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Dear Mayor Arreguin and Councilmembers:

As you consider bond measures to place on the November ballot (May 31 agenda, items 37 and 39), I have one plea: Please give me at least one clean measure that I can vote for in good conscience.

Please don’t even think about combining essential and prestige projects into “one big bond” that voters will be forced to vote down (The staff report’s “Option 1”). Please don’t even think about staff’s “Option 2,” nor about the potential combinations that Councilmember Droste helpfully listed in her May 27 newsletter: “repaving and street safety,” or “housing and disaster/climate resiliency.”

Please offer voters at least four separate bond measures, allowing us to vote for things we believe in: 

1. Affordable-housing creation – to reverse displacement, get people off the street, and help all Berkeley residents live in dignity. Note that this goal received by far the highest survey support (58%, more than twice its nearest competitor).
2. Needed repairs to aging infrastructure, with no changes to street configuration or any other legacy assets. (Second-most popular goal in the survey, at 27%.)
3. Narrowly-defined climate and wildfire mitigations – like utility undergrounding. If Berkeley needs to start building a seawall, that would go here.
4. All the virtue-signaling, counterproductive “traffic safety” and “climate friendly” novelties that the Deputy Public Works Director and Transportation staff want to dream up. This measure, alone, would authorize laying lots more concrete for these expensive follies. (Bearing in mind that cement production generates some 10% of global CO2 emissions. “Improving pedestrian, bike, and traffic safety” got only 11% support in the survey – and that’s optimistically, unrealistically assuming that staff’s terribly designed interventions would actually improve net safety, not degrade it.)

Berkeley residents have been very generous in voting to tax themselves for one “infrastructure” bond after another – and we keep getting less infrastructure. Streets are blocked for months or years to create pointless, costly prestige projects. Or they’re permanently compromised, in ways that reduce nonmotorists' safety, while increasing traffic congestion (and therefore CO2 emissions). 

This is why many of us voters have concluded that next time we’re offered another broad, ill-defined, infrastructure bond measure, we must adopt the Roger Daltrey (of The Who) policy: We won’t get fooled again. 

Please don’t give us no option apart from rejecting an omnibus bond measure that would fund new mischief. Please don’t make us actively campaign against a catch-all measure, taking down needed priorities (like affordable housing) along with the nutty, destructive stuff. 

To understand this plea, consider two recent (bond-supported) “infrastructure improvement” projects that current Councilmembers idealistically embraced, only to watch rogue staff and consultant actions turn them into fiascos: 

• A “Milvia bikeway” plan turned into a bizarre new iron curtain of concrete barriers – which the public was never warned about – and worsened cycling. Northbound cyclists now have southbound cars racing right at us, which is terrifying. A safe, convenient cycling street has become a nightmare.
• A Hopkins “placemaking” and street-safety effort devolved into a controversial “two-way cycletrack” design that even neighborhood cyclists opposed. Residents and merchants alike widely oppose staff’s unworkable, unnecessary, bizarre plan to remove almost all street parking.

Consider also some bond-supported “infrastructure improvement” projects that obliged our former Mayor Bates' imperial dreams: 

• Allston Way between Berkeley High and City Hall was torn up for months, snarling downtown circulation. This was to lay a permeable-pavement “demonstration project” on a single block. Net environmental impact: Sharply negative.
• Hearst St. from Oxford to Euclid was torn up to remove dozens of parking spaces, which UCB visitors, students, and faculty/staff had relied on for campus access, and for load-in/load-out of equipment and instruments. This was all to create a wide eastbound bicycle lane on Hearst’s south side – just a few yards beside a superb on-campus bike path that UC students and Berkeley residents had happily cycled on for generations. Even today, rogue cyclists menace pedestrians on the sidewalk, right beside their shiny new bike lane.
• Shattuck from University to Allston Way was torn up for 3-½ years for “pedestrian, cyclist, and transit improvements” that made life hell for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. I was nearly killed by a suddenly opened truck door, while biking down a Shattuck Ave. that was strangled down to one lane by parked construction equipment on both sides. The same contractors that were payed to widen sidewalks were apparently paid to narrow them, just a few months later. The end result: Shattuck from University to Center St. is dramatically less safe for pedestrians, because we now have to watch for traffic from multiple directions instead of just one. The only beneficiaries of this debacle were one-percenter public works contractors. And no one has taken accountability for the mess.

Finally, consider some of the contemplated “infrastructure improvements” that voters already know that a new omnibus bond would fund: 

• Artificially narrowing Adeline St. and MLK Blvd., to as little as one lane in each direction, to appease a few extreme car-hating ideologues who’ve dominated “Adeline Corridor” planning. Years of construction hell, followed by permanently strangled Route 24 access into and out of Berkeley.
• Artificially narrowing San Pablo Ave. (already chronically congested) to add bicycle lanes – right beside the two continuous, low-stress bike routes available just a block away, on lightly trafficked Tenth St. and Curtis/Matthews Streets.

Faced with a broad, unrestricted “infrastructure” bond that would subsidize lots more disasters like these, many Berkeley voters will conclude that our only option is to follow The Who’s advice: Get down on our knees and pray that we don’t get fooled again. And the only way to ensure that will be to vote against the whole package. 

To quote one of Berkeley’s most distinguished residents ever: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious…that you can’t…even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers…and…make it stop.” 

Thank you for considering the above arguments for giving voters a “cafeteria” choice of four clean bonds – allowing majorities to vote for the priorities we believe in, with a clean conscience.