Public Comment

I have a little catching up to do, having taken a holiday from writing last weekend.

I had lunch with friends this last week who live just across the Bay in San Rafael. The husband used to live in Berkeley and both were curious about local Berkeley politics. I described what I knew of the incident at the Berkeley Drop-In Center, four police with guns drawn, handcuffing the program manager and keeping him on the ground even after it was determined that he didn’t have a gun, just a phone.

The incident didn’t fit with their image of Berkeley as the bastion of liberal politics, but as I described to them Berkeley has changed with the high price of housing and gentrification--or maybe it hasn’t. I was pretty shocked when I started attending City Council in 2014 and saw firsthand the in-your- face racism.

I finished two books this week A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes and White Space Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality by Sheryll Cashin. Both books cover similar territory: the familiar story that if you are Black (non-white) your experience with policing is different than if you are White, although some might argue that being Poor White or Poor White and Homeless isn’t much better. Even though this isn’t new information for many of us, the books are still worth reading.

Hayes focuses mostly on the difference in who, what, where and how policing is performed and law is applied, based on race and neighborhood, and how Black neighborhoods are treated like an occupied colony.

Cashin goes deeper into history and the broader impacts and describes how “the Hood is a place of confinement, an enclosure, with surveillance, disinvestment, and dislocation from opportunity created through federal and local policy”. Cashin writes a lot about education financing, and also showsl that police are more likely to use force in a majority Black neighborhood and an integrated police force is no guarantee of ending biased policing.

Looking at old census data back to 1940, the highest percentage of Black residents in Berkeley was in 1970 at 23.5%. Now it is 7.8%. In the council redistricting map (Amber 2) which will be before council at 4 pm Tuesday, March 22 the neighborhoods with the highest percent of Blacks are still the formerly redlined areas, with District 2 as the highest with 18% Blacks. District 5 is 2% and Districts 6,7 and 8 are 3% Black. 

Listening to the public comment following the presentations on Reimagining Public Safety from the National Institute on Criminal Justice Reform and the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force on March 10, 2022 at the council special meeting, it was like listening to two different cities with two different experiences. There is a certain amount of fear expressed from District 2, a gentrifying area, and accolades for policing from the hills. The hills are where police turn a “blind eye” to illegally parked cars (per District 6 councilmember Wengraf at the Public Safety Policy Committee) versus the flats where parking enforcement is dutifully carried out. 

Parking enforcement in fire zones (the hills) as requested by the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission is complicated, according to Councilmember Wengraf, and can’t be enforced, according to Police Chief Louis, without increasing the budget allocation to expand parking enforcement.  

The Berkeley Drop-In Center incident was in District 3, 15% Black, where according to one public speaker at another meeting, the incident was started by a caller seeing a phone as a gun. We can all be grateful that as traumatic as the incident was for everyone involved, in Berkeley the police only pulled their guns, no one fired them. 

Part of the Reimagining Public Safety effort and the disparate policing found through the Center for Policing Equity Report in 2018 is Mayor Arreguin’s vision to create BerkDOT a Berkeley Department of Transportation to offload traffic enforcement and traffic stops from Berkeley Police. At the Transportation Commission meeting on Thursday evening, March 17, BerkDOT was described as moving parking enforcement and school crossing guards into the new BerkDOT. The commission chair Karen Parolek gave her support (which can best be described as enthusiastic) for the plan to hire a consultant for $250,000 to develop the program. 

Which leads to another question, just how much does Berkeley spend on consultants? My opinion on the matter is all this rearranging just adds layers of administration and diverts spending away from services that are so badly needed by the vulnerable in our community. And, it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. 

Parking is an issue that comes up over and over. The housing projects planned for the BART parking lots will leave only 85 parking spaces at Ashby BART and 200 spaces at North Berkeley BART. 

The survey of BART riders found most do not drive to the station, and one proposed solution at the public meeting was that those who do drive could park at the underutilized Center Street lot, which badly needs users to offset construction and operating debt and expenses. The walk to the Downtown BART from that location is short. Other options are being explored. It will be several years before the projects break ground so no immediate change is in the offing for drivers. 

The changes to Hopkins Street to improve bicycle and pedestrian safety will happen much sooner. You can see the plans at https://www.cityofberkeley.info/Hopkins/. Basically, the Sutter to The Alameda section will have a bicycle lane on each side of the street. Where Hopkins narrows crossing The Alameda toward the Bay down to the Hopkins and Gilman intersection both bicycle lanes (east and west bound) will move to the south side, the park, school and Monterey Market side of the street. Answers to public questions were thoughtful. 

The March 15 special council meeting on the Housing Element and Residential Objective Standards produced some interesting facts. No change in zoning is needed to meet the new Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) requirements of adding 8934 units, and the average time from project approval to pulling the building permit is 3 years. 

The first public speaker on housing and zoning was Matthew Lewis, the Matthew Lewis on California YIMBY staff (there is a different Matthew Lewis active in Berkeley public life) as Director of Communications https://cayimby.org/staff/ who should be registered as a lobbyist. He stated he would happily have the solar access on his roof blocked, because Berkeley has opted up to 100% renewable with East Bay Community Energy and therefore his solar doesn’t matter in decarbonization. Several public speakers made a similar comments. 

The justification for protecting solar access was well outlined in the Planet and in public comment by former Planning Commission Chair Rob Wrenn. It fell on deaf ears as Councilmembers Kesarwani, Taplin, Droste, Robinson and Mayor Arreguin dismissed such calls and gave their support for lifting the height cap on tall buildings in the downtown. Ben Bartlett was the only councilmember to speak in support of protecting rooftop solar. Wengraf avoided the topic of solar completely and Hahn and Harrison were absent. 

Droste also bemoaned the open space requirements as adding to building expense. The whole city would be better off if the requirement for open space was a contribution to support our parks and especially the marina than a balcony hanging off a building or a rooftop with planters instead of solar. 

Information about 3 years being the average time from approval of a project to the application for a permit may slide by those who aren’t deep into the topic of project approvals. The YIMBY build- everywhere group blames Nimbyism (“not in my back yard”) for blocking projects. If they were actually watching and attending meetings they would know only a handful of projects are appealed and in the end they are almost always unanimously approved. 

The real solution to getting multi-unit housing projects built is to enforce the lapsed permit section of the zoning code (though I would really support changing the time limit from one year to two years). If the lapsed permit rule were enforced, instead of the city turning a blind eye to entitled/approved projects that don’t proceed to a building permit. that would naturally select developers who want to build and rein in the speculators who don’t produce housing in the end.  

This is the Zoning Code BMC 23.404.060 

C. Time Limits 

2. Expiration of Permit  

a. The Zoning Officer may declare a permit lapsed if it is not exercised within one year of its issuance, except as provided in Paragraph (b) below. 

b. A permit authorizing construction may not be declared lapsed if the applicant has applied for a building permit or has made a substantial good faith effort to obtain a building permit and begin construction. 

Hill Street Realty, the applicant to be developer for 2211 Harold Way never built anything. They were speculators and wasted seven years of public and staff time for a doomed project that was poorly designed and couldn’t be built. Those of us protesting the project tried in so many ways to inform, but we were dismissed. After all, how could ordinary citizens do a better job of reading architectural plans and financials than city planners, ZAB commissioners, DRC committee members and city council? 

We were right, of course. The criticism of the proposed project’sl seismic study was right too. It was water that brought the plans down, the ground water that citizens warned would be a problem. 

There are some other meetings that might have slipped your attention. The Berkeley Marina Area Specific Plan wasn’t posted to the City Community Calendar until sometime Monday for the Wednesday, March 16 evening meeting. These public meetings never have video or audio recordings. 

By contrast the last three Hopkins Street meetings were recorded. It doesn’t take a conspiratorial mind to conclude that either the city staff and directors involved are completely disorganized or the intent is to deliberately give short notice to limit attendance. 

The March 16^th meeting consisted of: these are our three alternatives for development, which one do you like best? https://www.cityofberkeley.info/BMASP/ I couldn’t stay, so I can’t say how it ended. 

The March 16^th EBMUD presentation “Searching for the Sewage Signal” searching for COVID in wastewater was recorded and should be posted this week, maybe by the time you pick up this Diary. https://ebmud.com/about-us/education-resources/water-wednesday 

The CDC is tracking SARS-CoV-2 RNA in sewage https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#wastewater-surveillance. If you look at the map of the US, the Bay Area is looking good with decreasing COVID-19 RNA found in wastewater, but I wouldn’t visit San Benito which is the red hotspot in the northern California. The pandemic isn’t over yet, but if we pay attention, keep up with our vaccines including boosters and keep that N95/KN94 handy we can certainly reduce our risks.