Events

Before getting into the meat of this Activist’s Diary:

At the City of Berkeley’s July 1, 2024 Land Use, Housing & Economic Development Committee meeting, two proposals, Councilmember Taplin’s Affordable Housing for Artists and Berkeley Green New Deal: Just Transition Framework for the General Plan’s Environmental Justice Element were continued to a future meeting with no action or discussion. A message came from Taplin’s office to continue the items.

COPA/TOPA (Community Opportunity to Purchase Act / Tenants’ Opportunity to Purchase Act) is moving on to council, after attempts by Councilmembers Humbert and Wengraf to kill it with a negative recommendation. Lunaparra voted against the Humbert-Wengraf motion. 

There was just a handful of speakers. Humbert, committee chair, started off the discussion with his opinion that TOPA should not be pursued and should be forwarded with a negative recommendation. Wengraf concurred. 

Councilmember Lunaparra spoke in favor of TOPA, about the years of work put into it, stabilizing affordable housing and asked staff if she could pick up TOPA from former Councilmember Harrison and proceed as the sponsor. City staff told Lunaparra she could not. 

Interestingly, in the July 8 Agenda Committee discussion on legislative reform, committee members Mayor Arreguin and Councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf had a long discussion of how proposed ordinances and resolutions from councilmembers who have left office could move forward with new sponsors. 

If TOPA ever passes, it would require property owners to notify tenants that the property where they lived was being put up for sale. TOPA would give tenants the first right of refusal, meaning first right to purchase the property. The real estate industry,the property owners of rental property, as you might expect, had a small fit when it was first presented back in 2018 by Arreguin. Tenants clamored for it. 

I never thought there would be a huge number of tenants that could scrape the money /deposits / loans together to purchase a multi-unit building, but it could have been a stabilizing factor in housing. In the resubmission by Harrison (the first submission was by Arreguin who presented various versions over months and years and then let it disappear) COPA added a new dimension for the building purchase through affordable housing nonprofits in the COPA arm of the proposal.  

At the July 3 FITES (Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability) Committee, Taplin’s Train Quiet Zones in West Berkeley slipped off the table as too expensive to pursue, though the staff presentation on the costs of various options was excellent. Councilmember Bartlett’s EVITP (Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program) was referred out of committee for review by the City Attorney. This is an ordinance requiring 50% of electricians per job installing and maintaining city-funded electric vehicle supply equipment and infrastructure to be certified through a training program to reduce risk of fire. 

FITES Committee members Taplin, Humbert and Lunaparra had already made up their minds to refer the Curb Management Plan from the Environment and Climate Commission to the City Manager when they rejected my recommendation that this item really needed input from the Commission on Disability, the Design Review Committee (DRC) and the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) before sending the item off to sit (languish) in the very long City Manager “to do” list. Plus using these resources could speed up the process. 

Attending as many City meetings as I do (and life experiences as a caregiver and a RN) gives me a different perspective on how we can use the expertise in the community, including citizen scientists and commissioners, to get things done. 

Curb Management, which is about loading zones, parking, bus stops and bicycle lanes, vv really needs broad input. Disability parking isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. I remember handicapped spaces that didn’t work with our handicapped van. The inability of the DRC and ZAB to place loading zones where they would work best for new mixed-use developments hampers project design. 

I recall that creating council committees was sold with the idea that councilmembers would develop and refine proposals in committee. Former Councilmember Harrison often used the FITES Committee as a forum to bring in representatives from business and the community for input before finalizing ideas into ordinances. I miss that. 

As I have written many times before, City Council Committees are often a detour on the way to getting things done. 

The Bicycle Access Improvements on the Virginia Street Bikeway were in the draft agenda for July 23 City Council meeting until it was pulled on Monday to be postponed until fall. The Virginia Street Bikeway went through the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission on June 20. I arrived a little late that evening having attended the DRC first. I counted about forty people (most of whom spoke) on whether the Virginia bikeway should be 9 feet wide and preserve parking or 12 feet wide and remove parking. I did not count how many speakers pleaded for each alternative, but there was a heavy showing for preserving parking and a third alternative suggested by Bryce Nesbit complete with a map. 

Ray Yep, the commissioner chairing the meeting, tried to put together a compromise or at the very least at a community meeting to explore the bikeway alternatives further. The Commission was having none of it, declined to support Yep’s motion and voted for the 12 foot wide bikeway. 

I am not an enthusiast of curbed protected bikeways. If we ever really get people out of cars and on bicycles and scooters, narrow protected bikeways will not handle a real increase in usage. 

For all the attention to bike infrastructure, when Bryce Nesbit with a group of volunteers duplicated the prior bicycle rider counts by approximating the same locations, conditions and times, their bicycle counts found fewer bicycle riders in the 2023 count than the 2010 and 2015 counts. The population of Berkeley during that same time increased from 112,580 (2010) to 118,962 (2023). At the Transportation Commission meeting where the bicycle survey results were presented, the commissioners expressed no interest in pursuing why the investment in bicycle infrastructure wasn’t translating into changing behavior. 

My favored response to encouraging the switch from cars to bicycles and improving safety is reducing/restricting speed on residential streets and directing vehicle traffic to identified traffic corridors , resulting in bicycle and scooter friendly streets (quiet streets) instead of curbed bike lanes. 

At the June 25 City Council meeting the main event was the Council managing to pass the biennial budget for fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Councilmember Kesarwani made her pitch to remove the budgeted $10,000,000 for the small sites program and did not walk out as she did at the Budget and Finance Committee on June 19 when Councilmember Hahn countered Kesarwani by speaking for the importance of funding the purchase of existing small apartment buildings and thereby supporting existing affordable housing and community diversity. 

The $10,000,000 is more like seed money for housing trusts, grants, etc. 

The budget passed unanimously. 

What didn’t get any attention was agenda item 58. Climate lost. 

In 2021 when former Councilmember Kate Harrison proposed adopting an ordinance on climate with the overwhelming title “Establishing Emergency Greenhouse Gas Limits, Process for Updated Climate Action Plan, Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting and Regional Collaboration” 

T, he carbon dioxide level was described as staggering at 418 parts per million (ppm). Now three years later on July 6, 2024 CO2 was 425.50 ppm. 

Global warming which was at 1.1 °C above preindustrial levels in 2021 and given as justification for taking action came with this warning, “[C]urrent global growth trends and policies could push humanity past 1.5 degrees by mid-century…” and “[T]he ‘Global North,’ which includes Berkeley, has far exceeded its fair share of the emissions …[and] must reduce its emissions rapidly and justly”. 

In 2018 when the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published the special report on the importance of keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5°C instead of 2°C to avoid the most catastrophic impacts from climate change the prediction for reaching/crossing the 1.5°C threshold was sometime between 2030 and 2050. 

The report came with this directive to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of global warming. 

“The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.” http://tiny.cc/82n3zz  

The proposed Harrison climate ordinance was already dead long before City Council voted to take no action on May 25. I counted twenty-one meetings/opportunities for action, but found it was brought up for discussion only three times. The last FITES Committee discussion was on June 6, 2022, with nothing until May 15, 2024 when FITES took no action and sent it back to council. 

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, we have already crossed the 1.5°C threshold. The global average temperature was 1.6°C above preindustrial levels for the twelve months from June 2023 through May 2024. 

The latest climate news is anything but reassuring. On June 7, 2024 on Democracy Now the closing interview was with Jeff Goodall the author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Just four days earlier Goodall wrote an op-ed “The Heat Wave Scenario That Keeps Climate Scientists Up at Night” in the New York Times. That climate scenario is a power failure in the height of an extreme heat wave. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/opinion/heat-technology-climate.html 

Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University and the University of Michigan looked at the potential consequences of a total blackout for two days with three days of restoring power in three cities (Phoenix, Detroit, Atlanta) during an extreme heat wave. The results for Phoenix predicted 800,000 emergency room visits and 13,000 deaths, for Detroit 221 deaths and Atlanta 12,540 emergency room visits and 6 deaths. 

The first 2024 draft update to Berkeley’s federally required Local Hazard Mitigation Plan (LHMP) projects a potential annual average of six to seven 90–100-degree days in Berkeley in ten years and follows that with there isn’t much useful research on the economic impacts of high heat at the local level. 

Six or seven days doesn’t seem like much to worry about, though I certainly remember during 2022 heat wave receiving the text alert at 5:48 pm on September 6, 2022, to shut down all unnecessary power to save the grid. 

On July 10, 2024 the Mercury News published the California Department of Insurance found the hidden costs of extreme heat to be $7.7 billion for California over the last decade from lost productivity to healthcare for heat related illnesses. The evening news announced fourteen deaths (the number is expected to go up) in San Jose from heat in the current heat wave. 

In Berkeley, our first 2024 summer “heat wave” according to my iPhone Berkeley reached only 81° on July 4, but Palm Springs reached 124° on July 5 (day after reports in the newspaper). Now we’re in another temperature swing under the heat dome covering much of the U.S. West. 

In the LHMP, if in a ten-year future the heat wave for Berkeley is projected at six to seven 90° to 100° days then what are the temperatures going to be east, north and south of us? 

Jeff Goodall in The Heat Will Kill You First doesn’t stop with what happens to us humans. He includes what happens to plants (it isn’t good) our food in this heated future. Councilmember Bartlett’s Berkeley Food Utility and Access Resilience Measure (FARM) passed by City Council and sitting in the City Manager’s long referral “to do” list isn’t going to save us. In the committee discussion, the food resilience was to look at sources of food within 100 miles of Berkeley, seemingly forgetting that there are hundreds of thousands of other people living in that same 100 miles and what might happen to those food sources in a drought and on a heated planet. 

Mayor Arreguin’s April 11, 2024, email “Implementing Climate Policies for a Greener Future makes it sound as if here in Berkeley we’ve made incredible progress. I beg to differ. 

I went back to Mayor Arreguin’s email from April 11, 2024, extolling how great Berkeley is doing on climate action with temperature rise of 1.18 C° for 2023. (The 1.18 °C is from NOAA) A bulk of the conclusions Arreguin cited on GHG reductions attribute 54% of Berkeley’s GHG to transportation were from 2021 when we were still barely coming out of the pandemic shutdowns. 

Looking at the December 12, 2023, Climate Action Plan and Resilience Update from Jordon Klein, Director, Department of Planning and Development linked in Arreguin’s email, Berkeley has some big work to do this year with a budget that is undergoing some belt tightening. The goal for public Level 2 EV chargers is 420 by 2025. There were 110 in October 2023. The goal for public direct current fast chargers by 2025 is 100. There were 19 in 2023. 

More worrisome risks in the LHMP are active and potential landslide areas, wildland urban wildfire and the overdue big earthquake whenever that comes. Looking at the maps in the LHMP there is very little land in Berkeley that is not in one of the identified high-risk areas, i.e. the Hayward Fault, landslide, liquefaction or wildfire. 

You can read the LHMP at https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/disaster-preparedness/local-hazard-mitigation-plan-update 

The LHMP includes lots of charts and maps, but it does not include this link, where you can type in an address and see whether that address/land parcel is on a fault line, landside area or both or sitting in a liquefaction zone. https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/ 

One thing Wengraf and I totally agree on, is that Berkeley should not be adding density, building more housing and putting more people in the high fire zones which also happen to be next to or on top of the Hayward Fault and in landslide zones. 

Arreguin cited in his email the “Deep Green Building Initiative”, which he authored with Hahn. The Deep Green Building Initiative was an incentive-based plan. I said at the time as a participant in the meetings, that incentives would never work and they haven’t. Developers do use the state measure SB 330 density bonus with the formula for how far a project can exceed zoning restrictions by including a pittance of income restricted units in the building. 

From my perspective, we have a lot of work to do to warrant labeling Berkeley as a leader. 

A year of record global heat has pushed Earth closer to dangerous threshold by Scott Dance 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/06/05/global-temperatures-1-5-celsius-record-year/ 

When it comes to climate I have to ask: What are we thinking? Are we believing that some magical technology is going to come along and save us from the repercussions of our actions? Is the way we live so precious to us that we wish to blind ourselves to the impact of our lifestyles? And what about all the habitat, ecosystems that we destroy in the process of endless building that is really suited to the last century and not the future. 

We need to think, plan, act and live differently if we want a livable planet for those babies pictured in my facebook feed from friends and family. 

I have much more to say and some interesting reading to report, but this is on my usual writing long side already, so watch for the next edition of the Activist’s Diary.