Extra

If you thought Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin's recent explanation of his "agreement" with the University of California (UC) not to challenge their Long Range Development Plan sounded defensive, you would be right. His outrageous capitulation to UC on behalf of the outraged town he is supposed to represent got more media play than "the play", when Stanford's band charged onto the football field a little too soon, and the Cal football team had to thread their way through trombones to make their final, definitive touchdown.  

Mayor Arreguin tried to coax the numbers into formation, but the most innocent math shows that $31 from each of us for sixteen years would buy back our parks, landmarks, and control over the outrageous over-enrollment only recently affirmed by court challenges and easily illustrated by the tent cities Arreguin must consider an inevitable part of our landscape now that he's abandoned every campaign promise he rode in on. My favorite defensive extremity is his implication that his "agreement", which belongs securely in quotation marks, secures UC's financial contributions to the local Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), despite those contributions existing for years by undemocratic, property-based mandate. 

No one should be bragging about allowing interest-conflicted property owners the lion's share of control of Berkeley's planning and legislation, but that's about all Mayor Arreguin has left now that he's abandoned the democratic principles which, during a pandemic, should have constrained radical changes now streaming straight from UC's Capital Strategies offices and the BIDs unobstructed by pesky commissions or public comment in both official and unofficial closed sessions. The City of Berkeley has yet to respond to one local group's Brown Act challenge of Mayor Arreguin's closed session "agreement" with UC, the response to which should offer some top-quality pandemic entertainment. 

Most of us are facing lives completely upended by a deadly global pandemic, shuttered or ruined businesses, and the devastation of personal losses. No sane person, in the midst of this, would imagine for a minute that the considered opportunities provided most policy change had any fair hearing in even what's left of the fractured, technology-dependent open commission sessions available to the tech-connected public - provided they don't conflict with the parent-teacher conference scheduled for the exact same moment in time. 

Did anybody in town know what was agreed to ahead of time? Does anybody care to explain it now? According to attorney David Axelrod, who years ago was the field coordinator for People's Park's native plant garden and filed a Brown Act violation against the City of Berkeley's closed session, Mayor Jesse Arreguin's secret agreement is deeply flawed: 

"The Agreement appears to be one-sided and illusory, inasmuch as the University is not bound to honor its promises about limiting enrollment, but the City has permanently abrogated its options as to People's Park, Anchor House and Upper Hearst, even if the Agreement is terminated and payments eliminated. The only party permanently sacrificing its powers is the City, which I strongly suspect constitutes an unlawful abrogation of governmental authority." 

This comment came before Judge Seligman, on Tuesday, August 24, 2021, issued a decision ordering a halt to UC's upper Hearst development threatening the nearby neighborhood and a freeze on enrollment, which even UC claims not to be able to count: 

"Mogulof said he wasn't even certain this early in the semester whether this fall's enrollment is more or less than last year's." - San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 2021 

The public's business should be done in public, in transparent processes informed by our commissions, our neighborhood groups, our public input, and certainly the guidelines, ordinances, and legislation we've invested our time and resources creating to guide legal and political representatives. Don't be distracted by Jesse Arreguin's trombones marching across the field: keep your eye on the goal and hang onto the ball. Our historic landmarks, natural open spaces, parks, and rent-controlled housing are priceless treasures which should never be sacrificed to UC's current culture of cold monetization. 

# # #