Columns

The week started with a roundtable discussion Sunday evening on TOPA, the Tenants’ Opportunity Purchase Act. I was surprised by the slick mailers in opposition to TOPA that were shared on zoom during the discussion. TOPA was passed out of the Land Use Policy Committee May 20 with Councilmembers Hahn and Robinson voting yes and Droste voting no. If I had to take a guess on the outcome, TOPA has not shown up in any draft council agendas, making it look like the opposition is the winner. Of course, the city is in full throttle to finishing the budget by Tuesday evening. If TOPA does happen to squeak by in a vote later this year, I doubt it will benefit more than a handful of tenants. 

There were two budget meetings this last week and it doesn’t feel like the City is any further along. Most of the public commenters spoke to the union contract negotiations. At the Thursday meeting, Councilmember Harrison said that according to her calculations the police are 35% of the budget and there is an increase for the police of $8,000,000 for FY2022. Harrison said she was not happy with a “flat” police budget, but though she recognizes that this is a year of transition an increase is not okay. If that is how it stays, then she cannot vote for the budget, she said. This is money that won’t be available for other services. 

The next budget meeting, on Monday at 9 am, will be the telling one when the mayor reveals his proposal for FY2022. 

One of the books I read this last week was Tangled Up in Blue Policing the American City by Rosa Brooks. Brooks, who is a Professor of Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, joined the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) as a volunteer reserve police officer for four years before writing Tangled Up in Blue. Reserve officers are sworn members of the MPD and have the same training, certification and responsibilities as traditional police officers. In the book Brooks gives depth to the training and experiences that can’t be covered in this brief interview, but the interview still gives a glimpse into the problems: https://wamu.org/story/21/03/30/dc-gw-law-professor-police-officer-book/ 

Even before reading Tangled Up in Blue, I was thinking about how the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force seems to be circling around reorganizing with the initiation of the Special Care Unit (SCU) for incidents involving the mentally ill and creating a new department of transportation to deal with traffic enforcement (BerkDOT) without ever touching the core issue: biased policing and the underlying causation. I’ve written previously about how the meetings feel orchestrated to achieve a predetermined end. The next meeting of the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force is Wednesday evening at 6 pm with police department overview as the main agenda item. 

Councilmember Bartlett authored, with co-sponsors Mayor Arreguin and former Councilmember Davila, the Safety for All: The George Floyd Community Safety Act, for development of a Progressive Police Academy. It was referred to the Public Safety Committee June 16, 2020 and withdrawn December 7, 2020 as financially infeasible. 

After reading Tangled Up in Blue, I wonder how much of the training of our police is the same as what Rosa Brooks experienced at MPD or if our police have a program like the one created between MPD and Georgetown University after a change in leadership at MPD and out of what Brooks found missing. Is there a forum for current events like the death of George Floyd, Tamar Rice, racism, biased policing? 

Community meeting #3 for the Ashby and North Berkeley BART Station Planning was Saturday and followed the Monday BART Community Advisory Group (CAG) meeting. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/bartplanning/ 

I asked these questions: What has really been gained by the CAG meetings? and What would prevent city council from throwing out the CAG and Community recommendations as was done with the Adeline Corridor Plan? 

The answer from planner Alisa Shen wasn’t very satisfactory. She said she couldn’t predict what council will do; there are tradeoffs: financial and space. Also, decisions will include BART and council. 

The last meeting to mention (not the last attended) is the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) Thursday evening. After weeks of citizens like me speaking up on native plants and bird safe glass, ZAB and Design Review Committee (DRC) are coming along. Bird safe glass was brought up again with the 2000 University 8-story mixed use building. Charles Kahn said he was looking into it and maybe council will have to take action. I informed Kahn that council has already voted. 

Council passed the bird safe glass ordinance November 12, 2019, but Berkeley’s convoluted process means that the ordinance passed in 2019 still has hoops to jump through like Planning Commission before it actually hits the books as a requirement. The Planning Commission in its great wisdom or loss of it, put the bird safe ordinance/construction under miscellaneous #54 as NR (not ranked) with no staff assigned. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/uploadedFiles/Planning_and_Development/Level_3_-_Commissions/Commission_for_Planning/2021-03-17_%20PC_%20Item%209.pdf 

San Francisco implemented a bird safe glass ordinance in 2011, Oakland 2013, Richmond 2016 and Alameda 2018. https://goldengateaudubon.org/conservation/make-the-city-safe-for-wildlife/standards-for-bird-safe-buildings/ Birds in Berkeley will continue to lose their lives unnecessarily in collisions with transparent or reflective glass. Interesting how Arreguin has time to promote himself in an interview national TV with Lester Holt, but here at home he is mayor of a city that can’t manage in 19 months to get the bird safe glass dark skies ordinance implemented. 

In closing, there were three other books I finished this week. Crimson Letters Voices from Death Row ( by Tessie Castillo with contributions by: Michael J. Braxton, Lyle May, Terry Robinson and George Wilkerson) is a collection of essays. Tessie Castillo is a journalist who taught a journaling class to death row inmates in North Carolina until in May 2014 when she wrote an editorial in the Raleigh News & Observer; after which she was quickly dismissed. Castillo continued to exchange letters with the prisoners resulting in the collection Crimson Letters Voices from Death Row where they write about their lives of dysfunction, poverty, drugs, virtues and failings and evolution to self-reflection. 

You can find reviews of Premonition by Michael Lewis everywhere including the SF Chron pink section May 23 – 29. In response to a friend who complained that one of his heroes was not included, not everyone can be covered in 320 pages. I had trouble putting the book down. It kept me up until 4 am at least one morning. 

Last is The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee. I’m losing count of all the books I’ve read on race. This morning I turned on State of the Union to pass the time of my morning workout. Mitt Romney was being questioned about teaching Critical Race Theory. Romney responded with this: Parents should determine what their children are taught. 

How will we ever move forward in a country that is forever trying to bury the ugly truths? Then I thought about the conversation with a neighbor just a few blocks away on Tuesday morning. Somehow in our casual chat, she told me her 92-year old mother had just sold the family home in the San Pablo Park district. I let out an “oh no!” and told her about the Berkeley council vote to eliminate single family homes as exclusionary and racist. The neighbor, Juanita, is Black and she let out an exclamation of disbelief. She had me laughing with her discourse on apartment living, but it is no laughing matter when an industry uses race to swell its profits. 

As I walked away, I thought about how the three of us, two Black and me, White, standing on the corner chatting, jumping from one subject to another during the power outage while PG&E replaced a rotted transformer pole was all so pleasant. The Sum of Us is about what we gain together and what we lose through racism.