Public Comment

There is a lot to cover.

Monday was the first Agenda Committee meeting that I can recall Councilmember Wengraf missing in all the years I have attended. Wengraf certainly deserved a day off for post- Thanksgiving travel especially since she planned well in advance so the meeting could be covered by the committee alternate. I just hope Wengraf never misses another.

Wengraf had one request; that amendments to the ADU Ordinance be given priority. What slipped off the radar was the reason for the request; ensuring Berkeley’s ADU Ordinance is in place when the new State laws go into effect on January 1, 2022. Councilmember Hahn did manage to stave off postponement but the reason was never uttered and the ADU amendments sunk to positions 46 and 47 on the final agenda. Councilmember Droste,who covered for Wengraf, kept reminding everyone she didn’t know the Agenda Committee process, which made me wonder how she escaped that lesson in her seven years on council. 

Scott Ferris’s “companion” submission to the Parks and Waterfront Commission Adopt-a-Spot proposal successfully pushed that out of the mid-year budget consideration, placing all the coordination work back on the backs of the community volunteers. 

Tuesday night at City Council proved to be most interesting. Barely into the public comment on Councilmember Taplin’s Budget Referral, with co-sponsors Droste and Wengraf, for automated license plate readers (ALPRs) as a community safety improvement, someone mentioned a study which concluded that the City of Piedmont’s $600,000 purchase of 39 license plate readers was useless. https://www.cehrp.org/piedmont-license-plate-reader-analysis-shows-99-97-of-data-collected-is-useless/ plus another, “Automated License Plate Readers: A Study in Failure” https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=13893 

Setting aside all the potential issues around collecting and saving recordings of personal habits, the ALPRs don’t even catch criminals. This should be a concern to the constituents of District 2 who so desperately want an end to gunfire in their neighborhood. ALPRs are an expensive investment in a technology that doesn’t work, which is a takeaway from programs that can work. All this information didn’t stop council from approving ALPRs in a 7 to 2 vote to be considered in the December budget process. Harrison voted no and Hahn abstained. 

The budget referral for a pilot project of Existing Building Electrification by Councilmember Harrison with co-sponsor Councilmember Bartlett is the competing big-ticket item for the mid-year (AAO) budget allocations. The Building Electrification was item 21 on the consent calendar. Councilmembers Taplin, Droste, and Kesarwani all asked to pull it to action and proceeded to try and sink it. In the end, the pilot project was passed into the budget process with a 7 to 2 vote with Kesarwani and Droste abstaining. 

As I observed the comments, discussion and final vote and read for the first time the review of the failure of ALPRS, it made me think of all the useless Pentagon expenditures, approved by senators and representatives too afraid of being called weak on defense to vote no. Here in Berkeley there is another dimension to voting no on the ALPRs, the power of the Berkeley Police Association. I also wondered why ALPRs were even on the agenda in the first place when Berkeley has a task force of experts and community representatives devoting hours of work in the commission on Reimagining Public Safety. 

We will get a view of the council direction and city pressures for ALPRs Thursday morning, December 9 at the Budget and Finance Committee meeting. 

The Reimagining Public Safety Task Force met Thursday evening with Nikki Jones PhD in Sociology and Criminology from UC Berkeley as the speaker for the evening. Jones presented findings from “ride alongs” (riding along with a police officer through a shift) and the discussions with officers that followed. The finding was that officers believed certain neighborhoods and certain people needed more aggressive policing. This more aggressive handling was viewed as being a “good” officer. Finally, I thought we are getting to the heart of the matter of biased policing. I was so impressed with Jones’ presentation on policing behavior, that I ordered one of her books. 

After the presentation, the task force took up the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) Report (analysis and recommendations). Task force members gave a stinging rebuke of the report and revision, describing NICJR as just inserting Berkeley into their standard report. Members said their comments and responses were not included in the revised version, concluding the task force must submit a completely separate response of findings and recommendations. 

There were six attendees at Thursday’s meeting. Only two of us commented, Carol Morasavic and me. Without seeing the other attendees, we don’t know who was there: staff, BPD, and/or interested residents? Regardless, it is disappointing to have such poor attendance and gives a reason why the City Manager can give such a rosy report on the task force meetings when watching is something very different. 

Despite the mayor’s strong stand on climate Tuesday evening, item 7 on the December 14^th council agenda, the City of Berkeley’s 2022 Legislative Platform, doesn’t list climate as a priority – it is buried in the Sustainability and Environment Section. 

In the legislative platform, we can also see where Dr. Eleanor Ramsey’s November 16, 2021 presentation on Study to Achieve Equity in City Contracting with the conclusion of “Evidence of Intentional Discrimination Systemic Practices” landed. Equity is completely absent from the egislative platform section of Economic Development. 

Following city council and commission meetings as I do, it is a relief to see a meeting cancelled, but there is more to December 2^nd than just a chance cancellation. The Land Use Committee had just one agenda item and it was from Councilmember Taplin. The information I have gleaned is that Taplin cancelled at the last minute causing the meeting cancellation, and this is a pattern. Taplin stiffed the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability Committee (FITES) on Wednesday, when his item, the Native Plant Ordinance, was on the agenda. 

When the Berkeley voters approved raising the mayor and council salaries to a level that would resemble a living wage, did we not expect that they would fulfill their council responsibilities? The City Council Policy Committees are a council responsibility and the mayor and councilmembers all have committee assignments. As a member of FITES, Councilmember Taplin has a show rate of 50%. Taplin failed to attend six of the twelve FITES meetings and at least one more meeting was cancelled when Taplin wouldn’t be present for his agenda item. 

The discussion and questioning that I have come to expect from watching FITES is often absent in other committees and items slip by without in-depth review and ordinance development. That supposedly was the purpose for creating the policy committees in the first place. 

Taplin has been turning out an inordinate number of council items and referrals for ordinances; more than what I would expect of a new councilmember learning the ropes. When items come up, Taplin frequently appears to be tightly scripted. It’s hard to know sitting on the outside what exactly is going on, but it bears watching. 

There is another item that bears watching. The pier-ferry feasibility study is on the Tuesday, December 7^th council special meeting agenda. It should be interesting how council sees making the numbers match the decision they have already made to cover the cost of $93 million plus $32 million for electric ferries if Berkeley is actually committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  

On to books: When I ordered Absolute Convictions, My Father, a City and the Conflict That Divided America by Eyal Press it was because, I was so taken with Press’s book Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America. I was not thinking I would be finishing a book written in 2006 about the anti-abortion movement, abortion providers Drs. Barnett Slepian and Shalom Press (Eyal’s father) in Buffalo, New York and the assassin of Dr. Slepian, the day before the Supreme Court would hear arguments in Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case that is asking the justices to overturn Roe vs Wade and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. 

I know exactly where I stand on abortion. I was the exhibitions chair for NCWCA (Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art) in 2013 when NCWCA celebrated forty years of Roe vs. Wade with the national juried exhibition, “Choice, An Art Exhibition of Women’s Reproductive Rights.” Through that experience I learned to speak publicly and write about my own abortion. And, I learned something else. I learned of women who had always had access to birth control and always had the right to make whatever choice they wished about pregnancy and how they could not conceive of never not having that right. A life dominated with access only to illegal abortions was so far out of their frame of reference, they couldn’t imagine it. 

Eyal Press is thorough with much of the book focused on what he learned from meeting and interviewing leaders in Operation Rescue and the anti-abortion movement. Press was so nonjudgmental in his descriptions, that I was never sure what direction Press would take as the book progressed. A particularly interesting section referenced Kathleen Puckett Ph.D. in clinical psychology whose area of expertise is “lone wolf terrorists.” Slepian’s assassin fit this mold. 

Absolute Convictions is out of print and not in our libraries. If anyone wants to borrow my copy with its yellowed pages send me an email. 

I tried to get through the print edition of A Very Stable Genius by Phillip Rucker and Carol Leonnig without much success and switched to the audiobook which I finished in a couple of days. As I listened to the descriptions of Trump’s behavior, the tantrums, the rages I wondered have we forgotten how bad it was? 

It certainly seems like too much of the public has forgotten the chaos four years of Trump wrought and the mess President Biden was left to clean up looking at Biden’s approval rating and the sycophants lapping at Trump’s door. Take a hard look at the steps to autocracy listed in the November 20^th review of After the Fall. We all have work to do.