In another heated Richmond City Council meeting, the Richmond City Council on May 17, 2022, voted not to approve the proposed sale of Point Molate to a developer who, according to the city's attorneys, has failed repeatedly to comply with its numerous obligations to the city related to Point Molate. 

The meeting culminated two years of drama over Point Molate. 

But this time it was not the ideological disputes that have so often caused sparks to fly in Richmond that were at the root of what happened. It was the overall failure of the developer to follow its contractual obligations that brought the City Staff, the City's lawyers and the City's management to recommend against selling Point Molate to the developer, Winehaven Legacy, LLC, an offshoot of SunCal Inc., a southern California developer handpicked by Richmond's mayor to do a luxury housing development at Point Molate. 

The repeated failures of the developer to provide even basic information about how it would pay for the purchase and pay for the proposed development frustrated Richmond's new City Attorney, David Aleshire. Aleshire explained in detail to the City Council his multiple and increasingly strenuous efforts to get the essential information from the developer and the developer's repeated misdirection, repeated lapses in payments, repeated misinformation and repeated failure to provide the contractually required information. Aleshire finally had to recommend against proceeding with the sale and the proposed development on the grounds that it would put the city at serious financial risk. 

The City Attorney's recommendation against the sale was made against the backdrop of growing information showing that the city could lose hundreds of millions of dollars if the development went forward due to high infrastructure and fire protection costs. The development agreements between the city and SunCal's group had specified that the city could choose not to proceed with the sale if the city determined that the project put the city at financial risk. The developer repeatedly rebuffed efforts by Richmond's City Attorney, its hired outside attorneys and its staff to clarify the risks - finally causing the exasperated reaction and conclusion that the City should not approve the sale. 

In the end it was the developer's own failure to perform that sank the sale and the future development. The City Council voted 4 to 2 to have the City Attorney draw up the Resolution and the findings to not sell Point Molate to the SunCal group of entities. 

Now the city awaits the very likely move by the coalition of the Guideville Tribe (a branch of the Pomos) and Upstream Inc., to take over the marketing of Point Molate. Guideville/Upstream have informed the City they will purchase the rights to market the property on May 21, 2022, in accordance with the terms of their Settlement Agreement (reduced to a Judgment) reached over their lawsuit against the City. 

The interests in Point Molate of Upstream Inc. and the Guideville Tribe stems from their failed casino development plans of approximately a decade ago. The City had worked with Upstream and the Guidevilles on a proposed casino development at Point Molate. Mayor Tom Butt had promoted the plan but after the citizens of Richmond put a successful ballot measure out opposing the casino plan, Butt switched sides and helped vote down the casino plan. The casino developers had given millions of dollars to the city for the rights to pursue their casino development and spent more in working on the development plan. When the city refused to return the money, Upstream/Guideville sued in federal court for their money back. 

That case led to a Settlement between the City and the Guideville/Upstream group wherein: 1.) the City of Richmond was required to approve a development and sale of Point Molate within 2 years of the approvals of the entitlements for the development. 2.) If the city could not close a sale within the 2 years, then the Guideville/Upstream group would have the option to buy the property for $400 and the obligation to market it. 3) If the Guideville/Upstream group do not get the property sold within 5 years, the property reverts to the City. 

The deadline agreed to for the City to close the sale (and in this case for SunCal to act on buying the property) was agreed upon as May 21, 2022. So at this juncture the Guideville/Upstream group get to pay $400 and take over the marketing of Point Molate in accordance with the deal orchestrated by Richmond Mayor Tom Butt. 

The Guideville Tribe and Upstream had been in line to receive half of the agreed to sale price of $45 million, the other half going to the City, if the sale to the SunCal/Winehaven group had gone through. It is generally believed that SunCal/Winehaven was unable to raise the funds to buy and develop because of the extraordinary infrastructure costs and the big financial risks to develop at the remote Point Molate. It is assumed that the Guideville/Upstream group will face the same challenges. 

Point Molate has been a hot spot of fighting in the City of Richmond primarily because the mayor took a development-at-all-costs approach to the city's waterfront. Despite the wishes of the majority of the city's residents and elected officials to promote infill housing in the city center and along its transportation Corridors, the mayor wanted to sell off Point Molate for a luxury housing enclave in a spot designated as an ultra high fire risk by fire officials, a remote waterfront property next to the Chevron Oil Refinery. 

The City bought Point Molate from the U.S. Navy for $1 as part of the base closures of the 1990's and Richmond residents have been using it for recreation and open space and hoping to keep it as that. 

Because the mayor wanted to sell Point Molate for a luxury housing enclave, he pushed the SunCal plan through. The mayor alternately ignored and then derided all the input from the numerous residents who asked that the housing be put downtown where it is needed and where there is infrastructure, and to leave the waterfront as park and open space, while restoring the historic Winehaven buildings as a regional attraction. 

Instead, dismissing all pleas to hold off on approvals until the community coalesced on a plan, the mayor rushed the luxury housing development plan through, in the process tying up the city planning department, legal staff and city manager and staff, precluding any progress on the needed infill development for years. 

The SunCal development plan drew criticism from advocates of affordable housing as well as fierce opposition from environmentalists because Point Molate is the site of the last in-tact watershed in the East Bay and home of the best eelgrass and aquatic habitat in San Francisco Bay. Point Molate has been designated as park in the General Plan of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and in the General Plan of the East Bay Regional Park District. 

Among the wild creatures that visitors to Point Molate have seen are the recently spotted bald eagles flying high over Point Molate, the river otters and leopard sharks, the multiple nests of osprey, the wild turkey, other raptors and high-value native coastal grasses and native plants, the over 600 species of living, flying, burrowing, nesting and playing critters that inhabit the area, plus evidence of possibly cat predators able to take down a deer. 

A needed sports playing fields complex has also been proposed. Point Molate is a prime location for playing fields and much desired recreational space for Richmond. The sports fields complex that has been proposed for Richmond youth and adults would allow Richmond residents to play near home and would bring teams and visitors to Richmond along with revenue to the city. 

YIMBY-in-chief, State Senator Scott Wiener, wants to eliminate through legislation California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review for student housing projects statewide. Communities that host UC campuses have little power to hem in UC excesses except with the CEQA process, which only asks that environmental impacts be assessed in an open, transparent process. Because UC is exempt from municipal zoning and taxes and has well-funded armies of lawyers and public relations flacks to push its expansion plans, this is the only way the public can match UC’s nearly unlimited power. YIMBY allies of UC are similarly well-funded by real estate and development corporations, many of them out-of-state, that hope to profit from UC construction projects. One of them, publicly-traded American Campus Communities, the nation's largest developer, owner and manager of student housing, was just purchased by Blackstone, one of the largest private equity firms, and will go private. 

What sparked the quick drive to amend CEQA was the State Supreme court decision to leave in place the enrollment cap for UC Berkeley ordered by an Alameda County Superior Court judge. A UC Berkeley spokesperson said then in a New York Times article that the university will be “doing our best under the terms” of the court decision. This all raises the question of why UC Berkeley has not been “doing its best” under the past many decades to ameliorate a known and protracted problem. 

The community only wants housing construction to be sensitive to environmental concerns and be located in appropriate locations. For example, Project #2, People’s Park, is an irreplaceable open space that has been recently nominated for the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its cultural, historical and environmental significance. It is surrounded by highly historic architecture by Berkeley’s most famed architects. It is an inappropriate location for high rise housing. 

On KQED Forum some weeks ago, a caller recounted his experience getting an acceptance letter from Cal in 1964. The long ago letter stated that regrettably Cal would not have any housing available for him. Now, 58 years later, he questioned why UC Berkeley has allowed the lack of student housing to continue all these years. Clearly, the housing crisis we are experiencing in Berkeley, for students and longtime residents, has been fostered by UC Berkeley inaction for over a half-century. Cal shirked responsibility, rather than tackle a dire situation of its own making. 

The suggestion that this is a battle of students versus longtime residents is false. The people of Berkeley are the victims of the university’s efforts to pad its bloated bureaucracy and corporate research agenda by monetizing its real estate assets and increasing its entrepreneurial activity, while it maligns criticism of its failure to follow its public mission through a strategy of public relations manipulation. 

The university has also shown in practice its disregard for students of color. Despite having an Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB), last year it proposed eliminating the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI), which supports scholars of color. Only after a national outcry it reversed course. 

Those that oppose the university’s Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), which includes neighborhood groups and a campus labor union, are in favor of student housing and have supported housing at Upper Hearst and Blackwell Hall. The groups have also supported housing on a decrepit parking structure at Ellsworth and Channing, but when the community brought it up, UC said that they would have to replace the parking. Parking preferred over student housing? 

The university has once again demonstrated its lack of commitment to housing students when it announced plans to demolish Evans Hall and leave the on-campus site as open space at the same time it is eliminating open space off-campus. The Rochdale Cooperative, which provides affordable student housing, is threatened by UC Berkeley administration due to an expired lease agreement and potentially massive rent increases. A newly proposed project replacing the recently demolished Tolman Hall would provide academic space for what’s lost in Evans Hall and for various disciplines now housed in other campus facilities. The new structure is only five stories with no housing. UC could have built a wonderful housing and academic quad similar to those universities that it claims to emulate, such as Harvard, Michigan or Stanford. All of those institutions house their students on their main campuses, often in integrated academic and residential buildings. 

We all want a city that benefits from a symbiotic relationship between the intellectual fervor on-campus and the diverse artistic, literary and politically innovative culture off-campus. We do not want a city that fosters gentrification and displacement of its low-income neighborhoods of color that have been declining in population over past decades. We want UC Berkeley to be a good neighbor. 

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Harvey Smith, member of People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group and author of Berkeley and the New Deal. For more information, go to peoplesparkhxdist.org. 

 

On Thursday June 2, the Berkeley City Council will be voting both on zoning, and on what they want in a Joint Vision and Priorities (JVP) Document, for both the Ashby and North Berkeley BART stations. This JVP document will help guide the development process from developer selection through construction.

I would encourage people who want to see more affordable housing built in Berkeley to write to the City Council soon, before minds are made up, to urge them to do two things:

First, the Council should support a JVP that calls for 100% below market affordable housing to be developed in phases at both BART stations. Future Requests for Qualifications (RFQs) should make clear that the developers sought for the projects are those who are experienced at building projects where 100% of the units are below market affordable units. The housing built should be affordable to households whose incomes range from extremely low income (30% of Area Median Income and below) to Low income (up to 80% of Area Median Income)

The City Council should reject the alternative approach of selecting, via the RFQ process, market rate developer-led teams to develop each site, with a publicly funded non-profit developer in a junior partner role, allowed to develop only a small portion of each site. The work of the Unity Council in the development of Fruitvale BART station should be taken as a model of how affordable housing can be developed at a BART station. Expensive market rate high-rises, such as the one found at MacArthur BART, are not what Berkeley needs.

Secondly, the City Council should adopt the City staff zoning recommendation and set a maximum height of seven stories at both stations, a height appropriate for affordable housing.

You can send e-mail to the Council at council@cityofberkeley.info

Implement the Adeline Corridor Plan Goal

The Adeline Corridor Plan set a goal of “100% deed-restricted affordable housing” at Ashby BART with priority given for housing affordable to very low and extremely low income households. It also has as a goal that at least 50% of all new housing in the plan area built over the 20 year life of the plan should be income restricted affordable housing. This latter goal has no chance of being achieved unless all the housing built at Ashby BART is below market affordable housing, since market rate developers provide typically no more than 10% below market units, the number needed to qualify for the state density bonus. The City Council should respect the goals of the Adeline Corridor Plan, which was the product of extensive community input over a period of more than five years.

To provide some context for why affordable housing is needed in the BART station areas, we can look at the situation of those living in those areas. Median income of tenant households in South Berkeley near Ashby BART fall within the very low and low income range according to estimates from the most recent Bureau of the Census American Community Survey data for four South Berkeley Census tracts (which together include the area from MLK Jr Way to San Pablo between Dwight Way and the Oakland border). Half of all tenant households in this area have incomes of $50,000 or less. For a 3 person household, the 2021 income limit for a very low income family of 3 is $61,650; that is 50% of the Area Median Income (AMI) for that size of household. 

Median tenant incomes are somewhat higher in the two census tracts nearest the North Berkeley BART station. Estimates of median income indicate that the median tenant household is a low income household, but over a third have incomes under $50,000, making them very low income households. 

Low Income Residents Are Being Priced Out of Berkeley 

The recently released study by the Anti Eviction Mapping Project, entitled Densifying Berkeley: Potential Impacts on Displacement and Equity, shows that “low-income residents are being priced out of the city en masse”. They also conclude (page 33) that “because of the shortage of affordable options, 70% of low-income households (earning 80% or lower AMI) occupy housing outside of their income, and are therefore not adequately housed.” They are paying more that 30% of their income for housing, with substantial numbers paying over 50%. By contrast, moderate income and above moderate income households can afford the housing they are living in. The City should focus on people in households with incomes at 80% of AMI and below. 

New market rate housing is way out of reach for low and very low income households, not to mention extremely low income households. With two bedroom rent controlled units having a median rent for new tenancies of $2900, even available rent controlled units are out of reach. The 80% AMI upper income limit for a low income family of three, which would need a two-bedroom unit, is now $98,650. Such a family could afford a housing cost (rent and utilities) of at most $2466. The affordability standard is that housing is affordable if housing cost (rent and utilities) amount to no more than 30% of gross income. Using this standard, at 50% AMI, the upper limit of very low income, a three person family could afford a housing cost of $1541 a month. 

That housing for low, very low and extremely low income households is in high demand can be illustrated by the fact that there were 1000 applicants for 34 units at the recently opened Jordan Court senior housing in North Berkeley, which is affordable at 20% to 60% AMI. By contrast people who can afford the units in Berkeley’s newer market rate buildings have many units to choose from. Newer buildings typically have vacancy rates over 5%. And the market rate high rise at MacArthur BART recently advertised 7.8% of its units as available. 

Affordable Housing, Not Market Rate, is Urgently Needed 

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project report includes a table showing progress toward meeting the Association of Bay Area Government’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) plan goals for different income levels. For the six years 2015-2020, the City has permitted a total of 2709 units. 2476, or 91.4%, of those units are market rate units for people with above moderate incomes. For three person households that means incomes above $135,650. 2 bedroom units in new market rate buildings typically rent for over $4000 a month. That level of rent is affordable to people with household incomes over $160,000. These units are completely out of reach for low income people. 

The 2476 units permitted amount to 177% of the RHNA goal for above moderate housing. When data for the entire 2015-2023 RHNA is reported, it will certainly show that more than the double the number of above moderate units called for by RHNA have been permitted. By contrast, Berkeley has permitted only 32% of the very low income RHNA; and only 14% of the Low Income RHNA. The City is not only failing to meet the current Low and a Very low income RHNA goals, it has also failed to meet those goals in the two previous RHNA periods extending back to 1999. No wonder there has been displacement and demographic changes in Berkeley. 

Building market rate housing does nothing to keep low and very low income families from being priced out and displaced from Berkeley. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project study found that “increasing the overall housing supply has not decreased the probability of displacement.” That is building lots of market rate units does not help. The thing that can decrease displacement is building and creating more publicly funded below market affordable housing. The affordability crisis can be successfully addressed by non-profit affordable housing developers using public funds to build housing that Berkeley’s rent-burdened tenants can afford. (Acquisition of existing housing and its conversion to permanently affordable housing can also play a role.) 

Public Land for Public Benefit 

There is no better place to build new affordable housing than on public land. The cost of acquiring land to build on, especially in today’s overheated housing market, adds substantially to the cost of building below market affordable units. When non-profits build affordable housing on public land, land cost can be reduced or eliminated altogether. BART has adopted a policy of discounting land cost by up to 60% below fair market value for affordable housing projects. It’s hard for the nonprofits who build affordable housing to compete with market rate developers for expensive private sites. By prioritizing public land like BART stations for affordable housing, the city can make sure that available local affordable housing funds stretch as far as possible and produce the largest possible number of affordable units. 

Some recently permitted below market projects in Berkeley have been on land owned by churches or nonprofits (e.g. Jordan Court). But there is not a huge amount of church and nonprofit owned land in Berkeley. Public land has a big role to play if the City is serious about building more affordable housing. The two largest below market projects in Berkeley in recent decades, Oxford Plaza in downtown, and the Berkeley Way project now nearing completion, were both built on city-owned land. And use of public land is not new in Berkeley. In the 1980s, scattered site public housing was built on surplus public property, and Redwood Gardens housing for seniors was created on land that was formerly used by the state-run School for the Deaf and Blind. 

It’s appropriate to use public land for things that the private for-profit sector does not do well, and building affordable housing for low and very low income people is one of those things. Plenty of market rate housing is being built in Berkeley now, and market rate developers will continue to build in Berkeley as long as there is demand for the high rent units they build and it’s profitable. Public land should not be squandered on market rate development, but should be reserved to help meet the enormous unmet demand for low income housing. 

Our economy generates some jobs that require higher education and pay well, such as tech industry, and professional and managerial jobs. People like this can often afford market rate housing. But it also generates a lot of low wage service, clerical, blue collar and sales jobs that don’t pay well, and that provide incomes that fall way short of what’s needed to afford new market rate housing. If we want a city that is diverse and if we want to address the problems of displacement and gentrification, we have to build more housing for the lower income part of the Bay Area work force. Public land needs to be prioritized for that purpose. 

100% Affordable at BART to Meet RHNA Goals 

The upcoming 2023-2031 RHNA Plan calls for 2446 very low income units and 1408 low income units in Berkeley. As the City has not been able to meet the 2015-2023 RHNA goal of 553 very low and 442 low income units, it’s highly unlikely that it will be able to fully meet the 2023-2031 RHNA goals. However, if the BART sites are reserved exclusively for housing for people at 80% of AMI and below, it’s possible that the City could come close to achieving half of the RHNA goal for these income levels. 

The City will need to provide substantial local affordable housing funds to enable non-profit affordable housing developers to leverage other public funds and tax credits to build affordable housing. The City has Measure O bond funds, Measure U-1 revenue, and revenue from the paying of affordable housing fees by developers who decline to meet the city’s inclusionary requirement with 20% units on site. The City is considering another bond measure that would appear on this fall’s ballot. Such a bond measure could include funds earmarked for development of affordable housing at the Ashby and North Berkeley BART sites. It could also help fund a public plaza. $150 million for affordable housing could leverage enough other public funds to provide 750 affordable units, perhaps more. 

Practically speaking, development of BART sites will have to be phased development. As is noted in the Adeline Corridor Plan, only a tiny number of affordable housing projects funded in California have had more than 250 units. Some BART stations have had a project in one phase for seniors, followed by another phase with a project for families or vice versa. Some advocates of market rate high-rises seem to think that BART sites can be developed all at once. But even bad market rate dominated projects like MacArthur BART have been developed in phases. Construction of the first phase there began in 2011 and the last building completed was not occupied until 2020. Berkeley will not be able to build all the affordable housing it needs in the next ten years. It will still need affordable housing in twelve years, in fifteen years and later, and it will need workable sites for that housing. Phased development will allow time to address access issues – if parking for commuters and others is reduced over time, alternative ways of accessing the BART sites can be developed. 

Zoning 

The City Council should follow the staff recommendation and set a seven story maximum height for buildings at both BART stations. 

Higher building Costs: 12 story buildings cost substantially more to build per square foot than 4-6 story buildings. Non profit affordable housing developers rely on public funds, including local funds from Berkeley’s Housing Trust Fund and Berkeley’s Measure O bond funds. They don’t build more expensive 12 story buildings, which would be a bad use of public money. Affordable housing built downtown on Oxford on the former public parking lot, and now under construction on the City’s Berkeley Way parking lot, are both six stories, a height that works for non-profit developers, who want to make efficient use of public funds. 

A recent report by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation about construction costs states: 

“Building with steel and concrete costs more. Type I projects, which are typically over 5-7 stories and constructed with steel and concrete, cost an average of $65 more per square foot than other types of construction, like Type V over I (i.e. wood frame floors over a concrete podium).” 

https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/Hard_Construction_Costs_March_2020.pdf 

Non-profits have developed housing at a number of BART stations, including San Leandro and Fruitvale BART. None of the completed affordable housing has a height greater than six stories and four and five story buildings are more common. Affordable buildings are in the planning stages at Lake Merritt BART that would be 7 stories. 

100% Non Profit Development to Maximize Affordable Housing at BART 

Some people have argued that the greater the number of total units built, the greater the number of affordable units there will be. This is definitely not the case. What is true is that the greater the share of available developable space that is provided to non-profit developers to develop, the greater the amount of affordable housing there will be. And you get the maximum amount of affordable housing when non profits are chosen to develop 100% below market projects on 100% of the available space.  

Only a tiny proportion of the affordable housing built at BART stations to date has been built as inclusionary units in market rate buildings. At MacArthur BART, which exemplifies the kind of BART station development we don’t want to see in Berkeley, there is one publicly funded affordable housing building with 90 units. There are also two market rate buildings, one of them a high-rise, with a total of 787 units. One of the buildings has no inclusionary units at all while the high-rise has just 11% below market units. Had the site of the high rise tower been developed by affordable housing developers instead of market rate developers, with the same building footprint and same number of units per floor, but capping the height at 5 floors of housing, the number of affordable units would have ended up being 135 in that building instead of 45. Who develops the building is more important than building height in determining how many affordable units are created. 

Negative Environmental Impacts of High-Rise Buildings  

High-rise development has negative impacts with respect to climate change because 12 story and taller buildings use a lot more concrete and steel. Cement is the main component of concrete, and the manufacture of cement is very energy intensive and is responsible for an estimated 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Wood frame construction of four to six story buildings, with less use of concrete, has fewer negative environmental impacts. 

High-rise buildings also consume more energy per square foot than 5-7 story buildings; electricity use increases with height. More electricity is needed for elevators, fans and pumps to move people, air and water. https://phys.org/news/2017-06-high-rise-energy-intensive-low-rise.html 

Most of the city’s non-profit built affordable buildings have rooftop solar panels that provide hot water and, in some cases, electricity. Using solar panels to help meet a building’s energy needs is not very practical with high-rise buildings. Solar panels also reduce building operating costs which contributes to the building’s affordability. 

Depending on how they are located on the site, 12 to 18 story buildings could definitely shadow neighboring buildings. The reduction in solar access from shadowing would result in higher heating and lighting bills for those affected, and with it increased energy use; not what you want if the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Depending on their location, high-rise market rate buildings could shadow rooftops with solar panels. The JVP for the BART sites should specify that shadowing of buildings, both on the site and near the site, should be avoided. 

To reiterate, public land should be used for public benefit, and the BART sites should be reserved for below market affordable housing built at a scale that works for nonprofit developers and minimizes negative impacts on the environment and on residents of nearby neighborhoods. 

The agenda for the June meeting is not yet available but you can find the staff report for their April 19 worksession here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/f0v7w3m4va6sr6z/2022-04-19%20Worksession%20Agenda%20Packet%20-%20Council%20-%20WEB.pdf 

 

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Rob Wrenn is a District 3 resident, and was the chair of the Berkeley Planning Commission’s Adeline Corridor Plan Subcommittee. 

 

 

 

 

 

A crime wave is a political concept. It has no objective character. When a political institution like a city government, or a police department, wants to deflect a reform effort, it will pull stories about crime and crime waves out of the hamper and put them in the headlines to scare people. “You see?” they say, “You need us for protection.” 

But there is always an irony in it. The reasons people demand reform are never pretty. They generally point to institutional criminality -- police brutality, perhaps, or the endless building of high-rent housing whose major effect is to displace low income people. There are institutional crime waves and political malfeasances that the scare tactics cover up. To hold a mirror up to what is covered sometimes reveals a criminality so deep there is no name for it. Indeed, its invisibility depends on there being no name. 

As we move into this, our next election year, something tugs at us about elections. Hiding among the candidates and primaries, there lurks a suspicion that, once again, because it is an off-year election, the voting rate will be low. Indeed, for the last half century, if the non-voters ever organized themselves into a party, it would have had the majority. And this year, there will be a surplus of scare tactics. One will be the “return of Trump.” The other will be the final composting by the Supreme Court of the sanctity of "liberty" that underlies the constitutional right to privacy. In either case, the circus of autocracy will have gone full circle. How did government “of, by, and for the people” get so out of wack? 

Let us take a careful look at the electoral system as a system, ignoring for the moment why, in such a vast and complex country, there are only two major parties, and in which only minor parties appear to think independently. 

The Electoral System

The electoral system begins with individual people running for office (on a party ticket or not). For the most part, they idealize how they will better represent "their" districts, and "their" voters, in the councils and assemblies of government. Their purpose always contains that hope. Whether their eye is on a City Council, or a state assembly, or Congress, each candidate holds to the same ideal, an obligation to the voters. Across all differences in districts, all variations in cultural traditions and political issues, each candidate aims at representation as the goal. And after they win, they are expected to take care of business. To be elected is to be the go-to person for the district’s voters. 

When that doesn’t happen, however, most constituents generally shrug, realizing that it is “the same old stuff.” And the representative will complain in turn that the constituents didn’t put enough political pressure on them. But why do they need pressure? Why isn’t the election of candidates and their "promises" sufficient for the candidate to know what to do? 

The answer is structural. Real representation of a district in a "higher" body is not within the realm of feasibility, for three reasons. 

First, a single delegate cannot represent the complexity of a district. Each district is composed of different classes, cultures, political groupings, etc. each with their own political needs, desires, and ideologies. A single delegate will not be able to represent both renters, who require regulation of rents and curtailment of evictions, and homeowners who look at rentable spare as income. How will the elected delegate balance the interests of white homeowner, who have direct access to banks and financing, with black homeowners who live with the legacy of "redlining"? Each will demand a different resolution of the disparity. 

Second, membership in the "higher" body signifies a separation and disconnection from one’s original constituency. Though the candidates run from within their communities, once elected, they enter a different environment composed of other delegates with different interests and problems. They set out to find common grounds among these other elected "strangers," and find that it involves unforeseen processes of bargaining. Trading, compromising, and colluding, little of which furthers the ideal of representation, become the practical norm. It is a practice of political maneuvering that, because it pertains to the city or state as a whole, is only partially relevant to specific districts. And insofar as this constitutes "governance," the governing body becomes the replacement constituency for each elected delegate. Governance is substituted for representation, which is thrown aside. Then, when delegates call for political pressure from their district on specific issues, it is to counteract the force of this new constituency. But it rarely matters. 

Thirdly, almost as collateral damage, representation itself gets turned into its opposite. It is no longer the people being represented. It is instead the people who are placed in a position of representing what their representative does. Governance means to enact legislation that affects an entire city or county or state. Policies are made at that overall level, in terms that relate to that "bigger picture." Yet the people of each district are then bound by what the "higher body" accomplished. The people become responsible for what the governing body does, though it acts at the hands of each district’s elected "representatives." It is the people, in their daily lives, who end up representing what the elected representatives do as members of governance. In that sense, the people end up representing their representatives. 

This is the final irony of a representative system. Not only is representation inverted, but with the absorption of representation into governance, the very concept of a constituency evaporates. "Constituency" becomes a vestigial concept, pertaining to two bodies at once. When elected officials accept the role of governance, they abandon constituency to representation while abandoning representation to (“higher”) constituency. It is by these stages of abandonment that elected officials become members of an elite. 

It is at the level of governance that business contracts, social regulations, and institutional policies are established. Business and developer interests come along and gain privileges and property rights that nobody voted for. In Berkeley, for instance, the affordable housing needs of South Berkeley simply gave way to the Adeline Corridor Plan and its for-profit housing under governance by the city. Though task forces and community groupings were formed, they only amounted to substitute district representation. The district lost its representation to governance, and without representation, left its district constituents feeling abandoned -- which they blame on the delegate. 

And this takes us to the final shift, the transformation of the vote (the alleged driving force in all this). When a representative abandons their district, forgets their constituency, and disappears into governance, the voters are told they can elect different representatives in the next election. But the next election will occur under the same structure, leading to the same empty vote. Ultimately the voters realize that the vote was only a ticket for those who win an election to throw aside the idea of representation, exchange constituencies, and empty the vote that put them there. Though the vote was supposed to be their connection to policy making, it all just melts into air? Representation, constituency, and the vote all collapse into each other. 

So what happens to self-determination? Self-determination is the essence of democracy. When the voter must represent the structure, and not the other way around, self-determination disappears. Policy is not made by the people; they are simply given to represent it. When Berkeley made policy for RV dwellers, no RV dwellers were included in the process. When Berkeley made policy concerning affordable housing in the Adeline Corridor, some neighborhood association members had a seat at the table, and the table itself was then put in a closet by governance. 

In some profound sense, it is those who don’t vote who already understand the way this electoral system deconstructs itself. It all happens structurally, independent of the desires of those who run for election. Delegates cannot prevent themselves from falling into this kind of pit of political corruption once they are elected. Essentially, a candidate can preserve their authenticity as a member of a district only by not getting elected, by losing the election. That is, a candidate can preserve their authentic political desire to represent the people by standing shoulder to shoulder with them, and by building a social justice movement that can then represent itself as a representative of the people by ignoring the election. 

In sum, the electoral process separates policy from voting. By negating both constituency and representation, the vote becomes a disconnect between people and policy-making. When representation cannot realize itself, the vote for a representative becomes corrupted. It becomes an empty symbol of influence without substance – in other words, a con game. The inversions that the system puts the vote through are so fraudulent that no justice system knows how to regulate it. 

Is it possible to characterize a democracy in which the vote is not fraudulent? It would have to be a structure in which the people are involved in making policy from the beginning, and in which the vote becomes a punchline to the process rather than an entry-ticket. Democracy means that those who will be affected by a policy must be the ones to decide on the policy that will affect them. Votes would then become the means of moving from one stage to the next in that process. 

What are we missing here?

What is hiding deep down in this self-deconstructing political system of ours? How many times has it been said that this system has run quite well over the 230 years of its existence? That would be true if one didn’t count the Civil War, or segregation and its barring of entire populations from voting, its anti-labor campaigns and disenfranchisement of prisoners (most of whom are black), its “cold war” and the de facto barring of leftists from political participation. 

When the civil rights era burst upon the nation in the 1950s with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the lunch-counter sit-ins and the formation of mass activist organizations, at its center was a focus on the vote. Though the 14th Amendment (1866) was specifically designed to negate the Dred Scott Decision (1856), the US government waited until 1965, 99 years later (after Brown v. Board, and in the midst of the agonies of Birmingham-Harlem-Rochester-Watts), to pass a Voting Rights Act. 

After the Civil War, black people were given the vote, and white people killed those who exercised it. Thousands were tortured to death because of the black vote. In the year 2000, 10,000 black people in Florida were prevented from voting in order to determine the federal election, and neither party objected. Today, as in the 19th century, white people get together to pass laws, gerrymander districts, and invent new kinds of ID cards, in order to prevent black people from voting. Even in Berkeley, ten white men have acted in unison to evict one black woman from a Coop because they feel victimized by her very existence, and the threat of her voting in Coop meetings. 

Since the Civil War, there have been groups who continuously try to undermine the ability of black people to vote. It is the idea of black people belonging in this country that they seem unable to live with. It is also a part of the structural corruption that characterizes the electoral system. And it sets the issue of the black vote at the very center of the national political drama. But that is because the real issue underlying the black vote (Yes or No) would be so destructive to stable political process that it could not be allowed to appear in any but euphemistic form. It is to hide that destructiveness that the issue is broken down into two false political positions, represented by the two political parties. These two parties are a white attempt to resolve the issue of black people’s existence by dividing politics into two white approaches to black people, and couching it in terms of the vote. Whatever the Republicans say, they act on the idea that black people should not have a vote. The Democrats say that black people should have a vote, but “we will control it.” 

When it got out of control, black mayors were elected, and black police chiefs. The white power structure had to manufacture drug busts and scandals on many of them to get them out of office (remember Marion Barry?). Republicans even registered as Democrats in order to prevent Cynthia McKinney from running for Congress again. 

This history suggests that African Americans are really the only group that relate to the vote in a real way. Native Americans relate to the vote in the context of a struggle for sovereignty; and the Chicano communities relate to it in the context of cultural autonomy. But African Americans relate through a meaning given them by their entire history, which runs through slavery, segregation, massive uprisings, and mass incarcerations. The denial of the black vote is so entangled in the existence of black people as a people, and has occurred in so many ways, that the struggle for the vote by African Americans seems to be the vote’s only claim to reality. 

That is, it is the ability of the vote to signify political existence for black people that apparently is what motivates white people to keep trying to take it away. It doesn’t provide white people with access to representation or policy. It doesn’t provide white people with anything more substantial than party affiliation. That would seem to imply that the only thing that makes the vote real in the US is the possibility of withholding it from black people. 

Is that the legacy, the crowning achievement of 230 years of representationist elections? Is that why crime waves always seem to appear in election years? And that the majority of the criminals composing each "wave" seem to be people of color?

Dear Jagjit Singh: 

Your essay ends with "Jewish Holocaust victims must be weeping in their graves. Jagjit Singh." Try to remember Jagjit, that nearly all victims of the Holocaust didn't get a decent burial, which would entail a grave. They were incinerated in ovens after being gassed to death, and this followed being forced to do decimating work in concentration camps while at the same time being starved to almost nothing. 

Jagjit, please don't bring up the Holocaust unless it is relevant to what you are currently reporting. I do know that the Planet's policy is to publish anything sent, and yours seem to foster continued hatred on both sides. If you really want to make peace, you should not speak of Israel as unconditionally the villain. Doubtless, there are aggressors on both sides of this conflict, and you should try to be fair in your reporting. 

Not everything needs to be about race. Jewish people are not perfect, but no grouping of human beings is. I'd like to see more constructiveness in your work.  

I'll add there has been an uptick in anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S., including violent attacks on Jews. Israelis often feel threatened by acts of terrorism that take place in Israel, the U.S., and many other countries. Jews are historically victims of hate and violence. Let's put an end to all human violence of any kind. 

If human beings can stop the habit of fighting, we have a moderate chance of surviving the next few centuries as a species. We've already wrecked the Earth's biosphere to the extent that it will probably be necessary soon for human beings to live in artificially supported, indoor facilities. But if we can't stop the hate and the violence, we will not have prospects for survival. 

Blaming one's opponent and failing to stretch one's mind to try to understand one's opponent, so that they might no longer be an opponent, is vital. 

It has been a while since you've offered derogatory material against Israel, I commend you on your effort to cover other subjects. I'd like to see you cover various subjects more and I'd like to see you not focus so much on incidents of violence.

Palestinians are traumatized over the death of Palestinian American Al Jazeera reporter, Shireen Abu Akleh, after she was fatally shot in the head by an Israeli sniper while covering an Israeli military raid on a Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. At the time of her death, she was wearing a helmet and a vest marked “PRESS.” Ali al-Samudi, another Palestinian journalist, was wounded alongside Abu Akleh. 

Abu Akleh had worked at Al Jazeera for a quarter of a century and was one of the best-known television reporters in Palestine and the Arab world. Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, together with the International Federation of Journalists, are bringing a case before the International Court of Justice in response to the murder of Palestinian journalists. 

Israel has targeted media offices repeatedly to downplay its crimes. They bombed several media offices last May in Gaza, entirely destroying several bureaus. Even mourners carrying Abu Akleh’s coffin were brutally attacked. Israel has used increasing force, to quell resistance to its colonial occupation. It is especially egregious that the occupation is sustained by US weapons and our tax dollars— something that is essential for the Israelis to blur, to occlude, to hide with mendacity. 

There is little hope the fragile Bennett coalition government will move to a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians. Bennett is a settler himself. He lives in a settlement. He’s a committed supporter of the eternal, permanent occupation of all of what’s left of Palestine. He is unwilling under any circumstances to negotiate with the Palestinians. He’s made that very clear. So, he heads a coalition which includes some parties that are interested in a negotiated settlement, but his party and several of the other parties in the coalition are as committed to continuing the permanent occupation of Palestine, the continued establishment of Israeli settlements, and the continued expropriation of Palestinian land. 

Jenin has become a symbol of resistance. While we are heaping praise and lauding Ukrainians for resisting Russian occupation, the United States, has been aiding the aggressor, Israel, with annual donations of $billions. More and more Americans have expressed outrage over the blatant use of our tax dollars following Palestinian reporters’ assassinations and the publication of Human Rights Watch designating Israel as an apartheid state. 

There are stark similarities between courageous Ukrainians resisting Russian oppression and Palestinians resisting the Israeli inhumane occupation which they have endured since June 1967. 

Israel is a tinder box. It is on the verge of exploding into more spasms of violence. It is time the US stops being a passive observer and takes remedial action. It must demand Israel end its crippling occupation, lift the siege of Gaza and end all military and economic aid to Israel. The theft of the Golan Heights must be returned to its rightful owner, the Syrian government. Finally, to add insult to injury, Israel just announced an illegal settlement plan for over 9,000 housing units in Jerusalem. Jewish Holocaust victims must be weeping in their graves. Jagjit Singh

It was exactly one year ago that I wrote in my Activist’s Diary about how rapidly the earth was warming, that the degree of global warming was 0.8°C in 2018 and edging to 1.2°C. On Monday, May 9, 2022 the World Meteorological Organization announced a new warning https://tinyurl.com/2ww4xw27. Steve Newman summarized it in Earthweek this way, “The U.N. weather agency warns that there is now a 50% chance the world will warm past the 1.5°C goal at least briefly by 2026.” This warning is for NOW, not decades in the future.

Remember when lowering CO2 to 350 ppm was a thing? Today atmospheric CO2 was 421.84 ppm. The climate emergency is here. And, yes, it is hard to grasp the seriousness of it with a beautiful weekend like the one we just completed in Berkeley. Catastrophic climate-accelerated weather events leave recent memory when the sky is blue and the air is fresh. How easy it is to push the fires, drought and heat waves out of our thinking when they happen somewhere else and everything looks so normal when we open the door, but we are in a climate crisis. We are starting the summer dry season with snowpack at 35% of normal. Last week I wrote about the California Coastal Commission instructing Cambria and Los Oso to halt all new water-using development.

The lone agenda item at Monday’s Health, Life Enrichment, Equity and Community Committee was the proposed Fair Work Week Ordinance. It covers requiring things like advance posting of work schedules, overtime when there is less than 11 hours between work shifts, pay for cancellation and more, the kinds of conditions and protections workers at the lower rungs of the pay scale need. Businesses were well represented among the fifteen speakers. As one might expect they were less than enthused. No action was taken and it was continued to the next meeting. 

Tuesday evening at City Council after several speakers opposed reducing the Health Commission to nine positions, Councilmember Hahn withdrew her support and abstained while the mayor and remaining councilmembers voted their approval. The City Manager withdrew using $121,133 of Measure GG Fire Prevention Funds after a question from Councilmember Wengraf and this Activist asked how we could trust how the planned fall ballot measure funds will be used, when Measure GG funds for fire prevention are going to new carpeting. 

The big items of the evening were People’s Park and the configuration of bicycle lanes on Hopkins between Gilman and Sutter. 

The student housing projects at People’s Park were initially presented well over a year ago by UC Berkeley as including housing units for the homeless as a “benefit” of the project. Now it turns out that homeless housing isn’t a “benefit” after all. 

The City Manager will apply for $5,000,000 from the State’s competitive Local Housing Trust Fund (LHTF) program and the City of Berkeley has a one-to-one matching funds requirement. So not only is there significant public opposition to UC Berkeley’s filling People’s Park with student housing instead of building elsewhere, our tax dollars, through City of Berkeley, will be used for the homeless units part of the project. The item passed on consent. Things get messier all the time.  

Fifty-two people commented on the Hopkins Corridor Plan and Councilmember Hahn stated she received over 1600 letters. The best comments of the evening on the Hopkins corridor plan were, “People don’t know what it is like to be in a body that is not young” (I didn’t catch the name) and “Life is full of difficulties. It’s the solutions that are the problems” from Shirley Issl. 

There are long writeups elsewhere, but as I drove over to Monterey Market for my every-other -week food shopping, I wondered just exactly how well a double direction bike lane on the Monterey Market side of the street would work. It will mean crossing the bike lane to reach the parking lot and twenty-eight fewer spaces on the street. I walked the 1.2 miles once. It is possible, but walking means more trips, tripling the time for each trip when there never seem to be enough hours in the day and bicycling means dodging distracted drivers. And, given my out-of-practice bicycling skill, being in a narrow bike lane with bikers coming at me in their own narrow side seems hazardous at best. 

I am all for crosstown car free streets, but Hopkins is complicated, narrow, a bus route, with lots of schools nearby, the Monterey Market, shops and no reasonable parallel streets for alternate routes. Parking meters were part of the plan, but are now being referred back for more input and analysis along with residential preferred parking and a signal light at Monterey and Hopkins. 

This project in “process” was passed at 12:18 am making Zoom a much preferable choice over attending in-person. 

Wednesday evening, Kevin Burl from the Xerces Society (thank you Erin Diehm and Gordon Wozniak at the Parks Commission) earned the best meeting presentation of the week. Burl spoke to supporting butterflies and caterpillars and gave us the Xerces Society website www.xerces.org. There is a specific page for California https://www.xerces.org/pollinator-resource-center/california We could have used an entire evening on butterflies. I wish I had a link to give you for the presentation, but like most Berkeley commission meetings it wasn’t recorded. 

Points from Burl included, Monarchs hibernate on trees in the middle of groves where they are more protected from winter cold and temperature extremes. Thinning tree groves removes this protection. Butterflies need early spring nectar producing plants when they emerge from hibernation and host plants (milkweed for Monarchs) to lay their eggs. Urbanization, destruction of habitat, herbicides and pesticides like neonicotinoids sprayed on plants or seeds are responsible for the decline of Monarchs and other butterflies. We counter by choosing pesticide free plants wisely from https://www.xerces.org/pollinator-resource-center/california and https://calscape.org/ 

Before the presentation even began, David Fielder spoke to meetings not being recorded as unacceptable. Minutes are not comprehensive. Fielder chronicled the results of his communication with the City Clerk’s office. There is no prohibition of recording meetings as had been stated previously by City employees. My recall is that statement came from Scott Ferris but it could have come from the commission secretary or another City staff member. To Ferris’s advantage I can’t reference a recording and some of us feel that is why the community Berkeley Marina Area Specific Plan meetings were not recorded. 

Former Mayor Shirley Dean phoned in (there was a power failure in North Berkeley) her objection to monetizing the Marina. Former Councilmember Laurie Capitelli followed Dean’s comments with his own, saying, “It’s not often I am in agreement with Shirley Dean, but we are talking about monetizing our parks.”He emphasized that the purpose of the park system is to provide open space. We should not monetize our parks. He went on describing the view from the Marina as world class, and said that most of our parks should be off limits to revenue generation. 

The way the City of Berkeley has attacked the Marina is that the commercialization decision is made and then the public is presented with this: which arrangement of the commercial enterprises do you like best? Is site A or B better or maybe C? Not whether the Marina is even a location to be considered. That is the way it was last month with the Fitness CourtÒ. We have to give Nelson Lam and the Fitness CourtÒ sales rep credit for persisting when this was rejected over a year ago. At that time, it was suggested one of the BART housing projects was a more appropriate location. https://tinyurl.com/2p8b863b 

The Budget meeting on Thursday was short, with everything on the agenda moved to this coming week except the Auditor’s report on the financial condition of the City. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-audits/city-auditor-reports It is worth reading. 

The week ended with marches across the country for reproductive freedom and another mass shooting this time in Buffalo, New York. This was the same week that two Federal Judges appointed by Donald Trump ruled that the 2019 California law prohibiting the sale of long guns and semiautomatic centerfire rifles to anyone under 21 violates the Second Amendment. The lone dissenting vote came from Judge Sidney Stein , appointed by Bill Clinton. 

One thing that is different this time in the description of this mass shooting is the through line drawn to other mass shootings: White supremacy and White replacement theory. On April 30, 2022, the New York Times said “Night after night on Fox, Tucker Carlson weaponizes his viewers’ fears and grievances to create what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news. It is also, by some measures, the most successful.” 

The NYT analyzed more than 1100 episodes and reported finding Carlson mainstreaming “replacement” night after night. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/business/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news-takeaways.html 

It is unlikely Tucker Carlson will temper his racist rants. Fox pays Carlson $35 million annually for his popular nightly broadcasts and another $6 million for his podcasts. 

Carlson isn’t the first Fox show host whose venomous rants are associated with murder. Bill O’Reilly between 2005 to 2009 called the late term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, “Tiller the Baby Killer” repeating it until Dr. George Tiller was murdered during a Sunday morning service at his church, Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas on May 31, 2009. Afterwards came the denials that his rhetoric had anything to do with adding fuel to the fire. Nearly eight years and several sexual harassment lawsuits later Fox pushed O’Reilly out on April 19, 2017. 

Last week I wrote about The Story of Jane the Legendary Feminist Abortion Service in Chicago. You can hear the author talk about Jane in the Post Reports podcast https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/pregnant-dont-want-to-be-call-jane/ 

We shouldn’t be surprised that Roe v. Wade is about to fall. The fundamentalist evangelicals have been organizing the anti-abortion movement for decades and Republican politicians stepped in line to use them. In my August 22, 2021 Diary review of the book Jesus and John Wayne I wrote, “…[the] CWA (Concerned Women of America) the evangelical women’s organization with a mission to carry forward the pro-family, anti-feminist cause was far more organized than I realized. While Planned Parenthood has used each erosion of women’s reproductive rights as a fund raiser with never a call to action in the street, members of CWA were reported as 98% having voted, 93% had signed a petition, 77% had boycotted a product or company, 74% had contacted a public official and nearly half had written a letter to the editor.” 

This week following up on writings about fundamentalists, evangelicals and abortion, I picked up Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of IT Back by Frank Schaeffer, 2007. The book was fascinating. Frank Schaeffer’s father Francis Schaeffer and his mother Edith were big in the fundamentalist world. Frank describes talking his father into joining the anti-abortion movement and uniting with the Catholics. 

Frank eventually left the fundamentalists after seeing them as isolationist, anti-American and antithetical to valuing the arts and literature. It was “Focus on the Family” on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Company) with Ed Dobson a onetime Moral Majority leader that drove the wedge. Dobson was preaching needing to save America from decadence, corruption and evil. The way to protect children, to keep them from questioning, meant banning books, homeschooling, private spaces where they could indoctrinate their children free from interference. 

It was exactly one year ago that I wrote in my Activist’s Diary about how rapidly the earth was warming, that the degree of global warming was 0.8°C in 2018 and edging to 1.2°C. On Monday, May 9, 2022 the World Meteorological Organization announced a new warning https://tinyurl.com/2ww4xw27. Steve Newman summarized it in Earthweek this way, “The U.N. weather agency warns that there is now a 50% chance the world will warm past the 1.5°C goal at least briefly by 2026.” This warning is for NOW, not decades in the future. 

Remember when lowering CO2 to 350 ppm was a thing? Today atmospheric CO2 was 421.84 ppm. The climate emergency is here. And, yes, it is hard to grasp the seriousness of it with a beautiful weekend like the one we just completed in Berkeley. Catastrophic climate-accelerated weather events leave recent memory when the sky is blue and the air is fresh. How easy it is to push the fires, drought and heat waves out of our thinking when they happen somewhere else and everything looks so normal when we open the door, but we are in a climate crisis. We are starting the summer dry season with snowpack at 35% of normal. Last week I wrote about the California Coastal Commission instructing Cambria and Los Oso to halt all new water-using development. 

The lone agenda item at Monday’s Health, Life Enrichment, Equity and Community Committee was the proposed Fair Work Week Ordinance. It covers requiring things like advance posting of work schedules, overtime when there is less than 11 hours between work shifts, pay for cancellation and more, the kinds of conditions and protections workers at the lower rungs of the pay scale need. Businesses were well represented among the fifteen speakers. As one might expect they were less than enthused. No action was taken and it was continued to the next meeting. 

Tuesday evening at City Council after several speakers opposed reducing the Health Commission to nine positions, Councilmember Hahn withdrew her support and abstained while the mayor and remaining councilmembers voted their approval. The City Manager withdrew using $121,133 of Measure GG Fire Prevention Funds after a question from Councilmember Wengraf and this Activist asked how we could trust how the planned fall ballot measure funds will be used, when Measure GG funds for fire prevention are going to new carpeting. 

The big items of the evening were People’s Park and the configuration of bicycle lanes on Hopkins between Gilman and Sutter. 

The student housing projects at People’s Park were initially presented well over a year ago by UC Berkeley as including housing units for the homeless as a “benefit” of the project. Now it turns out that homeless housing isn’t a “benefit” after all. 

The City Manager will apply for $5,000,000 from the State’s competitive Local Housing Trust Fund (LHTF) program and the City of Berkeley has a one-to-one matching funds requirement. So not only is there significant public opposition to UC Berkeley’s filling People’s Park with student housing instead of building elsewhere, our tax dollars, through City of Berkeley, will be used for the homeless units part of the project. The item passed on consent. Things get messier all the time.  

Fifty-two people commented on the Hopkins Corridor Plan and Councilmember Hahn stated she received over 1600 letters. The best comments of the evening on the Hopkins corridor plan were, “People don’t know what it is like to be in a body that is not young” (I didn’t catch the name) and “Life is full of difficulties. It’s the solutions that are the problems” from Shirley Issl. 

There are long writeups elsewhere, but as I drove over to Monterey Market for my every-other -week food shopping, I wondered just exactly how well a double direction bike lane on the Monterey Market side of the street would work. It will mean crossing the bike lane to reach the parking lot and twenty-eight fewer spaces on the street. I walked the 1.2 miles once. It is possible, but walking means more trips, tripling the time for each trip when there never seem to be enough hours in the day and bicycling means dodging distracted drivers. And, given my out-of-practice bicycling skill, being in a narrow bike lane with bikers coming at me in their own narrow side seems hazardous at best. 

I am all for crosstown car free streets, but Hopkins is complicated, narrow, a bus route, with lots of schools nearby, the Monterey Market, shops and no reasonable parallel streets for alternate routes. Parking meters were part of the plan, but are now being referred back for more input and analysis along with residential preferred parking and a signal light at Monterey and Hopkins. 

This project in “process” was passed at 12:18 am making Zoom a much preferable choice over attending in-person. 

Wednesday evening, Kevin Burl from the Xerces Society (thank you Erin Diehm and Gordon Wozniak at the Parks Commission) earned the best meeting presentation of the week. Burl spoke to supporting butterflies and caterpillars and gave us the Xerces Society website www.xerces.org. There is a specific page for California https://www.xerces.org/pollinator-resource-center/california We could have used an entire evening on butterflies. I wish I had a link to give you for the presentation, but like most Berkeley commission meetings it wasn’t recorded. 

Points from Burl included, Monarchs hibernate on trees in the middle of groves where they are more protected from winter cold and temperature extremes. Thinning tree groves removes this protection. Butterflies need early spring nectar producing plants when they emerge from hibernation and host plants (milkweed for Monarchs) to lay their eggs. Urbanization, destruction of habitat, herbicides and pesticides like neonicotinoids sprayed on plants or seeds are responsible for the decline of Monarchs and other butterflies. We counter by choosing pesticide free plants wisely from https://www.xerces.org/pollinator-resource-center/california and https://calscape.org/ 

Before the presentation even began, David Fielder spoke to meetings not being recorded as unacceptable. Minutes are not comprehensive. Fielder chronicled the results of his communication with the City Clerk’s office. There is no prohibition of recording meetings as had been stated previously by City employees. My recall is that statement came from Scott Ferris but it could have come from the commission secretary or another City staff member. To Ferris’s advantage I can’t reference a recording and some of us feel that is why the community Berkeley Marina Area Specific Plan meetings were not recorded. 

Former Mayor Shirley Dean phoned in (there was a power failure in North Berkeley) her objection to monetizing the Marina. Former Councilmember Laurie Capitelli followed Dean’s comments with his own, saying, “It’s not often I am in agreement with Shirley Dean, but we are talking about monetizing our parks.”He emphasized that the purpose of the park system is to provide open space. We should not monetize our parks. He went on describing the view from the Marina as world class, and said that most of our parks should be off limits to revenue generation. 

The way the City of Berkeley has attacked the Marina is that the commercialization decision is made and then the public is presented with this: which arrangement of the commercial enterprises do you like best? Is site A or B better or maybe C? Not whether the Marina is even a location to be considered. That is the way it was last month with the Fitness CourtÒ. We have to give Nelson Lam and the Fitness CourtÒ sales rep credit for persisting when this was rejected over a year ago. At that time, it was suggested one of the BART housing projects was a more appropriate location. https://tinyurl.com/2p8b863b 

The Budget meeting on Thursday was short, with everything on the agenda moved to this coming week except the Auditor’s report on the financial condition of the City. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-audits/city-auditor-reports It is worth reading. 

The week ended with marches across the country for reproductive freedom and another mass shooting this time in Buffalo, New York. This was the same week that two Federal Judges appointed by Donald Trump ruled that the 2019 California law prohibiting the sale of long guns and semiautomatic centerfire rifles to anyone under 21 violates the Second Amendment. The lone dissenting vote came from Judge Sidney Stein , appointed by Bill Clinton. 

One thing that is different this time in the description of this mass shooting is the through line drawn to other mass shootings: White supremacy and White replacement theory. On April 30, 2022, the New York Times said “Night after night on Fox, Tucker Carlson weaponizes his viewers’ fears and grievances to create what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news. It is also, by some measures, the most successful.” 

The NYT analyzed more than 1100 episodes and reported finding Carlson mainstreaming “replacement” night after night. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/business/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news-takeaways.html 

It is unlikely Tucker Carlson will temper his racist rants. Fox pays Carlson $35 million annually for his popular nightly broadcasts and another $6 million for his podcasts. 

Carlson isn’t the first Fox show host whose venomous rants are associated with murder. Bill O’Reilly between 2005 to 2009 called the late term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, “Tiller the Baby Killer” repeating it until Dr. George Tiller was murdered during a Sunday morning service at his church, Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas on May 31, 2009. Afterwards came the denials that his rhetoric had anything to do with adding fuel to the fire. Nearly eight years and several sexual harassment lawsuits later Fox pushed O’Reilly out on April 19, 2017. 

Last week I wrote about The Story of Jane the Legendary Feminist Abortion Service in Chicago. You can hear the author talk about Jane in the Post Reports podcast https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/pregnant-dont-want-to-be-call-jane/ 

We shouldn’t be surprised that Roe v. Wade is about to fall. The fundamentalist evangelicals have been organizing the anti-abortion movement for decades and Republican politicians stepped in line to use them. In my August 22, 2021 Diary review of the book Jesus and John Wayne I wrote, “…[the] CWA (Concerned Women of America) the evangelical women’s organization with a mission to carry forward the pro-family, anti-feminist cause was far more organized than I realized. While Planned Parenthood has used each erosion of women’s reproductive rights as a fund raiser with never a call to action in the street, members of CWA were reported as 98% having voted, 93% had signed a petition, 77% had boycotted a product or company, 74% had contacted a public official and nearly half had written a letter to the editor.” 

This week following up on writings about fundamentalists, evangelicals and abortion, I picked up Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of IT Back by Frank Schaeffer, 2007. The book was fascinating. Frank Schaeffer’s father Francis Schaeffer and his mother Edith were big in the fundamentalist world. Frank describes talking his father into joining the anti-abortion movement and uniting with the Catholics. 

Frank eventually left the fundamentalists after seeing them as isolationist, anti-American and antithetical to valuing the arts and literature. It was “Focus on the Family” on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Company) with Ed Dobson a onetime Moral Majority leader that drove the wedge. Dobson was preaching needing to save America from decadence, corruption and evil. The way to protect children, to keep them from questioning, meant banning books, homeschooling, private spaces where they could indoctrinate their children free from interference.

On May 9th, Vladimir Putin made a much-anticipated speech to the Russian people (https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/nato-nazis-and-the-motherland-putin-s-full-victory-day-speech-1.10787657 ). Interspersed with familiar tropes, was a softer Putin message.

1.Narrowed Focus: Rather than focus on annexing all of Ukraine, Putin now seems intent on solidifying control of the Donbas region; that is, the eastern-most provinces of Ukraine: Donetsk and Luhansk. In addition, Putin wants to build a land bridge between Crimea and Donbas: secure Kherson and Melitopol and the surrounding territory.

Putin observed, "Donbass militia alongside with the Russian Army are fighting on their land today... I am addressing our Armed Forces and Donbass militia. You are fighting for our Motherland, its future, so that nobody forgets the lessons of World War II." 

Captured Russian documents (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putin-s-precious-war-plan-left-behind-by-fleeing-russian-troops-officials-say/ar-AAXaaQ5 ) reveal that Putin's original focus was to annex all of Ukraine: "'Investigators… found important documents of soldiers of the Russian Federation's Armed Forces that give a clear understanding that Russia was preparing to seize all the territory of Ukraine,' Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation Chief Oleksiy Sukhachev said in a statement." 

2. Calmer Presentation: Although Putin's justifications for the invasion were the same as they had been in previous speeches, his words were less bellicose. 

Although western observers can be encouraged that Putin has narrowed the scope of his invasion, the fact remains that he seems intent on annexing the Donbas region. Putin is going to have considerable difficulty doing this. Russian forces have lost control of strategic terrain and they can no longer move supplies using Ukrainian railways. This suggests that Putin has put himself in a "box." He can't move forward and he'll lose face if he retreats. 

3. Falsehoods: Much of what Putin told the Russian people were lies. The BBC fact-checked his speech (https://www.bbc.com/news/61379405). 

a. Ukraine wants nuclear weapons: "President Putin has repeatedly said Ukraine plans to acquire nuclear weapons as a justification for Russia's invasion, although there's no evidence this is the case... the Ukrainian government has not expressed an intention to acquire nuclear weapons and a military strategy document published last year did not refer to them." 

b. Neo-Nazis are seizing control of Ukraine: "President Putin has frequently claimed the presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine as a justification for Russia's invasion. At the last parliamentary election in 2019, support for far-right candidates was just 2% - far lower than in many other European countries. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and members of his family died in the Holocaust." 

c. NATO was preparing for war before the invasion: "President Putin appears to be suggesting, not only that Nato has been expanding its influence in the Baltic states which are Nato members - but also inside Ukraine, which is not in Nato. It's true that Nato allies have supported Ukraine with equipment and training since 2014, and they have deployed more forces to some Nato member states in eastern Europe." 

4. IMPASSE: Russia cannot win this war, but it can inflict terrible damage as it thrashes around. On May 10th, President Biden's advisor, Avril Haines (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/10/putin-nuclear-weapons-us-intelligence-avril-haines?) warned there is a dangerous path ahead : "Vladimir Putin could view the prospect of defeat in Ukraine as an existential threat to his regime, potentially triggering his resort to using a nuclear weapon... The prediction for Ukraine was a long, grueling war of attrition, which could lead to increasingly volatile acts of escalation from Putin, including full mobilization, the imposition of martial law, and – if the Russian leader felt the war was going against him, endangering his position in Moscow – even the use of a nuclear warhead." 

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Bob Burnett is a Bay Area writer and activist. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net