A well-connected Berkeley toxics consultant and developer has teamed with Donald Rumsfeld’s predecessor as secretary of defense and a landless Native American tribe to float a proposal to build a casino and 1000-room four-hotel complex on Point Molate in Richmond. 

James Levine, the Berkeley resident and driving force behind the Emeryville-based powerhouse firm of LFR Levine-Fricke, has been meeting with politicians and community and special interest groups to round up support for what could become one of California’s largest casinos. 

Levine heads a consortium which last December acquired exclusive rights to develop the site from the Richmond City Council. 

When contacted, Levine decline to offer specifics and asked the Daily Planet to hold off on the story in exchange for an exclusive when the final plans are unveiled in early July. 

“Otherwise, all I can tell you is that we are discussing ideas with folks. We’ve been meeting with environmental groups and the community, and it’s better for everyone if we can hold off on the story,” Levine said. 

“We’re doing something developers usually don’t do. We’re trying to collaborate with the community. We’re sharing confidential information with folks up front so we can receive their input and incorporate it into out plans,” he said. 

The Point Molate Navy Fuel Depot, built on the site of a former winery, was marked for closure in 1995 under the Department of Defense’s Base Realignment and Closure plan and officially ended operations that Sept. 30. 

Most of the property—364 acres—was transferred to the City of Richmond in 2003 for the token payment of $1, although the Navy retains about 15 percent of the property until environmental cleanup is finished. 

Of the site’s 415 acres—including those that have yet to pass to the city—290 are above the mean high tide line, and 90 are fully developable.  

Faced with a $7 million budget deficit this year and an expected $21 million funding gap in the upcoming year, Richmond City Councilmembers have been casting increasingly desperate eyes on the property as a source of revenue.  

For centuries home to the indigenous Ohlone people, the land was later included in a Spanish land grant. Chinese shrimpers built a camp on the point in the early 1870s and fished steadily for the next four decades. 

Among the most prominent features remaining on the property is the 20,000-square-foot Winehaven, a crenelated mock-Rhineland castle opened in 1908 by the California Wine Association. The winery—once California’s largest—produced five dozen varietals as well as brandy until 1920, when Prohibition forced a shutdown. 

The property passed briefly to Santa Cruz Oil in early 1941, but with the approach of war, the Navy took over the site later that year, constructing massive above- and underground storage tanks for both marine fuel oil and high octane aviation fuel. 

The site was criss-crossed with eight miles of fuel lines, which have been removed as part of the federal cleanup operations prior to handover to the city. The 22 massive underground fuel tanks are being cleaned up and will remain in place. 

Point Molate is surrounded on three sides by land owned by Chevron, which operates the nearby refinery and has considerable input on site uses, thanks to post 9/11 security regulations designed to protect major energy facilities located on or near public waterways. 

The 71-acre Village of Point Molate listed 39 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in October, 1978, including the winery and 29 housing units. 

Development of the site itself is in the hands of the Local Reuse Authority—a mantle the Richmond City Council conferred on itself to become the official agency responsible for development of the property. 

A 45-member Blue Ribbon Advisory Committee appointed by the Richmond City Council in 1995 developed a 20-year reuse plan for the site, which called for a mixed-used historical village centering on the winery featuring a retreat center, educational and job training facilities, light industrial uses and residential development. 

City councilmembers first indicated serious interest in a casino early last year, when they commissioned a $100,000 feasibility study from the Colorado-based Innovations Group. 

That study, unveiled late last July, predicted that a tribal casino would generate a yearly economic impact of a half-billion dollars, creating 4,462 more local jobs and adding $1.9 million to city sales tax revenues. 

The report listed four possible sites, including Point Molate and the Stauffer Chemical site now proposed for the high rise Campus Bay waterfront residential complex (see the Daily Planet’s May 28 edition). 

On Dec. 16, the city handed an exclusive six-month negotiation rights agreement to Upstream Investments, LLC, formed to develop the Point Molate site. The group includes Levine’s LFR Levine-Fricke (toxic clean up and development specialists), Legacy Partners (a real estate developer), the Odermatt Group (a Berkeley-based urban design firm headed by architect Richard A. Odermatt) and Lowe Enterprises—one of the country’s premier hotel firms. 

Levine said other possible participants include the International Risk Group (underwriters), Cherokee Investment Partners (a principal in the Campus Bay development) and Shell Global Solutions (a toxic cleanup firm affiliated with the Dutch oil company). 

Two other tribal casino projects are already proposed for areas near Richmond—an expansion of the San Pablo Casino and a planned casino by the Scott’s Valley Band of Pomos on the Richmond Parkway just outside the city limits. 

The proposed Molate project would be grander than either project, a complete resort destination sited in a breathtaking location with first class accommodations, a convention center, and a spectacular waterfront view of the Bay. 

“When we gave Upstream exclusive rights on the site, they said a tribal casino was one alternative,” said Richmond City Councilmember Tom Butt, who said earlier casino proposals had been made “for places where it would’ve been a really bad idea. If there’s going to be a casino in Richmond, Point Molate’s the right place because there are no neighbors to disturb with the lights and traffic.” 

Butt said mixed-use residential proposals for the site called were torpedoed by “some very underhanded and deceitful moves by Chevron. The market’s really bad right now for commercial and light industrial.” 

Butt had met with Levine several times. 

“He seems to be a nice guy, very amiable, and he claims to be very well connected,” Butt said. “He claims to have very substantial ties to influential people.” 

Levine is a major political contributor, primarily to Democratic candidates. He gave $27,500 to former Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante’s campaign against Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 2003 recall election. He helped fund the Gore campaign in 2000 and donated to the congressional races of both Democrat Barbara Lee and Republican Jerry Lewis. 

Though he said he has no moral objections to a casino, Butt said he is worried that the promised jobs will be offset by a loss of existing jobs in the local hospitality and entertainment sectors. 

“Another huge issue is what the city gets out of it,” he said, adding that negotiating a deal to build a casino on city-owned property could yield Richmond far more than a casino outside city limits. “The worst thing for the city would be something like the project on the parkway outside city limits, where Richmond would get any money at all. If something went on Molate that was high quality, it could bring a lot more to the city—although I’m totally reserving judgment ‘til there’s something on the table to look at.” 

One thing that bothers the councilmember is the refusal of his colleagues to poll the community on their feelings about a casino project. “I’ve been asking them to do it for a long time, and they’ve consistently rejected it. It would be a lot easier to decide if we knew what the people wanted,” he said.  

Enlisting the support of former Defense Secretary William Cohen gives the project a powerful ally in with the federal government. The Interior Department must approve the creation of a reservation on the site, and Cohen’s Pentagon contacts should help resolve any issues remaining with the Navy. 

Levine said that whatever happens to the site, Upstream will be guided by a set of principles that includes protecting the existing wildlife habitat, implementing a comprehensive integrated transportation plan, and providing jobs and revenue opportunities for the citizens of Richmond. 

“Though it will take a lot of hard analysis, we’re committed to all these things,” Levine said. 

Ninety percent of 800 workers who voted at the Alta Bates Summit Medical center rejected a recent contract offer by the hospital late last week, locking the two sides back into heated negotiations that have been ongoing since before the workers’ contract expired at the end of May. 

On Wednesday that battle escalated when the union, the Oakland-based Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 250, notified Alta Bates Summit that they filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court charging the hospital with assault, battery and false arrest of a union organizer and assault on an employee during incidents related to union organizing.  

A federal mediator also stepped in after a Wednesday bargaining session did not create any progress between the two sides.  

According to the union, employees rejected the most recent contract offer by the hospital because it did not acknowledge two of their primary demands. Those demands include equal employee participation in the decision process that sets hospital staffing levels and the establishment of a permanent employee training and education fund. 

Alta Bates Summit defended their offer, calling it “better than that accepted at a number of local hospitals” that recently re-negotiated contracts with Local 250. 

Among Alta Bates Summit’s offers were wage increases for licensed vocational nurses and tuition reimbursement for employees who want to take classes that will allow them to apply for more advanced positions in the hospital.  

“You want to do everything you can to promote and recognize [the workers],” said Carolyn Kemp, spokesperson for Alta Bates Summit. 

Organizers for Local 250 and workers at Alta Bates Summit said while the offer looks good on paper, it does not address several other important issues and contrary to the hospital’s claim, is inferior to contracts accepted by other hospitals. Of particular concern was the demand for equal representation during the staff ratio decision process, which union representatives said was necessary to ensure that employee’s patient loads do not get out of hand.  

“The people who actually work with the patient have a good understanding of what is required to take care of patients,” said Shayne Silva, a psychiatric technician at the Alta Bates Herrick campus. “It seems to me that logically they would be included in the decision.” 

Hospital spokesperson Kemp countered by saying that the current staffing level system is “working well.” 

Local 250 is also contesting the offer made by the hospital concerning tuition reimbursement funds. They say the contract they recently signed with CHW is better and want Alta Bates to agree to the same. The Catholic Healthcare West contract will establish a permanent training fund into which the hospital will put $4 million, allowing for up to $3,000 for tuition reimbursement for each employment. Local 250 said CHW also agreed to give employees 16 hours paid time off each year to attend class.   

Although Alta Bates Summit acknowledges the need for employees to move up, they are not taking drastic enough steps to ensure the hospital can fill empty positions, said union representatives,  

According to Sal Rosselli, Local 250 president, Alta Bates Summit has a high number of traveling employees that temporarily fill their open positions. According to a SEIU study, temporary positions place financial burdens on hospitals because traveling employees are often paid more than permanent employees. Traveling employees also result in inferior care, they said, because employees don’t have the chance to form experienced teams. 

For the union, the current organizing drive also reaches beyond Alta Bates Summit. Their fight, they said, is part of an ongoing battle with Sutter Health, the Northern California health care giant that runs a network of 26 hospitals, including Alta-Bates Summit. 

Even though negotiations have been taking place between Alta Bates Summit and Local 250, organizers at Local 250 said they are trying to get the same standards for all health care workers under the auspicious of Sutter. Unlike the Sutter system, where hospitals negotiate their own contracts, Local 250 representatives said their recent contract with CHW covered 28 of the hospitals administered by CHW throughout the west.  

Both sides disagree about where the lines are drawn concerning Sutter. Sutter maintains that they are a not-for-profit network set up to facilitate cooperation between hospitals at a time when many hospitals are struggling. 

“One of the key differentiating factors between Sutter Health and other networks is their affiliates retain their decision making autonomy,” said Bill Gleesen, a spokesperson for Sutter. 

Local 250 president Sal Rosselli calls Sutter’s not-for-profit classification a “shell game,” pointing to the company’s healthy profit margin and dozens of for-profit subsidiaries. According to an article in the East Bay Business times, Sutter reported earnings of $465 million and an operating profit margin of seven percent for 2003. 

While Sutter operates under the auspices of a network, said Rosselli, they are viewed by the union as another large-scale health care conglomerate with an interest in making money. 

“Sutter has no interest in working with their caregivers in providing patient care,” said Rosselli. “They have all interest in expanding their corporation and gaining market share so they can eliminate competition, overcharge the insured and in every predatory way go after the people who can’t pay their bills.”  

Union organizers point out that when Sutter secures certain contracts, such as their former contract with the California Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS, they act as one entity. 

The next bargaining session is June 24.

The Berkeley Unified School District has three business days to come up with $41,000 or else it risks losing a vital sponsor for a program that teaches students the splendors of urban gardening. 

After six years of receiving late or incomplete payments, AmeriCorps—the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps—has set a June 15 deadline for the district to square its long overdue balance.  

Should Berkeley Unified fail to deliver, AmeriCorps plans to withdraw its sponsorship of the Willard Middle School Greening Project, said Martin Weinstein the executive director of Bay Area Community Resources (BACR), a nonprofit that operates the program for AmeriCorps. 

“We’ve had a systemic problem with Berkeley for years now,” he said. “For whatever reason they haven’t been able to meet their obligation.” 

AmeriCorps provides half of the funding for two Greening Project employees at Willard and a third employee at Leconte Elementary School. At Willard, the employees work four days a week teaching a nutrition class, running a gardening club, supervising lunch, initiating beautification projects and assisting the gardener and cooking instructor to teach students to raise crops and cook the produce. 

“Without them we wouldn’t have a program,” said Matt Tsang, the school’s garden teacher and a former AmeriCorps volunteer at the school. He said it would be impossible for just one person to supervise gardening classes with more than 30 students. 

The 14-year-old program has an operating budget of about $100,000 and is part of a district-wide effort to teach students proper nutrition. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School has a more elaborate program, subsidized by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse.  

While school districts are notoriously bad for paying their bills on time, Berkeley has been among the worst, Weinstein said.  

Previously, BACR has taken out loans to cover the district’s delinquent payments, but Weinstein said the nonprofit could no longer afford to bail out Berkeley Unified. 

“We waste an enormous amount of time trying to make the system work,” he said. “Our accountants spend hours and hours of time trying to track down purchase orders that don’t get paid.” 

In addition to the Greening Project, BACR acts as the fiscal agent for other Berkeley Unified programs including an after school program at Jefferson Elementary School, which Weinstein said has also been plagued by late payments. AmeriCorps also runs a program at the Berkeley High Health Center, but the city pays the district’s share of the costs. 

This year, the district owed AmeriCorps $9,000 for each of the three Greening Project employees. Weinstein said he sent out invoices in September, but didn’t get his first payment until this month. After the most recent payment from the district, BACR is still owed a total of $11,000 for this year. 

Weinstein said AmeriCorps planned to discontinue its sponsorship of the program unless Berkeley Unified paid its balance and made an upfront payment for its share of next year’s program, slated to cost $30,000. 

District spokesperson Mark Coplan doubted Berkeley Unified would authorize advance payments and charged that BACR failed to voice their concerns to the district administration or Willard Principal Michele Patterson.  

“Once they start communicating with [us] then we can solve the problem,” Coplan said. 

Although he didn’t have an explanation for the history of late payments, Coplan said this year’s problems stemmed from confusion between Willard and the central administration. When BACR sent their invoices to Patterson, she assumed the district had also received copies and didn’t forward them to the district’s accounting department, Coplan explained. 

Last month, a BACR representative contacted District Director of Student Services Gerald Herrick asking him to investigate the delinquent payments. 

Herrick located the invoices and Wednesday BACR picked up a series of checks totaling $88,000. The money included half of the $22,000 owed for Willard, with the balance coming from the Jefferson after school program. 

Before the district can pay the remainder of the money for the Willard program, the school must first write a new purchase order authorizing the payment, and then make sure that money is available in the school site’s discretionary account which funds the district’s share of the program, said Coplan.  

If the program is continued, Coplan said that to avoid confusion, the district would request BACR send invoices directly to district’s business office instead of the school site. 

Willard PTA member and garden volunteer Yolanda Huang, however, insists the district’s business office is culpable for the payment problems. Huang said she hand-delivered requisition requests for purchase orders to the district’s accounting department on Dec. 11, but the first check wasn’t issued until mid-March, and a second requisition form had been lost. 

“This highlights a basic problem with the BUSD,” she said. “They don’t have a simple uniform accounting method.” 

Adolfo Rivera of Bay Area AmeriCorps said he was holding fast to the June 15 deadline because the contracts for the volunteers expire next month and he says he can’t afford to hire replacements without a guarantee that Berkeley Unified would pay its bills. 

“We’ve been continuing in good faith because we like the program, but at this point enough is enough,” Rivera said. “We can’t continue to let this thing play itself out.” 

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The Landmarks Commission designated three new Berkeley landmarks Monday night, but admirers of only one of the buildings (the Ace Hardware store on University Avenue) will be able to rest comfortably with that fact. The remaining two landmark sites are on UC Berkeley-owned property earmarked for possible demolition for the proposed downtown university-owned hotel, conference center and museums complex. 

Meanwhile, at the beginning of Monday’s meeting, Commissioner Leslie Emmington rose as a member of the public to vent her frustration with city officials for failing to include the commission among the city panels canvassed for comment on the controversial UC Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). 

“The university will develop significantly within the townscape and have significant impacts,” she said, adding that “the last time the university presented a Long Range Development Plan, we were consulted.” 

Berkeley Planning Director Dan Marks agreed, saying that the plan hadn’t been sent to the commission because of “an oversight.” He then urged commissioners to send in their comments by the end of the week. 

But the major news at the Landmarks Commission meeting was the three new landmarked buildings. The biggest new addition to the landmark list is the University Press Building at the northwest corner of Center and Oxford streets—a 1939 New Deal Moderne creation where the original copies of the United Nations Charter were printed in 1945 for the signatures of delegates gathered in San Francisco for the U.N.’s founding. 

The other UC-owned property landmarked by the commission on Monday, incorporating storefronts stretched along 2154 to 2160 University Avenue, sits on a site the university has indicated may house a parking structure for the hotel complex. 

The five-store storefront complex was built in 1911 adjacent to the terminus of the local railroad and streetcar systems, and reflects the Berkeley of the years of the first mass transit age. The building has been commercially viable throughout its history, said commissioner Robert Johnson, who drafted the proposal for landmark designation. 

Tim Wang, proprietor of the highly popular Eudemonia game store at 2154 University Ave., endorsed the landmarking. “We as tenants really love this building, and our customers do too,” he said. “It’s one of the most commercially viable parts of Berkeley. It’s a shame that the university is trying to take this part of the city down.” 

Manesh Sharma, proprietor of the India Palace at 2160 University, said, “We’d love to stay, and we have good business there.” 

Interim Commission Chair Jill Korte tempered the enthusiasm by stating the obvious: “Because the university owns the building, they can choose to demolish it. But by designating it as a landmark, we are sending them a message.” 

“Because it’s landmarked, at least they have to comply with CEQA,” said commissioner Carrie Olson. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires even the university to spell out its justification for destroying a landmarked structure. 

Commissioner Becky O’Malley said the panel should consider creating a downtown historic district, which would include all the buildings of merit in the city center. O’Malley is the executive editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet. 

The vote to landmark the structure was unanimous. 

The other University Avenue building landmarked Monday—the Berkeley Ace Hardware Store, designed by noted Berkeley architect James Plachek—is just across the street at 2145, originally the Sills Grocery and Hardware building. 

Since its construction in 1915, the building has housed only four tenants. After Sills came Appleton Grocery, which took over the property 10 years later, followed in 1940 by the first Montgomery Ward store on the West Coast. Ace took over in 1964. 

The building is the last remaining stand-alone store designed by the Czech-born Plachek, whose other creations include the Berkeley Public Library, the Berkeley Civic Center building, and Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. The building was created for William J. Acheson, whose father built the city’s first hotel. 

Seven commissioners voted for the landmarking, with two members abstaining—new appointee Steven Winkel (replacing Burton Edwards) and Robert Stevenson, sitting in for the absent Adam Weiss. 

The most controversial proposal facing the commissioners called for radical changes to two properties included in the recently landmarked Oceanview Sisterna Historic District, created by the commission on March 1. 

Developer Gary Feiner proposed to turn the two single-family cottages at 2104 and 2108 Sixth Street into duplexes. While the structure of 2108 had been landmarked, the commission included only the grounds of 2104 because the dwelling had been already been significantly altered by previous owners. 

Feiner had appealed the decision on 2104, further complicating the process. Both neighbors and commissioners worried that the revisions were both too large and too similar to fit in with the unique character of a neighborhood where each Victorian displays a distinct individuality.  

Neighbors came out in force to protest the proposed mitigated negative declaration on the project issued by Debra Sanderson of the city Planning Department, which would have authorized Feiner to move ahead without any further scrutiny. Neighbors objected to the size of Feiner’s proposed remodels, their impacts on adjoining properties, and what several called the city’s failure to provide adequate notice of his plans. 

Feiner indicated a willingness to work with commissioners, who appointed a subcommittee to handle the project.  

While Planning Director Dan Marks told commissioners Monday night that there was no opportunity to reopen the EIR process, Senior Planner Gisele Sorensen notified commissioners by e-mail Tuesday afternoon that Marks had checked with Sanderson and learned the negative declaration hadn’t yet been filed with the county. 

Marks then ordered her not to sign and record the document, and directed his staff to give commissioners a chance to review the document before a final decision is made.  

The proposal will return to the commission next month, with a final hearing expected at the August meeting so that neighbors Neal and Elise Blumenfeld—now in New York where Elise is undergoing medical treatment—can be present.4

Mayor Tom Bates Tuesday proposed a temporary reprieve for some community nonprofits slated for budget cuts in hopes that come November Berkeley voters will bail them out indefinitely. 

The mayor’s proposal—presented two weeks before the City Council is scheduled to adopt its 2005 budget—would allocate $192,000 to partially restore funding to an array of community agencies for six months.  

If voters end up passing two tax initiatives on the November ballot—an increase in the Utility Users Tax that would bolster the general fund and an increase in the tax on property sales that would be earmarked for youth service programs—the funding would be restored permanently, Bates said at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. 

Also at Tuesday’s meeting, the council approved a ballot measure that would make Berkeley the first city to publicly finance elections and backed a Transportation Commission proposal encouraging BART to charge parking fees at Ashby and North Berkeley BART stations. 

To temporarily increase funding for the nonprofits, Bates proposed using $66,000 in unallocated community agency funds and $126,243 from a Public Utilities Commission rebate. City staff will review the proposal and return it to the council next week. 

Last month, city staff proposed roughly $400,000 in cuts to community nonprofits to help the city plug a $10.3 million shortfall in its general fund.  

Among the programs slated to receive funds include civic arts grants, the Berkeley Art Center, the West Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corporation, the Youth Homeless Shelter, Housing Rights Inc., the Community Gardening Collaborative, the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice program, the Berkeley Guides, BART escorts, and twilight basketball. 

Most of the funding restorations were given to agencies that had suffered cuts larger than the city’s target of three percent. 

In addition to preserving programs, Bates’ proposal could pay political dividends for the council’s campaign in support of the November ballot tax measures. With the money still flowing to the agencies, the council and nonprofits would be able to argue that failing to pass the tax measures would kill some programs that have been temporarily spared. 

Bates’ plan would also restore $88,560 for full funding of the Berkeley Drop-In Center. The program was to have lost its funding this year. 

Councilmember Dona Spring offered an alternative plan that would have given more money to the Quarter Meal program to feed the homeless, provided $50,000 for more traffic circles, restored funding to the Habitot Children’s museum, and included funding for a design conference on a plan to unearth Strawberry Creek at Center Street. 

Spring said the new spending would have to be paid for by unspecified cuts elsewhere in the budget. 

One other key ingredient to balancing the budget remains unresolved. After a closed door meeting with city unions for the third consecutive week, the city has still not won agreement on its demand that the unions defer three percent of their salary increases until next year. The move would save the city about $1.2 million and if the unions don’t agree, the City Council has threatened to close city hall one day a month to recover the savings. 

With little debate, the council referred to the city manager a recommendation from the Citizens Budget Commission that the city take a far stronger position in negotiating with city unions. The commission recommended that the city require its workers to pay their share of contributions to the state pension system, withdraw its policy to limit layoffs, and demand that unions reopen their contracts before November. 

Amid concerns raised from citizen groups and homeowners at recent public budget meetings, City Manager Phil Kamlarz announced the city would hire summer interns to study the city’s tax burden and services in comparison to other Bay Area cities. 

Public Financing 

By a vote of 7-2 (Olds, Hawley no) the City Council approved placing a measure on the November ballot to replace private money in campaigns with a system of public financing paid for by the city. Under the system, candidates who qualify for public financing and accept the funding would be barred from accepting any private donations or any other financial assistance.  

Similar systems have been adopted for statewide races in Arizona and Maine. 

The council had been tinkering with the initiative for weeks under pressure from the Berkeley Fair Election Coalition, which threatened to put a similar proposal on the ballot. 

The measure—if passed by 50 percent of the electorate—would require the city to put aside $498,000 annually from the general fund to finance elections for mayor, council, city auditor and school board director. Elgible candidates would receive $160,000 for mayor and $20,000 for the City Council.  

The council can delay implementation of the program until the city’s budget outlook improves and can, by a two-thirds vote, suspend or reduce the funding in times of fiscal emergency. 

Transportation Commission Recommendations 

Parking fees could soon be coming to BART parking lots in Berkeley. Moments before the council unanimously approved a resolution from the city’s transportation commission urging BART to charge parking fees, BART’s new Director of Planning Kathleen Kelly told the council that the transit agency was set to review its parking policy and give recommendations this summer. 

BART parking was the one issue on which the council and Transportation Commission agreed Tuesday. The council turned aside a commission recommendation that it receive all transportation-related items.  

Mayor Bates said the proposal amounted to a “carte blanche” and that “the red tape would be ridiculous.” 

Transportation Commission Chair Dean Metzger insisted that the commission didn’t want to circumvent other city commissions, but only assume its role as the initial public body to study transportation-related policies. 

The council voted to send the item back to the commission to work with Councilmember Worthington on a more clearly worded proposal. 

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The Planning Commission decided Wednesday it wasn’t ready to rezone University Avenue after all. 

Scheduled to vote on zoning guidelines that promised to moderately scale down the size of new buildings and anger just about everybody involved, the commission instead opted to set a new deadline and take a different tack. 

With commissioners still in disagreement and residents still breathing fire, the commission voted unanimously Wednesday to establish a four-member subcommittee to recommend a new zoning overlay, set for commission consideration July 14. 

At its last meeting, a majority of the commission scoffed at delegating the matter to a subcommittee, but in the ensuing two weeks, most recognized that any recommendation to the City Council passed Wednesday would come from a divided commission and face stiff opposition from neighbors and developers. 

“We weren’t ready to vote,” said Commission Chair Harry Pollack, one of several commissioners to change course and embrace the subcommittee proposal. “At this point it seems like an appropriate way to come up with a recommendation the Planning Commission can support as a whole.” 

Pollack will sit on the subcommittee along with commissioners David Stoloff, Susan Wengraf, and Gene Poschman. After three months of regimented public hearings, where residents are allowed just three minutes apiece to speak, the commission hopes the subcommittee will allow stakeholders a chance to work through unresolved issues. 

Missing the June 9 deadline, however, means the new set of zoning rules won’t be ready for City Council approval until after its summer recess.  

Following years of complaints from residents that the current rules allow for bigger and bulkier buildings than called for in a 1996 strategic plan, both the council and the Mayor’s Task Force on Permitting and Development urged the commission to consider new zoning rules for the University Avenue area. The new zoning rules were supposed to be fast-tracked in order to prevent new developments from slipping in under the current guidelines. 

Four projects already submitted will be immune to new zoning restrictions. However, Planning Director Dan Marks said no development team is presently approaching the city with a new proposal for University Avenue. 

To address neighborhood concerns that new buildings would be too massive and not transition well to surrounding residential districts, the planning staff Wednesday proposed new setback requirements. 

In the front, buildings would be required to provide an average two-foot setback, while on the sides, setbacks would be zero for first and second floor commercial space and five feet on residential floors above so tenants receive more light and fresh air. For corner buildings, the setback would be two feet on University Avenue and eight feet at the adjacent residentially zoned parcel to ease the transition to smaller private homes. 

Building heights would remain three stories along the avenue and four stories at specifically targeted intersections. However, residents fear that developers will continue to use a state law that lets them build 25 percent more housing space for projects that include affordable housing, as all large Berkeley developments must. 

The bonus, residents have argued, leads to intrusive buildings that tower over neighboring houses and lack sufficient space for viable ground floor shops or commercial parking. 

Planning commissioners hinted Wednesday that parking and commercial viability issues were emerging as a top priority. In another about-face, a majority of commissioners—two weeks after asking staff to consider boosting incentives offered to developers for a wide variety of improvements—expressed a preference for limiting any incentives to building designs that promoted parking and commercial viability. 

“After two months of ignoring commercial issues, it’s coming down to stores and parking,” said Richard Graham a neighbor, and member of Plan Berkeley, a civic group that has participated in the zoning process. 

Wednesday’s twist of events left Graham and other residents hopeful the commission could pass a new zoning regulation the neighbors could accept. 

“It’s taken us a long time to get down here, but we’re happy to be where we are,” said Kristin Leimkuhler, also of Plan Berkeley. 

The University Avenue rezoning subcommittee is scheduled to meet at 4:30 p.m. Monday and Tuesday of next week (June 14 and 15) at the Permit Center. 

In some towns high school graduates are greeted with a new car or a family barbecue. This year in Berkeley the class of 2004 will stare out on a small army of voter registration volunteers. 

One week after the League of Women voters held a voter registration drive on campus, Friday’s graduation ceremony will include a visit from UC Berkeley’s Mobilizing America’s Youth seeking to register graduates, who—thanks to the work of a devoted team of parents—will find enclosed with their diplomas a voter registration card. Berkeley High students almost missed out on the registration cards, however, due to a foul-up by someone associated with the school. 

Across the state, schools are failing to distribute registration cards as required by the Student Voter Registration Act of 2003, said Nicky Yuen, a Berkeley resident and executive director of Get Out the Student Vote. The act requires the secretary of state to mail registration cards—about 350,000 in total—to every high school, community college and public university in the state. 

The problem, said Yuen, is that the schools weren’t informed that the registration cards were on the way. That was the case at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, where Yuen teaches government. He received a call from a school employee asking him if he wanted the cards before they recycled them. 

“Most schools didn’t know anything about it and their boxes just disappeared,” he said.  

Count Berkeley High in the majority. 

“The cards were delivered here, but they got lost,” said Caren Ohlson, assistant to Principal Jim Slemp. 

Yuen and his group didn’t blame overburdened school administrators for the snafu, but they weren’t going to be denied the chance to offer 18-year-olds a visit to the ballot box. After one member of the group found the missing box at El Cerrito High School, Yuen traveled to Berkeley High Wednesday and scoured the storage and mail rooms in search the cards.  

No luck, but not to worry. Arlene Blum, a Berkeley resident and member of Yuen’s group immediately ordered a new batch from the state. The United Parcel Service was scheduled to deliver the package Friday just hours before the graduation ceremony, but the package arrived Thursday giving parents ample time to stuff them into diploma sleeves. 

“It’s so much work to register voters. Here there are hundreds of thousands of students not registered, it seemed like a great opportunity,” Blum said. 

Ensuring that voter registration cards will accompany every Berkeley students’ diploma is just the start of Get Out the Student Vote’s work this summer, one of the busiest on record for local voter advocacy groups. 

Yuen’s group will team do non-partisan voter education and mobilization as part of a larger coalition with East Bay Votes, an umbrella group of local voter rights organizations. 

Mobilizing America’s Youth (MAY) decided to set up shop at the commencement when they learned Berkeley High had lost their registration cards, said MAY member and UC Berkeley Senior Marlee Furman. Even though the graduates will now get registration cards with their diplomas, MAY still plans to have a table at the commencement to promote the group’s march for health care June 19 in San Francisco. 

The San Francisco event will kick off MAY’s cross country ten-day RV trip, where college activists will attend 15 demonstrations. Furman said the goal of the whirlwind tour was to show young people across the country that politics can be fun and that it really matters. 

In Berkeley, this weekend the NAACP is holding its Medgar Evers Voter Advocacy Summit. The event, honoring the slain civil rights advocate, instructs participants in grass roots political organizing.  

On Sunday participants and members of the public will meet in San Pablo Park to canvas neighborhoods in South and West Berkeley to register voters. 

Anthrax Scare at Oakland Children’s Hospital Research Institute 

Scientists at the Oakland Children’s Hospital Research Institute discovered to their chagrin Monday that their lab mice were dying after they’d been injected with the supposedly dead anthrax bacteria obtained from a Maryland firm. 

Further tests proved Wednesday that the material was, indeed, a live and deadly culture. 

FBI bioterrorism picked up the remaining culture later Friday. 

Because the material was in liquid form, Children’s Hospital spokesperson Bev Mikalonis said employees should be in no danger. Nonetheless, some lab workers are taking precautionary doses of antibiotics, she said. 

The lab, at 6700 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland, is more than a mile from the hospital itself. 

The Centers for Disease Control is now investigating how Southern research Institute in Frederick, Md., managed to send out a live culture, Mikalonis said.  

Man Charged With Lawrence Livermore Thefts 

A 59-year-old Berkeley man was arraigned in federal court in Oakland Wednesday on two charges of theft of government property from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 

One count charges former lab employee Medhi Balooch with stealing $26,600 in unauthorized salary payments, and the second with claiming $23,000 in fraudulent travel expenses, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew J. Jacobs. 

Following the arraignment before federal Magistrate Wayne D. Brazil, Balooch was ordered to appear before U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken at 2 p.m. Tuesday afternoon. 

The arrest followed an investigation by agents from the FBI and the Department of Energy’s Office of the Inspector General. 

The maximum sentence on each count is a 10-year prison sentence and a fine of $250,000.  

—Richard Brenneman 



Berkeley Shooting Leads to Chase, Crash 

After Berkeley police responded to a shooting reported at Russell and Sacramento streets at 10:30 Wednesday night, some officers canvassed the area in search of shooters. 

After officers attempted to stop a gold Oldsmobile a short distance away, the driver hit the gas and led police on a northbound chase into Richmond, where a patrol car from that department joined in the pursuit. 

Officers briefly lost the Olds after the driver doused his lights, but the chase resumed after a Berkeley officer spotted the car on Mathieu Court. 

The fugitive was headed eastbound on Ripley Avenue when another Richmond officer attempting to serve a papers on a local resident pulled in the Olds path. 

The ensuing crash totaled both cars, and the driver of the Oldsmobile fled on foot, leaving a slightly injured police officer in the wreck of his cruiser. 

Paul McGee, a 30-year-old Richmond resident, was finally subdued after officers cornered him nearby. 

McGee was charged with a variety of felony counts, including evasion of police, escape, battery on a peace officer, and a probation violation. Officers also discovered that he was wanted on an outstanding warrant for felony hit and run. 

The suspect was hauled backed to Berkeley and given a cell in the city lockup. No weapon was found in his car or on his person, and police are still investigating to see if there is any connection between McGee and the Berkeley shooting—which resulted in non-life-threatening injuries to the victim, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Brazen Thief Boosts Three Minibikes 

A brazen daylight thief grabbed three Mini Ninja motorbikes from the Ramada Inn at 920 University Ave. late Tuesday afternoon. The miniature cycles, capable of speeds up to 40 miles an hour, are less than half the size of a regular cycle—but still very dear to their owner, who promptly called police. 

Foolish Response Thwarts Armed Bandit 

When a pistol-packing bandit approached a man at Cedar-Rose Park in Berkeley about 8:15 p.m. Tuesday, the would-be victim did precisely what police advise victims never to do. He just said no, refusing to fork over his wallet. 

As the bandit and his would-be victim argued, other park-goers wandered over and the frustrated felon fled. 

Pair Stages Office Depot Heist 

Unlike the gent at Cedar-Rose, a clerk at Berkeley’s 1025 Gilman St. Office Depot wisely forked over the gelt when confronted by a pair of armed robbers less than 20 minutes later. ›

Shortly after two Latino students were shot and wounded in a terrifying, daylight drive-by shooting at Oakland’s Castlemont High School, the Oakland Tribune interviewed Oakland City Councilmember Larry Reid, who had hurried to the scene. 

“It’s just depressing,” Mr. Reid was quoted as saying. “I don’t know what we can do to get through to these kids. I’m tired of seeing African Americans and Latinos dying on the streets. They have no sense of value for human life. There’s too much violence and too many guns on the streets. I’m not sure what we can do about that. I don’t have an answer.” 

Mr. Reid is the longtime City Councilmember from the 7th District, the most violent district in Oakland. He is also the chairperson of the Oakland City Council’s Public Safety Committee, the committee that is charged with overseeing the safety of Oakland citizens. He confesses that he does not have an answer to the most pressing public safety problem in the city. 

Let us return to that thought, in a moment. 

The lunchtime Castlemont shooting, in full view of many students, and leaving a bullet hole in one of the school’s office windows, suddenly puts the issue of violence in Oakland back in the public eye. And that is one of the problems. 

Except for those people who live in the most violent neighborhoods, our perception of how dangerous things are in the city often has little to do with the actual facts. If you’ve witnessed some violent incident, or if some particularly disturbing incident hits the news (such as the Castlemont shootings), then the belief tends to be that violence is going up. Let a little while pass with no newspaper or television highlight of some particularly horrific event, and people tend to think about other things. 

The only area where folks tend to pay attention to actual statistics is in homicides, but even here, we often look at it more like a sports event than something with devastating effects upon human beings. When homicides in Oakland rose above 100 in 2002, the public began to get seriously concerned. Throughout 2003, there was much talk in the city of whether the murder rate would once again top “triple digits,” and the news media noted each murder not only with its running total for the year, but also favoring us with a comparison to the statistics from that day of a year before. We are running slightly ahead of last year’s totals, we were told. Or slightly behind. “Last year, 114 people were homicide victims in Oakland, one more than in 2002 and the fourth consecutive year that saw an increase,” the Tribune informed us in a February, 2004 roundup. The paper added that 17 people had been killed in Oakland to that date. “If this year’s rate keeps pace,” the Tribune continued, as if it were describing Barry Bond’s home run rate, “it will be five straight years [of homicide increases].” 

But the pace did not keep up. The rate of Oakland homicides began to slow in late February, so that by the end of May, “only” 14 more people had been killed. Fourteen homicides in three months in a single mid-sized city seems like a ghastly fact. In Oakland, it meant that murders would “probably” drop under triple-digits for the year. No one seems to know why this is happening, but the general feeling around some parts of town is that it’s nice that things seem to be getting “better.” 

And looking at Oakland’s violent crime statistics posted by the police department on the city’s website, one might come to the same rosy conclusion. Taking the city’s five most violent council districts (districts 1, 3, 5, 6, and 7), and counting up the eight most violent crimes (assault with a non-firearm deadly weapon, assault with a firearm, shooting into an occupied home or car, battery with serious bodily injury, battery on a spouse, battery on a child, rape, and murder), then Oakland’s crime dropped approximately 10 percent between March-May 2003 and March-May 2004. Murders were down some 62 percent in that period. Serious beat-downs were down almost 50 percent. Shootings were down 25 percent. In fact, almost every violent crime statistic in Oakland was down from the spring of 2003 to the spring of 2004. 

Almost. 

In the spring of 2003, in the five most violent districts in Oakland, there were 101 incidents of what is antiseptically called “inflict injury upon child” — child beatings so serious that the police had to be called in, and a criminal report written. In the spring of 2004, there were 101 child beatings in those five districts. Exactly the same. 

The children of violence, we know, almost always turn to violence themselves. 

When violent outbreaks disrupted the tail-end of last spring’s Carijama Festival at Mosswood Park in North-West Oakland, it was almost universally agreed by city officials and festival participants that the problems centered around young people who came late and were not part of the festival itself. “These are people who came looking for something to do, and they did not want to leave,” the San Francisco Chronicle quoted festival organizer Jackie Artman as saying. “The people who caused the trouble had almost nothing to do with Carijama.” It was the second year in a row that violence had come at the end of the otherwise peaceful festival. 

In answering the complaint of many young Oaklanders that there is nothing for them to do in this city, Oakland Police Lt. Kozicki replied, “This is what they want to do. They want to raise hell and a lot of people want to watch them raise hell.” He added, “Until we figure out a way to keep troublemakers away, the scope of these venues needs to be severely restricted. “ 

This year, in its restricting mode, the Oakland Police Department forced Carijama to move its activities to the Frank Ogawa Plaza, on the theory that police could better control any problems in that controlled environment. Instead, violence broke out at the end of the 2004 festival almost identically to what happened in 2003. “We thought a change of venue would deter the rowdies,” Chief Richard Word said shortly afterwards, “but apparently, you can’t deter these people.” 

Perhaps we should be figuring out a way to include, rather than deter. 

“I don’t have an answer,” says Larry Reid, Oakland City Council’s public safety expert. 

Maybe what is needed, then, in Oakland, is different people, asking different questions. And quickly, too, before our attention gets distracted by something else. 

Everyone has heard about the human rights violations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But how many are aware of even deadlier human rights violations on our southern border? What is happening along our border with Mexico is policy directed from the highest levels of government and blame cannot be shifted to low-level soldiers. Victims have included babies and young children, not terrorists. Those killed have been seeking jobs or family reunification.  

In the apparent hope of deterring border crossings by migrants, Operation Gatekeeper was initiated by the INS in October 1994 to force people from the traditional suburban migration routes in the San Diego area to more inhospitable areas. A wall was constructed beginning at the ocean and stretching 14 miles inland. The number of border patrol agents was increased and military assistance and resources were given to INS. Three similar strategies were initiated by INS with Operation Hold the Line in 1993 in the El Paso, Texas area; Operation Safeguard in 1995 in Arizona and Operation Rio Grande in 1997 in the Brownsville, Texas vicinity.  

As a result of Operation Gatekeeper, the entire northern border of Tijuana became a wall and undocumented workers and their families were forced to try to cross the border by going through the Imperial Desert or to cross over the Otay and Tecate mountains. People have not been deterred from attempting to cross, but they have been forced to risk their lives in the crossing attempt. In one month during the 1996-1997 winter 16 migrants froze to death in the mountains. This is not an aberration. 

Global Exchange documented the deaths of more than 1,500 people trying to cross the Mexico-U.S. border between 1994 and 1999. Since many die in remote areas, the bodies of all are not found and the actual numbers may be far greater. Causes of death include: drowning (in the canals, ditches and the Rio Grande), dehydration, heat stroke, hypothermia, traffic accidents and the occasional bullet. The American Friends Service Committee presently estimates that an average of one immigrant a day dies along the border. 

Since 9/11 additional money has been allocated to the southwest border which now has walls, fences, canals, ditches, ground and air sensors, a vast amount of high tech lighting, mobile and fixed infra-red night scope cameras and more vehicles, aircraft and armed personnel patrolling the border than at any previous time.  

The INS is fully cognizant of the dangerous terrain that it is forcing migrants to cross. In one INS document describing the San Diego sector, it states, “The eastern 52 miles of the Sector...is marked by steep mountains, deep canyons, thick brush, and the absence of urban infrastructure and transportation facilities. The steep mountainsides, canyon walls, large boulders, and dense vegetation make travel slow, difficult, and dangerous, and lack of food, water, and transportation compounds the challenges faced by travelers. The eastern portion of the Sector also experiences extreme temperatures, ranging from freezing cold in the winter to searing heat in the summer that can kill the unprepared traveler.” 

In 1999, a petition was filed with the Organization of American States (OAS) by the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation (CRLAF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties (ACLU). It asserted that the U.S. violated human rights with its implementation of Operation Gatekeeper. It charged that, “...the United States has organized and implemented its immigration and border control policies in a way that has knowingly and ineluctably led to the deaths of an ever increasing number of immigrants seeking to enter the U.S. to obtain jobs or family reunification. Operation Gatekeeper has steered this flow of immigrants into the harshest, most unforgiving and most dangerous terrain on the California-Mexico border.” 

In November of 1999, Mary Robinson, the then United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, visited the Tijuana/U.S. border. She criticized Gatekeeper when she stated that, “I saw the sense of deflecting people at risk to their lives when they decide to immigrate. I do intend to take this issue up with the authorities of the United States.” But no changes have occurred as a result of appealing to the United Nations or OAS. 

And the dangers at the border are not limited to the environmental elements. There is also a problem with the human element, particularly the Border Patrol agents. 

A 1993 Los Angeles Times investigation of the Border Patrol found that it had hired agents with “dubious pasts, including criminal records and checkered careers with police agencies and the military....During the 1990s agents were prosecuted or disciplined for numerous offenses including unjustified shootings, sexual misconduct, beatings, stealing money from prisoners, drug trafficking, embezzlement, perjury and indecent exposure.”  

Between 1992 and 1997, Human Rights Watch published five highly critical reports about human rights abuses along the border. These reports included “dozens of instances of people shot and killed or injured by the Border patrol; violations of INS firearms policies on use of lethal force, sexual assaults, beatings and other ill-treatment of detainees; a code of silence by which officers refused to testify against colleagues accused of wrongdoing; and virtual impunity for agents, regardless of their actions.” Is the failure to control its own personnel another part of the strategy of deterrence? 

The reason behind Operation Gatekeeper and similar operations was deterrence. It was believed by U.S. government officials that by making the border crossings more difficult, migrants would choose not to make the crossing. But the General Accounting Office has released three reports that call this deterrence rationale into question. As in its two previous reports, its 2001 report concludes, “The extent to which the new strategy has affected overall illegal entry...remains unclear.”  

Operation Gatekeeper has apparently moved migrant crossings from California to Arizona and other areas. Should we continue to sacrifice a life a day on a strategy that is “unclear” in its results or that may just shift the location for the border crossing? Is this the policy of a nation that purports to uphold human rights? 

Kenneth J. Theisen is the communications director at Bay Area Legal Aid. He writes on public-interest law issues. 

It’s never nice to open up a newspaper and read a spiteful piece by an angry critic. But as a published author and photographer for nearly 30 years, I’ve had my share of bad reviews. So Bob Brokl’s commentary piece (”Nexus Artist Blasts Animal Shelter Decision,” Daily Planet, June 4-7) wasn’t a new experience for me, but it has left an especially nasty taste, as the critic is someone I had considered an ally, with common goals. 

From the title onwards, Bob’s commentary paints an absolutely false picture of the progressive steps taken to develop a true community-serving animal shelter for the residents of Berkeley. Brokl’s use of artistic license produces a strategically divisive account of the collaborative efforts to develop a model animal shelter. There has been no “decision” regarding the animal shelter for Brokl to blast and so the entirety of his diatribe is based purely on fear. 

Though it is tempting to respond point by point to his misinformation, I do not believe the pages of a local newspaper are the appropriate forum. Suffice it to say that while Bob casts my pursuit of an optimal site for our new animal shelter in a negative light, I am proud of seeking excellence instead of settling for mediocrity. An animal shelter is a vibrant element of civic life. Even if the animals don’t appreciate the efforts or the aesthetics, the people who use the shelter certainly do. It makes a statement when you put a public agency by the railroad tracks; it reflects a government’s priorities when you put a public facility in a place where it is unsafe to walk after dark. 

The Berkeley East Bay Humane Society has moved slowly towards working jointly with the City of Berkeley Animal Shelter on a shared facility and functions. Recently, with new leadership, this has changed and now we have an amazing opportunity to deliver better public service to the taxpayers of Berkeley, who spend almost $1.2 million a year on animal care services. 

Our first discussions with the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society took place in the full glare of an Animal Shelter Sub-committee public meeting. Nexus was invited to the meeting. Not belatedly, but exactly on time. At this meeting a motion was made and agreed to that supports the formation of a working group—to determine the feasibility and desirability of establishing a joint facility and operating agreement. No decision was made as to the location or design and won’t be until this working group has begun meeting and develops a shared vision.  

As is the case of any egalitarian process, arguments will be put forth, different “visions” shared, problem solving and compromise will be necessary. Brokl must recognize that complex issues require complex solutions and that, difficult as they are, discussions need to take place that might include proposed compromise on all sides. 

The private discussions between Nexus and their landlord, the Berkeley Humane Society are their business, not mine. As an artist myself, I hope a plan will be developed that meets all of our needs, bringing the community closer rather than pushing us further apart.  

I am not now and never have been a representative of the city. I am an activist, from head to toe, and proud of it. There are some in city government who wish—as Bob seems to—that I would just go away. 

Sorry, can’t do it—my vision of a model animal shelter is a beautiful thing, and I won’t quit pursuing the best site and the best design just because it doesn’t seem convenient to some. Berkeley residents deserve nothing less and those of us leading this effort—City Councilmembers, the Humane Society, city staff, and animal welfare activists—intend to deliver just that. 

Jill Posener is a community artist and chair of the Animal Shelter Sub-commitee. 

›

GRATEFUL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What great timing. The very day after a friend and I were stumped trying to name these flowery showstoppers your Ron Sullivan comes to the rescue (“A Paperbark Writer Talks of Trees that go ‘Oof!’, Daily Planet, May 25-27). They are melaleuca trees. 

This is the second time she has pulled a name out of the hat—the last time was her column on Red horsechestnuts that I had encountered near the Monterey Market. 

I look forward to more of her serendipitous columns in the future. For now, a big thanks from this grateful reader. 

Tim Aaronson 

El Cerrito 

• 

BABBITT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Where, for goodness sake, did you find your Police Blotter writer? His yuk-yuk, har-har style is an embarrassment to your paper. The guy writes as if he’s just sprung, full-blown, from the pages of a Sinclair Lewis novel, probably Babbitt. My god, get this person a stand-up gig at the local Rotarians or Elks Club. He’d be a sensation there. He doesn’t belong with the Planet. Next thing you know, we’ll be getting weekly excerpts from the “humor” columns of Reader’s Digest! 

Peter Hubbard 

• 

THE GADFLY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In response to Charles Smith and his admiring portrayal of Ralph Nader as a necessary gadfly (Letters, Daily Planet, June 8-10): Dear Charles, given that we already have a rat in the White House, why oh why should we consider a fly? Have you considered that by dividing the progressive vote, Saint Ralph right now, is doing absolutely everything he can to ensure the election of the one man (Bush) who will do in turn absolutely everything he can to ensure that absolutely everything Ralph Nader believes in will never happen. Got it? 

Mike Steinberg 

• 

ROSA PARKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It was interesting to note last week that Mr. Donaldson chides you and others for being poorly informed and self-appointed and then proceeds himself in that manner (Letters, Daily Planet, June 1-3). I think the situation at Rosa Parks School calls for more information and accountability. 

I have been “informed” that almost half the teaching staff is leaving and that number is divided between those asked by Superintendent Lawrence to transfer and those leaving on their own accord. Two teachers did not return from spring break. Mr. Donaldson says he was informed that “observations of both the principal, the superintendent and other educational experts who observed, over a period of many months, the teaching in individual classrooms” lead to recommended changes and teachers unwilling to change were asked to leave. My sources tell me the observations are questionable and that the only plan was that Ms. Herrera would remain as principal. 

Ms. Lawrence continues to stick with this despite the fact that almost all classroom teachers asked that a new principal be appointed. She has also not addressed issues raised by Concerned Citizens of Rosa Parks School which include unreliable leadership, inequitable treatment of students and staff, and lack of knowledge and support for some policies, programs and families. Ms. Herrera’s lack of experience as a principal has also been cited as an issue not addressed. 

I do agree with Mr. Donaldson that this important Berkeley public school must get beyond the gossip and criticism. Transferring experienced and well-respected teachers under the present circumstances only increases gossip and criticism. Scapegoating the teachers is not the answer. I urge Superintendent Lawrence to speak publicly and informatively on these issues. 

Nora Wellstone 

• 

REAGAN LEGACY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding your June 8 “Hot Air” editorial on Reagan: Reagan presided over the most murderous period ever of U.S. actions in Central America, when hundreds of thousands of peasants, labor leaders, nuns and other grass roots activists were tortured, raped, and brutally murdered. People in El Salvador and Guatemala remember him as the butcher of their region. His administration harbored the Iran-Contra scandal which armed Iran and killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguans and destroyed its popular democracy. He initiated a new U.S. arms buildup, attacked tiny Grenada and watched its president, Maurice Bishop, killed. Reagan’s CIA helped set the stage in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the current disaster in the Middle East. Because of his ignorance or senility, the practice of deniability became acceptable policy, preventing the accountability of the presidency. 

On the home front Reagan started the massive redistribution of wealth upwards, which removed funds though taxes and legislation from the public sphere, laying the groundwork for the impoverishment of our schools, hospitals and other public institutions. As governor of California, he closed the mental institutions and put thousands of mentally ill onto the streets. I credit him with making it feel OK to pursue personal wealth at the expense of social and community needs. 

As president he watched thousands die of AIDS and did nothing, actually worse than nothing because he blamed the victims. 

I could never stand to listen to the meaningless blather from his lips, and it’s a mystery to me how others can view him as a slightly flawed but harmless and genial old man. I did not expect such treatment of Reagan by you. Readers need real information on history, not personality and blanks. 

Karen Klitz 

• 

UC LONG RANGE PLAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing to express my opposition to the 100-unit high-density housing development proposed in the University of California’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan. The contiguous area is zoned for low-density single-family housing, and for good reason: It is one of the most high-risk fire zones in the United States. It is essential that we maintain adequate egress from our neighborhood, as well as access for emergency vehicles. The addition of 100 high-density housing units, along with the automobile gridlock they will create is simply not acceptable. 

It is also crucial that we stop further destruction of the upper Strawberry Creek Watershed. Impermeable surfaces, such as buildings and parking lots, increase run-off and detrimentally impact the city’s aging infrastructure. Sections of the proposed development site sit on an aquifer that, in times of emergency, such as a break on the EBMUD water line at the Caldecott Tunnel, could provide potable water for the entire city of Berkeley. Additionally, there are three fault lines that circumscribe the area — hardly a logical place for new housing.  

The City of Berkeley is experiencing an historical residential vacancy rate as well as a boom in construction of condominiums and townhouses, all of which are within walking distance to campus. It makes much more sense to utilize available housing within the stated objectives of the LRDP (“within one mile from campus”) than to begin an environmentally unsound, costly and potentially dangerous project.  

Andrea Pflaumer 

• 

REDDY CASE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I too am very sad to hear about the verdicts in the Reddy family sex slavery case. In my opinion, the whole family should be deported and their ill-gotten fortune should be confiscated. To my amazement, people still eat in their restaurant! At the very least there should be a total boycott of the Pasand restaurant. It’s a very sad comment on our “justice” system when rich people like the Reddy family can get off with such light sentences for such horrible crimes, and were it not for the quick thinking of Marcia Poole, the family might have gotten away with murder, literally. The citizens of Berkeley owe her a debt of gratitude for her civic spirit and moral courage. All too often people just turn their head and pretend not to notice. Thanks to Marcia and to the Daily Planet for shining the light of truth. 

Paul Griffin 

• 

UC HOTEL PROJECT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Central Labor Council and Building Trades Council of Alameda County support the recommendations of the task force appointed to study the proposed downtown hotel/conference center project. This project has the potential to be a major benefit to the city and the local community.  

Through a process that has been both open and thorough, the task force has had the opportunity to consider issues of concern to a broad cross-section of the community, whose support for the project will be essential as it moves forward.  

In particular, the recommendations relating to labor and employment will help encourage the creation of good, living wage jobs consistent with the City of Berkeley’s commitment to social justice and equitable and sustainable development. They will also help to avoid lengthy labor disputes, such as the ongoing fight at the Claremont Resort and Spa.  

The Central Labor Council and Building Trades Councils also support the maintenance of the task force as an active body as the project moves forward. When the developer submits a formal proposal, the broad expertise of the task force puts it in a good position to review and comment on that proposal, thus providing valuable feedback to the Planning Commission and City Council. 

This project can be a win-win for Berkeley residents, workers and businesses. The City Council adopting the entire set of task force recommendations and forwarding them to the developer would be an important step in this direction. 

Judy Goff 

Secretary-Treasurer 

Central Labor Council of Alameda County 

Barry Luboviski 

Secretary-Treasurer 

Alameda County Building Trades Council 

• 

CORRECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to correct an error in Matthew Artz’s article “School Board Moves Toward November Ballot Tax Measure” (Daily Planet, June 4-7). Mr. Artz erroneously states that BUSD has staffed school libraries with library media teachers, rather than “licensed” librarians. 

Library media teachers are “licensed” librarians: credentialed classroom teachers who possess a second credential in library science. A school librarian is therefore a teacher qualified to teach students information literacy, promote student literacy, and deliver curriculum standards, in collaboration with the regular classroom teacher. I believe Mr. Artz intended to recognize that BUSD does not have credentialed librarians in most schools. 

The confusion arises because our K-5 libraries, with the exception of a site-funded librarian at Malcolm X, are staffed by library media technicians (same initials— LMT’s), but these para-professionals are not credentialed librarians, i.e., teachers. Only the secondary schools have credentialed library media teachers, although the staffing allocations vary by site. 

What do our schools need? A professional library staff that includes credentialed library media teachers and library media technicians. Why? To improve student achievement, and enrich and support the K-12 curriculum. 

Kristin Collins 

• 

GATEWAY TO OUR CITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

You may drive along University or San Pablo avenues, and never see the wonderful neighborhoods just around the corner. Made up mostly of small cozy homes, amazing flower and vegetable gardens, fruit trees, little creeks that become raging water in winter. The low, down-to-earth scale here gives us sunshine like nowhere else in town. 

This is Berkeley’s melting pot of ethnic and occupational diversity. Fixer-upper homes are still affordable here although the fixing may take a lifetime! In our neighborhoods young families are having a baby boom such that our elementary schools north of University Avenue do not have adequate capacity. 

There are delightfully walkable neighborhoods here, but also some streets we avoid. The crime there generally seems to diminish only in election years. We wonder why the city tolerates that and why drug dealing and prostitution occurs in various locations on University and San Pablo avenues regularly. 

Why is the city imposing out-of-scale development next to our modest homes? Why does the school board have plans that may destroy schools, community resources, and pave over playgrounds for parking lots? Why are University Avenue sidewalks filthy and rarely cleaned? Why does it feel that the city does not care about us? 

In the Flatlands neighborhood of LeConte, where Mayor Tom Bates lives, things are done quite differently. LeConte Elementary School would never be sacrificed although the density of children in LeConte Neighborhood is one fourth that of the Franklin School neighborhood. When developers want to build on Telegraph or Shattuck avenues near LeConte, they go to the LeConte Neighborhood Association and work out all the details—design, parking, use, etc, and only after neighborhood approval does the project go to the city. 

In our neighborhoods we get a “done deal” landing on us, and over time, the “magic box” of development often changes to become even worse than what was approved. There is something terribly wrong here. 

We want our neighborhoods to be treated as responsibly and fairly as Mayor Tom Bates’ Neighborhood. 

Merrilie Mitchell 

Coalition for University-San Pablo 

• 

ANIMAL RIGHTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The democratic process got mugged in Oakland last month. Despite overwhelming public support, on May 18 the Alameda County Board of Supervisors’ “Fair Liaison Committee” (supes Scott Haggerty and Keith Carson) abdicated their responsibility to their constituents and killed a proposed ordinance banning wild animal acts at the Alameda County Fair. 

In the past the fair has featured elephant rides, demeaning tiger and bear acts, alligators and photo ops with a baby chimp. Bad for the animals, bad—and potentially dangerous—for the public. And inappropriate for a county agricultural fair. The endless travel, unnatural living conditions, and the stresses of performance-on-demand are harmful to the animals, as are the often brutal training methods. 

The board received some 200 letters in support of the ordinance, and not one opposed. A dozen animal welfare organizations representing more than 100,000 members in Alameda County (the Oakland Zoo, the SPCA, the Humane Society of the U.S., et al.) submitted support letters, as did State Sen. Don Perata and Assemblymembers Wilma Chan and Loni Hancock. Even County Sheriff Charlie Plummer was on board. 

Mr. Haggerty wasted a good deal of time extolling the alleged virtues of the fair’s 4-H program, his daughter’s dedication to her ailing pig, and his close ties (!) to fair boardmembers—all irrelevant to the matter at hand. He should have recused himself due to conflicts of interest. More than 30 ordinance supporters were not allowed to speak. 

Those concerned should express their dismay to Board President Gail Steele, an avowed animal lover. This matter deserves a public hearing before the full Board of Supervisors. Further, the ordinance should cover all of unincorporated Alameda County, and all county-owned property, not just the fairgrounds. The animals and the public deserve better. 

Eric Mills 

Action for Animals, Oakland 

• 

STAGECRAFT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While many who would deify Ronald Reagan praise his being “tough” against communism and terrorism, I am thinking about the 241 Marines who were killed when their barracks were bombed in 1983. President Reagan’s tough response was to abandon Lebanon. It is only now that we know this was a seminal event in Osama bin Laden’s career; it was the moment he saw the United States as a paper tiger. The larger-than-life image of a president who secretly sold missiles to terrorists in exchange for hostages and who used the money to conduct a war prohibited by our United States Congress deserves adulation for just one thing: the stagecraft of a Hollywood icon. 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

• 

MORE CLARIFCATION, PLEASE 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

I’m still trying to get it straight. The chairman of the Rent Control Board is opposed to means testing tenants because it is “an Ashcroftesque invasion of privacy” (“Rent Board Chair Chides Control Foes’ ‘Rant,’” Daily Planet, May 25-27), despite the fact that means testing is used to determine eligibility for many social welfare programs such as student financial aid, subsidized medical care and public housing. 

In response to my request for clarification (Letters, Daily Planet, June 1-3), one of his fellow commissioners, Chris Kavanagh, writes that anyone who supports means testing for tenants must also support a “parallel or reciprocal rental or property means testing process” without further describing such a process. He then states that such a process of “counterproductive and legally untenable” again without offering specifics (Letters, Daily Planet, June 4-7). Yet both tenants and landlords pay state and federal income taxes which rely on a process of means testing. 

It seems to me that rent controls redistribute income from a landlord to a tenant, regardless of whether the landlord can afford it or the tenant needs it. Instead of regulating rents, why not impose a tax on landlords whose net incomes exceed a certain amount, and use those taxes to help pay the rents of tenants whose net incomes fall below a certain amount? This would produce a more equitable redistribution of income than current rent controls do. And as the tax would be based on net income, it would encourage landlords to invest in maintaining and improving their rental properties, increasing the city’s property tax base, thereby reducing projected budget deficits or property tax rates. 

I am still hopeful for clarification, both from Commissioners Anderson and Kavanagh, regarding their comments opposing means testing. 

Keith Winnardˇ

The Wilde Irish Productions theater group is back at the Berkeley City Club with another sterling production—Irish, of course. This time it is Patricia Burke Brogan’s heartbreaking—maybe the word should be “horrifying”—internationally known drama, Eclipsed. 

Although Brogan herself insists angrily “it’s not a documentary!”, her play seems to have been the first in the storm of media attention paid to the (unfortunately) true Magdalene Laundry scandals. Films, articles, TV specials: the whole works have been spurred by the story of these women who, until uncomfortably recently, lived out their lives as quasi-slaves, providing free labor to the money-making laundries attached to some Irish (and English and Scottish) convents.  

Their crimes? They were—or sometimes were only suspected by their families of potentially being—too sexual. (Some were only seen as “too pretty”!) Enraged by, or fearful of, the stigma of illegitimate pregnancy, their families dumped them at the laundries where they were given new names.  

Their babies were placed in orphanages. Those children who as adults have attempted to trace their family history are frequently stymied. (A computer search has so far been unable to find any reference at all to the babies’ fathers). 

The last of the Irish Magdalene Laundries was closed in 1996.  

Brogan’s drama, fiction as it is, has unusual authenticity; the playwright is a former novice who was assigned to a Magdalene Laundry. 

One suspects that it is her personal acquaintance with the reality of life among these women that produces the most surprising part of the play—the playfulness which is often seen among the young women. This drama is not unrelenting misery.  

Yes, it’s a very painful story; but these are young women—probably late teens, early twenties, still very much full of life. They’ve become friends and they act the way young people do. When nobody is there to catch them, they’re very apt to joke and tease and waste time.  

It’s very real and very poignant. And a very effective part of the dramatic technique. 

It isn’t surprising that the Wilde Irish company has created such a strong production—they’re given to placing the right actors in the right roles, and this is no different. The Magdalenes themselves are fine actors, and believable, establishing individualized personalities. And both the Mother Superior (Breda Courtney) and the novice (Lauren Bloom) are uncomfortably real. 

To remark on only one or two of the production’s technical strengths: first, there is Richard Olmsted’s staging. He has done a truly remarkable job of transforming the City Club’s oblong room into a believable laundry. (It doesn’t seem do-able, but he did). And Greg Sharpin’s sound design is equally extraordinary. It’s pretty clear that the people who are running things in this production know what they’re doing. 

The laundries first came to public attention in Dublin in 1993 when 133 graves of unnamed women were found on grounds sold to developers by an old convent named High Park. (Subsequently more than 20 more graves were located). The graves belonged to the women who had served out their lives as unpaid workers in the laundry attached to the convent. 

Originally established in Ireland as a refuge and rehabilitation project for prostitutes, the laundries date back several centuries. Somewhere in the last half of the 19th century, they became dumping grounds for unwed mothers—even rape or incest victims—and for “wild” girls who were suspiciously flirtatious, or even, just too pretty. The “rehabilitation” to which they were subjected was labor in the laundries; they served as unpaid laborers doing the laundry generated by the church and, subsequently, other sources.  

It is considered to have been a good source of revenue for the church.›

Weekly public concerts from a rustic outdoor bandstand and al fresco family picnics on a park lawn on a sunny afternoon might seem most traditionally the stuff of Middle America rather than the Bay Area. But at San Francisco’s Stern Grove they are the essence of a local tradition you can enjoy every summer. 

Set in the southwestern part of San Francisco, Stern Grove is a venerable outdoor concert space that, for nearly seven decades, has hosted free public concerts on summer Sunday afternoons. This year’s Stern Grove Festival season starts out with jazz on June 13 and fades away with a Blues concert on Aug. 15. 

The festival is high quality egalitarian entertainment. Thousands of people crowd park benches or spread out on the lawn to listen to an afternoon of music.  

The grove is a natural amphitheater on the floor of a ravine that trends gently west towards the Pacific Ocean. Hillsides covered with eucalyptus, redwoods, and bright nasturiums rise steeply upwards from an open concert meadow and form a stunning backdrop to the simple stage, as well as effectively screening out the surrounding city. 

In recent years the annual programs have come to reflect the Bay Area’s increasingly eclectic cultures and tastes in music. The San Francisco Ballet and San Francisco Symphony remain traditional fixtures, but this year’s schedule (see sidebar) also features an Indonesian gamelan, West African music, Gershwin, and something called “Sounds Electronic.” 

Admission is free. There are no tickets and seating is based on when you arrive, not wealth nor connections, except for one row of picnic tables reserved for volunteers, the Stern Grove Festival leadership, sponsors, press and performers’ families. Anyone who arrives early enough can claim a good spot on the park benches or lawn fronting the stage. Many concertgoers make a day of it, trekking down into the grove in the mid or late morning and enjoying a leisurely picnic, conversation, a novel, or the Sunday paper in the hours before the performance starts at 2 p.m.  

Many concert-goers come back again and again. Stern Grove concerts have been a three-generation tradition in my family. My mother performed there in the 1940s, when Mrs. Stern, the founder and benefactor of the festival, still occupied her traditional table under a spreading tree. 

Some of my favorite Stern Grove memories are of lively Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, the Merola Opera (the San Francisco’s Opera’s annual training program for young singers), and the Bicentennial Fourth of July, when a vigorous “1776” was staged for a happy, festive, crowd. 

Owned since the mid-19th century by a Mr. Greene who had planted the surrounding eucalyptus, the grove was “discovered” as an outdoor performance space by wealthy San Franciscan Mrs. Sigmund (Rosalie M.) Stern in the 1930s.  

She purchased the property and gave it to San Francisco as a park and performance space. She later gave the University of California funds for its first women’s residence hall, Stern Hall, but that’s a different story.  

The first concert, by the San Francisco Symphony, was held in 1932. In 1938, Mrs. Stern, then president of the San Francisco Recreation Commission, set up the non-profit Stern Grove Festival Association to sponsor a regular summer program of music, dance, and drama.  

She laid down the foresighted and immutable requirement that the entertainment at the grove be free of charge. Her descendants still head the festival Association. 

Stern Grove is at the northwest corner of the intersection of Sloat Boulevard, which runs west to the San Francisco Zoo, and 19th Avenue, which speeds south from Golden Gate Park. You can reach the grove by bus or by car. Consult the Stern Grove Festival website (www.sterngrove.org) for public transit details, and lots of other particulars about attending the concerts.  

The most direct and scenic driving route from the East Bay is probably via the Bay Bridge to Market Street, all the way up Market around the shoulder of Twin Peaks to Portola, then down the hill to the intersection of Portola and Junipero Serra Boulevard. Veer right onto Sloat and the grove is not far ahead. 

Onsite parking is very limited. A steep driveway off Vale Street descends to a small amount of first-come-first-served parking near the Concert Meadow. You’ll probably have to make do in the surrounding neighborhoods north or south of the grove. Check street signage for any special Sunday parking regulations. 

A main entrance road (pedestrians and shuttles only) curves down into the grove from the intersection of Sloat and 19th Avenue, and steep, switchback, trails enter the park from several other points.  

Within the Meadow, besides lawn and bench seating, one row of picnic tables is available for first-come-first-served reservations by calling (415) 831-5500 at 9 a.m. on the Monday before the Sunday performance you plan to attend. 

You can come and go from your seats before the performance, as long as you leave at least one member of your party in place, get your hand stamped (since access is cut off to unstamped latecomers when the Meadow fills up), and get back by 1:30 p.m.  

Near the Meadow there’s the 1892 Trocadero clubhouse, originally a secluded stop for the “carriage trade,” now a venue for pre-concert talks. Food booths are set up for the concerts, and there are trails and parkland to explore. 

Prepare for your concert picnic with a blanket, quilt, or tablecloth to mark your picnic spot on the lawn or pad a hard wooden bench. Remember a hat or sunglasses; the spectator seating faces south.  

Travel light. It can be a long walk down into the grove. There are special access arrangements and seating for mobility impaired spectators. See the website for details.  

Dress in layers. It can be balmy in the East Bay and foggy at Stern Grove. It can also start out chilly, breezy, and overcast in the morning, and turn sunny and warm by performance time, or vice versa, if the fog is coming in. 

Although the performance is free, volunteers circulate asking for Festival donations. Be as generous as you can, since staging a summer’s worth of concerts requires at least a million dollars. 

Don’t smoke in the Concert Meadow or bring pets. Tall items, like sun umbrellas and folding chairs that can obstruct views, can be used but must be taken down before the concert. You can’t record or photograph the performances without authorization.  

ˇ

After 9/11, two signs appeared in the windows of many East Bay homes. One said “Hate-Free Community,” the other, “Justice not Vengeance.” A third, urging “No War in Iraq,” was widely displayed after March 2003. All three came from Inkworks Press in West Berkeley. Inkworks is a print shop with a mission summed up by two words on the cover of its brochure: “Progressive Printing.” By “progressive,” Inkworks means not only what gets produced, but how the work gets done. The press is a collective—a union shop owned and operated by the people who work there.  

This year Inkworks celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. As the date suggests, the collective was born in the ferment of the late ‘60s and ‘70s. “We were a group of activists,” says Erica Braun, Inkworks’ general manager and one of the founders. “There was a print shop before this, associated with an adult high school, where some of us learned how to print... We decided to set up a job shop that would be a resource to community groups... We seriously gathered the skills to make sure the project had a good foundation.”  

The challenges weren’t just technical. At that time, Braun notes, “there were very few women in the trade—really none. I had the wonderful experience of calling up other printers and asking how to fix our old press. From the older guys who really valued hard work, you’d get respect.” The younger men, she recalls, “were terrible.” 

Inkworks’ founders apparently learned what they needed to know. Today 21 people work at the facility on Seventh Street just north of Ashby, which the collective purchased in 1987. With two 12- by 18-inch presses and two 29-inch presses—one single-color and the other two—Inkworks can and does handle a great range of high-quality, offset printing assignments.  

Such breadth, says Bernard Marszalek, Inkworks’ sales and marketing manager, was once common for commercial presses but is getting rare. Nowadays, most print shops focus on labels or booklets or newspapers or some other format, and for good reason: Specialization makes for greater efficiency and hence larger profit margins. “If you’re doing one thing,” Marszalek notes, “you get that stuff down and have people trained for that thing.”  

At Inkworks, by contrast, “we still do a range of work—way beyond what most shops our size would probably do.” That’s because Inkworks is committed to meeting the needs of the progressive and non-profit communities. That commitment is reflected in the remarkable diversity of the shop’s products: posters, bumper stickers, window signs, leaflets, brochures, logos, books, newsletters, magazines and some hard-to-classify creations, such a deck of “war profiteer” playing cards, done in collaboration with Corp Watch, that parodies the deck that the U.S. military distributed in Iraq.  

Over 90 percent of Inkworks’ jobs are for nonprofits. “We don’t turn away projects,” says Marszalek. “If we can do them in-house, we do them here. Otherwise we find vendors who can produce the work. We bargain for the jobs ourselves, but we service the community in a way that many shops probably would hesitate to do because they wouldn’t seem profitable.”  

A client that’s not well-funded or that has no money at all is treated differently than one that has substantial financial backing. Besides discounting for community groups, Inkworks does a few projects each year as close to cost as possible. When the product is the first issue of a newsletter or magazine, says Braun, “We’ll donate the labor; you pay for the materials. You can get most print shops to donate the printing but not to underwrite the first issue.” 

Certified by Alameda County as a Green Business, Inkworks is listed in Co-Op America’s 2004 National Green Pages. The shop uses vegetable-based inks, and papers that are recycled and free of dioxin and chlorine. “Our practice,” says Marszalek, “is to minimize waste of all kinds; very little goes out of this shop.” This summer, Inkworks is taking a big technological leap in the direction of environmental sustainability. The shop has purchased a new, four-color digital press that uses no metal plates and that will bypass several stages of film and chemistry, greatly decreasing Inkworks’ contribution to the waste stream.  

Like all major decisions at Inkworks, getting the new press had to be vetted through the shop’s democratic decision-making process, which is to say it had to be approved by the entire collective. On routine matters, a majority vote suffices. “It’s the bigger decisions,” says pre-press specialist Nobuo Nishi, “like getting this new press, which is a huge expenditure and will affect the direction of the shop,” that require unanimity.  

Fifteen of the 21 people working at Inkworks are full members of the collective. New workers go through a six-month probation period, after which they become peers with everyone else. Everyone draws the same hourly wage. Inkworks is a union shop, so wages and benefits are union-scale. Year-end financial surpluses are equally distributed through a profit-sharing account. Members receive their dividends when they retire or leave the printing industry.  

About half the owner-operators at Inkworks have been working there for over 10 years. Finding new people is becoming more and more of a challenge, due in part to the increasing technological sophistication of the printing industry.  

Nishi joined in 1981. “When I came in,” he recalls, “I didn’t have any experience in pre-press. Somebody else came into bindery without any skills at the same time, and we were able to contribute fairly quickly to the shop. I think right now we would be very wary of bringing in people without any experience.”  

“The other side,” says Marszalek, “is that computers are just second nature to everybody, so a lot of people have some level of skill. But still, the software that you need to know now is more demanding than simply hands-on.”  

Add to this the recent closing of the last local resource for training on large presses, the Graphic Arts Union’s training center at the Printers Institute of Northern California. That closure reflects the outsourcing of printing and the consequent loss of local jobs in the industry. 

The upshot of all these changes is that those who are most likely to be taken into the shop are older people who already have the experience in the field. “It’s a big issue with us,” says Nishi, 54. When I started, I was just over 30, and was probably the median age of the group at the time. Now, I’m still the median age!” 

Training and technology aside, participating in the Inkworks collective demands a set of faculties and inclinations that can be hard to find. “Not everybody is cut out to be both into the craft of printing and the responsibility of managing and being a participant,” observes Braun. “Sometimes you can do two of these things and not the third.” 

“It’s also a privilege to do it,” she goes on to note. “People struggle everyday to keep body and soul together, to live out their ideals. There’s a message there. That people can do that.” 

And that they can do that right here in Berkeley, one would like to add. Inkworks’ longevity is a testimony to both the vision and commitment of its participants, and the progressive character of the local community that supports its work. To be sure, these days the shop gets work from distant clients. So many thousands of people printed out the post-9/11 window signs from its website that Inkworks’ Internet service provider warned that the shop would need to upgrade its capacity.  

But Berkeley is home. “We want to be here,” says Marszalek, “because people know where we are. We’re close to the freeway exit, which is important in terms of moving paper around. We want to be here also because we’re close to another green printer, Consolidated, down the street, that does a kind of work we can’t do, on a web press... We complement each other. Being allied with the vendors in the area is good... Also, we’re a union shop, and we like to promote union jobs, and we think it’s important that Berkeley have a diversity of resources in terms of its tax base and its community... But mainly we want to be in Berkeley because we feel part of this community, in terms of Berkeley being in the forefront of promoting green businesses.” 

This last sentiment meshes nicely with Mayor Bates’ green business initiative and the forthcoming establishment of a Sustainability Office under the Berkeley city manager.  

But its greenness is only of the many ways in which Inkworks embodies Berkeley at its best: a community that is both humane and forward-looking, committed to justice and to quality endeavor, intensely democratic and imaginatively enterprising. 

Happy Birthday, Inkworks! Here’s to 30 more! 

ˇ

FRIDAY, JUNE 11 

CHILDREN 

Roaring Wild Animals with readings from “The Biggest Bear” and “The Water Hole” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Transition/Exploration” works by five Bay Area artists, reception from 5 to 7 p.m. at A.C.C.I. Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527.  

THEATER 

Berkeley Rep “Master Class” with Rita Moreno at The Roda Theater. Runs through July 18. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Berkeley Rep, “21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com” Thurs., Sun. at 7:30 p.m. and Fri. and Sat. at 8:30 p.m. through July 2. Tickets are $25-$35. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Shotgun Players, “Quills” by Doug Wright at the Julia Morgan Theater. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through July 3. Free, donations accepted. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Wilde Irish Productions, “Eclipsed” by Patricia Burke Brogan, at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 27. Tickets are $15-$20. 841-7287. www.wildeirish.org 

FILM 

“The Corporation” Featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and many others, opens at Act I and II Theater on Center St. and runs though June 17. 464-5980.www.thecorporation.tv/usa/index.php 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Carol Field introduces her new cookbook “Italy in Small Bites” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Katherine V. Forrest will read from Kate Delafield’s latest adventure, “Hancock Park” at 7:30 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books. Reservations strongly suggested. 555-9184. boadbks@norcov.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

U of North Texas Colegium Baroque Ensemble, present “Pillars of the Italian Baroque,” a program of vocal and instrumental music from 17th-century Venice and Rome, at 12:30 p.m. at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way Tickets are $5-$10. www.music.unt.edu/the/Collegium%20Musicum.htm  

Letitia Berlin, recorder, John Dornenberg, viola de gamba, and Katherine Heater at 2:30 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $15-$18. $5 children. 559-4670. tishfeb@mindspring.com 

Ronnee Fullerton, solo viol da gamba music from the Renaissance and baroque periods at 4 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $12-$15. 206-351-3469. 

Flauti Diversi Frances Feldon, recorder/baroque flute; Karolyn Stonefelt, multiple percussion; Christy Dana, Fluegelhorn; Karen Clark, contralto; and guests perform “Wild Thing, You Make My Heart Sing,” at 6 p.m. at The Jazzschool. Tickets are $15-$18. 527-9840. 

Rotem Gilbert and Adam Gilbert, recorder and Mahan Esfahani, harpsichord and organ, “A Due Canti” chamber music from 17th-c. Italy and 18th-c. France at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $5-$15. 650-625-0635. rxg35@po.cwru.edu  

Chanticleer performs Johannes Ockeghem’s “Missa Ecce ancilla domini” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $30. 415-252-8589. 

Carolyn Mark, Bermuda Triangle Service, Pickin’ Trix at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Women Songwriters Concert at 8 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. 540-1925. 

Marimba Pacifica with guests Fantuzzi and Emaman & Hadley at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“The Movement” CD release party for Youth Movement Recods at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-10. 849-2568. 

DJ and Brook, jazz trio, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Rebecca Riots, fresh radical folk at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

An Evening with Roger Glenn at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Submission Hold, This is my Fist, 1905, Machine Gun Romantics at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Erik Friedlander, N.Y. cellist in a rare solo performance, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Hip Bones, instrumental jazz, funk and rock at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

The Katie Jay Band at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 12 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Visualizing Perspective” featuring Gary De Jong and Chung Ae Kim. Reception for the artists at 7 p.m. at 4th Street Studio, 1717D Fourth St. www.fourthstreetstudio.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Barry Lopez reads from his new work of fiction, “Resistance,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Mable Maney, author of the Nancy Clue and Cherry Aimless mystery spoofs at Boadecia’s at 7:30 p.m. Reservations strongly suggested. 398 Colusa Ave. at Colusa Circle, Kensington. 555-9184. www.bookpride.com 

Anita Wells, author of “Notes and Documents of Free Persons of Color” at 3 p.m. at the African American Museum and Library of Oakland, 659 14th St. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Farallon Recorder Quartet performs music from the Renaissance, baroque and today at 1 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way . Tickets are $15-$18, children $5. 559-4670. tish-feb@mindspring.com 

Sarah Eyerly, soprano and Phoebe Craig, harpsichord, “The Anguish and Pleasures of Love” at 1 p.m. St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $15-$18. 415-871-3793. 

Ensemble Krazyat Harry Bower and Rick Wilson, flutes; and Alan Bostrom, piano, perform music by Friedrich Kuhlau and Ernesto Koehler on period instruments, at 3 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $12. 626-792-1369. krazykat@oldflutes.com  

The Camerino Band performs “Alfabeto Soup,” Italian Renaissance songs, at 3 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Free. 806-928-6309. 

David Barnett, clarinet, and Janine Johnson, fortepiano, perfrom “The True Sound of Sentiment,” Early Romantic music at 4 p.m. at Music Sources, 1000 The Alameda. Tickets are $15-$18. 707-996-8524. 

Tamara Loring, harpsichord, at 4:30 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $12-$14. 415-663-8398. tloring@svn.net  

Musica Pacifica performs “Baroque Hits with a Twist,” at 5:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. 444-4113. info@musicapacifica.org 

Wilcat Viols Joanna Blendulf, treble & bass viols; Julie Jeffrey, tenor & bass viols; and Elisabeth Reed, bass viol, perform English consort music at 5:30 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana at Durant. Tickets are $15. 482-1684. ereed@eskimo.com 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Chamber Players at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant Sts. Tickets are $25-$35. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org  

Kensington Symphony with Eric Hansen, guest conductor, and Robin Hansen, violin, at 8 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. Suggested donation $8-$10. Children free. 524-4335.  

San Francisco Choral Artists “Piece Work/Peace Work” at 8 p.m. at Piedmont Community Church, 400 Highland Ave. Piedmont. Tickets are $13-$20. 415-979-5779. www.sfca.org 

Tom Rigney and Flambeau at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Youth Movement Records Artists at 8 p.m. at Youth Radio Cafe, 1801 University Ave. Cost is $3. 435-5112. 

Moot Davis with Pete Anderson, Real Sippin Whiskeys at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com  

Rebecca Riots, fresh radical folk at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bryan Girard and Graham Bruce Quintet at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $10. www.thejazzhouse.org 

Feliz Cumpleaños La Peña with Cuban timba music at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

Larry Stefl Jazz Quartet at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Rich Hubbard, pianist, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

John Schott’s Typical Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Brian Melvin, drummer, at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Four Eyes, Try Falling, Teenage Bottlerocket 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, JUNE 13 

CHILDREN  

Vincent Spaulding in a benefit for McGee Farm Preschool at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

THEATER 

Acme Players Ensemble “Martha Stewart in Hell” at 7 p.m. at APE Space, 2525 8th St. at Dwight. Free but donations welcome. Continues every second Sunday. 

FILM 

“Focus” A middle-aged businessman’s new glasses make him see and be the target of anti-Semitism, at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Suggested donation $2. 848-0237. www.brjcc.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

James Lee Burke reads from his new novel “In the Moon of Red Ponies” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

“Tales From the Bed: on Living, Dying and Having it All,” Jenifer Estess’ book will be discussed by representatives from Project ALS, combatting Lou Gehirg’s disease, including actor Willie Garson of HBO’s “Sex and the City” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Flash with Laynie Browne and Andrew Joron at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Pacific Mozart Ensemble performs at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $15-$20. 415-705-0848. www.pacificmozart.org 

Ruth Escher, soprano, with David Wilson, violin, Elizabeth Reed, cello and Jonathan Salzedo, harpsichord at 2 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $10-$15. 650-494-6474.  

Charles Sherman, harpsichord and Anthony Martin violin and viola perform J.S. Bach, Froberger, and Kuhnau at 4 p.m. at MusicSources, 1000 The Alameda. 528-1685.  

St. Ann’s Consort performs Sestina and other works by Monteverdi, Marenzio, and A. Gabrieli, at 4:30 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $12. 965-0587. 

Galileo Project performs “It's a Mad, Mad World,” an exploration of the darker side of 17th-century England, at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $10-$15. 787-9956.  

Don Kim, countertenor with Eric Kinsley, harpsichord and piano at 7 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana at Durant. Tickets are $12-$15. 323-469-4168.  

An Afternoon of Sephardic Songs by Judy Frankel, sponsored by the Sisterhood of Beth Israel, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. 549-6950. www.magnes.org 

Americanan Unplugged: The Stairwell Sisters at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Ben Goldberg’s Brainchild, original new jazz clarinet, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donations accepted. www.thejazz- 

house.com 

Bob Frank, Americana and roots country originals 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 

Dick Conte Quartet in a birthday celebration and benefit for the Dick Conte Jazz Piano Scholarship Fund at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazz- 

school.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 14 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Don Lago describes “On the Viking Trail: Travels in Scandinavian America” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Nichelle Tramble reads from “The Last King,” a new novel set in Oakland, at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Express, featuring Rich Yurman, from 7 to 9:30 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC 

Alameda High School Band at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, JUNE 15 

FILM 

“The Corporation” Featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and many others, opens at Act I and II Theater on Center St. and runs though June 17. 464-5980.www.thecorporation.tv/usa/index.php 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Charles Derber describes “Regime Change Begins at Home: Freeing America from Corporate Rule” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

David Brooks takes a satirical look at middle class America in “On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Lee Gaines, jazz pianist, a regular performer at the Cheese Board, in honor of Lesbian and Gay Pride month. Everyone welcome. At 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. corner of MLK. 

Ray Abshire and the Aux Cajunals at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun zydeco dance lesson with Diano Castillo at 8 p.m. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mimi Fox, solo guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz House Jam at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Steffon Harris and Blackout at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Also on Wed. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jamison Green, an activist in the transgender movement describes his experiences in “Becoming a Visible Man” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Berkeley Poetry Slam at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-7. 841-2082. www.starryplough.com 

Geoff Nunberg, Stanford Prof. of Linguistics, raises concerns in “Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Confrontational Times” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Wayne Bernhardson introduces “Handbook Buenos Aires” with slides and discussion at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Forbidden Christmas ot The Doctor and The Patient” by Rezo Gabriadze, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Also Thurs. and Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sun at 3 p.m. Tickets are $65 available from 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Dezarie at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13 in advance, $15 at the door. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jules Broussard, Ned Boynton and Bing Nathan at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Whiskey Brothers, oldtime and bluegrass, at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Ray Abshire and the Aux Cajunals, Cajun accordionist, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Key of Z: Experimental Instruments, and the Music They Make, at 7:30 p.m.at the Pacific Film Archive. Sponsored by Amoeba Records. 642-0808. 

ª

Pack the car. It’s time for another getaway, along country roads, through quiet towns, heading toward the spectacular Sonoma Coast. Allow time to sample, to browse, to walk, and at the end of the day, to relax and picnic on the beach. 

Your final destination is Doran Beach Regional Park, south of Bodega Bay, with stops in Freestone, at Wild Flour Bakery, and the other Bodega, the one without the bay. 

Heading west on Bodega Highway, your pace begins to slow as you savor the surrounding landscape. Views of rolling hills, outcroppings of rock, cows in verdant pastures, fruit laden orchards, country homes and rustic farm buildings are not to be rushed. 

A stop at Wild Flour Bakery serves two delicious purposes, a morning snack and breads for an afternoon picnic. From Friday through Monday, owner Jed Wallach and his staff bake 800 loaves of bread daily in a wood-fired brick oven designed by Alan Scott. The other three days of the week are spent building up the temperature necessary for the seven types of sourdough bread and two pastries that are rotated daily—a true labor of love evident in the finished product.  

Inside the renovated barn you are treated to wonderful aromas, bread samples, and a bright airy space fronted by a large window and extending back into the workplace. You can enjoy your espresso and scone or one of the world’s biggest sticky buns at a farm style table while watching a steady stream of customers being served by Jed and his staff. A true craftsman who highly values personal contact with his patrons, Jed doesn’t advertise. With a product this good, he doesn’t need to. 

Fortified for browsing, your next stop is the quiet town of Bodega, small in size but not in spirit. Like a step back in time, the schoolhouse on the left as you enter town, harks back to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. At the Country Store you can purchase cool Birds t-shirts along with assorted seashells, other seaside memorabilia and typical general store merchandise. Only five miles from the coast, the theme continues at Northern Light Surf Shop where well-crafted surfboards and a large selection of brightly patterned Hawaiian shirts are enticingly displayed outside. Craftsmanship is artistically displayed at the Artisans’ Coop Gallery where locals display their work in various mediums: jewelry, pottery, hand knits items, hand dyed silk. Further browsing can take you past the antiques at Hamilton Trading Co., or to the Cup O’ Mud for coffee and ice cream, but it won’t take you far. This “don’t blink” spot is small but buzzes with community camaraderie and is well worth a stop.  

Once you reach the popular coastal village of Bodega Bay, you should be ready to enjoy its natural bounty. Drive to Bodega Head, at the northern end of town, the site of an aborted attempt to build a nuclear power plant. In this case the power definitely resided in the citizens of Bodega Bay. Bodega Head is a rugged promontory with spectacular views of Bodega Harbor, out to sea, and down the coast to Point Reyes, sheer cliffs, and trails for hiking and walking. With bracing winds at your back, yellow lupine at your feet, pelicans and oystercatchers soaring above, sandy beach coves below, and, during fall and spring migrations, the spouts of California Gray Whales, this is the ideal natural site to work off the morning’s treat and clear the cobwebs of a busy week. There are two main trails circling the promontory that start from the cliff parking lot and numerous smaller trails, former deer trails, which crisscross the headland.  

Bird watchers might enjoy a gentler walk before settling in for the day’s relaxation and picnic. At the Bird Walk Coastal Area, just south of Bodega Bay, a main trail surrounds a restored saltwater marsh. Benches and viewing platforms, an information kiosk highlighting the myriad number of birds calling this marsh home, and marshland vibrant with colorful grasses, reeds and wildflowers provide a gentle environmental contrast to the rugged beauty of Bodega Head. 

Enough driving, walking and viewing. A relaxation period is critical to a successful getaway and Doran Beach Regional Park is the spot. At Cypress Day Use Area you’ll find sturdy picnic tables with grills beneath the trees or on the beach, a two-mile expanse of white sand in a protected cove, and sparkling surf. On a recent visit various beach activities were being enjoyed: kite flying, volleyball, fishing, dog walking, sand excavations, water play, beach reading and various forms of passive observation of the views. Something for everyone. 

A spacious mellow place to end a day spent discovering the riches along the Bodega Highway to the coast: its people, crafts, and natural beauty. 

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FRIDAY, JUNE 11 

Rachel Corrie’s Parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, will speak at 7:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Benefit for Middle East Children’s Alliance and International Solidarity Movement. Tickets are $20. 548-0542, 234-42 50. www.mecaforpeace.org 

“Teens and Depression” a presentation by Berkeley High School Health Center at 9 a.m. at the 6th flr conference room, 2180 Milvia St. for information call Kim at 644-6258.  

Car Wash to Benefit the Homeless from 9:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. at St. Augustine Church, 400 Alcatraz Avenue in Oakland, between Telegraph and College Aves. All proceeds go to help the homeless families with children and the single women and men who call Harrison House their home temporarily. 

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

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Players at all levels are welcome. 652-5324. 

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. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. Parking is free and is handicapped accessible. 525-5231. 

Herbal Tea at Three Learn tea lore, medicinal properties, and taste familiar and exotic varieties. Every Friday from 3 to 4 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy. 549-9200. www.elephantpharmacy.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 12 

Berkeley Fire Station Open House from 1 to 4 p.m. at Station 5, 2680 Shattuck Ave. Tour the station, see a safety presentation, and historical display and enjoy hot dogs and cake. Families and children especially welcome. 981-5506. 

Help Shape the Future of San Pablo Avenue Residents are invited to a Public Workshop to re-energize the San Pablo corridor, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Oakland Public Library Auditorium, 125 Fourteenth Street in Oakland. Sponsored by Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) District 4, the Association of Bay Area Governments, East Bay Community Foundation, Greenbelt Alliance, and A.C. Transit.  

Greens at Work will assist Aquatic Park EGRET in an old-fashioned radish pull from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. This in support of the habitat restoration efforts of Aquati c Park EGRET. Meet at the Cabin on Middle Pond at the south end of Aquatic Park, one mile south of the bike/ped bridge. The park’s south end can also be reached by heading south from Ashby, west on 67th, and then north on Shellmound to its terminus at the circle where parking is available. AC Transit 19 will take you to 67th and Hollis. Bring a hat, sunblock, something to drink, and a trowel or weeder if you have one. 

Live Oak Park Fair from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. with art and crafts, food, jazz performances. Free admission. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfair.com 

Caterpillar Count at the Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7 to 12. Who is eating our leaves? Look for the larva and match their favorite plants to discover their flying forms. From 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Fee is $3-$4. Registration required. 525-2233.  

Project Wet Educator’s Academy from the State Water Education Foundation and Water Department. It serves as an introduction to the investigation of water and its uses – from aquatic ecosystems, water conservation, groundwater, and water pollution prevention, to wastewater treatment and the Activity and Curriculum Guide that includes them all. From 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Cost is $45-$51. Registration required. 636-1684. 

The Sub-T ropical Garden a workshop on plants suitable to the inner Bay Area, at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Nursery, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. www.magicgardens.com 

Keeping Chickens in the City David Morris, chicken keeper for over 20 years, will cover the basics of ra ising chickens, egg production, and using chickens as a central component of your recycling and composting operation. He will also cover the fundamentals of the laws regarding keeping chickens in the city. Class will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Davi d's chicken coop in Berkeley. Call to pre-register and for location. Cost is $10-$15, no one turned away for lack of funds. 548-2220, ext. 233. beck@ecologycenter.org 

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

ProArts Open Studio s with over 160 participating artists in Berkeley and around the East Bay. For a list see www.mesart.com/openstudiosPA.jsp 

Ardenwood Celtic Festival fom 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Ardenwood Historic Farm, Fremont. Cost is $5-$8.50. 796-0663. www.ebparks.org 

Alt ernative Materials: Cob and Strawbale Two natural building methods are currently undergoing renewed popularity and gaining building code approval in many communities. Class runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610. 

Let Us Eat Cake Marriage Celebration Inviting all couples - gay or straight - who wish to celebrate the institution of marriage to join us at 1 p.m. at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. We will confirm our Christian commit ment to include all who wish to form loving partnerships. Families invited. Cakes for all couples to cut. Rice can be thrown. Register at 524-2921.  

Save the Day Gala A fund-raiser for the American Red Cross Bay Area with cocktails, dinner, dancing with music by Know Jazz, and auction at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland, from 6 to 11 p.m. Tickets are $125. 595-4460. 

Vocal Jazz Workshop with Richard Kalman, 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. followed by jam session, at the Albany Community Center. 1249 Marin Ave. 524-9283. 

Introduction to Hawaiian Shamanism with Elizabeth Burke at 2 p.m. at Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., from 10 to 11 a.m. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. For further information and to register, call Karen Ray at 848-7800. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

Dream Workshop on Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to noon at 2199 Bancroft Way. Cost is $10. www.practicaldreamwork.com 

SUNDAY, JUNE 13 

Live Oak Park Fair from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. with art and crafts, food, jazz performances. Free admission. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfai r.com 

Rent Board 2004 Election Progressive Slate Nominating Convention Help select the candidates for the pro-Rent Control slate. At 3 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Sponsored by the Committee to Defend Affordable Housing, the Gray Panthers and other community groups. 333-0539. 

Labor Conference of Peace and Freedom Party at 9 a.m. at the Fellowship of Humanity, 390 27th Street & 411 28th Street, north of downtown Oakland, between Telegraph & Broadway, below Pill Hill. 393-5685. 

Scratch and Itch: Poison Oak Learn how to identify the plant throughout the seasons, avoid it and treat the rash when it appears. For all ages from 11 a.m. to noon at Tilden Nature Center. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Garden Friends at Tilden Nature Center from 2 to 3 pm. for all ages. Summer is beginning and the garden is full of life. We’ll tend to the plants, munch on some snacks, and look for signs of life in the butterfly and Kids Gardens. 525-2233. 

Campfire and Sing-a-Long for the Whole Family at 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Bring your hot dogs, buns, marshmallows, lo-o-ng sticks, etc. We’ll cook over an open fire, sing old songs and tell stories. Dress for possible fog. We’ll walk uphill to the campfire circle. Disabled accessible, call for transport ation 525-2233. 

ProArts Open Studios with over 160 participating artists in Berkeley and around the East Bay. For a list see www.mesart.com/openstudiosPA.jsp 

Hands-On Bike Maintenance from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Solar Elect ricity For Your Home Now you can produce your own electricity and “sell” the excess back to PG&E, running your meter backwards! Learn how to size, specify and design your own solar electrical generator. A short field trip to a functioning house/system in Berkeley and current catalog of available equipment are also included. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610. 

Golden State Model Railroad Museum open from noon to 5 p.m. Also open on Saturdays and Fri day evenings from 7 to 10 p.m. Located in the Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline Park at 900-A Dornan Drive in Pt. Richmond. Admission is $2-$3. 234-4884 or www.gsmrm.org 

“Results” Susan Ochner presents the work of Results, a Unitarian Universalist Association partner organization improving health care, at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Road, Kensington. 525-0302.  

Tibetan Buddhism with Lee Nichol on “Conducting New Knowledge” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 14 

“Food and Insect Borne Diseases” with Dr. Loren McGills at 10:30 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Balata Refugee Camp Cultural Presentation at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley Main Library, Meeting Room, 3rd fl.  

Peace Between Peoples presented by a delegation of Americans who went to Najaf, Iraq at 6 p.m. at The Fellowship of Humanity, 390 27th St. between Telegraph and Broadway, below Pill Hill. 393-5685. 

Sacred Feminine Book Clu b meets are 7 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. to discuss “Seven Houses” by Alev Lytle Croutier. 526-6454. 

Women’s Cancer Resource Center, volunteer training, every second Monday of the month, from 6 to 8 p.m. at 5741 Telegraph Ave. To sign up call Emily at 601-4040, ext. 109. emily@wcrc.org 

Fitness for 55+ A total body workout including aerobics, stretching and strengthening at 1:15 p.m. every Monday at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5170. 

Baby Yoga at 11 a.m. and Yoga and Meditation for Children at 2:45 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 5 48-0425. 

TUESDAY, JUNE 15 

Organic Produce at low prices sold at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon Streets every Tuesday from 3 to 7 p.m. This is a project of BOSS Urban Gardening Institute and Spiral Gardens. 843-1307. 

“Oakland to Argentina on Vegetable Oil” David, Mali, and their son Emilio tell amazing stories of their veggie oil trip adventure from Oakland to Argentina in their 1980 VW Dasher this past winter, at 7 p.m. at Biofuels Oasis, 2465 - 4th St. 665-5509.  

Phone Banking to ReDefeat Bush on T uesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Bring your cell phones. Please RSVP if you can join us. 415-336 8736. dan@redefeatbush.com 

American Red Cross Blood Services is holding a volunteer orientation from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at it s office, 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Volunteers are needed to support the more than 40 blood drives held each month. Advance sign-up needed 594-5165. 

Death Penalty Vigil, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at the North Berkeley BART station. Sponsored by Berkeley F riends Meeting. 528-7784. 

Wellness for Life with Vanessa Anderson at 6 p.m. at Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Leonard Joy, UN Consul tant will speak at 11 a.m. 845-6830. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672.  

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday, rain or shine, at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes, sunscreen and a hat. 548-9840. 

Downtown Oakland Walking Tours every Wednesday and Saturday at 10 a.m to 11:30 a.m. Discover the changing skyline, landmarks and churches. For details on the different itineraries call 238-3224. www.oaklandnet.com/wallkingtours 

Berkeley Gray Panthers with KPFA’s Jennifer Stone of “Cover to Cover” at 7 p.m. at 1403 Addison St. 548-9696. 

Peralta Hopkins Garden Tour with the North Berkeley Senior Center. Advance sign up required. 981-5190. 

Adv ocates Forum: Legal Rights Training at 6:45 p.m. at the Albany Public Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Attorney Angelo Butler will lead a free legal rights training covering freedom of speech, unreasonable searches and seizures, and questionning by Law Enforcement. Sponsored by East Bay Animal Advocates. 925- 487-4419. www.eastbayanimaladvocates.org 

“Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh” a film describing Helena Norberg-Hodge’s experiences living in Ladakh, at 7 p.m. at the Fellowship of Humanity, 390 27th St., Oakland. 393-5685. 

Sons In Retirement, East Bay Branch No.2 Annual Spring Ladies Day, at 10 a.m. at the Galileo Club, 371 South 23rd Street, Richmond. Cost is $18, For reservations call Dick Celestre 925-283-1655.  

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meet s the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:15 a.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 524-3765. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities. 

com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Prose Writers Workshop meets 7 to 9 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, at Rose. For information call 524-3034. 

Fun with Acting Class at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcom e, no experience necessary.  

Berkeley CopWatch open office hours 7 to 9 p.m. Drop in to file complaints, assistance available. For information call 548-0425. 

Free Feldenkrais ATM Classes for adults 55 and older at 10:30 and 11:45 a.m. at the Jewish Commun ity Center, 1414 Walnut at Rose. 848-0237.  

ONGOING 

Vista College Study Abroad in Mexico Live with a family and learn language skills in a two-week session in July in Guadalajara. 981-2917 or visit www.peralta.cc.ca.us/interntl/studyabr.htm. 

Berkeley Vide o and Film Festival is calling for entries. The deadlinel is July 10. For information please call 843-3699. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

Find a Loving Animal Companion at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society Adoption Center, open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. T uesday through Sunday. 2700 Ninth St. 845-7735. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

Medical Care for Your Pet at the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society low-cost veterinary clinic. 2700 Ninth St. For appointments call 845-3633. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

Interesting Backy ards Do you have a really cool backyard project or unusual sustainable living practice that you’d like to share with others in the East Bay? Consider becoming a stop on the 5th annual Urban Sustainability Bike Tour on Saturday, July 31. Past sites have included features such as graywater systems, chicken coops, bee hives, solar installations and permaculture gardens. For information call Beck at 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Summer Reading Games at the Albany Public Library, from June 14th through August 14th. For information call 526-3700. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Public Housing Resident Advisory Board meets on Mon. June 14, at 4 p.m. at Berkeley Housing Authority, 1901 Fairview St. Angellique DeCoud. 981-5475. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publichousing 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon. June 14, 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 Tues., June 15, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 98 1-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycoun 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., June 16, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Katherine O’Connor, 981-6601. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/humane 

Commission on Aging meets Wed., June 16, at 1:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Lisa Ploss, 981-5200. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/aging 

Human Welfare and Community Action Commission meets Wed., June 16, at 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/welfare 

Design Review Committee meets Thurs. June 17, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Anne Burns, 981-7415. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/designreview  

Fair Campaign Practices Commission meets Thurs., Ju ne 17, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Prasanna Rasaih, 981-6950. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/faircampaign 

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., June 17, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Peter Hillier, 981-7000. w ww.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/transportationa

The four-year criminal prosecution of Berkeley’s most scandalous family ended in federal court Monday when Judge Claudia Wilken sentenced Prasad Lakireddy, 45, to five years probation, one year under house arrest and a $20,000 fine for his role in his family’s plot to smuggle girls into the country for sex and cheap labor. 

Judge Wilken reluctantly accepted the sentence suggested in a March plea bargain hearing for Lakireddy, the son of Berkeley Real Estate tycoon, Lakireddy Bali Reddy.  

Reddy is believed to control more than 1,000 apartment units in Berkeley and is serving an eight-year sentence for his role in the plot. He has since filed a writ of habeus corpus to overturn his guilty plea. 

Wilken said she had difficulty agreeing to the sentence for Lakireddy, but ultimately decided to abide by the recommendation of the parole officer. 

Last November Lakireddy, who operates the family’s Berkeley restaurant Pasand Madras Cuisine and Gift, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to employ unauthorized aliens. In return, federal prosecutor Stephen Corrigan dropped the more serious charges that Lakireddy had raped the girls and helped place them under the control of his father.  

Vijay Lakireddy, Prasad’s younger brother, is serving two years in a federal prison after pleading guilty to the same charge. 

Both plea agreements came after revelations that a court-appointed interpreter had encouraged the prosecution witnesses to embellish the stories of their abuse. 

At a sentencing hearing in March, Wilken questioned if the plea bargain proposal for Prasad Lakireddy was too lenient considering other sentences handed down in the case. 

Corrigan, however, assured the judge that the evidence against each of the family members was different and that the government had less evidence against Lakireddy than the other defendants. 

“We have concerns about the credibility of the people who would be testifying to these charges,” Corrigan said. 

Corrigan also concurred with the analysis in a supplemental sentencing report issued by Lakireddy’s defense team arguing in favor of a lighter sentence for Lakireddy. 

On the argument that Lakireddy should be sentenced more harshly because his victims were especially vulnerable, his attorney Susan Raffanti held that Lakireddy had no part in choosing them and once they were at the restaurant, he didn’t victimize them in their employment. 

She told the court that the alleged victims were treated better than indentured servants. They were paid a salary (below minimum wage) given free groceries and free room in board, she said. 

Based on the testimony of defense witnesses, Raffanti added, “they had more financial freedom and ability to save money when the worked at the Reddy family business than they do now.” 

Before the sentence was rendered Lakireddy gave a rambling address to the court. He called the charges against him “silly” and said “Thank God I put up resistance against my family’s wishes. I have good values. I hope I raise my children better than their father was raised.” 

Regarding the victims, he said they “have sympathy for us and my father.” 

On the issue of the interpreter, he said that although he spoke Telegu—the language spoken in the village from where the Reddys hail—he too couldn’t understand all of the witness testimony.  

“This is a difficult case for an attorney to understand,” he said adding that he had sent one of his lawyers to India and had offered to arrange a trip for Judge Wilken as well. 

Prasad Lakireddy is the fifth and final member of his family to be sentenced following the death of 17-year-old Chanti Prattpati, who died of carbon monoxide poisoning Nov. 24, 1999 in a Berkeley apartment owned by the Reddys.  

The girl’s 15-year-old sister survived the gas poisoning, caused by a blocked heating vent, and ultimately told federal authorities that she and her sister were flown to the United States and forced to have sex with members of the Reddy family. In all, prosecutors alleged the family had illegally brought at least 33 men, women and children into the country. 

In addition to Lakireddy’s father and brother, his uncle, Jayprakash Lakireddy and his aunt, Annapuma Lakireddy, pled guilty to immigration fraud, but did not receive jail time. 

In March the Reddy settled a civil case against four victims. They agreed to pay $2 million in criminal restitution and $8.9 million to the family of Chanti Prattipati. Michael Rubin, the attorney for the victims, said after the hearing Monday that the facts discussed weren’t consistent with the facts he believed to be true, but he had to defer to the judge and the criminal justice system. 

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Dozens of Latino students at Berkeley High are working extra hard this finals week to once again save the job of the librarian they lovingly call “La Doña,” the head mistress. 

“She’s like our grandmother,” said Enrique Rojas, a Berkeley High junior. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable going to the library if she’s not there.” 

Rojas was among about 40 demonstrators last week who demanded the school board investigate why “La Doña”—Ernestine Troutman—is losing her job as a part-time library media technician after more than 30 years in the district and why she isn’t being considered for the school’s open full-time librarian position. 

“Something fishy is going on,” said Berkeley Federation of Teachers President Barry Fike, echoing the sentiments of other speakers at last week’s school board meeting. Fike wondered how the district found enough money this year to hire a library consultant and full-time second librarian when the school opened its new library in January, but didn’t have the funds to keep Troutman. 

Next year, Berkeley High will hire a second full-time librarian and eliminate the library media technician post Troutman has held since 1982. Troutman, who received a masters degree in library science in 1973 from UC Berkeley, applied for the librarian job but didn’t make it past the screening process. 

She said the snub was just the latest of indignities Berkeley Unified has dealt her in recent years. Since the district suffered a financial crisis in 2001, Troutman has been reduced from full-time status to just an hour-and-a-half per day. 

The few hours she is paid to work are thanks to the efforts of her Latino students. Last year, when Troutman faced a certain layoff, students wrote a grant proposal to the high school’s site commission for money to pay her reduced hours. 

With the funding unavailable for next year, the students want to know why Troutman isn’t being considered for the librarian position. 

“We need her there,” said Angela Fillingim a member of the class of 2003. “At Berkeley High you realize that there are only a few people who look out for you and she’s one of them.” 

According to Fillingim, Troutman made sure that she (Fillingim) enrolled in the classes needed to graduate. The librarian also took extra time to find books she thought Fillingim would be interested in reading. 

“The students see her as an elder,” said Heidi Webber, who teaches English to English Language Learners at the high school. “She has a moral authority and she’s always willing to work with every kind of student with their projects or research.” 

Despite concerns from the Berkeley Council of Classified Employees, which represents library media technicians, the school board in March decided to drop Troutman’s position in favor of hiring a more expensive certified librarian. 

Pat Calvert, the district’s human resources director for certified employees, and Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp didn’t return phone calls about Troutman’s application for the librarian position. 

When Troutman asked why she wouldn’t be granted an interview, she said the district told her they couldn’t discuss personnel issues. 

“It’s systematic exclusion,” she said. Troutman insisted the district has been trying to get her out of the high school for years. Earlier this year, she was transferred to Washington Elementary School for three hours a day until the grant came through and she could return to the high school. 

Three years ago, the Berkeley Council of Classified Employees filed a grievance on her behalf charging that the district was using volunteers to pay for cutting back Troutman’s hours. 

“My thing is to be back at the high school one hundred percent with these kids,” Troutman said. “If I couldn’t come back, I’d be devastated. It would be like being severed from family. I’ve bonded with so many people.”›

Berkeley teenagers looking for work this summer face two monumental hurdles: a lagging economy and a job market in which desperate adults are taking the jobs once the preserve of the young. 

“The competition for jobs is very keen right now, and a lot of Berkeley teenagers haven’t been able to find jobs because adults are taking them,” said Juanita McMullen, director of Berkeley Youth Works, the city’s major youth work-training and job-finding program. “The market is very narrow now with the overall employment picture so bleak.”  

“Certainly last summer was widely seen as one of the worst in recent history,” said Stuart Tannock of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “Over the last five years during the economic downturn, there has been increasing competition for jobs at the low end—places like grocery stores and fast food outlets—with a lot more immigrants, unemployed adults, and retirees getting the kinds of jobs that traditionally went to young people.” 

Jay Verdoorn, communications director for the Sacramento-based California Job Journal, agrees. “Starting two years ago, employers are much less interested in hiring teen workers since they can hire experienced adults for the same jobs,” he said. “Especially in retail, employers are more prone to hire someone with five or six years experience than they are a teenager, and we in the workforce have become a lot more humble in the jobs we’ll take.” 

Nationwide, job chances for teenagers will be the second worst since 1948, topped only by last year’s low ebb, according to Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies. 

In 2000, 52 percent of 16-to-19-year-olds found summer jobs. By 2003, the rate had fallen to 36.5 percent, with this year’s rate expected to be a marginally improved 37 percent. 

Hardest hit are African American youth, according to Northeastern’s Andrew Sum, with more than three out of four high school age youth unemployed last summer, followed by Hispanics with two of three youths unemployed and whites with one in two jobless. 

Tannock said suburban youth from middle class families have far better chances of landing summer jobs than urban youth, where unemployment rates are higher. 

“There’s been a huge shift in the kinds of jobs that are available,” Tannock said. “The explosion of part-time jobs at the low end—the fast food model—has worked its way up the workforce.” 

The end result for young job-seekers is that not only has work become harder to get, but those jobs that are available tend to be “pretty crappy,” he said. 

One result has been that young would-be workers have turned to public and private sector job programs for help. 

“Most of the summer job work permit applications I get come from Youth Works,” said Antoinette Cooks, who processes the permits for Berkeley High School students. 

A city program operated out of basement offices at 1947 Center St., Youth Works trains youths from ages 14 to 22 in the skills needed to seek and retain employment. 

“We do job development and placement, we teach how to prepare resumes, we offer counseling, skills training and job performance evaluation,” said director McMullen. 

McMullen said she expects Youth Works will place at least 310 young city residents in jobs this summer, many with the city and some though a program on the UC Berkeley campus. Most job-seekers come from South and West Berkeley. 

“We get a lot of referrals from the schools, and we also get referrals from courts and from parents’ groups,” McMullen said.  

One Youth Works offering, Clean City, places young workers on crews that clean up debris along city streets. A new offering this year is the city’s Sunrise Energy Youth Program, in which young workers are trained to help residents find low-cost ways to save money by reducing energy use in their homes.  

The Berkeley Biotech Education Program prepares Youth Works candidates for the corporate world, with internships at Emeryville-based Sybase, and the pre-apprenticeship training program with the Cypress-Mandela Employment Center in Oakland prepares trainees for future work in the construction trades.  

For the past three years, Youth Works had administered the city’s Workforce Investment Act funding, but that will end of June 30 when Berkeley Youth Alternative takes over that program. 

“We’ll be losing some staff as a result, so our summer program won’t be as large as in the past,” McMullen said. “But young job-seekers should keep coming here. I arrive early and I stay late.” 



Is anti-Semitism on the rise on the UC Berkeley campus? 

Pro-Zionist students point to a string of incidents, including several this past year, as a clear sign of continued anti-Jewish intolerance at the university.  

But many associated with groups that have been linked to claims of anti-Semitism said that, contrary to the claims, their groups are working to combat anti-Semitism and all forms of racism on campus, but have been targeted because of their Pro-Palestinian political agenda. Claims of anti-Semitism, they said, are a quick and easy way to try to sway the political debate by students who construe any sort of political criticism of Israel as criticism of Jews. 

Additionally, as reports surface, Palestinian solidarity activists on campus point to incidents of hate crimes and discrimination aimed at Muslim, Arab and other communities of color that they say are continually deflated, overlooked or dismissed by a campus they say is being taught to accept certain types of racism in a post-9/11 environment. 

According to UC Berkeley campus police, there were three hate crimes and seven hate incidents reported to police during the year 2003 (hate incidents are reported events that do not fall under a crime already on the books).  

Of the three reported hate crimes last year on campus, one stemmed from the harassment and assault of a Sikh man wearing a turban. Another involved anti-Semitic graffiti spray painted in a lecture hall. One of the hate incidents was a report of two graffiti defacements that insulted people named Mohammed. 

The statistics compiled do not represent all of the hate crimes or incidents on campus, according to the police, but only reflect the ones that get reported. A representative from the police said the department does outreach to groups that may be the target of hate crimes or incidents in order to ensure that group members know they can turn to the police. Still, the police representative admitted, reports are fairly infrequent. 

Anti-Israel is Not Anti-Jew 

Students doing Palestinian solidarity work on UC campus claim that pro-Israel students are conflating incidents as a way to quash pro-Palestinian activism. They point to a long article recently published in the East Bay Express which documented what several students claimed was a spree of anti-Semitism since the second Palestinian Intifada started in 2000. 

One section of the Express article recounted a February incident in which Harvard professorand fervent Israel supporter Daniel Pipes lectured at Pimentel Hall and was met by numerous protesters. The article described the protesters as making physical threats to people who are Israel sympathizers.  

Pipes—the founder of the Campus Watch website which posts dossiers on university professors alleged to be anti-Israel—has been widely criticized for public remarks that many feel are racist towards Muslims and Arabs. 

Lisa Stampnitzky, a graduate student and member of Tzedeck, a Jewish group on campus, was at the Pipes lecture. She not only disputes the claim that the event was filled with anti-Semitic protesters, but also the claim that UC Berkeley has experienced widespread anti-Semitism. 

“As a student, I don’t see [UC] Berkeley as a particularly anti-Semitic place, which is not to say that there are not incidents of anti-Semitism,” she said. But “it doesn’t seem to be a rampant problem.” 

At the Pipes event she said she saw at least one person, who she said was not a UC Berkeley student, carrying an anti-Semitic sign. But for the most part, she said she and others were there to protest Pipe’s political views, not Judaism.  

Stampnitzky said she has never been the victim of anti-Semitism at UC Berkeley, even though she is involved in organizing around the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. Tzedeck, the group she belongs to, actively supports the right for Israel to exist. However, the group has also worked with pro- Palestinian groups demanding human rights and a viable state for Palestinians. 

Stampnitzky did say, however, that she has seen a trend where Palestinian solidarity activism is construed as anti-Semitic. She said she thinks it’s a tactic used by a few who feel a strong connection to Israel and want to discredit any kind of criticism. Stampnitzky says that strategy doesn’t represent her views as a Jew, nor does it allow for criticism of any real anti-Semitism. 

But those most prominently involved in pro-Israel organizing on the UC campus say there have been instances of anti-Semitism during pro-Palestine events and that some of the political claims made by activists are anti-Semitic. They dispute the claim that anti-Semitism is being used to quash pro-Palestinian activism. 

Gordon Gladstone, the Israel initiatives coordinator for Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish student center at UC Berkeley, said Hillel tries to draw a specific line when classifying anti-Semitism as it relates to Israel. Hillel says one of the group’s main concerns—stated in its charter—is a commitment “to Israel’s right to exist and flourish as a democratic Jewish state within secure and internationally recognized boundaries.” 

When political protests claim Israel does not have a right to exist as a state for Jewish people, Gladstone said he would classify that as anti-Semitism. He said he would also classify claims that Israel is an apartheid state as anti-Semitic because he said those claims de-legitimize Israel as a state.  

Pro-Palestinian groups on campus who have been labeled anti-Semitic say the lines are not drawn so clearly. Chris Cantor, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, said he would label Israel as an apartheid state because of the way an Israeli minority occupies a Palestinian majority in the West Bank and Gaza strip.  

“When they say Israel is a Jewish state, I have no problem with that, as long as that doesn’t translate into preferential rights for one group of citizens over another,” said Cantor. But in Israel’s case, he said, the occupation does give preferential treatment and therefore critics have the right to label it with the proper political term. 

Others put it more plainly.   

“The problem they have is not everyone is in love with Israel,” said Hatem Bazian, a lecturer at UC Berkeley who has continually spoken out against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and in return received political flack. “They are disturbed that not everybody is towing the line in this country.” 

Bazian said behind all the definitions of what is and isn’t anti-Semitism concerning criticism of Israel is a campaign to stop all criticism of Israel. Israel has consistently violated international law, he said, so it uses anti-Semitism to defray criticism.  

“If you are unable to challenge the content, then smear the messenger as a way to try and win the debate by excluding the other from the debate to begin with,” said Bazian. “There is nothing unique about Israel, there is nothing unique about other nation states. If [Israel is] violating international law, they cannot take a carte blanche exception. There is nothing unique about occupation. They are asking for Israel to be handled as an exception to the norm. They don’t want to hear that message, they want to manage the situation so they are the only ones who have the right to speak about Israel.”  

Hate 

While many question the legitimacy of the claims of anti-Semitism, others question why it gets so much publicity. They said even though it goes unreported, Berkeley is full of hate incidents targeting other groups, including Arab and Muslim students, especially those involved in Palestinian solidarity work.  

According to Afira Vhora, a student at UC Berkeley and a member of the Chancellor’s Task Force on Hate Bias, most hate incidents go unreported. She said students also claim the university puts less emphasis on hate crimes or incidents that target students from Arab or Muslim countries or against students who resemble Arabs or Muslims. 

“Some communities [are] favored over others by the administration,” said Vhora. She said the hate incident reported to the police concerning the Sikh student is just one incident of the how the campus mishandles discrimination and hate. She said that even though the case was reported, the university never met with the Sikh community to do a comprehensive follow-up. 

An official campus representative from the Chancellor’s Task Force on Hate Bias was not available for comment. 

“On the world political scene, we have daily torture and slaughter of Iraqis and Palestinians, we have occupations,” said Jess Ghannam, president of the San Francisco chapter of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Council. “That is on the foreign front. The domestic manifestation [is the] Patriot Act that targets Arab Americans very aggressively. Generally speaking, there is an awesome movement of hate.” 

As a result, said Ghannam, reports that conflate instances of anti-Semitism, in particularly when they are related to Palestinian solidarity work, only increase that hate toward the Arab and Muslim community. 

“We are not saying anti-Semitism doesn’t exist,” he said, but conflation only “fuels the flame of a climate that is deeply hostile to our community.” 

Other students have personal experience with hate incidents they say are a common occurrence on campus. One student, a member of SJP who wished to remain anonymous, said she is continually told to blow herself up at political rallies.  

The same student, who wears hijab, the covering worn by Muslim women, said she and other women consistently get called names, told they are oppressed and are sometimes harassed with brash sexual comments. 

When she reported these instances to the campus, she said the campus told here to join the Muslim Student Association so she could be around people with similar experiences. Most of the time, however, she said people are afraid to even report these incidents because they don’t want to draw attention. 

“Its very palpable, the hatred,” she said.  



Release of the long-awaited report tallying millions in UC Berkeley’s unreimbursed costs to the city will likely be delayed one week, Assistant City Manager Arrietta Chakos said Monday.  

The report’s findings, gathered by the consulting firm Economic and Planning Systems (at a cost, itself, of $50,000), were scheduled to be released at tonight’s (Tuesday, June 8) City Council meeting. However, with UC Berkeley extending the public comment period on its Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) four days until June 18, Chakos said the city might further fine-tune the report and release it at next Tuesday’s meeting. A final Draft Environmental Impact Report for the LRDP is due to go before the UC Regents in November. 

UC Berkeley currently pays the city $500,000 for services including sewers and public safety. 

One long-awaited item that will go before the council Tuesday is a recommendation from the Citizens Budget Review Commission calling for the city to require its workers to pay the employee portion of their retirement costs, rescind its policy to limit layoffs, and demand that unions reopen their contracts before the November election. 

Confusion between commission members and staff kept the controversial recommendation from appearing before the council two weeks ago amid claims that the omission was an effort to keep the politically potent issue away from the council. 

Councilmember Dona Spring called the commission’s recommendation “a reasonable approach,” and said the city should look at it when the union contracts expire. 

Currently the city is demanding that the unions accept a one-year deferral of three percent of their pay increases to help the city close its $10 million budget shortfall. If the unions refuse, the city has threatened to close non-essential city services one day a month to save the needed $1.2 million.  

Also on the City Council agenda is a recommendation from the Transportation Commission demanding that all transportation-related items be referred to that commission. 

Sometimes derided as the “bicycle commission” for its reputation for supporting the interests of pedestrians and bicycle riders over motorists, the Transportation Commission has been kept out of the loop on several key transportation policy initiatives, said Commissioner Wendy Alfsen.  

Last fall, for instance, the council sidestepped the Transportation Commission on a controversial initiative to give free parking spaces near the Ashby BART station for city parking attendants. Alfsen insisted the neighborhood fury over the proposal could have been mollified if the proposal was first discussed at the commission level. 

Councilmember Spring said the City Council has at times deliberately not sent issues to the commission “because they knew they’d raise a fuss.” 

In response to the proposal, City Manager Phil Kamlarz said the city didn’t have enough staff to handle an increased workload. He estimated the proposal would require at least one new employee and more frequent meetings than the current monthly format. 

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SAN FRANCISCO—As a number of water contracts in California’s agriculturally rich Central Valley come up for renewal, two California tribes say the pro-agribusiness Bush administration is reneging on government promises made to restore rivers the tribes depend on. 

The concerns of the Yurok and Hoopa Valley tribes are not always heard, tribal members say, as deals are negotiated in the courts and in government offices to decide how the region’s scarce water resources will be apportioned. Media coverage of California’s “water battles” often leaves tribal voices out as well, the tribes say. 

In a presidential election year, the stakes are high, because water districts are exerting pressure on communities and negotiators to cinch up water deals before a potential new administration with new water policies takes over leadership in the Department of the Interior, says Mike Orcutt, the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s fisheries director. 

In 2002, the death of more than 30,000 salmon along the Klamath River, which is fed by the Hoopa Valley’s Trinity River, attracted a flurry of media coverage that often included tribal voices.  

But in-depth articles are now being written on Pacific Coast water issues without mentioning tribal interests at all. A March 17 story in the Wall Street Journal on water battles in the Central Valley completely overlooked the views of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, says tribal Chairman Clifford Lyle Marshall. 

In a letter to Wall Street Journal editors published April 19, Marshall said the story ignored the huge environmental cost of water diversion schemes designed to provide Central Valley farmers with irrigation: “The fish are dying, threatening our livelihood, and causing economic devastation in Pacific Coast communities from Coos Bay, Ore., to San Francisco Bay.” 

Much of the river water that once coursed naturally from Northern California’s Sierra Mountains to the sea was dammed and diverted in the 1950s for crops in the once-arid Central Valley, now one of the nation’s most lucrative agricultural areas.  

Marshall argues in this letter that U.S. government promises to rehabilitate the Trinity and provide enough water for its salmon are routinely ignored as federal authorities side with “agribusiness giants” and their desire for cheap water.  

The sticking point is a year 2000 agreement, signed by President Clinton’s administration, that said Trinity River water levels were to be brought up to almost half of natural flow—after decades of water levels that dropped to as little as 10 percent of natural flow, due to diversion for hydropower and irrigation. 

But the Westlands Water District—which covers a large swath of the Central Valley—and power suppliers filed a lawsuit, claiming that this change would cause harm to Central Valley residents and businesses.  

That lawsuit is still in the federal court system, and the burden has been put on tribes to prove the drain on water is adversely affecting the river basin and its wildlife. 

The Hoopa tribe, along with the neighboring Yuroks, have put decades of hard scientific research into proving their observations that that low water levels caused by diversion are bad for the fish, says Joseph Orozco, manager of tribal station KIDE 91.3 FM Hoopa Valley Radio.  

The tribes are also weighing in on a related, equally contentious debate concerning the ecological viability of hatchery salmon versus wild salmon stocks.  

Those who say that the Trinity River and other West Coast watersheds are not as threatened as tribes and environmentalists contend base part of their arguments on the fact that hatchery salmon have been successfully introduced into rivers and are living alongside wild salmon stocks.  

Last month, President Bush’s administration proposed, then abandoned, a controversial plan to take many species of West Coast salmon off the Endangered Species list because of the presence of hatchery fish in the rivers.  

Orozco says the tribe is marshaling evidence to prove that hatchery fish are no substitute for wild stock. Plus, he argues wild salmon could be adversely affected by interbreeding with hatchery fish, which are more susceptible to disease and smaller than wild salmon. Worse, he says, the hatchery fish, unused to having to compete for food, also “seem to feed on wild fish eggs.” 

Hupas, who throughout their history have relied on salmon for sustenance, can even taste the difference between the two, an indication of how important healthy salmon stocks are to the tribe’s identity and well being, Orozco says. “Those who have been raised on salmon all their lives can practically tell what creek the fish they eat came from.”  

The tribe has been reaching out to communities with a stake in these water contracts—especially those in the Central Valley—to share their scientific evidence that less water for rivers like the Trinity means starved ecosystems. These efforts contributed to several parties dropping out of the Westlands lawsuit, including the Port of Oakland, the City of Palo Alto and Alameda County, according to Orozco. 

John Fistolera, legislative director of the Northern California Power Agency, one of the lawsuit’s main backers, says the 2000 agreement to restore half the Trinity River’s flow did not fairly account for the adverse effects reduced water would have on agriculture and hydropower in an energy-strapped state.  

The Hoopa tribe, meanwhile, has focused on its own awareness building: One event, begun after the 2002 fish deaths, involves an annual relay-style “fish run” along rivers and streams during spawning season. Students carry batons carved to resemble salmon.  

George Kautsky, deputy director of the neighboring Yurok Tribe Fisheries Department, says the neglect of tribal and environmental interests in Trinity River water negotiations is a long story.  

He says the original 1955 contract dictating use of the Trinity River’s water was a compromise among agriculture, hydroelectric power and local ecosystems.  

“It was a three-legged stool, but the fish and the tribal land were neglected,” Kautsky says. 

Julie Johnson works for NCM, an association of more than 600 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service and members of ethnic media. 

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The resignation of George Tenet as CIA director, following a string of disastrous failures at the agency, underscores the greater failure of the U.S. intelligence community to understand a Middle East where allegiances constantly shift, duplicity is considered an honorable political necessity and America is regarded with mixed and extreme emotions of love and loathing. 

A change at the top will be of little consequence at the CIA as long as the same “white bread” brand of espionage based on Western assumptions is practiced in a part of the world where America has staked its global reputation. The CIA, as well as its better-funded, lesser-known counterparts that function mostly under the Pentagon’s command, should go far beyond hiring more Arabic and Farsi linguists and begin to learn the Middle East’s secret language. 

It makes sense from a Western viewpoint—and jibes with a stereotypical image of a Middle East where bakshish (bribe money, to the West) opens all doors—to buy with cold, hard cash “human assets,” an intelligence term for living, breathing spies. Yet, as clearly demonstrated in the case of Ahmad Chalabi, who received millions from Washington over the years, money only buys the slyest, sleaziest and ostensibly least useful of agents. 

The West’s arch-nemeses, the radical, militant organizations that continue to proliferate throughout the region, clearly understand the limitations of money. They know they must appeal mainly to seething religious and national sentiments to recruit agents of such dedication that they would think little of giving their lives for their cause. 

In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward describes a CIA operation dubbed ROCKSTARS for its perceived spectacular success during the months that led up to the invasion of Iraq. American agents in the northern Kurdish region paid tens of millions of dollars to two Kurdish brothers and their father, who created a network of high-echelon informants within Saddam’s military and civilian ranks. Information, considered to be extremely sensitive, poured in on CD-ROMs and via satellite phones. 

Only today, as Iraq remains an unsettled cauldron, does it seem clear that many of these informants sold for top dollar information they knew to be useless about a regime that had already disengaged itself from Saddam, decided to put up a pro forma resistance to the invasion and was gearing up for protracted guerrilla warfare. 

Also disingenuous was Tenet himself, as he reported to the White House that finding WMDs in Iraq was a “slam-dunk case,” offering Bush and Cheney what they wanted to hear in their monomaniacal march to a war that they thought would secure America’s vested corporate interests in an oil-rich, strategically important country. 

Tenet, the definitive good ol’ boy who served the agency for seven years (the longest term since Allen Dulles, who served for eight) may consider Afghanistan a success story during a tumultuous tenure that also saw America’s costliest intelligence failure with 9/11. In truth, Afghanistan constitutes a case of misspent millions and a bungled message as well. The warlords who were the recipients of Langley’s largesse (“It’s easier to pay them off than to kill them,” one agent reasoned) continue to undermine Kabul’s authority, making Afghanistan a haven for a thriving drug trade and militants of many stripes. 

Ironically, it was in the Middle East that the CIA began to gain its once-storied and notorious reputation, when it overthrew the government of Iran’s Mohamad Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power in 1953. Yet the Iranian coup d’etat also planted the seeds of anti-Americanism in the region, while a politicized Islam began to present itself as a viable alternative to haphazard Westernization. Fundamentalist Islam has failed as a panacea; at the same time, an America whose worst face was bared at Abu Ghraib remains far from attractive. 

Paramount among the lessons learned from half a century of CIA misadventures in the region is that American money and might can no longer buy true friends or intimidate even some of the weakest of foes in the Middle East. Americans, however, are admired for their ingenuity and enterprise, and for the prosperity and liberty they enjoy within their own borders. It will take an administration appreciably more competent and articulate, and appreciably less tainted than present one, to convince Middle Easterners that America has the good faith and the ability to help them achieve the best of America’s values while holding on to their own religious and national traditions. 

A native of Iran, Behrouz Saba writes on American and Middle Eastern political, social and cultural issues. He is a graduate of USC with a Ph.D. in communications. 

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Persistent Chef Keeps Cookin’ as Stove Burns 

Two engine companies raced to a large apartment building at 1945 Berkeley Way early Saturday evening, summoned by an alarm triggered by smoke detectors and greeted by a smoke-filled hallway. 

Conducting a door-to-door search, the firefighters discovered a woman cooking away at a burning electrical stove. Asked to leave, she struggled to keep at her cooking, even with the stove surface ablaze. 

One incandescent burner had fallen through the surface and scorched its way into the range’s interior, but that hadn’t deterred the iron chef, who merely moved her cooking to another burner—stopping only when police hauled her out of the apartment.  

Firefighters discovered that the cook had plucked the batteries from her smoke detectors, with the result that the alarm was raised only after the fumes had oozed out from behind her closed door and set off a hallway detector. 

Deputy Fire Chief David Orth said damage to the stove was estimated at $500, with smoke damage to the apartment running several times more. 

Extension Cord Sparks Bedroom Blaze  

Firefighters were summoned to a home at 2511 Mathews St. shortly before 4 p.m. Sunday, where they found a bedroom engulfed in flames. Extinguishing the blaze within a matter of minutes, they discovered that the cause was damaged extension cord—a frequent cause of domestic fires, said Deputy Chief Orth. 

There were no injuries, and total damage was estimated at $30,000. 

Reignited Cigarette-Spawned Blaze Claims Shed 

A young man inadvertently sparked a blaze when he failed to stub out a cigarette as he worked in a shed behind his parents’ home at 2705 Hillegass Ave. Sunday evening. A small fired ensued, which he then extinguished—or so he thought. 

Then, by 3:20 a.m. Monday, smoldering coals triggered a second blaze. When the Berkeley Fire Department arrived, the shed was fully ablaze. 

By the time the blaze was finally and fully out, the shed was toast and much of an adjoining fence was history. Firefighters estimated the structural damage at $5,000, with lost contents valued at $10,000.  

Photographer Burned in Ice Cream Deception 

When Daily Planet photographer Jakob Schiller shot the picture of a firefighter hosing down an imaginary blaze during a wildfire training exercise for the paper’s June 1 edition, the blaze battler identified himself as “Captain Gary Cates.” 

But Gary Cates he was not—that’s the name of Berkeley’s former fire chief. A little sleuthing disclosed that the gentleman with the hose was none other than Capt. Rich Waters, whom “Deep Hydrant” tells us had offered up the pseudonym to circumvent a firehouse custom which calls for folks identified in press pictures to buy ice cream for the whole station crew. 

And while you’re buying, Cap’n, we suggest you pay for double scoops—and bring a cone by for our chagrined Schiller while you’re at it!

Berkeley Man Slain in Richmond Drive-by 

A 20-year-old Berkeley man died Friday night and two others were lightly wounded after shots erupted from a car that pulled up alongside theirs at a Richmond intersection. 

Andre Foster was rushed to Doctors Hospital in San Pablo, where he was pronounced dead after the 10:38 p.m. drive-by attack. 

Richmond police spokesperson Sgt. Enos Johnson said Foster was driving a blue Chevrolet station wagon on South 23rd Street near Ohio Avenue when a white station wagon—possibly a Chevrolet or Buick—pulled alongside and one or more of its occupants opened fire. 

The driver was described only as an African American male dressed in dark clothing. There may have been other occupants of the car, similarly clad. 

Neither of Foster’s passengers, Oakland residents ages 16 and 20, was seriously injured. 

Johnson requested anyone with information about the crime to call 620-6614. Detective Mitch Peixoto is conducting the investigation. 

Cheesy Heist Ends with Arrest 

A 54-year-old Berkeley man was arrested early Thursday evening after he strong-armed a shopper outside the Berkeley Bowl at 2020 Oregon St. and tried to make off with a bag containing what turned out to be two blocks. 

The irate shopper fought back, and when the dust settled, the shopper had the blocks of cheese and the robber had a new pair of shiny steel bracelets. 

Evades Gang of Four, Keeps Scooter 

When four young males tried to strongarm a scooter from a rider at Eighth Street and Channing Way shortly before 8 p.m. Friday, the resourceful would-be victim made good his escape by fleeing into his nearby home and locking the door. 

Traffic Stop Leads to Really Bad Day 

What began as a routine traffic stop at 63rd and California streets Sunday evening quickly turned into something else when Berkeley police discovered a driver holding a dealer-quantity stash of cocaine. 

The upset driver tried to resist, laying hands on one of the arresting officers. That earned the 31-year-old motorist three criminal charges—possession of cocaine for sale, battery on a police officer and interfering with an officer—and a new temporary home in the Berkeley hoosegow.Q

Last year Ralph and I were invited to a pre-prom party at the Berkeley home of our friends, Laurie, Milton and Sarah. It was a small soiree. We were the only guests. 

Because there are steps to their front and back doors, Ralph and his wheelchair could not get inside the house. Undaunted, Laurie and Milton held the party on their front walkway. They set trays of food on their porch steps: sushi and strawberries, tiny egg rolls, pickles and chocolate cookies. We drank champagne and waited for their daughter, Sarah, who was going to the Head Royce Junior Senior Prom, to come outside and model for us. But Sarah had other plans. We forgot that a 15-year-old doesn’t necessarily want to stand on her front porch in a formal dress waiting for her date, while her parents’ friends gawk at her. But we hung around, hoping that she would give us a sneak preview before her escort arrived. 

No such luck. 

I went upstairs to her bedroom and saw the size 4 prom dress hanging in her closet, waiting until the last moment to be slipped on. Laurie tried to talk Sarah into modeling it for Ralph, but it was of no use. Sarah, an exceedingly good-natured young woman, had definite ideas on how she would make her entrance and those plans did not include a quick preview. We finished off the champagne and made plans to go home. Ralph turned his wheelchair around on the front walkway and wheeled toward the sidewalk, but he miscalculated the angle of the street and began to slide downhill, out of control. 

“Help,” he screamed, just as Sarah appeared on the front porch and her date arrived in his mother’s Volvo station wagon. Ralph sailed past the nervous teenager, who was dressed in a tuxedo and was carrying a corsage box under his arm. 

“Hello,” said the young man. 

“Look out!” shouted Laurie as she ran by him in an effort to catch Ralph. Milton and I followed in a panic. Sarah stood on the porch watching as we sprinted out of sight. There was no way she was going to be of help to us in tiny sling back heels and a strapless ball gown slit up to her thigh. Her date hadn’t seemed to notice us as we ran past him. He was staring in awe at Sarah. 

Laurie, Milton and I managed to halt the wheelchair and push Ralph back up the hill. 

“I think we’ll go now,” I said to Laurie as we reached the front walkway. 

“No offense or anything,” she panted, “but that might be a good idea.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead and tried to compose herself before meeting her daughter’s escort. 

I looked back at the young man and Sarah. She looked beautiful and sophisticated and he looked like a scrawny kid in a suit that was two sizes too big for him. I waved good-bye, pulled Ralph into the van and drove home. 

“I don’t think we’ll be invited to Sarah’s prom next year,” I said to Ralph as I pushed him up the wheelchair ramp. 

“I think you’re probably right,” he answered. 

This year we weren’t asked to send Sarah off to the prom. But Sarah, always a trendsetter, has taken up boxing. So we are going to a boxing match instead of a pre-prom party. Boxing ringsides are far more wheelchair-accessible than narrow sidewalks on steep Berkeley streets. Sarah in boxing gloves and a mouthguard doesn’t look like the Sarah in a floor-length silk Jessica McClintock dress, pointy high heels and plaited hair. But she is just as impressive, determined and poised in the boxing ring as she is on her way to the prom. 

And if Ralph’s wheelchair goes out of control or gets stuck in high gear while he’s watching her at ringside, Sarah will be dressed appropriately for the occasion. She’ll come to his rescue. 

Like just about all of Berkeley, Marcia Poole never knew Chanti Prattipati. 

Graphic designers and sex slaves don’t necessarily cross paths in the normal course of events. But, by sheer coincidence, one November afternoon nearly five years ago, Poole was on the scene when Berkeley police and firefighters yanked open a darkened stairwell door on Bancroft Way and found the 17-year-old Prattipati, slumped over and unconscious. 

Prattipati would soon be pronounced dead at Alta Bates Hospital, the victim of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked heating vent in the apartment she shared with two other teenage girls also under the control of Berkeley real estate mogul Lakireddy Bali Reddy.  

Prattipati’s death ultimately blew the lid off the Reddy family’s plot to smuggle young Indians into the country for sex and cheap labor, but much to the chagrin of Poole and others, it hasn’t toppled the family’s real estate empire or yielded heavy prison sentences. 

“Justice has not been done,” Poole said. “Chanti was brought in powerless to a country that was supposed to protect her. Instead she was raped, forced into servitude, and when she died no one cared.” 

Poole has followed closely the criminal case against the Reddys which ended Monday when Reddy’s son, Prasad Lakireddy, received no jail time for his role in the family plot. Lakireddy was the fifth member of his family to accept a plea bargain and the third to avoid prison. 

“It’s part of the same theme,” Poole said. “Money talks and the rich walk.” She said she wasn’t quite so cynical before the November day she happened past the scene she’ll never forget. 

Poole was driving down Bancroft Way past Shattuck Avenue when she spotted a group of Indian men carrying what looked like a carpet towards a van parked at the curb. Something about the scene struck her as strange, so she slowed down and noticed that the load was sagging in the middle. 

“Then, a leg descended from what I thought was the carpet,” she said.  

Poole pulled over and joined the fray. She saw several other men trying to push and pull a hysterical teenage girl who kept trying to fall back on the ground. 

“I ran over and told them to stop and let her go,” she said. Then a man, who Poole later identified as Reddy, approached Poole. He said, “Go away, this is a family affair,” Poole recalled. 

She refused and ultimately managed to get a passing motorist to dial 911. When the sirens first blared, Poole said, “the Reddys melted into the background.” 

Soon thereafter, authorities found Chanti Prattipati in the nearby stairwell. Her sister, who had been wrapped up in her own clothing that Poole thought was a carpet, survived. 

The ensuing police investigation was marred from the beginning. Since most of the witnesses spoke Telugu, an Indian language common in the south-central region, and translators were hard to find, the police picked Reddy as an interpreter. 

Given that Reddy was later charged in the case, it was, of course, an error. 

“We needed someone to translate and he offered his services because we had an emergency situation on the street,” Lt. Cynthia Harris, the former Berkeley Police spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. “Of course, in hindsight we should not have done that.” 

Reddy insisted that a colleague was the surviving girl’s father, and that they were rushing the two of them to the hospital when Poole had spotted them. 

Despite Poole’s efforts to tell her side of the events, for more than a month the Reddy tale was the official story.  

Even a highly publicized article that December in the Berkeley High School newspaper from students Megan Greenwell and Iliana Montauk questioning why neither of the sisters was enrolled in school failed to reopen the case. (Greenwell later worked as a reporter for the Berkeley Daily Planet.) 

Finally, in January, federal authorities received a letter from India claiming that the Reddys were running an illegal smuggling operation. 

A renewed investigation with different translators yielded different results. Girls in both America and Reddy’s hometown of Velvadam, India, stated that they were forced to work for Reddy for almost no pay and satisfy his sexual desires. 

Although the victims spoke to investigators, many refused to testify in court. They told investigators they feared the for their safety and for their families in India. 

Last October, six of the 10 plaintiffs originally represented by Michael Rubin dropped out of the civil suit against the Reddy family after conversations with family members in India. All of the plaintiffs had been offered cash settlements by the Reddys before they eventually abandoned the cases. 

“For someone to have gone through years of deposition and then drop out for no money, I’d say that’s pretty unusual,” said Rubin. In a settlement agreed to last March, the Reddy’s agreed to pay $2 million in overall criminal restitution and $8.9 million to the family of Chanti Prattipati. 

With few witnesses willing to testify, prosecutors opted to plea bargain the cases. In 2001 Reddy pled guilty to four counts, including the transportation of minors for illegal sexual activity, and was sentenced to 97 months in jail—nearly two years more than the original plea bargain, but just a fraction of the 38-year maximum sentence he potentially faced. 

The case against Reddy’s sons—prosecuted after their father—unraveled when prosecutors alerted defense attorneys that federal translator Uma Rao had told victims to embellish their claims of abuse. 

Following that revelation the Justice Department dropped all sexual misconduct charges against the sons, Vijay and Prasad Lakireddy. 

Poole blamed prosecutors for “giving up” when the girls refused to testify.  

“They needed to find a way to get to the truth and not let these people get away with it. But the government doesn’t care,” she said.  

Not only did prosecutors plea bargain sentences, but they refused to invoke the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) which has been used to confiscate the property of mobsters and marijuana growers who amass wealth through illegal means. 

However, Lucus Guttentag, who worked on the civil case as part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants Rights Division, defended the efforts of John Kennedy, who prosecuted Lakireddy Bali Reddy, and blamed the failure to win big sentences on Justice Department brass. 

“The problem is that Washington doesn’t provide the resources for the enormous amount of commitment and understanding that goes into a case like this,” he said.  

One person conspicuously absent from the Reddy case is Assistant District Attorney for Berkeley, John Adams. He never filed charges against the Reddys, which the attorney close to the case said is not unusual, since with high profile cases where state and federal laws are violated, the Justice Department takes over because it has better resources to prosecute. 

“The Reddy’s probably would have preferred to be tried in state court,” Adams said. Still, he added, “that could have been a serious state case no doubt about it.” 

Although the plea bargains on federal charges don’t preclude a state case on rape or involuntary manslaughter charges, Adams said he remembered little of the case and didn’t recall there being sufficient evidence to press charges. 

“What I do remember leads me to believe there was a bunch of speculation, but nothing to substantiate the charges on the state’s side. Otherwise we would have filed,” he said. 

Although Reddy and his sons have faced jail time, their real estate empire remains intact, said Tom Brougham, Senior Management Analyst for the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board. Tracking the family’s properties is always difficult, he said, because they register them under different business names, but the family is still believed to own over 1,000 units worth an estimated $50 million. 

The Reddy empire often found itself in trouble with the rent board for making substandard repairs, and not returning security deposits, especially to foreign tenants, but Brougham said since Reddy was arrested there have been “far fewer” tenant complaints. 

Reddy emigrated to Berkeley in 1960 and started fixing up shabby apartment complexes in the early 1980s and quickly built his fortune partly off the backs of his smuggled employees. 

“He had indentured servants by the scores. That’s a lot of capital,” said Brougham. “If anyone else had so many working for nothing they’d have an empire too.” ˇ

The City of Berkeley’s plan to reduce its $10 million budget deficit relies most heavily on cuts to city services while relying very little on fee and/or tax increases to generate new revenue. Balancing the budget in this way will exacerbate, at the local level, the tremendous economic inequality that exists in California and throughout this country as a result of unbridled military spending, unjust federal and state tax policies, and the erosion of the public sector. 

The United States ranks first in terms of wealth inequality among all industrialized nations. The richest one percent of Americans owns 40 percent of the wealth. In California, during the so-called “boom” of the 1990s, incomes of the poorest 40 percent of California’s families fell approximately five percent. In contrast, the average income of the wealthiest five percent of California’s families increased by 50 percent. This income gap widened despite the fact that the poorest 20 percent of Californians worked 378 hours more per year in the late 1990s than they worked in the late 1970s. Children, tragically, are not sheltered from the storm: Nearly one quarter of California children grow up in poverty. 

The Bush administration, of course, has contributed greatly to the problem of wealth inequality in this country. Bush is spending over one billion dollars each day on the military while ensuring that he bankrupts the country further by giving huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. As a result of Bush’s tax cuts, people earning one million dollars a year have seen their incomes go up by $32 an hour, while the increase for those earning $20,000 a year is a meager 21 cents an hour. To make matters worse, a congressional investigation found that, for the years 1996-2000, approximately 60 percent of U.S. corporations paid no income taxes. The effect of Bush’s “tax relief” plan is to send the country spiraling into debt at a rate of one million dollars per minute. And with deficits surging out of control, Bush has the ammunition he needs to justify deep cuts into public services that serve the disabled and working poor, as well as significant cuts in federal funding to state and local governments. California will likely lose $4.5 billion in federal dollars linked to affordable housing, public education, community development, and environmental protection in the next year. 

And how has our governor responded to the budget deficit in California brought about, in part, by Bush’s voodoo economics? By slashing much needed public services, of course, and failing to raise revenues by keeping a highly regressive and unjust state tax system in place. In California, the poorest 20 percent (incomes less than $18,000 per year) pay 11.3 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the richest one percent (incomes greater than $567,000) pay only 7.2 percent of their income in taxes. And like his counterpart in the White House, the governor tells Californians that we have no choice but to “tighten our belts” and make deep cuts in to public services, which means, among other things, taking money away from cities and counties throughout the state. 

And this brings us to the City of Berkeley, which has already cut $6 million from its budget over the last two years and still faces a $10 million deficit, in large part due to the aforementioned cuts in state funding. The city’s response to the current deficit has been to make 20 percent cuts to city departments and to propose salary reductions for city employees. Only three percent of the $10 million deficit is scheduled to come from fee and/or tax increases. 

As the city grapples with the budget deficit over the next couple months, we must ask ourselves whether we want to be part of the problem, or part of the solution. The problem is staggering wealth inequality that exists throughout this country and, in fact, right here in Berkeley. The solution is to maintain the quality of public services by initiating progressive tax and fee hikes so that wealthiest among us, who have benefited disproportionately from regressive federal and state tax policies, pay their rightful share. I encourage the mayor, the City Council, and the residents of Berkeley to work together to ensure that the city’s budget is balanced in a fair and just manner.  

Michael Marchant works for the City of Berkeley. 

Criticizing the president, the war, or the conduct of the war does not put our troops in danger, rightly claims General Anthony Zinni, former commander-in- chief of the United States Central Command and Bush administration special envoy to the Middle East. He said, “Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else. And that’s the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and troops were dying as a result. 

“I can’t think anyone would allow that to happen, or that they would not speak up. Well, what’s the difference between a faulty plan and a strategy that’s getting just as many troops killed?” 

I, for one, am extremely glad that Nancy Pelosi spoke up about the criminal handling of the war in Iraq for which the Bush Administration is irresponsibly responsible. What I have found hard to believe from the beginning, is that, as a democracy, this country could have allowed this usurping of the presidency to take place at all. Why did anybody buy it that a free state like ours could be purchased by a machine? (If you don’t know what I am referring to, do a little research.) If a little gal like me can see through this administration’s plot, why can’t anyone see through the lies and know that this “Bush machine” is an imperialist demon reminiscent of the Nazi era that is robbing us of the leisure and freedom that allows us to think and realize truth for ourselves, rather than be brainwashed by self-motivated power-mongers? All we have worked for over the years is being destroyed! Like the weekend, minimum wage, a woman’s right to choose, the environment, responsible taxation, medical relief, better education for all children, the list goes on... 

I just can’t believe that the supposedly most liberated and intelligent people on Earth are standing still with closed eyes and mouths for this sad unfolding of the plots of evil men. 

If more folks could only wean themselves from their TV sets, their SUVs, and their routines, (their terror at being basically separated from God—the whole reason for anyone’s misery—and intoxication with these things) and pay even a little attention to what is really going on, they couldn’t possibly stand for what this administration is trying to pull off! 

Know that this administration is trying its best to cut us off from knowing what they are up to—from shutting down newspapers in Iraq, controlling the movie industry, (Disney in particular), as well as Fox news channel, to trying to silence dissenting viewpoints at home in every way they can (without arousing too much suspicion? Ha Ha). This administration is making the U.S. Constitution look like a left-wing idealist joke. What is actually the meaning between “left” and “right”? Think about it. Meaningless labels. Free speech??? The Bush administration only likes free speech when it’s what they want to hear! 

Differing viewpoints are what makes a democracy what it is. Leaders have to be willing take on the challenge of hearing—really hearing—what others have to say. And unless they do this, what is the value of their political work??? Otherwise it all becomes canned. 

All glories to Nancy Pelosi for calling a spade a spade! Pray for more like her, and pray that her example will get people to take the cotton out of their ears, the blinders off their eyes, and open up their mouths to speak out against what they’ve instinctively got to know is a threat to their very happiness. 

Caroline Gay Attri is an Oakland resident. ›

Editors, Daily Planet:  

The article “Cal Grad Proposes Touchscreen Alternative,” Daily Planet, May 7-9) is only another attempt to layer more complexity onto a system. It is like a British motor car. When a problem exists, they tend to layer a solution on top of the problem, but not to solve it. As layer upon layer added with each “step further” obfuscates the original architecture, new solutions will cause inconsistencies with other no longer visible aspects of the system. 

I have spent the last 30-plus years designing, developing, implementing, documenting and maintaining information systems and their components. 

I propose a much simpler solution to the problem of vote authentication, storage, tabulation and verification—simpler than the solution proposed by Daniel Silverstein in your May 7 article. Vote tabulation in a repeatedly verifiable fashion is trivial once vote authentication and storage are solved. I solve them with cooperatively developed open source, commodity hardware, write-once media (CD), a reread verification step to allow the voter to correct errors, and digital signatures. No dead trees are required. 

The first problem to be addressed is authenticity of a vote. The statement: “Once a vote is cast on a computer even the most comprehensive checks sometimes can’t ensure the machine won’t make a switch” is inaccurate given currently available verification and authentication capabilities. We can know that a vote is recorded digitally on a non-modifiable medium exactly as the voter requested it be. 

The keys to this are code transparency for the programs that run the voting machines and recording the votes on a write-once medium like CD. 

The big problem with current touchscreen machines is that Diebold will not let anyone see the program listings for each and every piece of object code in their machines. If we can’t see the code, we cannot know what it is doing. 

The solution to this problem is open source. Program listings for systems much more complicated than this simple single user application have been publicly available and cooperatively maintained for decades. The most obvious instance is the Linux operating system. But, there are open source solutions available for each and every layer of program needed to implement a touchscreen voting application. As reference, I would suggest you take a look at projects tracked by sourceforge.net or even the finished packages at freshmeat.net.  

For hardware, I would recommend commodity components. I’d get multiple manufacturers to build them from well known components such as miniCD writers, Intel processors packaged with a touchscreen into a commodity voting machine. Given the open source nature of all code for such a machine, the market would be worldwide and the units would be cheap. 

I would also cooperatively develop a set of quality assurance (QA) acceptance test suites that could be downloaded and run on any new piece of hardware. The manufacturers could use these in their QA. Election folks could use them to vet any new purchases. 

OK, now the process. Because it is open source, the state could read, verify and digitally sign OS CD’s that each county could download and use as boot CD’s for their machines. The county elections personnel could prepare a ballot XML file for each district that would also be burned onto the CD. The CD could then be digitally signed in any of a number of ways that would reveal any subsequent tampering. 

A “voter-verified paper audit trail” would not be provided on paper. It would be provided on the little CDs the machines use. After the voter has finished selecting their choices for each office and measure and verified their choices on a summary screen, the record would be digitally signed and written to the CD. The record of the vote would then be reread from the CD, and the voter presented with a second summary screen. Should the voter not like what they see, a vote nullification record would be written to the CD, and the voting process would begin again. The voter gets two chances to verify their vote. Once before it is written to CD, and a second time when it is reread from that CD. 

In information systems our mantra is “Garbage in, garbage out.” The time to deal with uncertainty is as close to the source as possible. We like to deal with potentially inaccurate data at the acquisition phase. The tricks employed by Mr. Silverstein do not address this. They are back-end compensation. They increase the load on the election management team at the time they are most burdened. Simplifying the system and vetting its components in advance will make things run much more smoothly on election night. 

Henry Mahon 

ô

REAGAN’S LEGACY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I cannot help but wonder if the media has forgotten President Reagan’s leadership in funding and arming Afghanistan’s “freedom fighter” revolution in the 1980s.  

That immoral gun-running is of course what allowed the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan, oppress Afghani women, and shelter Bin Laden’s terror-training camps. George W. Bush’s $30 million in direct aid to the Taliban in 2001 was merely a token of our support. The World Trade Center destruction and the “war on terrorism” will always be remembered in my heart as the Gipper’s real legacy.  

Lee Wallace 

• 

DAY-GLO GORILLA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The schools, the infrastructure, the social programs are all, most agree, in a severe budget crisis. Few seem to be demanding the obvious solution, the 800-pound day-glo gorilla standing in the middle of the meeting room: Cancel the war! Fund the schools! Fund everything that we, the people, know will benefit ourselves and our country! I do not understand why all public officials and all individuals of good will and common or uncommon sense are not out in the streets screaming that the federal government bring home the surviving troops, stop the theft of our money by corporations and mercenaries, and educate the children, treat the sick, fix the roads, and do the rest of what all sensible people know is necessary. 

Let’s not forget clean air, clean water, and protection for other species as well as our own. 

Ruth Bird 

• 

TACTFUL HUMOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I must wholeheartedly disagree with letter writer Sandy Rothman, (Letters, Daily Planet, June 4-7) who takes the Police Blotter columnist Richard Brenneman to task for the creativity he employs in his writing. His style is indeed humorous, but not tactlessly so, and I have not seen the “mean-spiritedness” she claims to be so offended by. Instead, Brenneman manages to impart most of the pertinent details of several incidents that are reported on nowhere else in a manner that is lively, interesting, and contains the occasional wink. To me this is a tremendously welcome change from the stupefyingly repetitive contents of the other local alternative papers. Thanks Richard! 

Douglas Smith 

• 

GADFLY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We need gadflys. They have different points of view, different concepts, and inventive ideas that no one else has considered. 

The gadflys are a bother, ask off beat questions, and are often persistent.  

Ralph Nader is a gadfly. He observed court sessions at age 4. 

He reads and speaks four other languages: Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Portuguese. 

He started and has spun off many good projects . 

He is responsible for many good books including Unsafe at an Speed and Civics for Democracy by Katherine Isaacs. 

If he gets in the presidential debate he will ask the questions which the Democrats and Republicans have already agreed not to discuss in violation of the law setting up the debates. 

Let’s give him a chance and see what happens! 

Charles L. Smith 

• 

RETAIL ACTIVITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

According to Malcolm Carden (Letters, Daily Planet, June 4-7), “Folks from the suburbs do not flock into Union Square to shop, except perhaps once a year at Christmas,” and out-of-town shoppers tend to avoid BART. I often take BART to the city on weekends, where I see numerous people (including children) boarding at the Powell Street station, carrying a variety of bulging name-brand shopping bags back to the East Bay. So it’s clear to me that many people will shop by transit when it’s a relatively convenient and cost-effective option. And as we round the top of the bell curve of petroleum extraction while global demand continues to increase rapidly, the “fact of life that retail activity and cars go hand in hand in this country” may soon turn out not to be hardwired into our genes after all. It would be prudent to plan ahead for this epiphany. 

Ken Cheetham 

• 

AC TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bus fare hikes are again being considered by AC Transit, not yet six months following the December 2003 fare hike for seniors and disabled persons.  

Despite drastic cuts in services, according to items 9 and 10 on an agenda for last AC Transit board meeting (May 19) those who can least afford a fair increase (disabled people, seniors, and students) may be asked to pay more to ride AC Transit next September 2004.  

AC Transit holds its board meetings first and third Wednesdays at 2 p.m.  

Although AC Transit does have a limited if ineffective forum for riders to protest its policies, meetings are always held in small rooms that soon fill, usually at 2 p.m., when working people are least likely to be able to attend. President Wallace, a kindly soft-spoken man, is obviously preempted in meetings by the AC Transit attorney. 

Now is the time to protest fare hikes. Let us not allow a second fare increase in less than a year! AC Transit Riders unite!  

Arlene Merryman 

• 

OHLONE DOG PARK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It came as a great surprise to learn that once again there is a campaign to curtail or eliminate use of Ohlone Dog Park. Although I no longer have a dog, there was a time when this Berkeley institution was important in my life and I know it is to many Berkeley residents today. I don’t think that current and future dog owners are deprived of the assistance and pleasure I experienced as a frequent visitor to the dog park. Once again, those who would deprive other Berkeley residents of this important resource are neighbors of the park who moved in long after it was well established, well aware of its place in the neighborhood. Many of us live in neighborhoods impacted by activities of outsiders, whether all-day parking because of being near BART or the University Avenue transit corridor or short-term parking for schools, shopping areas or other parks. Should we take down the basketball courts a couple of blocks down Hearst because too many rowdy young boys go there, parking their cars in the neighborhood and making a lot of noise? 

The long-established rules governing the park are reasonable and if they are not being followed the solution is to enforce them, correcting those who break the rules, not punishing everybody. My experience was that most park users helped enforce the rules, reminding others to pick up after their dogs, advising new owners of methods of control, and, certainly, objecting if anyone was irresponsible enough to leave dogs unattended. It was to our own interest to help other users so we all had a positive experience. 

Moving the dog park out of the neighborhood is no solution. Many users can’t drive to the Marina. Shortening the hours would discriminate against those who work and must bring their dogs to the park either before they go to work or after they return home. If neighbors are concerned about there being too many dogs at one time (which is questionable) and too many non-resident cars parked in their neighborhood (which happens to all of us), the obvious solution is to establish more dog parks throughout the city. Don’t Willard Park, San Pablo Park and possibly other areas associated with the BART line have available space? Not a lot is needed; a small space can be advantageous in maintaining supervision of one’s dog. If users had dog parks closer to their homes they would be able to walk and that would alleviate any problem with parking. 

I recall that not long ago, Doris Roberts, one of the earliest proponents of the dog park, was honored by City Council for having the foresight and interest to help establish this very important element of Berkeley life. They recognized it as worthy then, I hope they continue to acknowledge its importance. 

Honor Thompson 

• 

TIME FOR HARDBALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have lived in Berkeley since I was born 78 years ago, and as yet to see anyone in city government use any common sense about anything; including dealing with the university. No one seems to care about what the tax burden has become to the city’s homeowners. 

One example: A solution to make the university pay its fair share of Berkeley’s sewer fees. The regents have long ago stipulated that the dormitories must be self-supporting. Part of that self-support should be paying their share of the sewer fee. 

The Berkeley homeowners pay a sewer fee based on each toilet they have in their homes. It seems to me that the City Council has only to count the numbers of toilets in each dorm and throughout the university campus and charge the university the same fees that each homeowner is charged. Serve notice to the university officials that they pay the same sewer fee that the homeowner pays. 

If they refuse, then it is time to play hard ball with the university. Simply put, send a crew up to the dorms and locate each sewer outlet coming into the main line. Then proceed to close it off. Dig a hole at that point and install a gate valve. If they still refuse to pay their fair share of the sewer fee—then close the valve. 

Before we concern ourselves with more property tax increases, perhaps the City Council needs to consider this one approach to this one problem first. 

If the City Council hasn’t got the common sense to pursue this and other simple fee approaches, perhaps it is time for the homeowners to consider a new City Council in the next election.  

Andrew Laird 

• 

REALITY TV 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Inside, everyone knows that reality TV is about a different reality than what is on the screen. Knows that, like the marathon in the 1970s era film about the misery of the Great Depression (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) reality programming works the heartstrings of despair of Americans, creating hope, vicariously, for those who are struggling in their own lives. The sad part is not just the marketing of a Cindarella-like atmosphere but the backdrop fraud behind the mythical paradise—the “other” America that viewers aspire to—there being no such America. Reality TV perfects the myth in which the United States is a paradise, not the marauding superpower, the colonizing imperialist, the greatest purveyor of scientific violence and terror in all history, and the debaucher of its own citizenry. While in the world we live in, the one smoothed out of the picture by Reality TV, a president publicly declares that the United States is at war with much of the world and launches wars that will “never end,” our TV lot is to cheer the young “martyrs” whose coffins we are not supposed to see. Over in that other world, Wall Street uses “America” to steal the world’s food and their resources, to kill their poor and dictate to their governments. Of course, declaring war on the world is not a new idea, invented in the USA. That most of us can’t resist the hell that it portends for us reflects, however, the success of reality TV. 

Marc Sapir 

• 

9/11 COMMISSION 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Congratulations to KPFA for airing the New York City portion of the Kean Commission 9/11 hearings. No other media organization would touch it, not even CSPAN. 

One issue that has me seriously concerned, if we are to believe Larry Bensky’s unflinching support of the Bush administration’s account of what happened on that day, is the strength of our steel frame buildings. 

On 9/11, two 60-ton jets slammed into the towers near their points of greatest leverage and thinnest steel, yet despite no visible movement of the buildings less than an hour later, the south tower (WTC2—the second building to be hit) collapses, according to the Kean Commission, in 10 seconds. The upper floors, which were on fire and which were lighter and, according to the Bensky/Bushco model, lost all their strength from the fires, traveled through the lower floors, which were constructed of thicker steel and had no fires in seconds. WTC2 was 1,362 feet tall. Freefall in a vacuum from a height of 1,362 feet is 9.2 seconds. This means that the steel structure of the twin towers offered little more resistance than the air surrounding the buildings in it’s vertical direction. 

One can only conclude from the Bensky/Bushco New Physics Order, that steel frame buildings have incredible horizontal strength and almost no vertical strength. I submit that we immediately stop all construction of steel frame buildings as they are prone to instantaneous collapse from the forces of gravity. 

David Heller 

• 

LIBERALS SHOULD REJOICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We are in an election year and the country is more politically polarized then any time since the Civil War. Any subject which can be politicized is exaggerated and intensified so it may be exploited before it’s news cycle runs out or a new issue pushes it off the front pages. We must all keep this in mind when we read or hear the news. 

The “torture” photos could just as easily be part of a Mapplethorpe exhibit funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. There are those in the Castro who pay good money to have this done to them. No one was beheaded! 

I believe that all truths and information including photos on controversial subjects should be universally available. But different groups want the light to only shine in certain places. I believe that photos of a partial birth abortion and the moving images of a baby laughing and sucking it’s thumb inside a mothers womb should be shown to those who are about to end that life. But, of course, those gruesome images might have an impact contrary to one group’s agenda. We all need to think for ourselves; no group or side of an issue is completely right or wrong. 

The price of gasoline is high and may go higher. John Kerry is directing the blame to Bush. Logically, this should help Bush with liberals, especially here in Berkeley. High gas prices should be a benefit to health as people walk more and drive those polluting vehicles less. The higher the price of gas, the more competitive and attractive alternative forms of energy become. Congestion on the roads may lessen as people use public transportation. These are all things which the Berkeley liberals should rejoice at, yet, the price of gas will be used as an issue to attack Bush with. The nation has taken on a cult like fanaticism after it has chosen sides. The only hope is for people to analyze an “issue” and not just listen to the spin from their chosen sides. 

Michael Larrick 

As Faye Carol swings from side to side, clapping and grooving, her energy is immediately picked up by the line of young girls standing directly in front of her. Accompanied by a solo piano, each girl—with Carol’s encouragement—belts out their individual part of the tune they are rehearsing. 

“Yeah that’s it!” shouts Carol, smiling wider and wider as the girls gain more confidence as their turns come around again. 

One of the Bay Area’s most famous jazz and blues performers, Carol is training a young group of impressionable singers as part of a program called Music In The Schools. For three years, the program has recruited students from Oakland and Berkeley to be part of a year-long musical training institute.  

“There is talent in every generation that comes along, “said Carol. “It always manifests itself in some way.” She added, however, that it’s not the obvious stars she’s looking for when she auditions people for the program. “I’m not looking for the person who is going to win American Idol. I’m looking for the person who has never explored their talent.” 

Carol, whose accolades stretch way back, said she started the Music In The Schools program because she loves to teach, but also because of the recent drought in music education and opportunities for students. Because music has been such a huge part of her life, Carol said she’s dedicated herself to filling in the gaps so students have the same opportunity to experience and benefit from music. 

Eight students, ages 13-19, went through the program this year, and on June 10 they will be performing at the Black Repertory Group where they’ve been rehearsing thanks to help from the theater and its director, Dr. Mona Scott. The Black Rep has sponsored the program and given Carol space for the rehearsals and performances for the past two years. When the program originally started, it was funded by a grant from the California Arts Council. 

Several of the students this year, said Carol, had no formal musical training, and probably never would if it were not for the program. Most of them, she said, didn’t consider themselves singers until they discovered their talent through Music In The Schools. 

“If it wasn’t for Ms. Faye, I probably would have kept it to myself, because nobody knew,” said Jazmin Noble, 17, from Castlemont High in Oakland. After two years in the program, Noble is an outgoing and confident singer.  

Asked to describe the program she said there was no other way to put it other than “the love.” 

“It’s a catharsis, it’s an obligation, I can’t see myself not doing it,” she said. 

Since they started at the beginning of the school year, the students have been through Musicology 101, with singing lessons, music theory, music history, and anything else Carol thinks will help round out their music education. During the same time, said Carol, the students have blossomed. Their repertoires have grown, and during the performance the students will showcase a number of different musical styles and genres. 

The class also has a style all its own, much of which comes from Carol’s own background as a performer. 

Born in Mississippi but raised in California, Carol grew up singing in church choirs and at school. She continued to sing throughout college around the same time the Motown music was at its height.  

She got her first break when she won a talent show at the Oakland Auditorium and was awarded a two-week stint as a singer performing with Johnny Tolbert at the one of the more well-known black clubs in the area. Just as Carol was gaining notoriety, however, disco came into the mix, displacing the live band and marginalizing the kind of music she was doing. Fortunately, Carol said, she was able to turn to her friend, Martha Young, the niece of the great jazz player Lester Young, and her eventual husband James Gamble, who versed her in other music genres and allowed her to continue performing. 

Carol spent 10 years as a jazz and cabaret singer in the gay neighborhoods in San Francisco. Afterwards she built her own bands, establishing herself as an authority in both the blues and jazz scenes in the Bay Area.  

Her range as a singer, she said, has helped her appreciation of music. And since she’s played so many different kinds of music, she said she’s willing to give anything a chance. 

“We can say we don’t like something as a matter of taste, if a person doesn’t like it that’s their opinion,” she said. “I always teach my students that you at least owe yourself a listen, because you might be missing out on some you might really like.”  

That’s why, in the music history part of the program, students start at the beginning and work their way to the present. “I don’t leave any stone unturned,” said Carol. 

Students usually start around the time of Louis Armstrong and end somewhere around hip-hop, a form of music that Carol credits with re-invigorating an empty scene. 

“By the time the hip-hop generation came along, there wasn’t a whole lot of ways to get music from one generation to the next,” said Carol, unlike the times, she said, when live music was more popular and musicians were people, not icons. “They had to create a way to express what was happening on the streets…and the rhythm of hip-hop, it was infectious.” 

After a year of rehearsing, all the students say they are ready to perform. Each rehearsal is more intense and energetic than the last, as students continually build their confidence in the music and themselves.  

“I’ve found jewels out there,” said Carol. 

The performance by the Music in the Schools group is this Thursday, June 10 at 7 p.m. at the Black Repertory Group, 3201 Adeline St. For more information call 652-2120 or go to www.blackrepertorygroup.org.›

“Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry... When I take you out in the Fringe without a surrey” if you’re looking for early music in Berkeley this month. 

The Oklahoma! lyrics, somewhat modified, come to mind when contemplating the music scene. Until 2002, every other year, for a decade and a half, Cal Performances produced a major summer event, called the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition (BF&E). 

This year, lacking funds, the event has been canceled, but the Berkeley Fringe Festival is alive, kicking, and running, June 9-13. The Fringe, as the name implies, was an add-on, a variation on the theme. Now the theme is dead—either for the time being or indefinitely—but the low-budget, far more modest (but not less dedicated) Fringe is on. 

It will have some 40 public events, mostly concerts, but also master classes, a “great recorder play-in,” and other attractions. Performers include such luminaries as Chanticleer and members of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Jonathan Harris, of “Early Music News,” says the difference between academic/official and Fringe concerts is mostly in the ear of the beholder.  

“I have felt privileged to hear quite a few of the Main Stage events over the years, and some were indeed jaw-droppingly wonderful,” Harris said. “But so were some of those on the Fringe. At the 2000 Festival, for instance, my favorite show the entire week was a Fringe concert of 17th-century music by a young ensemble from Southern California called La Monica. There’s no better way to put it: they rocked!” 

There will be music performed on the recorder and the lute, various now-exotic and standard instruments, works by Bach, Purcell, Ockeghem, masters of the Italian and German Baroque, etc. Venues range from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, to St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, to the International House, and the First Congregational Church. Detailed information is available at www.sfems.org. 

Also, at the same time and intertwined with Fringe events and artists, Early Music America is holding a national conference in Berkeley, with a title that should get some kind of award: “The Future of Early Music in America.” 

The conference, say the organizers, is for “anyone who has a stake in the future of early music in America—performers (both professional and amateur); administrators, board members, and volunteers for early music organizations; educators (teachers, professors, workshop directors, collegium directors), and enthusiasts (all who love early music, attend concerts, or buy CDs).” It will take place in the Berkeley City Club, June 10-13. For information, visit www.earlymusic.org. 

Similarly to BF&E, Early Music America offers events and shows besides concerts, lectures and symposia. There will be an exhibition in the First Congregational Church during the three days of the conference, free to the public, and offering an “early-music marketplace,” including book stores and publishers, record stores and companies, instrument makers, national societies, presenters and agents.›

TUESDAY, JUNE 8 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Penelope Grenoble O’Malley introduces her memoir “Malibu Diary: Notes from an Urban Refugee” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Geneen Roth discusses weight-loss in “The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat who Fixed It” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

The Whole Note Poetry Series, with Toby Kaplan and Howard Dycus at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave.549-9093. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

2nd Annual June Jazz Jubilee from 3 to 5 p.m. at Salem Lutheran Home, 2361 East 29th St., Oakland. Free, but reservations requested. 434-2871. 

Mimi Fox, solo guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz House Jam at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Janis Siegel in a tribute to Broadway at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. Also on Wed. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Stan Ridgeway at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of ensembles from Berkeley Jazz-school at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9 

CHILDREN 

Preschool Storytime, a program introducing books and music to promote early literacy skills, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library West Branch, 1125 University Ave. 981-6270. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Marc Bojanowski talks about “The Dog Fighter” set in the underworld of 1940s Mexico, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Peretz Kidron introduces the anthology “Refusenik!: Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Penelope Tzougros talks about “Wealthy Choices: The Seven Competencies of Financial Success” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-3635. 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Concord Ensemble, a cappella sextet performs “Your Beautiful Eyes,” music from the Renaissance, at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $20. 310-867-9583. www.concordensemble.com  

Coro Ciconia performs “Ockeghem & Son,” late medieval and early Renaissance choral music, at 8 p.m. at Loper Chapel at First Congregational Church, Dana at Durant. Tickets are $10. 843-0450. pcfisher@berkeley.edu  

Billy Dunn and Bluesway at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. West Coast Swing lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Carol Denney, singer, songwriter, activist at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Christy Dana Quartet, trumpet-led original jazz, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Jules Broussard, Ned Boynton and Bing Nathan at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. www.downtownrestaurant.com 

The Key of Z: Experimental Instruments, and the Music They Make, with Peter Whitehead and his recycled instruments, at 7:30 p.m.at the Pacific Film Archive. Sponsored by Amoeba Records. 642-0808. 

Gaucho Gypsy Jazz at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

ubzorb and Sandhya Sanjana, Indian jazz vocalist at 9 p.m. at The Lucre Lounge, 2086 Allston at Shattuck. Cost is $5. 841-1390. 

THURSDAY, JUNE 10 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“High Fiber” an exhibit exploring the intersection of digital technology and fiber-based artworks. Reception for the artists at 6 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Gallery hours are Tues.-Fri. noon to 5:30 p.m., Sat. noon to 4:30 p.m. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

“Anatomy of the Artist,” a reception for photographer Hugh Shurley and others at 6 p.m. at NIAD Art Center, 551 23rd St., Richmond. 620-0290. www.niadart.org 

“Interior Dialogues” works by Katherine Boyd, Lisa Bruce and Deborah Drew. Reception at 5:30 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. 848-1228. 

THEATER 

California Shakespeare Theater, “Comedy of Errors,” Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, through June 27. Tickets are $13-$32. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Shotgun Players, “Quills” by Doug Wright at the Julia Morgan Theater. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through July 3. Free, donations accepted. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Wilde Irish Productions, “Eclipsed” by Patricia Burke Brogan, at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 27. Tickets are $15-$20. 841-7287. www.wildeirish.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Hari Kunzru reads from his new novel “Transmission” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Kevin Nelson describes “The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers Julia Vinograd and George Tirada, followed by an open mic, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave., near Dwight Way. For information call 526-5985 or 205-1749.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Zoe Vandermeer, harp and soprano and Howard Kadis, lute and theorbo, perform “Terra Antiqua,” a concert of 16th-century lute songs and early 17th-century monody, at noon at Loper Chapel, Dana at Durant. Tickets are $10-$15. 524-2803. www.zoevandermeer.com  

Elaine Thornburgh, harpsichord, performs a late 16th- and early 17th-century keyboard repertoire at 12:10 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $8-$12. 415-387-6890. tsviandilana@mindspring.com  

Healing Muses, Eileen Hadidian, recorder & baroque flute, Maureen Brennan, Celtic harp, Natalie Cox, Celtic harp; and Dan Reiter, cello, perform “Celtic Spirit,” at 3 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $10-$15. 524-5661. www.healingmuses.org 

Elizabeth Brown and Gus Denhard, lutes and Baroque guitars at 1 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $5-$15. 206-297-9507. emg@earlymusicguild.org  

Sheli Nan, harpsichord at 5 p.m. at The Music Studio, 150 Vicente Road, near the Claremont Hotel. Tickets are $10-$15. Limited seating, reservatiosn requested. 841-2860. www.shelinan.com  

Geert van Gele and Letitia Berlin, recorders and Webb Wiggins, harpsichord at 6 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $16-$18, $5 children. 559-4670. tish-feb@mindspring.com 

The Novello Quartet Tekla Cunningham and Cynthia Miller Freivogel, violins; Anthony Martin, viola; and Elisabeth Reed, cello perform Haydn’s Opus 50 string quartets, at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $8-$12. 415-794-1100. www.novelloquartet.org  

Summer Noon Concert with Ten Ton Chicken at the Berkeley BART. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 

Ducksan Distones, jazz with Duck Bailey on the piano, at 8 and 9:30 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $6-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Brian Kenney Fresno, Amy X Neuberg, Andre La Fosse at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Rebecca Riots, fresh radical folk at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Monty Alexander and Freddy Cole in a tribute to Nat “King” Cole at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Through Sun. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Keni El Lebrijano, flamenco guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 11 

CHILDREN 

Roaring Wild Animals with readings from “The Biggest Bear” and “The Water Hole” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Transition/Exploration” works by five Bay Area artists, reception from 5 to 7 p.m. at A.C.C.I. Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527.  

THEATER 

Berkeley Rep “Master Class” with Rita Moreno at The Roda Theater. Runs through July 18. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Berkeley Rep, “21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com” Thurs., Sun. at 7:30 p.m. and Fri. and Sat. at 8:30 p.m. through July 2. Tickets are $25-$35. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Shotgun Players, “Quills” by Doug Wright at the Julia Morgan Theater. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through July 3. Free, donations accepted. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Wilde Irish Productions, “Eclipsed” by Patricia Burke Brogan, at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 27. Tickets are $15-$20. 841-7287. www.wildeirish.org 

FILM 

“The Corporation” Featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and many others, opens at Act I and II Theater on Center St. and runs though June 17. 464-5980.www.thecorporation.tv/usa/index.php 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Carol Field introduces her new cookbook “Italy in Small Bites” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Katherine V. Forrest will read from Kate Delafield’s latest adventure, “Hancock Park” at 7:30 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books. Reservations strongly suggested. 555-9184. boadbks@norcov.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

U of North Texas Colegium Baroque Ensemble, present “Pillars of the Italian Baroque,” a program of vocal and instrumental music from 17th-century Venice and Rome, at 12:30 p.m. at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way Tickets are $5-$10. www.music.unt.edu/the/Collegium%20Musicum.htm  

Letitia Berlin, recorder, John Dornenberg, viola de gamba, and Katherine Heater at 2:30 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $15-$18. $5 children. 559-4670. tishfeb@mindspring.com 

Ronnee Fullerton, solo viol da gamba music from the Renaissance and baroque periods at 4 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $12-$15. 206-351-3469. 

Flauti Diversi Frances Feldon, recorder/baroque flute; Karolyn Stonefelt, multiple percussion; Christy Dana, Fluegelhorn; Karen Clark, contralto; and guests perform “Wild Thing, You Make My Heart Sing,” at 6 p.m. at The Jazzschool. Tickets are $15-$18. 527-9840. 

Rotem Gilbert and Adam Gilbert, recorder and Mahan Esfahani, harpsichord and organ, “A Due Canti” chamber music from 17th-c. Italy and 18th-c. France at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $5-$15. 650-625-0635. rxg35@po.cwru.edu  

Chanticleer performs Johannes Ockeghem’s “Missa Ecce ancilla domini” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $30. 415-252-8589. 

Carolyn Mark, Bermuda Triangle Service, Pickin’ Trix at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Women Songwriters Concert at 8 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. 540-1925. 

Marimba Pacifica with guests Fantuzzi and Emaman & Hadley at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“The Movement” CD release party for Youth Movement Recods at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-10. 849-2568. 

DJ and Brook, jazz trio, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Rebecca Riots, fresh radical folk at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

An Evening with Roger Glenn at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Submission Hold, This is my Fist, 1905, Machine Gun Romantics at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Erik Friedlander, N.Y. cellist in a rare solo performance, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Hip Bones, instrumental jazz, funk and rock at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

The Katie Jay Band at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 12 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Visualizing Perspective” featuring Gary De Jong and Chung Ae Kim. Reception for the artists at 7 p.m. at 4th Street Studio, 1717D Fourth St. www.fourthstreetstudio.com 

THEATER 

Acme Players Ensemble “Martha Stewart in Hell” continuation of the serial comedy at 8 p.m. at APE Space, 2525 8th St. at Dwight. Free but donations welcome.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Barry Lopez reads from his new work of fiction, “Resistance,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Mable Maney, author of the Nancy Clue and Cherry Aimless mystery spoofs at Boadecia’s at 7:30 p.m. Reservations strongly suggested. 398 Colusa Ave. at Colusa Circle, Kensington. 555-9184. www.bookpride.com 

Anita Wells, author of “Notes and Documents of Free Persons of Color” at 3 p.m. at the African American Museum and Library of Oakland, 659 14th St. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Farallon Recorder Quartet performs music from the Renaissance, baroque and today at 1 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way . Tickets are $15-$18, children $5. 559-4670. tish-feb@mindspring.com 

Sarah Eyerly, soprano and Phoebe Craig, harpsichord, “The Anguish and Pleasures of Love” at 1 p.m. St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $15-$18. 415-871-3793. 

Ensemble Krazyat Harry Bower and Rick Wilson, flutes; and Alan Bostrom, piano, perform music by Friedrich Kuhlau and Ernesto Koehler on period instruments, at 3 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $12. 626-792-1369. krazykat@oldflutes.com  

The Camerino Band performs “Alfabeto Soup,” Italian Renaissance songs, at 3 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Free. 806-928-6309. 

David Barnett, clarinet, and Janine Johnson, fortepiano, perfrom “The True Sound of Sentiment,” Early Romantic music at 4 p.m. at Music Sources, 1000 The Alameda. Tickets are $15-$18. 707-996-8524. 

Tamara Loring, harpsichord, at 4:30 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $12-$14. 415-663-8398. tloring@svn.net  

Musica Pacifica performs “Baroque Hits with a Twist,” at 5:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. 444-4113. info@musicapacifica.org 

Wilcat Viols Joanna Blendulf, treble & bass viols; Julie Jeffrey, tenor & bass viols; and Elisabeth Reed, bass viol, perform English consort music at 5:30 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana at Durant. Tickets are $15. 482-1684. ereed@eskimo.com 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Chamber Players at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant Sts. Tickets are $25-$35. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org  

Kensington Symphony with Eric Hansen, guest conductor, and Robin Hansen, violin, at 8 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. Suggested donation $8-$10. Children free. 524-4335.  

San Francisco Choral Artists “Piece Work/Peace Work” at 8 p.m. at Piedmont Community Church, 400 Highland Ave. Piedmont. Tickets are $13-$20. 415-979-5779. www.sfca.org 

Tom Rigney and Flambeau at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Youth Movement Records Artists at 8 p.m. at Youth Radio Cafe, 1801 University Ave. Cost is $3. 435-5112. 

Moot Davis with Pete Anderson, Real Sippin Whiskeys at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com  

Rebecca Riots, fresh radical folk at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bryan Girard and Graham Bruce Quintet at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $10. www.thejazzhouse.org 

Feliz Cumpleaños La Peña with Cuban timba music at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

Larry Stefl Jazz Quartet at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Rich Hubbard, pianist, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

John Schott’s Typical Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Brian Melvin, drummer, at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Four Eyes, Try Falling, Teenage Bottlerocket 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.

Matthew Artz 

Berkeley Resident Norm Hirose tells a Berkeley High School class about his experience at a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Hirose would have graduated with the class of 1944, and this week he and four other Japanese Americans will receive their diplomas with the class of 2004.

The young Southern magnolias (or “bull bays”) strung along Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, from mid-Berkeley through its long run into Oakland, were planted along with flowering locusts to fill empty spots and dress up the street when its name was changed from Grove Street. The idea was good, but some of the trees are clearly struggling. The life of a street tree is a hard one, and they, like most of the world’s creatures, are most vulnerable when they’re small and spindly. A lot of the damage I see is clearly just human boorishness, supplemented by our sometimes sloppy use of motor vehicles. 

Nevertheless, some are bravely starting to bloom. The flowers — for which the tree’s named: Magnolia grandiflora — are almost comically huge on such coltish youngsters, though they’re in scale with the big leathery leaves. They’re fairly substantial themselves, and fragrant, though it’s hard to get much of that from a tree blooming in the exhaust and wind of a busy street. On a senior tree, they present a graceful spectacle, especially if the tree has had room to expand into its natural symmetry. They contrast nicely with the glossy deep green upper surfaces and velvety brown undersides of the leaves. 

Those leaves are so heavy and dense that if you’re near a tree that’s dropping some onto the pavement, you can hear them crash. It’s disconcerting until you figure out what you’re listening to. Unlike some of its congeners, grandiflora never drops them all at once, which I guess is fortunate, as that would make autumn a deafening season. I’ve found them dried and gilded for ornaments; they last for years if you don’t bash them around, and then what happens is that the gilding peels off. In one of his books about walking around Japan, Alan Booth tells of eating a meal including vegetables in miso, grilled at the table on a dried magnolia leaf. He doesn’t specify which magnolia species but I’d imagine grandiflora would be best suited. 

The tree’s favorite living conditions involve nice deep rich loamy streamside soils with decent drainage, but it’s obviously adaptable, both to drought and to the poor drainage typical here. They’re native to forests of the southeastern U.S. like the liquidambars they share the street with, but as a family they make the liquidambars look like parvenus. 

The Magnolia genus is one of seven in the family Magnoliaceae, of the order Magnoliales, class Magnoliopsida, division Magnoliophyta of the plant kingdom. This sounds like being a Carroll of Carrolton in Carroll County, and with good reason. The family is among the oldest of flowering plants. Their fossils are found in really old strata, and their structures show features regarded as “primitive—that conical arrangement of sex organs in the middle of the blossom, for example, and the relatively undifferentiated banners around them, which are called tepals rather than distinct petals and sepals. 

The distribution of magnolias and their near relatives is so odd it can be explained only by continental drift. There are representatives in Asia; some of the most beautiful hail from the Himalayas and thereabouts. Then there’s a spate of them in southern North America, and nothing in between. There’s a whole suite of plant species with that odd pattern, including ginseng, Jack-in-the-pulpit, and mayapple, and they have animal companions like alligators, hellbenders, and paddlefish. 

We used to have native magnolias here, in the Eocene when “here” was a lot different, a bit warmer and a lot wetter all year. We had swamp cypress and tupelo too, as the Southeast has now, and dawn redwood, like China. Well, we didn’t have “we,” as we hadn’t evolved yet, let alone made the three-quarters-of-the-world trek from Africa. There are a few dawn redwoods planted in Berkeley, on the UC campus and some public places (there’s one by the tennis courts at MLK and Russell) and private gardens. 

Now that we’re here, arriving in our variously hued waves, we seem to be arranging several sorts of Old Home Week reunions: the liquidambars with the magnolias of the contemporary Southeast, and the magnolias and dawn redwoods that coexisted here in the distant past. I hope they’re finding the venue congenial.Ã

TUESDAY, JUNE 8 

Organic Produce at low prices sold at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon Streets from 3 to 7 p.m. 843-1307. 

Backpacking 101 with Martin Dickinson at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Phone Banking to ReDefeat Bush on Tuesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Bring your cell phones. Please RSVP if you can join us. 415-336 8736. dan@redefeatbush.com 

Writer’s Workshop with Teresa Leyung Ryan at 7 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books, 398 Colusa Avenue at Colusa Circle, Kensington. Suggested $5-$20 sliding scale donation. 559-9184. www.bookpride.com 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672.  

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wed., rain or shine, at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes, sunscreen and a hat. 548-9840. 

Poetry Writing Workshop with Alison Seevak at 7 p.m. in the Edith Stone Room, Albany Public Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 20. 

East Bay Genealogical Society meets at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room at the Family History Center, 4700 Lincoln Avenue in Oakland. Ray McFalone will speak about “A Time to Remember.” Guests always welcome. 635-6692. 

Boadecia’s Women’s Book Group meets to discuss Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price of Salt” at 7 p.m. at 398 Colusa Ave., Kensington. Suggested donation $3-$5. www.bookpride.com 

Book Forum with American Society of Journalists and Authors to discuss what publishers are looking for at 7:30 p.m. at the Journalism Library, UC Campus. RSVP to 530-6699. 

Fun with Acting Class every Wednesday at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome, no experience necessary.  

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities. 

com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JUNE 10 

Medgar Evers Voter Advocacy Summit Thurs. through Sun at St. Paul AME Church, Ashby Ave. Hands-on nonpartisan voter advocacy training by grassroots specialists. Topics include campaign planning; fundraising; message development; GOTV; and campaign finance. The cost is $25, which will include meals, t-shirt, Voter Empowerment Handbook and certificate of completion. RSVP with the Berkeley NAACP Youth Council 435-3101. www.geocities.com/berkeleynaacp  

Voter Registration Training and pot-luck at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento at Cedar. 415-565-0201, ext. 23. 

Awesome Earthen Buildings from Around the World Slide show and presentation by Janell Kapoor at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Berkeley Farmer’s Market with all organic produce at Elephant Pharmacy parking lot, 1607 Shattuck Ave., at Cedar from 3 to 7 p.m. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Reading Workshop for Parents of 3rd-5th Graders at 8 p.m. at Classroom Mattters, 2607 Seventh St., Suite E. Free, reservations required 540-8646. www.classroommatters.com 

East Bay Mac User Group meets the 2nd Thursday of every month, from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Expression Center for New Media, 6601 Shellmound St. www.expression.edu  

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers meets at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave. for a fly-tying demonstration and slide show by Andy Burk. Cost is $5 for non-members. 547-8629. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 11 

Rachel Corrie’s Parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, will speak at 7:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Benefit for Middle East Children’s Alliance and International Solidarity Movement. Tickets are $20. 548-0542, 234-4250. www.mecaforpeace.org 

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

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Players at all levels are welcome. 652-5324. 

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. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets every Friday at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. Parking is free and is handicapped accessible. For information call Katherine, 525-5231. 

Herbal Tea at Three Learn tea lore, medicinal properties, and taste familiar and exotic varieties. Every Friday from 3 to 4 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy. 549-9200. www.elephantpharmacy.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 12 

Berkeley Fire Station Open House from 1 to 4 p.m. at Station 5, 2680 Shattuck Ave. Tour the station, see a safety presentation, and historical display and enjoy hot dogs and cake. Families and children especially welcome. 981-5506. 

Help Shape the Future of San Pablo Avenue Residents are invited to a Public Workshop to re-energize the San Pablo corridor, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Oakland Public Library Auditorium, 125 Fourteenth Street in Oakland. Sponsored by Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) District 4, the Association of Bay Area Governments, East Bay Community Foundation, Greenbelt Alliance, and A.C. Transit.  

Greens at Work will assist Aquatic Park EGRET in an old-fashioned radish pull from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. This in support of the habitat restoration efforts of Aquatic Park EGRET. Meet at the Cabin on Middle Pond at the south end of Aquatic Park, one mile south of the bike/ped bridge. The park’s south end can also be reached by heading south from Ashby, west on 67th, and then north on Shellmound to its terminus at the circle where parking is available. AC Transit 19 will take you to 67th and Hollis. Bring a hat, sunblock, something to drink, and a trowel or weeder if you have one. 

Caterpillar Count at the Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7 to 12. Who is eating our leaves? Look for the larva and match their favorite plants to discover their flying forms. From 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Fee is $3-$4. Registration required. 525-2233.  

Project Wet Educator’s Academy from the State Water Education Foundation and Water Department. It serves as an introduction to the investigation of water and its uses – from aquatic ecosystems, water conservation, groundwater, and water pollution prevention, to wastewater treatment and the Activity and Curriculum Guide that includes them all. From 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Cost is $45-$51. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Live Oak Park Fair from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. with art and crafts, food, jazz performances. Free admission. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfair.com 

Keeping Chickens in the City David Morris, chicken keeper for over 20 years, will cover the basics of raising chickens, egg production, and using chickens as a central component of your recycling and composting operation. He will also cover the fundamentals of the laws regarding keeping chickens in the city. Class will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at David's chicken coop in Berkeley. Call to pre-register and for location. Cost is $10-$15, no one turned away for lack of funds. 548-2220, ext. 233. beck@ecologycenter.org 

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

ProArts Open Studios with over 160 participating artists in Berkeley and around the East Bay. For a list see www.mesart.com/openstudiosPA.jsp 

Ardenwood Celtic Festival fom 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Ardenwood Historic Farm, Fremont. Cost is $5-$8.50. 796-0663. www.ebparks.org 

Alternative Materials: Cob and Strawbale Two natural building methods are currently undergoing renewed popularity and gaining building code approval in many communities. Class runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610. 

Let Us Eat Cake Marriage Celebration Inviting all couples - gay or straight - who wish to celebrate the institution of marriage to join us at 1 p.m. at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. We will confirm our Christian commitment to include all who wish to form loving partnerships. Families invited. Cakes for all couples to cut. Rice can be thrown. Register at 524-2921.  

Save the Day Gala A fund-raiser for the American Red Cross Bay Area with cocktails, dinner, dancing with music by Know Jazz & auction at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland, from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. Ticket are $125. 595-4460. 

Vocal Jazz Workshop with Richard Kalman from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. followed by jam session, at the Albany Community Center. 1249 Marin Ave. 524-9283. 

Introduction to Hawaiian Shamanism with Elizabeth Burke at 2 p.m. at Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. The class is taught by Rosie Linsky, who at age 72, has practiced yoga for over 40 years. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. For further information and to register, call Karen Ray at 848-7800. 

Pet Adoptions, sponsored by Home at Last, from noon to 5 p.m., Hearst and 4th St. 548-9223. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

Dream Workshop on Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to noon at 2199 Bancroft Way. Cost is $10. www.practicaldreamwork.com 

SUNDAY, JUNE 13 

Rent Board 2004 Election Progressive Slate Nominating Convention Help select the candidates for the pro-Rent Control slate. At 3 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Sponsored by the Committee to Defend Affordable Housing, the Gray Panthers and other community groups. 333-0539. 

Scratch and Itch: Poison Oak Learn how to identify the plant throughout the seasons, avoid it and treat the rash when it appears. For all ages from 11 a.m. to noon at Tilden Nature Center. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Garden Friends at Tilden Nature Center from 2 to 3 pm. for all ages. Summer is beginning and the garden is full of life. We’ll tend to the plants, munch on some snacks, and look for signs of life in the butterfly and Kids Gardens. 525-2233. 

Campfire and Sing-a-Long for the Whole Family at 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Bring your hot dogs, buns, marshmallows, lo-o-ng sticks, etc. We’ll cook over an open fire, sing old songs and tell stories. Dress for possible fog. We’ll walk uphill to the campfire circle. Disabled accessible, call for transportation 525-2233. 

ProArts Open Studios with over 160 participating artists in Berkeley and around the East Bay. For a list see www.mesart.com/openstudiosPA.jsp 

Hands-On Bike Maintenance Class from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Solar Electricity For Your Home Now you can produce your own electricity and “sell” the excess back to PG&E, running your meter backwards! Plus you can receive thousands of rebate dollars from the State at the same time. Learn how to size, specify and design your own solar electrical generator. A short field trip to a functioning house/system in Berkeley and current catalog of available equipment are also included. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610. 

Golden State Model Railroad Museum open from noon to 5 p.m. Also open on Saturdays and Friday evenings from 7 to 10 p.m. Located in the Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline Park at 900-A Dornan Drive in Pt. Richmond. Admission is $2-$3. 234-4884 or www.gsmrm.org 

“Results” Susan Ochner presents the work of Results, a Unitarian Universalist Association partner organization improving health care, at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Road, Kensington. 525-0302.  

Tibetan Buddhism with Lee Nichol on “Conducting New Knowledge” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 14 

Live Oak Park Fair from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. with art and crafts, food, jazz performances. Free admission. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfair.com 

“Food and Insect Borne Diseases” with Dr. Loren McGills at 10:30 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Balata Refugee Camp Cultural Presentation at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley Main Library, Meeting Room, 3rd fl.  

Sacred Feminine Book Club meets are 7 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. to discuss “Seven Houses” by Alev Lytle Croutier. 526-6454. 

Women’s Cancer Resource Center, volunteer training, every second Monday of the month, from 6 to 8 p.m. at 5741 Telegraph Ave. To sign up call Emily at 601-4040, ext. 109. emily@wcrc.org 

Fitness for 55+ A total body workout including aerobics, stretching and strengthening at 1:15 p.m. every Monday at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5170. 

Baby Yoga at 11 a.m. and Yoga and Meditation for Children at 2:45 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING 

Vista College Study Abroad in Mexico Live with a family and learn language skill in a two-week session in July in Guadalajara. For information please call 981-2917 or visit www.peralta.cc.ca.us/interntl/studyabr.htm. 

Berkeley Video and Film Festival is calling for entries. The deadlinel is July 10. For information please call 843-3699. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

Find a Loving Animal Companion at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society Adoption Center, open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. 2700 Ninth St. 845-7735. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

Medical Care for Your Pet at the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society low-cost veterinary clinic. 2700 Ninth St. For appointments call 845-3633. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

Interesting Backyards Do you have a really cool backyard project or unusual sustainable living practice that you’d like to share with others in the East Bay? Consider becoming a stop on the 5th annual Urban Sustainability Bike Tour on Saturday, July 31. Past sites have included features such as graywater systems, chicken coops, bee hives, solar installations and permaculture gardens. For information call Beck at 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Summer Reading Games at the Albany Public Library, from June 14th through August 14th. For information call 526-3700. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., June 8, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on Disability meets Wed. June 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 Wed., June 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 Wed., June 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 Wed. June 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 Wed., June 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 Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs, June 10, at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/health 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m., at the West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning

As part of our ongoing series of Planet editorials which annoy proponents of major and minor religions, we’d like to share with our readers a press release which we received this week from the United Methodist Communications Office of Public Information in Nashville. Here’s the headline: “Crawford Pastor Leaving Bush Back Yard for Iraq; United Methodist Clergyman To Serve as Military Chaplain.” 

The Rev. Kent Berry of Crawford United Methodist Church, just a few miles from the “western White House,” who is in the Army National Guard, is being called to active duty. The press release quotes his analysis of the situation in Iraq: “Keep praying,” he advises, “and hang in there. Stay with it. Our goal is to stabilize the government, help the people, and then get out,” he says. “We’re doing the right thing.” 

The gushy press release goes on to tell us that “church members are praying for the president who put Crawford on the map, as well as for their pastor. They and Berry’s family say their support for Operation Iraqi Freedom brings them closer together. ‘I’m very proud of my Dad,’ says daughter Britney, ‘because he’ll be over there fighting for our country and for Iraq.’” 

The United Methodists in Nashville are so proud of Berry they’ve made a video about him, which you can see, if you’re interested, on their corporate website, umtv.org. Yes, that word is corporate. Pro-government propaganda seems to be big business for United Methodist Communications, as you can see for yourself at umtv.org. The site links to the Crawford, Texas, official website, which in turn links to Western White House Gifts, which boasts that “We are PROUD to be the Official Merchandiser for the McLennan County Republican Party...the Home County Party of President George W. Bush!” The site hawks Bush memorabilia of all kinds, including the Official “From Crawford to Baghdad” Commemorative Mugs. Cozy, isn’t it? 

Here in Berkeley, Methodists are best known for standing up to their national organization on a variety of gay rights issues, but in Crawford and Nashville it’s obvious that you aren’t in Berkeley any more, Dorothy. The press releases out of Nashville provide yet another example of why some of the founding fathers didn’t think we should cut any slack for anyone just because they wrap themselves in the mantle of religion.  

The UMTV website says that “at UMCom, our mission is to help the church tell its story.” Pardon us for not getting it, but why are Bush and company’s politically stupid and obviously immoral activities in Iraq part of the church’s story?  

The Methodists are not the only mainstream religious group which has tried to climb on the political bandwagon lately, either. Some (not all) U.S. Catholic bishops are out in full cry against John Kerry and any other Catholic candidates who deviate from selected mainstream church positions. Of course, these same bishops don’t propose sanctions against candidates who don’t agree with the Pope’s stalwart opposition to both the war on Iraq and capital punishment.  

There’s nothing wrong with churches expressing opinions on moral topics which intersect with the political sphere. In fact, some would see it as their duty, consistent with their articulated principles. In the olden days, children, at the beginning of the Vietnam war, it was the Methodists and the Catholics, in Ann Arbor where we lived, who first started expressing doubts about the morality of the U.S. government’s position, long before local politicos got on board.  

The maxim, often articulated by Quakers, that religious people should “speak truth to power,” is compelling. But when religious leaders appear to be sycophantically aligning themselves with power, they look less noble. The United Methodists are certainly entitled to their own opinion about the legitimacy and efficacy of Bush’s war on Iraq, but an outside observer might wonder exactly how what looks like pro-Bush political propaganda activity squares with the tax exemptions of which they undoubtedly take full advantage. The website solicits contributions for the sponsoring Foundation for United Methodist Communications, identified as a tax-exempt corporation organized under U. S. Internal Revenue chapter 501(c)(3). Perhaps someone ought to ask the IRS a few questions about this exemption. 

—Becky O’Malley

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” That’s the old rule. About the dead, nothing but good should be said. In the ancient world, perhaps, it was followed. In the 19th century it was widely quoted and usually observed for a long time after death. In the last half of the 20th, it was followed for a shorter period of time, at least by the press, until historians got started on their revisions. In the speeded-up 21st, bloggers have rushed to judgment on Ronald Reagan even before the completion of the elaborate funereal observances which the First Actor planned long ago. Berkeley’s Best Blogger, Economics Professor Brad DeLong, weighed in on Saturday: “He tried hard, but by and large he didn't have the brainpower to think his way out of the boxes that his prior commitments and initial personnel choices handed him.” For including faint damns with his mild praise of the late president, DeLong was roundly excoriated by some of his correspondents. A Mr. or Ms. Zarkov reflected the opinion of several: “One would think you could put the criticisms aside on the day the man died. Nasty, nasty. I’m disgusted.”  

In Berkeley, where we recently voted to landmark the building on whose rooftop James Rector was shot, by troops ordered up by then-Gov. Reagan during the People’s Park demonstrations, most tears shed for Ronald Reagan will probably be of the crocodile variety. Brad DeLong accurately reflected the word on the street here. In local café chat, if Reagan is not damned he is at least marked for a long spell in Purgatory. My friend the recovering red diaper baby used to claim that she voted for Reagan once as a way of getting back at her upbringing, but she now denies it. The best that anyone says about him is that he was an amiable non-entity Peter-principled up to his level of incompetence. 

But really, that’s not too bad, is it? Especially if the stress is on the amiable. For comparison, consider George W. Bush, another non-entity, but not an amiable one. In fact, a pretty vicious non-entity, as it turns out. Compare their war records, for example. Ronald Reagan actually served in the military during World War II. He ended up in Hollywood making propaganda movies, but in later years he seems to have believed that he took part in the heroic actions the films depict—he wanted to serve. GWB, on the other hand, ducked out of his softball assignment in the National Guard for long periods at a stretch. Reagan seems to have believed in the voodoo economics (remember that term?) which his advisors told him would help the average citizen. Bush appears to be operating with a much more cynical “cut taxes, take the money and run” philosophy. Reagan espoused a number of quasi-Libertarian beliefs opposed to “big government.” Bush, on the other hand, is vastly extending the reach of the most dangerous elements of the national regime.  

You know things have come to a sorry pass in this nation when people in Berkeley begin to indulge in Reagan nostalgia. “His kids turned out okay,” they say, thinking of young Ron and Maureen, mensches both. “He really liked to take naps,” they say approvingly. And of course “he gave a great speech.” At least when Ronald Reagan said nothing, it sounded like something. Again, as contrasted with the current incumbent, who talks about everything as if it were nothing, when in fact it’s often something dreadful coming our way that he’s promoting in his speeches. Listening to Bush cynically duck questions at his infrequent press conferences, you begin to long for a breath of that good old Ronald Reagan hot air, reflecting his boundless if unfounded optimism about the America he genuinely loved, well if not too wisely. 

—Becky O’Malley 

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