Editorials

If you want to know why the city of Berkeley seems so dysfunctional these days (potholes, homeless encampments, deteriorating public buildings, etc. etc. etc.) you really should watch the last hour and a half of last week’s Berkeley City Council meeting. It lasted until about 12:15 a.m., so only the hard core civic watchdogs and crazies like me were still awake to watch it on Zoom.

Councilmember Wengraf dropped off at 11 p.m. She’s always been an early-to-bed gal—when we were both on the Landmark Preservation Commission around the turn of the millennium she’d go home about ten, even though the meetings often lasted to midnight.

Councilmember Davila’s obvious frustration with the way the mayor was running the meeting seemed to cause her to skip the last few minutes on camera, easier to do on Zoom without actually leaving the room.

I was pretty frustrated myself, but to my regret I watched the whole embarrassing boondoggle right through to the end.

What was it about? Well, it was what George H.W. Bush called “the vision thing”. 

You can see the recorded version at your convenience here. Fast forward until 4 hours 17 minutes to reach the relevant presentation and vote, then watch until it ends at 5:41. If you’re not that masochistic, you can start at about 5:25 to view just The Final Struggle. 

Here’s the agenda item: 

Adoption - Civic Center Vision and Implementation Plan (Staff report and resolution)
Complete Item (Including Vision and Implementation Plan)
Presentationh
From: City Manager
Recommendation: Adopt a Resolution approving Berkeley’s Civic Center Vision and Implementation Plan, and declaring Council’s intention to support the vision and preferred design concepts articulated in the plan. 

What, you say? Some readers may remember that Berkeley has adopted, in living memory, both a General Plan, a Downtown Area Plan and many more. All of these involved lengthy citizen meetings of special committees and the Planning Commission before final adoption by the Council. But none of this has happened to my knowledge for this one. 

My wakeup call about this agenda item was from Kelly Hammargren, the very model of a model civic watchdog, who has assigned herself the impressive retirement project of exhaustively documenting all the meetings and events that are supposed to add up to how Berkeley’s governed. It’s Kelly who assembles from the agendas and minutes of the city’s wide array of disparate boards and commissions and agencies of all kinds the invaluable weekly document which is published here as “The Berkeley Activist’s Calendar” and on at least two other sites, including Sustainable Berkeley Coalition and the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council. 

She’s gone to almost every meeting of the City Council committee which sets the agenda for the following City Council meeting, but she’d missed the last one because of a doctor’s appointment. So where, she asked me, did this “vision” item come from, and what was it all about? 

If she didn’t know, how should I? 

With some effort I dredged from the deep recesses of memory a tour of Berkeley’s Civic Center that I’d gone on sometime last fall. Back then I was a member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission,and had been assigned to a subcommittee which was supposed to attend the tour and report back to the full commission. So I went on the tour. 

I’ve been in all of the buildings in the Civic Center sometime in the 40+years I’ve lived here, but I was saddened to see how much the city mothers and fathers had presided over their demolition by neglect. 

Just one quick example: In the Veteran’s Building, since I was dealing with a bad knee I followed posted signs, which led me to an elevator with a disability icon on the door where I pressed the button and waited. And waited. After what was easily ten minutes, a client of the men’s shelter which now uses the building told me “that thing hasn’t worked for 20 years.” 

Surely ADA must have something to say about that? At least they could take down the incorrect signs. 

I also remembered one informal meeting in a City Hall conference room where some stylish people with charming Italian accents showed us pictures of places they liked and had worked on around the world. They appeared to be fancy international consultants who had been retained to help us hicks here in Berkeley figure out what kind of a Civic Center we need. 

Later, I learned that this advice was to cost the taxpayers something like a half million dollars. 

I also remembered having a long phone conversation sometime in December with a COB Economic Development staff member who was working on the project, but like much else in what the young are now calling The Before Times, that talk has faded from recollection almost nine months later. And in early February I was removed from the LPC by the mayor, who had appointed me, so I assumed that was why I hadn’t heard about subsequent committee meetings. 

When I searched my old email I did find a general announcement of a public tour of the Civic Center on March 7. But that happened to be the very moment when the world was waking up to the danger of COVID19, perhaps the very week Berkeley’s State of Emergency had been proclaimed by the mayor, so the tour might not have happened after all. Me, I was already Sheltering in Place by then and certainly didn’t go. 

So I checked last Monday with many sources on the City Council, the Planning Commission and the LPC, including my former committee colleagues. For good measure I also checked with the non-profit advocacy organization Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, since there are many designated historic structures in the Civic Center. 

. By and large, these were people who had put in days, months and years serving the city of Berkeley, and they had been appointed to their respective commissions by councilmembers elected to serve the public. 

I learned that none of them were aware that anything like the agenda item was proposed for adoption last Tuesday. Some were downright shocked to hear about it. 

A number of them called and wrote to City Council members and other officials. Several told me that they’d been assured by said parties, and even higher up officials, that despite the agenda description nothing was going to be adopted that night. 

So if I’d had any sense I would have watched the Zoomed meeting from a comfortable chair at home and gone to bed at the usual time. 

But I’m kind of a political junky. If there’s a somewhat contentious meeting on my small screen, I sometimes just watch it for entertainment the way some people watch sports. When meetings in The Before Times were in person downtown in uncomfortable chairs, I seldom went to them and went home early if I did. 

I’ve learned that most all of Berkeley City Council policy can be explained by one rule: if it’s important enough to attract a crowd of concerned citizens, it will be heard very late, at the end of the agenda, and each citizen commenter will be limited to one minute, half the usual time, to speak. That rule goes back to the Tom Bates regime, and the current mayor has enthusiastically embraced it 

And Zoom à la Berkeley makes it so much easier to enforce. 

The faces, names and even numbers of attendees who sign on the speakers’ queue at online City Council meetings are not shown to the home audience, so no one can work the crowd. 

Shills can call in anonymously from, for example, Sacramento, to promote a Berkeley decision that touches on one of their personal hobbyhorses, e.g. Weineroid Yimbyism. 

Speakers who exceed their meager minute can be kicked off the call with no mercy if the mayor doesn’t like what they’re saying, or extended if he does. 

So, fast forward to the last Berkeley City Council meeting, which started in the wee small hours of Tuesday night and spilled over into Wednesday morning. 

Why do I suspect that this late finish was a planned outcome? 

Two things: first, an item which involved lengthy personal statements from a passel of appealing teenagers, safe at home though they were, was moved up in the agenda to be heard before the Vision Thing. This guaranteed that many of the grown-ups waiting up at home to hear about it would have gone to bed. 

Second,, Councilmember Lori Droste, who is increasingly the Mayor’s best budd, was the first member recognized for an effusive opening sally that well exceeded the announced limit on each subsequent councilmember’s’ comments. This meant that every quarter of an hour the councilmembers were required to vote to extend the meeting time, finally until 12:15 a.m. 

I have neither time, nor space, nor energy to discuss the merits of the proposal itself, which featured lots of pretty pictures and elicited lots of flowery gush from the councilmembers who had voted to pay for it in the first place. Like those of many such documents, its individual elements were good, bad and just plain silly (putting a roof garden on top of the Veterans’ Building, cutting down the two beloved giant sequoias to build a fancy pop-out council chamber…) 

What was most annoying, as is frequently the case in Berkeley lately, was the procedure, which in some cases verged on Trumpery in its disregard for facts. The topic I knew most about was the role of the Landmarks Preservation Commission in the proceedings between early March and late September, which is to say approximately none. I checked carefully with several of my former colleagues to be sure. 

Never mind reality, one of the consultant’s Power Point screens triumphally boasted of working with both the LPC and Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association on the report. But BAHA President Carrie Olsen showed up to refute that claim in the 60 seconds she was allowed to speak. She pointed out that proponents said proudly that they’d talked to 300 people, which might seem impressive, but BAHA alone has at least 1100 dues-paying members (and many more fans). 

I’ve seen close to 300 people at a single City Council meeting. And those few this project polled were not systematically selected, but certainly skewed toward privilege. I think what happened is that when Shelter in Place occurred the consultants finished out their contract Zoomily, with no publicity and very little idea of who they were talking to. 

Somehow Steven Finacom, former president of both the Berkeley Historical Sociey and BAHA, long term member and former chair of the LPC, who had already written a detailed letter to the council explaining how the public had been left out of the Post-COVID consultant-led deliberations, was not allowed to speak in the wee hours of Monday morning. 

How could this happen, do you think? 

Said the Mayor: “I didn’t see Mr.Finacom’s hand raised. “ Oh suuure. 

And minutes or even seconds, later, on the edge of adjourning, someone made a motion with language adopting the whole deal, slambamthankyoumam, despite previous copious assurances that this wouldn’t be happening at that meeting. Only very quick thinking by Councilmember Sophie Hahn, who was grudgingly allowed by the Mayor to speak for just 30 seconds at the very end, got in a quick amendment which made the vote advisory instead of binding. 

But never fear. The three lavish proposals fronted by the international consultants are estimated to cost between about $50 million and about $90 million, and given the current state of the economy they’ll probably never happen. 

The half-million dollars or so that they cost the city, however, is money down the drain, money that might have been better used, for example, to house the people who now try to camp and hang out in the City Center because they have no place else to go. I imagine the quick vote was because the consultants wanted to get their final payment and leave town, though I have no evidence of that. 

Now it’s time for the arrogant officials who increasing dominate Berkeley governance to once again consult the many capable citizens who have volunteered their time for free to make this city work. Every time I look up a name on the roster of commissioners I am impressed by the caliber of free help this city manages to get for free. It’s about time to treat them with respect, isn’t it? 

Just a suggestion.