Public Comment

While neighborhood groups, student groups, historical preservationists, and natural open space advocates have successfully organized opposition to the extremity of the city's high-rise friendly and open space averse planning revisions and the University of California's effort to monetize our landmarks, parks, threatened architectural gems, and rent-controlled housing, Mayor Jesse Arreguin has been oddly silent. 

While the merchants along Telegraph Avenue have swooned over 60's iconography and made the poets and flower children thematic images for their posters and marketing, Mayor Arreguin all but shrugs. It's as though the anti-war movement, the student-led ethnic studies origins, the local revolutions in music and poetry and the legendary leaps in opposing racism and gender oppression had no connection to People's Park, Telegraph Avenue, and the cultural explosion that moved the times whether they were ready or not. 

There may be nothing we can do at this point to inspire Mayor Arreguin to catch a sense of the magical qualities of Berkeley's most iconic early architecture, or the seminal role People's Park played in stopping the Vietnam War and putting cultural rebirth and political resistance into hyper drive. There may be nothing we can do to nurture what little interest our current UC chancellor has, unlike some previous chancellors, in finding an honest compromise between both the towns and the campus's current and future needs. 

While some California towns have found ways to negotiate mutually beneficial strategies for their shared futures, Mayor Arreguin and Chancellor Christ have one obvious commonality: to shove a settlement agreement through as quickly as possible during the pandemic, when fewer voices have the means to "attend" the nightmarish Zoom meetings and many commissions, often the city's best citizen-run organize voice of the impacted people, are entirely shut down. 

Green washing works for the oil industry. Blue-and-gold-washing works for the university, which, despite its ties to nuclear weapons and other generous corporate interests, walks in a misty cloud of college nostalgia. So put your pennies together. The courts have started to see through the blue-and-gold haze that clouds politicians' perspectives, especially since donations and political job stability seem to go hand in hand with a posture of agreement. If the Berkeley City Council won't take a stand for our best, most green, most livable future, the recent track record of neighborhood victories of UC's excesses in our courts may be our most sensible bet. 

# # #