Public Comment

With the greatest respect for Kelly Hammargren for the wonderful work she does providing us with information about how the City Council, commissions, and city administration are operating, I’m writing to counter the implications that may be drawn from her report on Measure L that we should vote No on it. 

I’ve lived in Berkeley since 1962, and for many decades have seen reports and admonitions that the city is not allocating enough to infrastructure, that failing to maintain, repair, and upgrade infrastructure will cost taxpayers much more in the long run. Almost never do the city budgets allow for catching up on the needs, and indeed the needs get more extensive and expensive because of the shortfalls every year.

Police and fire services use about 50% of the city budget. Even with the movement to reallocate police funds to more productive and constructive unarmed health, traffic, and related workers’ services, there will still be only 50% or less of the budget for maintaining and improving infrastructure as well as funding parks, libraries, recreation, public health, permitting, building inspection, and the myriad other services the city must provide for us.

The current council has had the courage to put on the ballot at last a measure large enough to actually allow the city to catch up on the decades of backlog in infrastructure maintenance and to make improvements required by the climate crisis, so that the city COULD in fact in future maintain and repair our streets, public buildings and recreation facilities, communications equipment, and the like using regular budget funds annually, as various critics have long said it should.

It will take a long time for such a big endeavor to reach its goal. The more years, the greater the total of interest payments on the bond amount. Those are realities of bond funding and construction that the measure cannot avoid. And it can be highly problematic for a long-term bond measure to specify precisely what the funds are to be used for in what order of priority, because unforeseen disasters or infrastructure failures may demand immediate action that would then be foreclosed by not being specified in the measure.

Keeping in mind that continuing to fail in maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure will inevitably cost more, I intend to vote YES on Measure L.

Kelly gives us very valuable insight into the problems facing committees tasked with overseeing how bond funding is being spent. I’m very grateful for that. What it tells me is that we citizens must make more of a fuss to the city council and the city administration when the spirit of oversight is being undermined or sabotaged. I think this is not a reason to fault Measure L. It is a constant problem for all measures that provide for independent oversight, as L does. No person working in administration likes having an oversight body looking over the work with an eye to finding fault, so hedging, delaying, even obstructing release of data are common tactics. In a better world, administrators and oversight committees would both feel the bond of wanting to get the work done the best they can to serve the needs of the public; but we don’t live in such a world. We, the public, need Kelly to keep us informed of what’s going on and need to press city officials for improvements that will serve our interests.

I ask you to join me in voting YES on Measure L. (And thanks for reading this far!)