says he wants more answers from the city to prove that the mock structure is legal and is, in fact, not real antennae. “How do we know they are really mock antenna?” he said. “How do we know they’re not transmitting?” In a June 23 e-mail to Kalmarz and city attorney Manuela Albuquerque, Shahruz asked the city to point to a city law that specifies the definition and purpose of a mock structure. He also asked why such a structure would not require a permit. “Can we erect a ‘mock’ Eiffel Tower as tall as the real one, made out of cardboard without permit in our backyard? It appears that the city allows ‘mock’ structures without permit,” he said. 

Calls to Rhoades requesting answers to the same questions were not returned.

Attacks on American troops in Iraq are not letting up. The Bush administration blames “Saddam Hussein Loyalists,” and has launched a military offensive, Operation Sidewinder, to root out these supposed American enemies. But Sidewinder so far has been a bust, as an organized body of Saddam Loyalists is proving to be as difficult to find as weapons of mass destruction.  

The White House must now face up to the uncomfortable fact that troubles related to the occupation are coming from almost every quarter of the Iraqi population, particularly the Shiites, who never supported Saddam. Moreover, these difficulties spring not from some organized opposition, but from public dissatisfaction with the incompetent and disorganized management of the occupation.  

Some remnants of Saddam’s elite troupes may be doing some of the sniping, but one would not know it from the results of Operation Sidewinder thus far. To date, more than 300 persons have been arrested in house-to-house searches, yet it is not at all clear that the bulk of those arrested were guilty of anything. On June 30, Amnesty International questioned the arrests and the conditions under which the detainees are being held.  

The U.S. Central Command claims to have apprehended 11 people on a “targeted” list, but none of the remaining regime members presented on the ubiquitous “villains” playing cards have been found. In short, no one in any position of authority in Saddam's circle has been located or shown to be behind the attacks.  

Ordinary Iraqis, meanwhile, have plenty to be upset about. Conditions in occupied Iraq are desperate.  

Basic utilities have not been restored. There is no drinking water. Food spoils in the scorching heat with no electricity to run refrigerators. There is no cooking fuel. The Americans’ decisions to fire public officials associated with the Baath Party, including those who could help turn the electricity back on, was deeply unpopular.  

Basic nutrition is also a desperate concern. “Today, the lives of 100 percent of the Iraqi population, 27 million people, depend on the provision of monthly food rations,” UNICEF chief representative in Iraq Carel de Roy declared on July 1. The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) chief representative in Baghdad, Torben Due, says the crisis is unprecedented. “To avoid a food crisis in the country we have initiated the largest emergency operation in the 40-year history of the WFP,” he told the InterPress News Service on July 2.  

Religion continues to be a source of strife.  

In the town of Fallujah, an explosion in a mosque resulted in the death of Sheikh Laith Khalil, the prayer leader, on July 1. The details of the explosion were confused. Some residents claimed it was the result of a U.S. military attack; American troops claimed that the occupants of the mosque were trying to make a bomb. In any case, the explosion was not created by Saddam loyalists, and it resulted in greater hostility toward American forces.  

Insensitive, heavy-handed tactics by U.S. and British soldiers have done little to win hearts and minds. Broadcast images of a male American officer physically searching an Iraqi woman inflamed sensibilities in religiously conservative regions of Iraq. British troops searching homes with dogs -- considered by pious Muslims to be polluting -- further demonstrated disrespect. Many of these offenses could be avoided with minimal cultural sensitivity training.  

Occupation administrator Paul Bremer’s plan to appoint a committee of his own choosing to write a new Iraqi constitution has met formidable opposition from the most revered Shiite religious leader in the nation, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf.  

In a fatwa, or religious decree, issued on July 1 and translated by Iraqi Shia expert Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, Sistani declared, “The occupation officials do not enjoy the authority to appoint the members of a council that would write the constitution.” The ayatollah insisted, “General elections must be held so that every eligible Iraqi can choose someone to represent him at the constitutional convention that will write the constitution.”  

Sistani’s opposition to the Bremer's autocratic plans will likely generate further public opposition to the activities of the occupation. If Bremer continues to ignore Sistani's authority, religious zealots will be tempted to attack the American troops.  

For now, portraying Saddam Hussein as a kind of Bogeyman responsible for all that is going wrong in Iraq may help the White House with the American public. At some point, however, the administration must stop alienating Iraqi citizenry. If not, the epithets for the occupation Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been trying to reject—“quagmire,” “guerrilla war” and "Vietnam"—will become reality.  

William O. Beeman (William_beeman@brown.edu) teaches anthropology and is director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is author of "Language, Status and Power in Iran," and two forthcoming books: "Double Demons: Cultural Impediments to U.S.-Iranian Understanding," and "Iraq: State in Search of a Nation."

The Zoning Adjustments Board last Thursday approved the final environmental impact report (FEIR) for the Durant Street Apartments, removing another hurdle in developer Ruegg & Ellsworth’s efforts to demolish the historic Ellen Blood House in order to construct 44-unit, mixed-use project. 

The next step is getting the permits to demolish the old building—a 19th-century house that was deemed a structure of merit by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1999—and construct the five-story, 31,000-square-foot proposed development. 

Critics of the plan, including preservationists with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA), have argued that the FEIR did not adequately provide alternatives to demolishing the structure, including a proposal to relocate the house to a site on Berkeley Way. 

In a letter to board chair Lawrence Capitelli, BAHA president Susan Chase said that alternative, which she described as “serious and concrete,” should have been considered in the environmental impact report. Critics have also said that the need for the housing in the Southside area is no longer strong enough to justify a housing project that will require the destruction of a historic building. 

The board will consider whether to issue the permits for the plan at the July 10 meeting.

“Hot Prowl” burglary 

A thief entered a home on the 600 block of San Luis Road in the Berkeley Hills early Wednesday morning in what the police call a “hot prowl” burglary—a robbery with residents in the home. 

The thief, described as a heavy male over 5’ 6”, entered through an open window. A 56 year-old female resident awakened “when she heard some rattling noises from downstairs,” said Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Mary Kusmiss. 

Seeing what she believed was a flashlight briefly turning on and off through an open door in her bedroom, the resident walked to the top of her stairs. 

“She looked down the stairs and saw a man she didn’t recognize,” said Kusmiss. “She went back into the bedroom, slammed the door and started screaming.” 

Her husband awakened and called 911. Police found two large paintings that belonged in the living room outside, but residents said two other paintings, heirlooms painted by a family member, were missing. The residents did not attach a monetary value to the paintings. 

As of Wednesday, police had no suspects. 

DVD heist 

A patrol officer driving west on Channing Way at 11:43 p.m. Monday night noticed a man running out of Blockbuster Video with a backpack, shouting incoherently. 

“[The officer] caught up alongside the man who was running and attempted to ask him what was happening,” said Kusmiss. 

At that point, the man turned and ran north on Milvia Street. 

“Just then another man came running westbound on Channing Way and appeared to be chasing the first man,” Kusmiss said. 

At that point, the first man dropped the backpack and the second man picked it up. The police officer caught up with the pair at the corner of Bancroft Way and Milvia Street and discovered that the first man had stolen 23 DVDs from Blockbuster—including “The Fast and The Furious,” “Spiderman” and “The Recruit” —valued at $690. 

The man who picked up the backpack was a Blockbuster employee. 

Police picked up the thief, a 32 year-old Oakland man, and charged him with grand theft and a parole violation. 

Bicycle gang attempted robbery 

An 18 year-old resident of Birmingham, Alabama, visiting a brother’s home on the 2200 block of Derby Street in Berkeley, set out with his brother Monday night to pick up some supplies at Andronico’s Market for a road trip. 

On the way to the market, according to police, the brothers noticed three young men on bicycles. The three men, riding pink, red and black bikes, approached the brothers and asked if they wanted to buy marijuana. 

When the brothers declined, one of the bicyclists asked to borrow $5. The brothers declined. 

“One of the suspects hauled off and whacked the Alabama brother in the face,” said Kusmiss. 

The same suspect proceeded to punch the Alabama brother about 15 times, the victim told police. The brother then “teetered backward and fell onto a white Ford Mustang,” Kusmiss said, triggering a car alarm and a call to the police by the car owner. 

The three assailants escaped with no money. Later, an officer found three young men who matched the description of the attackers at the corner of Adeline and Harmon streets, near the Ashby BART station, and caught two of them. The two brothers positively identified the pair, both 18 year-old Berkeley residents, who have been charged with attempted strong arm robbery.

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

About a dozen people marched Saturday from People’s Park toward the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists on Cedar Street in memory of Kevin Freeman, the longtime Berkeley transient who allegedly was murdered by his cell mate in Santa Rita Jail in May. 

Like most of the marchers, John “Papa” Lacy held up a sign protesting the circumstances of Freeman’s May 9 death. Critics say the fatal beating of Freeman, a chronic alcoholic who was in and out of jail for public drunkenness for years, is an example of what’s wrong with a system that incarcerates addicts and alcoholics instead of treating their substance abuse problems. 

Those critics—including chemical dependency counselors, homeless care providers and veteran Berkeley activists—say the city needs to open a detox center. But, unlike most of those critics, Lacy, a self-described speed addict who lives with his wife on the streets, knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with addiction and to be demonized by the rest of the world. 

While walking on Shattuck Street near Center Street, Lacy gets yet another taste of that regular dose of antipathy from a pedestrian crossing the marchers’ path. “Maybe you shouldn’t take the shit in the first place,” the passerby snaps. 

“Maybe you should have your brains and guts splattered, too,” Lacy spits back, alluding to the grisly scene found at the scene of Freeman’s murder. According to jail guards, the walls of the jail cell were smeared with matter from Freeman’s brains and internal organs. 

Lacy, who is called “Papa” by the street kids he looks after, has lived in Berkeley since 1993, when he moved here from the Southwest. Shortly afterward he met Freeman, whom he says was “always drunk.” Lacy added: “I’ve heard hearsay about him doing other things but the only thing I’ve ever seen him do is alcohol.” 

While Freeman’s death has made him a sort of symbol for the national movement to implement more humane ways of dealing with drug and alcohol problems, Lacy’s continuing struggle makes him a living testament to the need for such reform. Lacy said he would be more likely to sober up and seek treatment if there was a place nearby he could go to. 

“I think it would help ... me and my wife,” said Lacy, a wiry, slouched-over man with an eager-to-help attitude and the weathered face of a long-term addict. 

But whether Freeman himself would have done so in time to save his life is questionable. Friends who eulogized him said his problem was intractable. Teddy Mead, who first met Freeman more than 20 years ago when both were residents at a former student co-operative called Barrington Hall, said he and other friends tried for years to convince Freeman to get help. “But he never listened to us,” Mead said. 

Mead said he didn’t know Freeman well, but never knew him to “be a liar or a thief. He always maintained his ethics.” Speaking before a crowd of about 45 people, he said Freeman, a former high school state swimming champion, could talk with him “about the differences in Hindu spiritual paths and about politics. He was well read and intelligent.” 

The memorial included an invocation by Beaver Berry, a Native-American elder from Oklahoma, who recounted his own struggle with chemical dependency and homelessness. “I know how it feels. People look at you like they don’t want to be around you, even your own family,” he said. 

One of the eulogizers was Michael Diehl, a longtime Berkeley activist most noted for his work with Copwatch. He said he had seen him around since the early seventies, when both men moved to the Bay Area, Diehl said, “looking for the legacy of the 1960s.” Diehl said he believed Freeman was “pretty disenchanted with political dissent,” recounting an incident in which Freeman took money from a police officer to tear down flyers Diehl was passing out to rally support for a sleep-in demonstration on Dwight street to protest the arrest of homeless people for sleeping outdoors. “I said, why you tearing my flyers down man? We’re doing this for you. And he told me a cop gave him $50 to do it,” Diehl said, eliciting chuckles from the audience. 

Diehl took the opportunity to criticize the city’s use of stay-away orders to prevent transients from going into certain areas. Freeman’s last arrest involved not only public drunkenness, for which he had been arrested repeatedly in the last few years, but also for violating a court-ordered stay-away order, which proscribed him from being in certain areas of Telegraph Avenue. Diehl said that by issuing the stay-away order the city “took his home away from him,” forcing him into the outskirts of the city, away from the familiar band of street people. 

Christina, who would only give her first name, gave a glimpse into Freeman’s darker side. She said she was a friend of a woman with whom Freeman was involved. At times, she said, this friend would call her asking her to rescue her from Freeman’s physical abuse.  

But she also recounted his good side: “He had a good sense of humor and a distinctive laugh that in turn made you want to laugh. ... When I heard about [his death] I was devastated,” she said, breaking out into tears. 

Another who took to the microphone was Debbie Moore of the Xplicit Players, a pro-nudity activist theater group. She painted herself white and held a totem with a skull to symbolize death and the vulnerability of the homeless. Moore, who has been arrested 12 times for public nudity, said jail is a dangerous place, particularly because it becomes a sort of wasteland for substance abusers. “When I was in there, there were a lot of people on drugs, in various states of distress, and I was trying to heal them and comfort them, but it was very difficult to maintain the balance. It’s a delicate situation. Anything can happen in there,” she said. 

TUESDAY, JULY 1 

Celebrate David Brower Day and Help Restore The Bay Join Earth Island Institute, Save The Bay, and Earth Team in celebrating the third annual David Brower Day with a community wetlands restoration project, from 1 to 5 p.m. at Oakland’s Arrowhead Marsh on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Shoreline. Guest speakers will include Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, Save The Bay co-founder Sylvia McLaughlin, and the Brower family. For more information call Marilyn Latta at 452-9261. mlatta@savesfbay.org 

Wine Tasting at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Derby St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333. 

Alternatives to Action Discussion Group with Robert Berend at 7 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 527-5332. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 525-3565. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2 

Amnesty International Berkeley Community Group meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1606 Bonita Ave., at Cedar St. Join fellow human rights activists to help promote social justice one individual at a time. 872-0768. 

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. 

I Spy! Come undercover in a disquise and visit our spy training stations. Make a gadget, decode a secret message and network with other spies in training, from noon to 2 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. 643-5961. www.lawrencehallofscience.org 

THURSDAY, JULY 3 

Berkeley Liberation Radio 104.1 FM holds public meetings for all interested people first and third Thursdays, 7 p.m. at the Long Haul Info Shop, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 595-0190.  

FRIDAY, JULY 4 

Independence Day, City of Berkeley Offices Closed 

Pools are open! Come swim the 4th at your neigborhood pool. Willard, Telegraph at Derby, 1 - 4pm; King, Hopkins at Colusa, 1 - 4pm; or West Campus, Browning at Addison, 1:30 - 4pm. For more Berkeley Aquatics information call 981-5150.  

July 4 at the Berkeley Marina, sponsored by the City of Berkeley. Free celebration from  

noon to 10 p.m. with two stages for live music, arts and crafts, free sailboat rides, bicycle parade at 7 p.m. and a fireworks show at 9:30 p.m. “Operation Kidprint,” a program of the Berkeley Police Department will provide parents with their children’s fingerprints at no cost. Valet bicycle parking will be available free of charge. Personal fireworks and alcohol are forbidden. Cars must be in by 7 p.m., and will not be permitted out until after 10 p.m. 981-7000. 

Evening Canoe Outing with Save the Bay Celebrate the 4th away from the crowds, paddling through Oakland’s serene Arrowhead Marsh, from 7 to 10 p.m. Cost is $25 for STB members, $30 for non-members. To register or for more information call 542-9261.  

www.savesfbay.org 

World One Festival, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. in Cerrito Park, El Cerrito. Music includes classical Indian dance, global fusion, bluegrass, reggae, capoeira, roots, and African. Sponsored by the City of El Cerrito, and 88.1 KeCg 97.7. For information contact  

worldone@worldoneradio.org 

SATURDAY, JULY 5 

Sick Plant Clinic UC Botanical Garden experts diagnose your plant woes the first Saturday of every month from 9 a.m. to noon at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755. www.mip.berkeley.edu/garden 

Rattlers! Learn abut the only poisonous snake in the park and meet its very common harmless mimic. Fact, folklore and live snakes. Bring the whole family. From 1 to 3 p..m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Free. Wheelchair accessible. 525-2233.  

Living House Help make a house that is alive! Construct a trellis for a garden and plant beans that will climb up and bring shade. Learn about plant ecology and how beans are able to reach for the sky. From 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Free. Wheelchair accessible. 525-2233.  

SUNDAY, JULY 6 

War Tax Resistance Information and Gathering Find out ways to respond to the use of our tax dollars for the military, from 4 to 6 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. 843-9877.  

Butterfly Count Our native plant garden is blooming. Learn to identify the local species to add to our butterfly list. From 1 to 3 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Free. 525-2233.  

Eckhart Tolle Talks on Video Free gatherings, at 7:30 p.m. to hear the words of the author of “The Power of Now” at the Feldenkrais Ctr., 830 Bancroft Way. We will meet on the first and third Sunday of each month. 547-2024. EdShorelin@aol.com 

Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Culture from 3 to 5 p.m. and Betty Cook on “Maps to Enlightenment” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Place. 843-6812.  

www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JULY 7 

Berkeley Biodiesel Cooperative Orientation for those interested in making biodiesel welcome at 7:30 p.m. Call for location, 594-4000 ext. 777. biobauerx@hotmail.com 

Berkeley CopWatch meets at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING 

Science Fair Projects by students at Thousand Oaks Elementary School will be on display at the Children’s Room of the Berkeley Main Library, 2090 Kittredge. For information on the projects, contact the science teacher, Mallorie Baron, at 549-1724. 

Summer Fun Camps for Children and Teens, from age five and up are offered at Berkeley recreation centers and include such activities as arts and crafts, swimming and tennis lessons, yoga, organized sports and games, and field trips. The Summer Fun Camp Program runs June 30 through August 22, Mon. - Fri., 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.  The fee, including lunch and snack, is $77 per week for Berkeley residents. Extended morning and afternoon sessions are also available at an additional cost. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley’s Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department. Applications for the camps can be picked up at the Camps Office, located at 2016 Center St., or can be mailed upon request. 981-5150. 

Echo Lake Youth Camp for ages 6 - 12 at Echo Lake, near South Lake Tahoe. One week sessions are offered between July 7 and August 22. Cost is $235 per session. For registration information please visit the City of Berkeley’s Recreation Programs Office at 2016 Center St., or call 981-5150. 

The Bay Area Shakespeare Camp offers a complete theatrical experience for children 7-13 years of age covering casting, staging, costuming, and performing, in a series of five, 2-week sessions, through August 22. Sessions are held at John Hinkel Park, Southampton Place at Arlington Ave. Cost is $340 per session. Additional after-care is also provided for a fee. Scholarships are available. Call 981-5150 for scholarship details. To register for the camp, or for more information, please call 415-422-2222, or 800-978-PLAY. 

Free Quit Smoking Class on six Monday evenings, from 6 to 8 p.m., starting July 14th, at the South Berkeley Senior Center. To register or for more information contact the Berkeley Tobacco Prevention Program, 981-5330 or QuitNow@ci.berkeley.ca.us 

Bay Area Technology Education Collaborative, a community non-profit offers low-cost training in Computer Information Technology. Free orientations on July 2 and 9, classes start July 14. For information call 451-7300, ext. 604. www.baytec.org 

Free Energy Conservation Retrofits for Berkeley Residents CA Youth Energy Services (CYES) is a nonprofit sponsored by the City of Berkeley that trains and employs high school students to provide conservation retrofits to residents. Work includes weatherstripping doorways, replacing lightbulbs with CFLs, cleaning refrigerator coils, replacing faucet aerators and showerheads with low-flow devices, checking hot water temperature, installing earthquake preparedness measures, a comprehensive audit, and more. Available to home owners and renters. Takes 1-1.5 hours. Call for an appointment. 428-2357. 

www.risingsunenergy.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Monday, July 7, 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, July 8, at 7 p.m. in City Council hambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

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

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wednesday, July 2, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruby Primus, 981-5106. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/women 

Fire Safety Commission meets Wednesday, July 2, at 7:30 p.m. at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. David Orth, 981-5502. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/firesafety 

School Board meets Wednesday July 2, at 7:30 p.m., in the City Council Chambers. Queen Graham 644-6147 or Mark Coplan 644-6320. 

Peace and Justice Commission meets Monday, July 7, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Manuel Hector, 981-5510. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/peaceandjustice 

Youth Commission meets Monday, July 7, at 6:30 p.m., at 1730 Oregon St. Philip Harper-Cotton, 981-6670. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/youth

“We are trying to build an organization to counter the ‘dumb growth’ positions of what the defeat of Measure P told us is a distinct minority of Berkeley residents. The subtle propaganda of the revived Daily Planet is clearly fanning the flames—and adding an ugly note of personal defamation that should remind us demagoguery is not reserved just to the Bush administration.” 

—From an e-mail fund-raising letter sent out by Hank Resnik on behalf of the recently re-constituted Livable Berkeley organization, forwarded to the Planet by a number of friends who are on his e-mail list. 

Well, no. Defamation is a fancy word for libel, and an essential element of the legal definition of libel is that the supposedly libelous statement must be untrue. As far as we know, the Planet has never been accused of making an untrue statement about any person. We certainly say true things that people don’t like to hear, and will continue to do so. We also expect to make some mistakes, but if we find out about them, we will correct them promptly. 

Truth is the most important product of a newspaper, and when someone accuses a newspaper of defamation, when no defamation has take place, that actually comes pretty close to something called “trade libel,” disparaging a business or its products untruthfully. Look it up. Ask your lawyer. But we’re not going to sue. 

It is kind of heavy-handed, however, to compare the Planet to the Bush administration. Nice to know we’ve finally made the big time, but still ... isn’t that kind of over the top? 

Land use discussions frequently take on this kind of acrimonious tone, here and elsewhere, and there are good reasons why this is so. Neighborhood participants often have no other assets but the equity in their home, so a perceived threat to its value is traumatic. Developers are usually skating on pretty thin ice, with millions of dollars in loans and small profit margins; some say the risk is what makes it fun, but it can also be stressful. 

Then there are the true believers, some of whom, like Resnik, are now carrying water for the aforementioned Livable Berkeley. Environmental problems are real and scary, and it’s tempting to believe that the right mantra, like “smart growth,” is going to save us from ourselves. Many of us wish we believed that building a thousand high-rise apartments in Berkeley will prevent McMansions in Fairfield, but there’s just no evidence that it’s true. (Austin, Texas, in fact, one of the early adopters of the Smart Growth slogan, has already officially given it up.) 

The current Livable Berkeley organization is a rump faction of the original Coalition for a Livable Berkeley, a campaign committee formed to oppose Measure P, the November 2002 ballot measure intended to restrict the height of buildings in Berkeley. The lion’s share of the No-on-P campaign funding came from the development crowd, including principals, investors, sub-contractors, employees, spouses and in-laws. They outspent the proponents many times over, winning a predictable 3 to 1 margin in the election. But it is a mistake to think, as the most avid Livable Berkeley spokesmen do, that the vote on Measure P meant that a big majority of Berkeleyans favor unrestricted development of pricey rental apartments. Some No-On-P supporters were persuaded that affordable housing required tall buildings. Many “No” voters simply thought that limiting height was one-dimensional planning, and that height was not the only thing that mattered. 

After the election, an e-mail letter calling for a purge of city commissioners who supported Measure P was circulated under the name of Councilmember Linda Maio’s aide Brad Smith, although Resnik later admitted to being the author. Then, a couple of public meetings were called by Resnik and others, with the announced intention of carrying on the Coalition ideology in a successor organization. Much to the consternation of the true believers, a significant number of people who had opposed Measure P but also believed in careful planning turned out for these meetings. Attendees voted to establish committees for organization and goal-setting, and many signed up for them. 

But then, in a coup worthy of the left sectarian wars of the thirties (or of the Bush administration), self-styled “core” participants simply started over again, with a brand-new steering committee chosen by unnamed individuals meeting at undisclosed locations, just as if the first meetings had never taken place. 

Are you lost yet? It gets even more baroque. Now new members are being recruited (that’s the purpose of Resnik’s latest letter). They can join by paying 30 bucks, but this time they don’t get to vote. The unelected steering committee makes all the decisions. The members just send money. Don’t believe this? Go to livableberkeley.com. 

This is a long tale, and perhaps not interesting to people who aren’t planning mavens. There is a point to it, or perhaps several points. 

The opposite of “smart growth” is not “dumb growth.” It may be “no growth.” Some supporters of Measure P, as well as some who didn’t support it, think that any growth in Berkeley needs to be a lot smarter than what we’ve been getting lately. It’s not smart, to borrow a phrase from backers of the war against Vietnam, to destroy cities in order to save them. There’s nothing smart about simply granting every permit application for large buildings until all buildable sites are gone, destroying any vintage structures in the path. Berkeley is already crowded. If it becomes unpleasant for current residents, you can bet they’ll flee to the suburbs, as previous residents of carelessly urbanized areas did before them. 

The San Francisco Chronicle and the S.F. Bay Guardian have recently done  

excellent pieces on the effects of dumb “smart” growth on San Francisco. On Rincon Hill, according to Chronicle urban critic John King, San Francisco has been blithely ignoring an intelligent plan for increased development drawn up in the eighties, instead granting building permits to anyone who has enough juice, to build whatever they want, regardless of the consequences. The Bay Guardian had a cover story on the big empty holes which have been left South of Market after the bottom fell out of the dotcom boom. The building projects are off, but the small businesses and artists have already been driven out. 

Berkeley has managed to avoid the worst of such excesses. So far. Our planning processes have been criticized for being too slow and cautious, with too much citizen input, but maybe we’ve got it about right. Or, if you believe some of those who supported Measure P, the Cassandras among us, perhaps we’ve gone too far in the wrong direction already. 

It’s time to take stock of where we are, before we decide where we want to go next. 

That’s why The Planet has asked former Planning Commission chair Rob Wrenn to report on exactly what has been built, and where. It’s remarkable that he’s had to compile this information himself, more or less from scratch, since there is no comprehensive and accessible database of cumulative development maintained by the city of Berkeley. 

And now we are pleased to quote the closing sentence in Resnik’s fund-raising pitch: “Read the Daily Planet and you’ll know why this matter is urgent.” We couldn’t agree more. The next part of the Planet’s Special Report on Berkeley’s Housing Boom will appear next Friday. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Planet. 

TUESDAY, JULY 1 

FILM 

Sarunas Bartas: “Three Days” 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 

Berkeley Summer Poetry from 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. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jonathan Wilson reads from his new novel, “A Palestine Affair,” set in British-occupied Palestine, at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

K. K. Ottensen discusses her new book “Great Americans: Famous Names, Real People,” of interviews and photographs of ordinary people with famous names, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ronnie Gilbert Celebrates Gay Pride in song at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Libby Kirkpatrick, singer-songwriter, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$10 sliding scale. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Noche Flamenca from Madrid performs at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus at 8 p.m. Tickets are $42. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

DP and the Rhythm Riders at 8:30 p.m., with a Cajun dance lesson with Cheryl McBride at 8 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2 

FILM 

Excess of Evil: “God Told Me To” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive, with Larry Cohen in person. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808.  

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Christine Wicker discusses “Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Happy Turtle performs Latin jazz at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$10 sliding scale. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Noche Flamenca from Madrid performs at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $42. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Reeltime Travelers and Bluegrass Intentions perform traditional and original dance songs at 8 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jules Broussard and Ned Boynton at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Angel of Thorns, Half-Seas-Over, Superlarry, Anna Oxygen perform at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886.  

www.blakesontelegraph.com 

THURSDAY, JULY 3 

FILM 

Aki Kaurismäki: “Calamari Union” at 7:30 p.m. and “Shadows in Paradise” at 9:10 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 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert Downtown features a performance by students of the Capoeira Arts Café at the Berkeley BART Station. Seating available. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Assoc. 549-2230. 

Noche Flamenca from Madrid performs at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus at 8 p.m. Tickets are $42. 642-9988.  

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Monkey Ranch Hands performs at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $4.  

841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Keni el Lebrijano Flamenco Guitar at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

FRIDAY, JULY 4 

FILM 

“Gridlock” Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth play addicts fighting bureaucracy to get help, at 8:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, a reading room, library and community center located at 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. Free, sponsored by N.E.E.D. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tropical Vibrations, Harry Best and Shabang perform a mix of Caribbean styles at 9 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

SixFourTwo and My Hero perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5.  

841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Celebrate END Dependence Day in collaboration with Underground Railroad and Brown Fist Collective at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568.  

www.lapena.org 

Mimi Fox Trio performs at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

S.T.F.U., Critical Unit, Dead Fall, D.F.A., Strung Up perfrom 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. 

SATURDAY, JULY 5 

FILM 

“War Game” a British docu- 

drama on the horrific possibilities of an atomic holocaust, at 8:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, a reading room, library and community center in South Berkeley located at 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. All events are free. 540-0751.  

www.thelonghaul.org  

Aki Kaurismäki: “Crime and Punishment” at 5 and 8:45 p.m. and “Hamlet Goes Business” 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 

Bay Area Poets Coalition holds an open reading from 3 to 5 p.m., at the West Branch Berkeley Public Library, 1125 University Ave. Free. For information, call 527-9905.  

poetalk@aol.com 

Aphrodite Jones reads from her new book, “Red Zone,” about the San Francisco dog-mauling case, at 5:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Celebrate END Dependence day in collaboration with Underground Railroad and Brown Fist Collective at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Noche Flamenca from Madrid performs at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus at 8 p.m. Tickets are $42.  

642-9988.  

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Vince Black with Root Awakening perform socially conscious reggae classics at 9:30 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Pernice Brothers, Warren Zanes and Heavenly States perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Collective Amnesia at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Benefit for Lynn Morris with Peter Rowan, True Blue and Earl Brothers at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $18.50 advance, $19.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Cost, From Monument to Masses, Red Light Sting, 1905, The Cinema Eye 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. 

SUNDAY, JULY 6 

FILM 

Aki Kaurismäki: “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” at 5:30 p.m. and “Hamlet Goes Business” at 7:10 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 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s with G. P. Skratz and Summer Brenner at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Noche Flamenca from Madrid performs at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus at 7 p.m. Tickets are $42. 642-9988.  

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Teka brings an evening of Hungarian music and dance to Ashkenaz, at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $12. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

MONDAY, JULY 7 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Christopher Moore reads from “Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Last Word Poetry, featuring Kirk Lumpkin and Mary Rudge, at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Bookstore, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Dan O’Neill discusses how communal-living cartoonists provoked the ire of Disney in his new book, “The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Underground,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

www.blackoakbooks.com 

Poetry Express, open mic night, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bandworks Student Recital, featuring rock, blues and pop at 7:30 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $4. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Sassafras, Shotgun’s 11th Anniversary Spendalicious Silent Auction Family Reunion and Supperganza. Come have supper with us, enjoy live music and support the Shotgun Players, for 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are sliding scale $11-$111. For reservation call Kimberly 704-8210 ext. 317.  

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. Through 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 through 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. Through July 27, Thurs. - Sat. at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 5 p.m. No performance July 4 or 24. At the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $8-$20 sliding scale. For reservations call 558-1381.

A gun shot victim hoisted from a rocky embankment at the Berkeley Marina early Monday morning was in critical condition at Oakland’s Highland Hospital Monday afternoon, authorities said. 

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Kevin Schofield said police, responding to a 2:40 a.m. report of gunshots in the area, found a male victim who was “conscious but non-responsive” near the marina’s public boat launch. 

Schofield said the department is treating the incident as a felony assault at present, but has not ruled out attempted murder. Police are not releasing the name of the victim and did not have any suspects in custody at press time. 

Authorities found the victim half-in and half-out of the water at the bottom of a rocky embankment in the northern section of the marina, according to Deputy Fire Chief David Orth. 

The fire department, called in by the police, used ropes to shimmy down the slippery rock face and pull the victim to safety, Orth said. 

The incident came just two months after a pair of dog walkers found the bodies of high-profile murder victim Laci Peterson and her unborn son just two miles north, on the Richmond shoreline. 

Workers at the Berkeley Marina said they were unfazed by the Monday shooting. 

“It doesn’t matter to me, unless they come in my area,” said Chris Starrett, owner of the Starrett Stainless metal shop at the Marina. “Then I’ll shoot back.” 

Starrett said the area around the public launch, in the northern section of the Marina, is usually quiet, except for the occasional car break-in. 

Police are asking anyone with information on the shooting to call the homicide detail at 510-981-5742. Callers may remain anonymous.

SHOOTINGS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for covering the numerous shootings recently in South Berkeley and North Oakland. I’m glad to know that someone is paying attention—besides the Berkeley police.  

When I attended the Thursday night ROC meeting (the neighborhood association of Russell, Oregon and California), I learned from our marvelous beat officer, Jim Marongoni, that there have been six shootings in the area in the past two weeks. Given this level of violence and murder, police patrols on both sides of the border have been increased. 

I think the Berkeley police do a pretty good job of responding to our numerous problems, but where has our city government been? Both our newspaper-loving mayor and South Berkeley councilmember Ms. Shirek were invited but neither could be bothered to show up. None of Ms. Shirek’s aides came either. I really find the lack of support from our city government offensive. 

For the nine years I’ve lived in this ‘hood, I have rarely seen Ms. Shirek attend a meeting. I can only remember one time. And I found her unhelpful to say the least, and that’s being very polite. As for our new mayor, he showed up once and “held court” as a fellow attendee described it. He said he might come back if we were nice to him. 

I’m really fed up with those two who don’t do enough for South Berkeley. As Ms. Shirek’s term is coming to an end, I want everybody to ask themselves: Has South Berkeley gotten any better? Is there less drug dealing? Do the buildings look better? Do people have better jobs? I actually think it’s gotten worse and I’ll vote for just about anybody before Ms. Shirek. 

Indigo 

• 

TITLE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mr. Scharfenberg states in his article of June 27 that the Alameda County Green Party has “come out in formal opposition to the recall.” This is not completely correct, as the local Green Council reached consensus only on opposing the recall petition signature drive, and urged Greens not to sign. 

Some councilors believe everything about the recall should be opposed and the party should not run a candidate under any circumstances. Others support running a candidate and support Peter Camejo’s candidacy. Some councilors believe that it is too early to take a position on the recall itself or on possible candidates, because it is unknown when or even if there will be any recall at all and who will or will not run for the Demopublicans. 

This broad spectrum of opinion is not a sign of a “rift” as your headline states, but is the signature of a democratic, grassroots organization wherein each person’s opinion is respected. The Green Party does not try to impose control over its members’ speech or actions as other parties often do. 

Robert Marsh 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Green Party members demonstrate a lack of political imagination when  

they say that Peter Camejo’s participation in a potential recall vote would somehow reflect poorly on the Greens. To characterize Republican efforts as “undemocratic” implies that we have a choice between a legitimate, democratic electoral process and one that is not. Until multi-million dollar campaign chests, and all that goes along with them, are removed from the political equation, democratic elections will continue to be a chimera of fevered delusion. Political advantage could be scored with a public disgusted with the entire sordid spectacle of electoral politics as usual. In the last election, the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor were the strongest argument possible for an instant run-off process, and making “None of the above” a valid ballot choice. 

A good number of liberal/ progressive interests are acting as if the Republicans are about to blast the state with the electoral version of Darth Vader’s Death Star. Republicans are not acting from a position of strength but one of incredibly desperate weakness. Unable to elect anyone to an office at the state level higher than dog catcher or the state Legislature (at times, somewhat interchangeable positions), despite all their wealth and resources, the Republican Party is basically toast in California. They are a political one trick pony whose slash and burn social and fiscal policies and recent budgetary escapades have alienated them from a variety of political sectors. 

Liberal and progressive forces need to embrace and project the type of  

political imagination shown in Upton Sinclair’s campaign for governor in 1934. There are parallels worthy of immediate consideration and adoption contained within Sinclair’s “End Poverty In California Campaign.” Those were  

times of grand and sweeping political vision. Peter Camejo’s entry into the recall fray offers a viable alternative to choosing between Conan Republicans and venal, GOP-lite Democrats. Both grovel and drool at the feet of their corporate masters; growling, barking, and performing tricks on command. No more selling out to the Democratic Party, portraying itself as the lesser of two evils. Democrats must feel the pain of losing elections when a progressive candidate splits the vote by taking positions they refused to embrace. 

Stephen Dunifer 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

According to Rob Wrenn’s informative article about housing in Berkeley, over 7,000 housing units were built in Berkeley between 1960 and 1974, while 1,140 units were built during the 1990s.  

The 1990s looked like a boom compared with the previous decade or two, but we actually were building housing at not much more than one-fifth of the rate of the 1960s.  

Charles Siegel

After 16 years of selling transit passes and helping locals navigate the Bay Area’s complicated web of trains and buses, the Berkeley Transit Rideshare and Parking shop, better known as Berkeley TRiP, closed its doors Friday. 

Local transit advocates said the demise of the combination ticket store and advocacy organization, jointly operated by the city and UC Berkeley, is a blow to public transit in the East Bay and beyond. 

“Berkeley TRiP was actually a national model in how a city, in this case a city and university, could really try to make alternative transportation use more accessible to the public,” said Stuart Cohen, executive director of the Oakland-based Transportation and Land Use Coalition. “It’s setting a very unfortunate precedent now in shutting down during tough financial times.” 

The decision to pull the plug came from UC Berkeley, which will likely take tens of millions of dollars in cuts when the state Legislature, deadlocked in budget talks, finally addresses its $38 billion deficit. 

UC Berkeley Director of Transportation Nadeson Permaul said the university could not continue to pay for about 65 percent of TRiP’s $350,000 annual budget when only 18 percent of the people who buy passes or seek transit information at the Center Street store are affiliated with the university. 

UC Berkeley, he said, must focus its public transportation dollars squarely on faculty, students and staff. 

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for the university to be neglecting, in some sense, its own constituency,” said Permaul. 

City officials dispute the university’s budget figures. They say Berkeley’s contribution of a rent-free building and utilities payments mean the city and the university have split the cost of the TRiP store evenly.  

City Councilmember Dona Spring argues that UC Berkeley should maintain its commitment to public transit given that its students and employees contribute heavily to the city’s traffic problems. 

“[Closing TRiP] was a real disappointing blow,” Spring said. “The university has just decided it wants to do its own thing.”  

Starting this week, UC Berkeley is offering passes and travel advice to faculty, students and staff at its main parking and transportation office at 2150 Kittredge St., downtown. Former TRiP employees will work at the downtown office.  

So far, the city has not made alternative arrangements for members of the public. But Mayor Tom Bates said he is negotiating with the Berkeley Convention & Visitors Bureau, located next door to the TRiP office, about opening a new shop. 

Berkeley transportation planner Cherry Chaichara said several other options are also on the table. The city has had preliminary discussions with the nonprofit Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition about setting up a TRiP-like store at the organization’s bike station at the downtown Berkeley BART station. The station currently provides free protection for train passengers’ bikes. 

Chaichara added that one of the two companies bidding for management of the city-owned Center Street parking garage has expressed interest in selling transit passes on site.  

The city and university are also talking about re-establishing their partnership at some point, albeit in a different form. Permaul said the two sides may work together to deliver passes to the public cheaply through the Internet or vending machines.  

Last week, with no alternative yet in place, Berkeley TRiP directed customers to a range of local businesses that sell public transit passes, from the Ecology Center Bookstore on San Pablo Avenue to Try Us Bail Bonds on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

Felix Brenner, a lawyer at the Berkeley firm of Duane & Seltzer on Center Street, said Friday that he purchases $122 in two-week transit passes at Berkeley TRiP every month. 

“I will miss it,” he said outside the shop, which was covered in orange and green signs announcing its closure. “I’ll have to track down my BART-plus ticket somewhere else, and I’m not sure where yet.” 

Office manager Carolina Vasquez, who arrived in May to shut down the program, said the elderly may have the most difficult time with TRiP’s demise. 

“The people who will really be hurt are the seniors, because they are used to going to one place,” she said, adding that language barriers have made it difficult for staff to tell some customers where they can go to get passes in the future. 

Berkeley TRiP was born in 1987 when the city, the university and three transit agencies—BART, AC Transit and Caltrans—set up the organization to promote public transportation. For years, the group combined ticket sales with advocacy, dropping off passes at senior centers and meeting with local businesses to encourage large-scale transit pass plans for employees. 

Cohen said the program was a model for similar efforts in places like Santa Clara County and Boulder, Colo. 

But Permaul said the advocacy work waned in recent years as growing ticket sales occupied more and more staff time. In the meantime, he said, Berkeley TRiP’s financial woes ballooned as the transit agencies pulled out of the program and the city, until two years ago, maintained flat funding for the shop.

The furor in Washington over possible nuclear weapons development in Iran is fueled in part because Bush administration officials claim that Iran doesn’t need to generate nuclear power. They assert that Iran’s nuclear energy program is unnecessary given its oil reserves. Therefore, officials say, its nuclear plants must exist for weapons production.  

In fact, for Iran, generating nuclear power makes sense. Moreover, the plans to do this were started decades ago, and with American approval.  

Ex-CIA director James Woolsey, in an interview on the PBS program Frontline on Feb. 23, claimed “there is no underlying [reason] for one of the greatest oil producers in the world to need to get into the nuclear [energy] business.”  

At first glance, such logic seems sound. Countries with vast oil reserves also have large reserves of natural gas sitting on top of those reserves. Some years ago, the natural gas was regularly burned off to get at the oil beneath. However, technological advances today make it feasible to use this gas for power generation.  

Even so, nuclear power still makes sense in a country with vast amounts of natural gas, particularly given the unusual circumstances in the Iranian hydrocarbons industry. There are needs for gas in Iran that command much higher priorities than the construction of gas power plants.  

First, gas is vitally needed for reinjection into existing oil reservoirs (repressurizing). This is indispensable for maintaining oil output levels, as well as for increasing overall, long-term recovery of oil.  

Second, natural gas is needed for growing domestic use, such as in cooking fuel and domestic heating (Iranians typically use kerosene for both), where it can free up oil for more profitable export. New uses such as powering bus and taxi fleets in Iran’s smoggy urban areas are also essential for development.  

Third, natural gas exports—via pipelines to Turkey or in liquefied form to the subcontinent—set an attractive minimum value for any available natural gas. With adequate nuclear power generation, Iran can profit more from selling its gas than using it to generate power.  

Fourth, the economics of gas production in Iran are almost backwards, certainly counter-intuitive. Much of Iran’s gas is “rich”—it contains by-products, such as liquid-petrolem gas (LPG, better known as propane), which are more valuable than the natural gas they are derived from. Iran can profit by selling these derivatives, but not if it burns the natural gas to generate power. Furthermore, Iran adheres to OPEC production quotas, which combine oil and natural gas production. Therefore Iran cannot simply increase natural gas for export to make up for what it burns at home.  

Overall, therefore, it can reasonably be argued that natural gas in Iran has economic uses that are superior to power generation, in spite of Iran’s much-touted large reserves. The economic rationale is therefore plausible—the costs of gas versus nuclear power generation are sufficiently close that the choice is a standoff, especially given the reported bargain price for the Russian reactor.  

The great irony in America’s accusations is that Iran’s nuclear program was first developed on the advice of American specialists, who urged the government of the Shah to begin producing nuclear power in order to save oil reserves for more lucrative purposes than fuel. The prospect of an industrial base built on petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals never materialized, but the nuclear power program continued unabated.  

Now, to have American officials express alarm over the exact same program is illogical at best and utterly disingenuous at worst. Much of the criticism of Iran’s nuclear program comes from the same people who insisted that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons development program before the American invasion of that nation on March 19. That fact alone should raise severe skepticism throughout the world.  

Thomas Stauffer is a former nuclear engineer and a specialist in Middle Eastern energy economics. William O. Beeman is director of Middle East studies at Brown University. Both have conducted research in Iran for more than 30 years.

A grass fire Saturday consumed an acre and a half off Centennial Drive, near the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the Lawrence Hall of Science, before being extinguished by Berkeley, Oakland and East Bay Regional Parks firefighters. 

The blaze, which was reported to the Berkeley Fire Department at 7:41 p.m., began spreading up the hill from the north side of Centennial Drive toward LBNL. Firefighters responding to the scene contained the fire by 8:08 p.m. 

“It produced a nice column of smoke and scared everybody, but we took care of the problem pretty quickly,” said Berkeley Fire Department deputy chief David Orth. 

Because the Strawberry Canyon area, which includes Centennial Drive, runs along the Berkeley-Oakland border, the location is a full-response area, which meant that companies from both cities and the parks department responded to the call. The Berkeley Fire Department sent three engines and a ladder truck, along with 15 firefighters, to fight the blaze. 

A team from the California Department of Forestry also responded, but did not join the fight because the others had contained the fire so quickly. Orth said none of the area structures, including LBNL and the Lawrence Hall of Science, were threatened by the fire. 

The cause of the fire was unknown and under investigation as of Monday. Because much of the area is University of California land, the investigation will be directed by the state fire marshal. 

“For the moment it is being treated as a crime scene,” Orth said. 

California State Fire Department personnel said the results of their investigation would be made public later this week. 

A second, smaller fire was reported about a half-mile north of the Centennial Drive blaze around the same time. It had been extinguished by citizens by the time firefighters arrived at the scene.

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean nearly captured the MoveOn.org PAC’s endorsement for the Democratic presidential nomination. With almost 44 per cent of the vote, Dean came closest to the required 50 per cent majority, the political advocacy group announced Friday.  

More than 300,000 members participated in last week’s 48-hour Internet primary, making the vote larger than the New Hampshire Democratic primary and Iowa caucuses combined. Following Dean, the leading candidates were Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, with 23.9 percent of the vote, and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry with 15.7 percent. No other Democrat received more than 4 percent of the vote, and about 2 percent of voters were undecided.  

A second question on the ballot asked whether voters were united to defeat President Bush, no matter which Democratic candidate is eventually nominated to run against him. Almost 29 percent of voters said they would enthusiastically support any Democratic nominee; others named multiple candidates they’d be willing to back in the general election, indicating broad support for Democratic leaders. 

The independent polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research verified the results before their release last week.  

The primary was the first of its kind for Berkeley-born MoveOn, which was founded during Clinton’s impeachment, in 1999, by software entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades. Though the MoveOn PAC has supported congressional campaigns since its inception—raising $2.3 million in 2000 and $4.1 million in 2002—this primary marked its first foray into presidential politics. 

Chief Operating Officer Carrie Olson said on Monday that reaction to the results was mixed. Some members expressed relief that there would be more time to deliberate about the candidates while others suggested holding a run-off for quick closure.  

MoveOn, however, has no immediate plans to push for endorsement. “We’re going to wait a while and let that bubble up from our membership,” she said. Any other primaries would likely wait until the fall, she added. “Meanwhile, we just hope folks are paying attention.”

WASHINGTON — Measures taken by the U.S. against Arab and Muslim immigrants after 9/11 have not only failed to protect U.S. security, but may have made it more vulnerable, according to a major report released last week. 

The round-up and detention of more than 1,200 immigrants after the attacks on New York and Washington were particularly abusive, says the report by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI) an influential think tank. 

It said the government's efforts to depict some of those who were detained as terrorists were simply wrong. “The only charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or ordinary crimes,” concludes the 165-page report, “America's Challenge: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties and National Unity After September 11.” 

“Many of the policies that have been adopted in the wake of Sept. 11 are an attempt to use immigration as a proxy for anti-terrorism,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior counter-terrorism official in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who is on MPI's board of advisers and helped prepare the report. 

“We haven't learned anything about pre-empting terrorism in America, but we have intimidated, antagonized and alienated many (minority) communities (which is) counter-productive to what the FBI and other agencies are trying to do,” he added at the report's release. 

What breakthroughs have been made in identifying and apprehending terrorists have been the result of traditional police and intelligence work and co-operation and information-sharing with foreign intelligence agencies, not from any of the immigration initiatives taken by the administration, says the report, which also includes the most comprehensive compilation of the individuals detained after 9/11 and their experiences. 

“Arresting a large number of non-citizens ... only gives the nation a false sense of security,” the document added. 

The report is likely to be taken seriously. The MPI's advisory board members include the last two commissioners of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS): James Ziglar, who just served in the current administration; and Doris Meissner, INS head under former President Bill Clinton. Meissner co-authored the report. 

In addition to Cannistraro, it also includes Mary Jo White, who, as a former U.S. attorney in the southern federal district of New York, gained a reputation as a tough and relentless prosecutor in high-profile terrorism cases. 

The report also coincided with news that the Justice Department's inspector general (IG) is investigating possible abuses by federal prison guards in Brooklyn against immigrants detained there. 

In a widely noted report released earlier this month, the IG found “significant problems” in the way federal officials dealt with the post-Sep. 11 roundups. Dozens of detainees were subject to verbal and physical abuse by guards at the facility, where they were left to languish in “unduly harsh” conditions for months, some without access to family members or attorneys, it said. 

The MPI report, whose scope is broader than the plight of the detainees, nonetheless “puts flesh on the bones of the IG's report,” according to David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who also contributed to the document. 

It found, for example, that, unlike the Sept. 11 hijackers, the majority of those detained had significant ties to the United States and roots in their communities here. Of the detainees on which relevant information was available, almost half had lived in this country for at least six years and had close family relationships here. 

The report examines the government's post-9/11 immigration measures from three distinct perspectives—their effectiveness in actually fighting terrorism; their impact on civil liberties; and their effect on America's sense of community as a nation of immigrants. In each case, it concludes that the administration's policies were largely counter-productive. 

The key to fighting terrorism, according to the report, is focusing on improved intelligence, information and information sharing; better and more targeted border protection; vigorous intelligence-based law enforcement; and engagement with Arab- and Muslim-American communities. 

“We believe it is possible to use immigration measures more effectively to defend against terrorism, while also protecting the fundamental liberties at the core of American identity,” Meissner said. 

The latest raids follow an established pattern in U.S. history, according to the report. During the McCarthy era in the 1950s, Congress enacted strong anti-immigration measures while, during the “Red Scare” that followed World War I, the attorney general at the time, A. Mitchell Palmer, ordered thousands of immigrants rounded up and detained without due process. 

During national security crises, Washington has often followed “the course of least resistance,” according to Cole, who noted that immigrants are particularly vulnerable to abuses at such times. 

But the greatest harm to U.S. anti-terrorist efforts in this case has been the impact of the administration's harsh measures on Arab- and Muslim-American communities, says the report. Programs such as requiring special registration by males from certain countries carried out last year has discouraged co-operation with law-enforcement agencies, in part because they became a vehicle for sweeping up those with minor immigration violations. 

At the same time, the alienation and persecution felt by the same communities immediately after Sept. 11 have also had the unintended effect over time of reaffirming their identity as Muslims and Arabs in the United States, according to Muzaffar Chishti, an MPI senior fellow and co-author. 

“The experience of Muslim and Arab communities post-Sept. 11 is, in many ways, an impressive story of a community that first felt intimidated, but has since started to assert its place in the American body politic,” he said. 

But Cannistraro stressed that the administration's ham-handed attack on immigrant communities had also taken a heavy toll on its image in the immigrants’ homelands overseas. 

“If anything, we have painted an image of us as a narrow, biased society that really believes in the ‘Clash of Civilizations’,” he said, singling out Attorney General John Ashcroft as especially responsible. “It serves us poorly abroad, and it has provided ammunition to some of the fiery imams who encourage young people (to sacrifice) themselves.’”

Policymakers in some very conservative places are moderating their approach to crime and punishment, but in California, which imprisons more people than any other state, politicians still think more prisons are better.  

On June 22, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed legislation passed overwhelmingly by Texas’ Republican-controlled House and Senate to divert thousands of low-level drug offenders from prison into treatment. Texas is one of the toughest states in the nation when it comes to criminal justice policy. The Lone Star State’s prison population is second only to that of California. One in 10 prisoners incarcerated nationally is incarcerated in Texas, and one out of every 21 Texans is under the control of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The new law will save taxpayers $115 over the next five years.  

Texas is far from the only state sensibly re-examining its imprisonment binge under growing pressure to cut prison spending. Many of them are governed by Republicans. For example:  

• In December, Michigan Gov. John Engler signed watershed legislation abolishing most of that state’s mandatory sentencing laws and returning discretion to judges. The reform saved Michigan taxpayers $43 million this year alone, money that can go into reducing cuts to education and health care.  

• When Gov. Mike Foster of Louisiana signed legislation reforming his state’s mandatory sentencing laws and returning discretion on non-violent drug offenses to judges, he stated, “There’s nothing worse than having a state that is tops in incarceration. We went a long way toward curing that.” 

• Ohio Gov. Bob Taft carefully “scrubbed” his state’s prison population through revised sentencing and parole guidelines and by creating new treatment programs and other alternatives to incarceration. While prison populations in other Midwest states increased by nearly 4 percent between 1998 and 2000, Ohio’s prison population declined by nearly 6 percent, allowing the state to close two of its prisons and save millions annually.  

Policymakers are finding support for such changes from a public that, across party affiliation, is disappointed with the war on drugs and supportive of diverting non-violent offenders into treatment instead of prison. In a poll conducted by Hart and Associates last year, three-quarters of Americans approved of sentencing nonviolent offenders to probation instead of imprisonment. More than two-thirds of Republicans favored treatment and probation for non-violent offenses, while a majority of Republicans favored “tougher approaches to the causes of crime,” over the policies of the past. In December 2001, four times as many Californians surveyed in a Field Poll reported that they preferred to reduce the state’s prison budget rather than cut higher education.  

Republicans are hardly soft on crime. “I have no problem with putting people in jail,” says Republican Rep. Mike Kowall, former chair of Michigan’s Criminal Justice Committee. “I consider myself to the right of Attila the Hun. This just gets back to common-sense approaches to crime rather than just locking them up and throwing away the key.”  

The budget proposal currently being debated by the California Senate includes just such common sense proposals. The Senate has painstakingly identified low-risk offenders for placement in drug treatment, mental health programs, educational programming, vocational training and drug court as alternatives to imprisoning non-violent inmates. Even after the cost of the new treatment and education programs are accounted for, the state would save over $120 million next fiscal year by adopting these reforms.  

So it’s not too late for California to become part of the “smart on crime” trend. As the debate heats up over tax increases and service cuts, policymakers should thoughtfully trim the corrections budget and put low-risk offenders under treatment and supervision, instead of in counterproductive prisons. If they can do it in Texas, you can certainly do it in California.  

ßVincent Schiraldi is president of the Justice Policy Institute, a research and public policy organization in Washington, D.C.

The following is a report by the Pesticide Action Network Updates Service.  

This week, people dressed as corn and killer tomatoes faced off against riot police on the streets of Sacramento. Meanwhile, in the air-conditioned Sacramento Convention Center, agricultural ministers and delegations from 115 nations around the world attended the U.S. government-sponsored Ministerial Convention and Expo on Agricultural Technology from June 23 to 25.  

The public was not invited to the Ministerial, but from the look of the news headlines, they crashed the party. 

The convergence of protesters, a broad coalition of local and international organizations and direct action activists concerned about food and agriculture, attracted swarms of media to hear their critique of genetically engineered (GE) crops, pesticides and other aspects of the corporate food system, and new free trade and investor rights agreements that further the industrial model of food. 

The aim of the meeting, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), was to apply new agricultural technologies—particularly GE crops—to the problem of world hunger. Mass protests outside the meeting, however, suggest that many saw it as an attempt to further the corporate food agenda and to lobby ministers regarding trade issues. 

The Sacramento Bee summarized, on the front page, “Protesters contend the meeting is not about ending hunger, but rather is a stage for the United States to push its agenda on other countries, an agenda that promotes big-business interests and technology, specifically the genetic engineering of crops.” 

Educational events began before the ministerial officially started with a teach-in at California State University Sacramento, attracting overflow crowds to hear speakers from the Third World and other analysts of food, trade and corporate power. 

During the event, PANNA released a call for protest in Sacramento from more than 150 Third World organizations, representing hundreds of thousands of people. The statement read: “This summit will promote industrial models of agriculture that enrich transnational agribusiness interests while undermining the food security, and food sovereignty of peoples of the global south.”  

The teach-in was organized by the Institute for Social Ecology, Public Citizen, PANNA and others. 

On Monday, June 23, a permitted rally and march convened on the steps of the Capitol. More than 3,000 people marched through the leafy streets of Sacramento, led by a contingent of labor organizations. Drums rattled, “Killer Tomatoes” chanted in unison and a chef from the world-class Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse waved a giant whisk and threatened, “We’re here to whip the lies of big agribusiness.” 

A series of rolling street blockades and other non-violent civil disobedience erupted on Sacramento streets throughout the days of the Ministerial. Whimsical street actions attracted attention, including a “dump” of genetically engineered corn at a press conference held by the National Family Farm Coalition and a “Dr. Monsanto genetically altered vs. organic dog food taste test” hosted by the Organic Consumers Association.  

The city of Sacramento estimates $750,000 was spent on policing the Ministerial; the figure spent by the California Highway Patrol tops one million dollars. In all, about 40 people were arrested. 

A debate organized by PANNA and Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy drew about 1,000 attendees, despite a phalanx of police lining the street outside the venue. Panel members from developing countries faced off with a USDA official, the director general of Crop Life International and a pro-biotech spokeswoman from the University of California.  

One biotech proponent said, “The real issue is not biotechnology; the real issue is starvation.”  

Earlier, Timothy Byakola from PAN Africa had responded to that argument with an example from Uganda.  

“The problem in Uganda isn’t production, it’s distribution. Western Uganda is very fertile and very wet and produces a tremendous surplus of crops. But our roads are horrible; we have no infrastructure, so we can’t move that food around.” 

George Naylor, of the National Family Farm Coalition, asked the USDA representative why farmers growing GE crops weren’t required by the government to leave buffer zones. Naylor complained that he has lost 65 percent of his fields to buffers protecting his crop from Bt corn. 

The protests and educational events highlighted the trend of diverse groups focusing on issues such as food safety and sovereignty, sustainable farming, pesticide reform, labor rights, public participation, globalization and corporate power, to join forces to contest exclusionary international meetings and institutions. Their message is bound to be repeated this September during the World Trade Organization Ministerial meeting in Cancun and beyond.  

These groups argue that the growing international framework of new trade and investment rules affects everyone. 

As one marcher said to the legions of police lining the march, “Get off your horses and join us. It’s your food, too.” 

PANUPS is a weekly e-mail news service providing resource guides and reporting on pesticide issues that don’t always get coverage by the mainstream media. It’s produced by the Pesticide Action Network North America, a nonprofit and non-governmental organization working to advance sustainable alternatives to pesticides worldwide.

A More Friendly Route for Migrants: Into U.S. Via Canada  

Sometimes, the longer route is easier. Due to the stepped-up security on the U.S.-Mexico border, an increasingly popular route for undocumented Mexicans has emerged that takes them by air to Vancouver, and overland into the United States across the less carefully patrolled Canadian border.  

The Vancouver route is also attractive because the Canadian government offers temporary jobs through a well-organized guest worker program for Mexicans, according to a story published June 21 by Los Angeles bilingual weekly Eastern Group Publications. 

The Canadians also offer the guest workers language classes in order to help them adapt to life there, said the story, which cited a recent report on emigration by the Mexican Institute for Statistics and Geography.  

According to the report, Mexican migration north and then into the United States has increased by 70 percent since 1994, when the United States launched Operation Guardian, meant to guard the urban areas along the Mexican-U.S. border to prevent illegal crossings, said EGP, in the story by reporter Elda M. Arroyo Macias.  

The majority of those migrating to the United States are men between the ages of 25 and 34 fleeing economic hardship in rural areas of states like Jalisco, Oaxaca, Michoacán, Durango, Zacatecas, Chiapas y Guanajuato, said EGP. But the report said that the number of Mexican women heading to the United States was also on the rise.  

‘I am American, not Latino or  

Amerindian’  

The emergence of Latinos as a major demographic force in the United States has caused a bit of confusion: is the correct term Latino or Hispanic? If Latino refers only to ethnicity, then what “race” is a Latino of mixed Indian, European and African heritage?  

One letter to the editor published in Los Angeles Spanish-language daily La Opinión on June 23 added a new twist to the endless debates over Latino terminology and identity. The reader, who identified himself only with the apparent pseudonym of Marco Aurelio Greco, wrote that he would be offended if he were a descendant of any of the Latin American tribal groups and he was referred to as a “Latino.” 

“My thesis is that only Italians are Latinos, and only them,” wrote Greco, referring to the fact that Latino is a Spanish-language term that refers to the language Latin, or people who spoke it in the times of the Roman Empire.  

But Greco said he didn't want to be called an Amerindian either -- as indigenous people from the Americas are often referred. Amerindian is a word invented by those who wanted to appropriate the root word --American-- since they are estranged from their own roots, Greco said. He proposed that only those people “descended from the original settlers of the continent” have the right to be called American.  

Greco, however, left out one fact that could confuse the issue further. The New World landmass, America, was named after the Italian cartographer and explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Should the New World's indigenous populations be named after a real Latino?

The Aurora Theater Company in downtown Berkeley has, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, elected to end its 11th season with Emile Zola’s 19th-century warhorse, “Therese Raquin.” Possibly they’re presenting it because it gives their season subscribers a remarkably well-rounded set of plays for the year, running from farce to melodrama with several stops in between. Or maybe it’s just because it provides the actors with a particularly juicy set of scenes in which to show their chops. And these guys do, no question about that. 

The truth is they just don’t make plays like “Therese Raquin” any more. They can’t. Times have changed way too much. For obvious reasons, Zola’s then-scandalous novel about adultery and murder made a big splash in the France of 1867 and became the basis for the only successful play he ever wrote. (About that time, over in England, the more sober Brits had to make do with Charles Dickens’ relatively bland “Great Expectations.”) But for a modern audience, in an era in which marriage is too frequently merely the forerunner to divorce, the substance of this plot is sadly undercut. We don’t have to kill our husbands anymore: divorce works quite efficiently (and is far less messy). 

Be that as it may, Aurora has cast the drama with strong actors who manage to extract the most out of their fairly lively collection of characters. It isn’t their fault that the first act sags under the load of too much background exposition. Things pick up in the second act, however. In fact, Joy Carlin’s extraordinary performance as mother-in-law Madame Raquin might be enough to justify the price of a ticket. In the second act, she manages to get more drama out of sitting paralyzed in her chair, unmoving except for her eyes, than most actors could get if they stripped naked and ran screaming through the audience. It is an incredible piece of acting. 

The adulterous pair, Therese and Laurent, are more than effectively played by Stephanie Gularte and Mark Eliott Wilson. They have the opportunity of their performing lifetimes to pull out every stop in their repertoires. As Therese, Gularte moves from near immobilized depression, through lust and guilt, to rage. The only complaint about Wilson’s performance is that he does such a terrific job of seeming to be a nice-guy best friend to Therese’s idiotic husband, Camille (Jonathan Rys Williams), that it’s a leap to buy into the idea that he’s double-crossing the same jerk. However, he does get the point across with real zest.  

Williams combines with Zola, by the way, to turn the husband into a character who just might create an argument for justifiable homicide.  

The supporting actors are equally strong, presenting well-developed, almost Dickensian, types. This is one production where there can be few complaints: acting, direction, staging, everything is fine. The only real question is, why?  

The curious thing is that the play seems to retain its popularity, with surprisingly frequent modern productions as well as films. An opera was based on it about two years ago and, about the same time, Kate Winslet was trying pretty hard to get a version off the ground in which she and Judi Dench would star. 

Maybe there’s a public need for a regular dose of melodrama. After all, soap operas are still going strong. Or maybe it’s just that the acting community yearns for a chance to play the entire range of passions in the grand old manner. Whatever ... Here it is.

“The Hulk” lumbered into theaters last week and you know the drill: Mild-mannered nerd wears purple pants, gets angry, turns green, has a temper tantrum and, in this case, is eventually talked out of his manic phase by an Oscar-winning fox playing a scientist.  

Ang Lee, who directed “Sense and Sensibility” and “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon,” helmed this monster movie, and aside from the jolly green giant himself, the film isn’t all that bad. Lee demonstrates capable filmmaking, highlighted by an innovative use of transitions, but ultimately the film is too slow and self-absorbed to amount to much. And really, that’s not of any real concern. Crap comes and crap goes in Hollywood. What is of real concern is that “The Hulk” was shot in and around Berkeley; and as such it must be held to account. 

Some films have not been so kind to this city, while others still have immortalized it. 

The 1990s were particularly rough on Berkeley. “Junior” (1994) with Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger represents a low point. The UC campus, likewise, has had rough cinematic sledding, making a photogenic, yet ultimately embarrassing appearance as the backdrop to the forgettable “Boys and Girls” (1999).  

There should be some kind of committee that regulates, and then prohibits, stupid movies from using Berkeley as a film location. After all, there is a history here—not just in the beauty of the town, but an immense cultural history as well—that movies like “Patch Adams” (1998) cheapen. 

Noticing Berkeley in a movie is the same as noticing someone you know in a movie. There’s an initial rush of excitement. You say, “Hey, I know where that is.” Or, “Hey, I live near that.” Followed by an uneasy feeling of shame at realizing that the “this” or “that” you live near is in a movie with Jason Biggs. 

One of the few bright spots is “The Graduate” (1967), maybe the only film shot in Berkeley to properly capture not only the look of the town, but its vibe as well. The film and its themes are ideally suited to Berkeley in the sixties. A film that examines a generation at odds with an increasingly frustrated and hostile establishment couldn’t be shot anywhere but Berkeley. In “The Graduate” the town serves not only as a location, but also as a symbol. 

In certain, distant ways “The Hulk” similarly uses Berkeley in some unusual, if not ultimately keen respects, the most interesting of which is Jennifer Connelly. She has that Berkeley thing nailed: long, dark hair; denim jacket; braided, craft-like jewelry. She’s sensitive, understanding, concerned with The Issues and probably belongs to PETA. In a sense, the town reinforces her character. 

The rest of “The Hulk” is far too concerned with the big green cartoon to give Berkeley much time. As such, what else of Berkeley that appears in the film is what every out-of-towner puts in his film—views of San Francisco. In this case the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and His Lordship’s Restaurant in the marina provide the gazing points. 

Bad cinema and calendar art of San Francisco aside, film is a unique medium to the extent that it is both art and commerce; and Berkeley is home to a surprising number of cinematographers, gaffers, grips and best boys. When a film company rolls into town, regardless of their intended artistic achievement, they generate cash for our economy.  

When Ang Lee and “The Hulk” came here with a bankroll larger than the GDP of most African nations, they not only employed many of our local film personnel, they paid fees to the city, took rooms in hotels and spent money in restaurants. A film that size creates a small but positive ripple throughout our economy. 

We should be happy when films come to town. Ang Lee and his crew were very good to Berkeley. It’s just that Berkeley is long overdue a role in a great film, and “The Hulk” ain’t it. 

Even though gardening for wildlife is a popular trend, some Berkeleyans might be a bit disconcerted to learn that their gardens harbor venomous snakes. There’s no reason to panic, though. These snakes are only kind of venomous, and they’re basically on your side. No, really. 

The serpent in question here is the ring-necked snake, a striking pencil-thin creature with a black head and back and a yellow-orange belly and matching collar. Its size varies geographically, with a maximum length of about 20 inches in our region. Ringnecks are retiring in disposition, most often found under rocks, boards or loose bark, or inside rotting logs. 

The only one I’ve ever seen in Berkeley was a recently deceased specimen, retrieved from a cat. But they can be common in favorable habitat: a study in Kansas found population densities of up to 700 per acre. And they’re sociable as snakes go, 10 or more holing up together. 

When a ringneck feels threatened, it threatens back by coiling its tail (yes, snakes have tails) into a tight corkscrew and presenting the scarlet underside. This warning, like the skunk’s, should not be taken lightly. If picked up, the snake besmears its captor with foul-smelling secretions. Otherwise unemotional herpetologists have used words like “loathsome” to describe the effect. 

Harry W. Greene, author of “Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature,” speculates that the tail-coiling display may have evolved in response to predation by scrub-jays, sharp-eyed birds that are hell on small vertebrates. Only ringnecks in Florida and the west, where scrub-jays occur, have contrasting red undertails and perform the display. Since birds have color vision, it could be an effective “don’t touch” signal. 

You’re wondering about the other end of the snake, though. Ringnecks are rear-fanged snakes, which means you would have to go out of your way to be bitten by one. Those who have experienced bites report nothing worse than a localized burning sensation. The effect is more powerful on its small prey. Rather than killing its victims outright, the ringneck’s venom just immobilizes them so they can be swallowed without a lot of thrashing around. 

The rear-fanged syndrome appears to have been a first evolutionary step to a venom delivery system, pre-dating the more sophisticated equipment of vipers, cobras and their kin. Most rear-fangers pose no threat to humans. Some, though—the African boomslang, the East Asian yamakagashi—can be deadly. 

Here’s how it works: In the back of its mouth, the ringneck has a pair of enlarged saber-like teeth. Unlike the hypodermic-style fangs of a rattlesnake, they’re not hollow, and there’s no injection mechanism. The teeth channel toxic secretions from a structure called the Duvernoy’s gland—which appears to be a modified salivary gland—into the snake’s prey. Some chewing may be required for the venom to take effect. Snakes that kill by constriction, like kingsnakes and ratsnakes, have Duvernoy’s glands but have either lost or never evolved the ability to produce toxins. 

In addition to its role in prey capture, the ringneck’s venom seems to function as a defense against ophiophagous (snake-eating) snakes. There is no professional courtesy among serpents. A Florida biologist once observed a ringneck being swallowed, alive and tail-first, by a long-nosed snake. When its head came within range, the ringneck bit the longnose in the floor of the mouth. After a few hours, up came the ringneck. The larger snake tried again, and was again bitten by its intended dinner. Following a third iteration the long-nosed snake succumbed, and the ringneck worked its jaws loose and crawled away, apparently none the worse for wear. 

Fine, but why would you want one of these in your garden? Because, in addition to salamanders, lizards, smaller snakes and earthworms, ring-necked snakes eat slugs. Anything that eats slugs is welcome at my place. They don’t do snails, though. There are snail-eating snakes in the New World tropics, but no North American species ever evolved that taste, more’s the pity. 

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

Five months after pledging to boycott the Claremont Resort and Spa the UC Berkeley football team has signed up for a week-long stay at the hotel in August. 

The team had promised to stay away from the hotel to show support for the hotel workers, who have been locked in a bitter, two-year contract dispute with the Claremont. The team’s room reservations sparked outrage among union officials, student activists and clergy who have sided with clerks, dishwashers and waiters pushing for better wages and health care benefits. 

Athletic department spokesperson Bob Rose said the football team is staying at the Claremont for one week during a three-week, pre-season training camp in August. He could not confirm the dates of the stay, but said he thought it will cover the week of Aug. 14 to 21. Rose said he did not know the cost of the week-long booking. 

Claire Darby, boycott coordinator for Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 2850, which represents about 300 workers at the Claremont, said the football team booked rooms under a different name in an attempt to avoid scrutiny. 

Rose said he knew of no such ruse, but Claremont spokesperson Anne Appel could not find any listing for the team in the hotel’s books.  

The team will spend two weeks of its training camp at UC Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Campus on Warring Street, Rose said, but the athletic department was unable to book the space for the entire three-week camp. The Claremont, he said, was the only available local hotel that could accommodate the team, and the meeting space it needs, during the final week of camp. 

The only other option—moving the entire training camp off-campus and taking freshmen away from academic orientation sessions—was unacceptable, Rose said. 

“In the real world, there are times when your intent is to do what’s right—[but] you need also to do what’s right for your student-athletes,” he said. “That’s always our number one priority—student-athletes.” 

“To me, it sounds like another excuse,” said Liana Molina, interfaith organizer for the Oakland-based East Bay Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. 

The team is maintaining a partial boycott of the hotel. Before this year, Cal football stayed at the Claremont the night before home games, mirroring the practice of many big-time football programs around the country. Rose said the team will take its business elsewhere this year, staying at the Doubletree Hotel at the Berkeley Marina. 

Students applauded the decision to pull out of the season-long contract, but said the one-week stay was unacceptable. 

“I think it’s a betrayal,” said graduate student Mo Kashmiri. “Obviously, the students were really pissed about this.” 

Darby, the boycott organizer, said UC Berkeley’s chancellor’s office, Boalt Hall School of Law and School of Social Welfare have joined in the boycott, while the Haas School of Business has resisted. The Yoga Journal, California State Bar Association and high-tech powerhouse Intel have also pulled out of the Claremont, she said. 

HERE vice president Wei-Ling Huber said the union pulled out of contract talks in May when the Claremont wouldn’t budge on health care and wages. The union is asking for full coverage of health care costs and a 50-cent increase per hour in wages, Huber said. The hotel, she said, is offering to cover only part of escalating health care costs and to provide a 25-cent raise per hour. 

Appel, in a written statement, said the Claremont had offered a 19 percent hike in health and welfare contributions over three years in its latest bid to finalize a contract. 

HERE is also attempting to unionize about 100 non-union spa employees at the hotel —massage therapists, nail technicians, hair dressers and estheticians, who provide facials. 

The union and the hotel have battled for months about the proper way to conduct an election among spa employees. HERE wants workers to sign union authorization cards while the Claremont wants a secret ballot election. 

The AC Transit Board of Directors appears poised to raise bus fares to avoid service reductions that would eliminate the 17 bus line in Berkeley and reduce service on nearly 50 other lines across Alameda and Contra Costa counties. 

Based on public response from two hearings on June 11, the board concluded that most riders would rather see fares increase than have bus lines eliminated altogether. The transit organization faces a $40 million deficit for the next fiscal year, which begins Wednesday. 

“The plan originally was to keep fares about where they were and trim service,” said AC Transit public information officer Mike Mills. “But most people said they would willingly increase the costs if they could keep the same amount of service we have now. So we’re looking at ways to do just that.” 

By expressing their willingness to pay more money, local riders likely saved the 17 line, one of the more heavily frequented lines that would have been eliminated. Though several Berkeley bus lines were affected by a previous round of reductions that took effect on Sunday, the 17 bus, which runs through South Berkeley toward the Rockridge BART station, is the only Berkeley line that would have been reduced under the new plan. 

On Wednesday, July 16, the board of directors will hold another public hearing to solicit community input on the newest proposal. The meeting will be held at 2 p.m. in the AC Transit District Board Room at 1600 Franklin St. in downtown Oakland.