Extra

The success of the week was at the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) meeting. There are two of us who have been attending regularly educating ZAB on habitat, native plants, bird safe glass, down lighting, bird migration, ecosystems, keystone plants, heat island effect, permeable paving and more. We haven’t made a dent with the Berkeley Planning Department staff, but ZAB is responding and Thursday evening we had a big success with 2015 Blake. The up lighting was caught and changed to downlighting, the balance of exotic non-native plants was reversed with a threshold of 80% native plants and the project will come back to DRC (Design Review Committee) on EV charging stations (ZAB request) and the bird safe glass.

There are three things that contributed to this success, 1) persisting in educating ZAB at meeting after meeting for months, 2) a willingness of ZAB members to listen and 3) cooperation from the developer. On the last piece, Mark Rhoades is on this project and he should know better than to bring a project with up lighting and non-native plants.

It is not enough to speak up once or twice or write an occasional letter. Making change requires persistent follow through. Success can never be taken for granted and sustaining forward motion requires paying attention.

It is hard to know what is in the heads of the Planning Department staff, but one thing for certain is that no matter how many meetings we attend, no matter what we present, they are unmoved to act in any different way than they always have. From all appearances it is a narrow world without vision. 

The mayor and council are a harder nut to crack. Without Kate Harrison we would not have a natural gas ban in new buildings. And, Terry Taplin is picking up the mantle on native plants. That gives hope, but it leaves the mayor and six councilmembers who have been more about rhetoric and appearances than actual action. 

For all the hand wringing on fire risk and fire prevention in the hills, the City of Berkeley has yet to enforce parking restrictions in the fire zones to ensure there is a clear path for fire trucks and crews to reach the fires when they come and for residents to evacuate. This was the subject of the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission on Wednesday evening. The parking enforcers need to make it up to the hills to start passing out parking tickets and those tickets need to appear year-round not just on high fire days. The item received unanimous approval, but will the City act? 

The other item that was continued to the next meeting for the purpose of finalizing the wording was about limiting the addition of new housing in high fire zones. With the passage of SB 9 and SB 10 and finding places for 8934 new dwelling units, it is unclear if these would open high risk fire areas to more construction. It would seem foolish to put more people in the areas of the 1991 Oakland Berkeley Firestorm where 25 people died or the area of the Berkeley 1923 fire, but that is exactly what has transpired over the years. The firestorms of the present decade burn hotter and faster than anything seen in the past. Under the current conditions an uncontrolled fire in the hills, the urban wildland interface can quickly grow to engulf large areas of Berkeley, even all of it according to our former Fire Chief Brannigan. 

On the natural gas ban, I had an interesting conversation with a friend about replacing her stove. She did not know that she was burning methane in her kitchen. She isn’t the only one. Too many people know methane is bad, but have been lulled into thinking the “natural gas” fed to their stove and the other big appliances like the water heater and furnace is something different, “natural” and not toxic to their household, the environment and the climate. Will we ever move past the propaganda from the fossil fuel industry and successful marketing? 

Tuesday evening was the presentation to council on the Housing Element AKA how the consultants will go about creating a plan for adding 8934 new units of housing in Berkeley between 2023 and 2031 with 2446 very low income units, 1408 low income units, 1416 moderate income units and 3664 market rate units. Berkeley has a history of overbuilding market rate (better known for price gouging students and residents) and underbuilding affordable housing. 

If you are unfamiliar with how eligibility for affordable housing is determined this should help: https://www.cityofberkeley.info/BHA/Home/Payment_Standards,_Income_Limits,_and_Utility_Allowance.aspx 

The number of units is based on an expected growth of 45% and assigned by ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments). Mayor Arreguin is the ABAG President and chair of the committee that developed the assignment of units. It was surprising to see in the list of participants in the creation and assignment of unit allocations members of the aggressive pro-development groups. With Arreguin as the chair and president of ABAG, one has to wonder who invited the lobbyists. As expected while other cities are submitting objections, Berkeley is not. 

In the Housing Element presentation there was not one even one tiny drop of attention to the impact on the environment, local climate, heat island effect, habitat or ecosystems. There was no attention as to any consideration of how the plan for additional housing could be planned to coexist with nature. It appears that it will be up to the public and it will take more than the question poised to council by an attendee and left unanswered: “Where will the water come from?” 

After a summer break the Community for a Cultural Civic Center met Monday. There was a short review of the Tipping Structural Engineering assessment which provides seismically resilient structures at a substantially lower cost than the Gehl proposals. Gehl was the consulting group hired by the City for $375,000 to create a Civic Center plan that included the restoration of the Maudelle Shirek and Veterans Buildings. At the October meeting the group will formulate a recommendation for Council. The Council worksession for the Civic Center is listed as unscheduled with a likely date in early 2022. 

The Thursday morning Budget and Finance Committee meeting covered one subject, allocating the marina Doubletree Hotel tax to the Marina Fund. The Parks and Waterfront Chair Gordon Wozniak gave a thoughtful presentation followed by an amazing slide show by Erin Diehm on biodiversity. Did you know there are apps to identify and record observed species of birds, insects, plants and more with iNaturalist and eBird? I didn’t. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/uploadedFiles/Clerk/Marina%20TOT%20presentation%202.pdf 

In the end, the City Manager wants the transfer tax/hotel tax from the Doubletree to stay in the general fund and not to be allocated to the marina. She formulated the motion. The final: qualified negative (to allocating the transfer tax to the Marina fund) and made a referral back to the Budget and Finance Committee to discuss and develop alternative revenue measures/streams for the marina, including a reserve, and to look at other approaches. 

In closing, there are some books that should just be required reading. At book club on Wednesday that was the agreement on The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder who may be better known outside of academic circles for On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. I have another required reading recommendation, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press, 2021. Dirty Work challenges the reader to think about the jobs that we as a society want done and our attitudes toward the workers who do them. For example, when putting our fork into a piece of meat or dishing out the food for one of our meat loving pets, we do our best not to think about the killing and butchering of animals in meatpacking plants and the toll on the workers who do the killing and butchering. 

Last weekend when it was finally confirmed after lots of rumbling that those killed in the U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan were all civilians and seven were children, I was reading the section in Dirty Work on drone operators. When the use of drones as warfare first became public, I remember hearing speculation that to the drone operators the actual task was merely like playing video games. Drone operators in Dirty Work paint a different picture of being haunted by the strikes. One description was a strike that killed the suspected adult terrorist and spared a child only to see on the screen the little child trying to put the pieces of the parent back together as if that would make them whole and come alive. 

The book goes further in the triple pain to the workers, the trauma of the job itself, being trapped by poverty or residency status into the job and the scorn from the public. 

At times, if we are to grow, we need to leave our comfort zones and challenge our thinking.