Public Comment

The title implies that it might read like a Hallmark card. But "Love Letters to the Park" is a blistering indictment of Berkeley's $1,100,000 proposal to commercialize its most beautiful park, Cesar Chavez, a detailed description of the bewilderingly moronic city council that signed off on it, and the educated, thoughtful public that stopped it. It is a must-read for anyone interested in public process, legislative obfuscation, and grassroots organizing during a numbing, disorienting pandemic. It's beautifully illustrated with photographs of the small groups that came together to save it by the photographers who were there. 

Hargreaves Jones Inc., an arguably respectable international architectural consulting firm, displays its stunning misunderstanding of the park's history, purpose, use patterns, public, and underlying budgetary setting by blindly accepting a contractual challenge to yank even more income out of its state-owned natural bayside setting to siphon into the city's general fund. This despite years of rotting infrastructure thanks to the city's indifference, an indifference well illustrated by fifteen years between Berkeley pier inspections. 

In anyone else's hands this might be tedious detail. But Nicolaus's deft storytelling includes marina activist Paul Kamen's kayak trip under the Berkeley Pier with a camera, the only reason those fifteen years of indifference wasn't even longer. With quick, broad strokes Nicolaus paints the compelling portrait behind the numbers and policies, the fairy tale of the ferries the council to this day promotes as potentially lucrative along with Hargreaves Jones's zip lines, "ropes courses", pavilions, and large-scale performance venues. Most planners know only the naive believe any of this would benefit the city financially after subtracting the overwhelming cost of supportive services required. 

But it's the public, not the consultants or the politicians, who are the collective stars of this profound constellation of dog-walkers, naturalists, biologists, families, kite-fliers, photographers, former and current commissioners, bird-watchers, neighbors, wind-surfers, bike-riders, sailors, and gardeners. The letters themselves are a perfect parallel to the respite the park itself offers for free from dawn to dusk by reminding us who we honestly are, and what we can accomplish by simply organizing together mind by sharp mind and heart by whole-hearted heart. 

Clifford Fred, former planning commissioner, patiently notes the proposal's ignorance of previous public open space protections such as Measures P, Q, and L from as far back as 1986, and cautions against the almost casual brutality of "naming rights" and corporate logos. Deborah Scott joins dozens of other neighbors bewildered that Hargreaves Jone's proposal references "Questionnaire Respondents" which didn't manage to include anyone they knew or any of the relevant groups, including the Chavez Park Conservancy, the Solar Calendar organization, Golden Gate Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the California Native Plant Society, or the Citizens for East Shore Parks, to name a few. 

The powerful course of the river of park-protective protest, as it picked up speed, put such an obvious end to Hargreaves Jone's proposal that politicians fell all over themselves distancing themselves from the obvious support they'd given it in the first place; the initial documents make no secret of the financial monetization goals some of them now, at least privately, decry. It's a good lesson right before an election; a lesson in how easy it can be to slide destructive planning by an intelligent public unless your neighborhood has some dedicated, sharp-eyed, creative thinkers in the mix stirring up the right kind of inquiry and launching some simple petitions. Reading "Love Letters to the Park" will refresh your faith in your community in one witty, understated, true story, and it really does name names. It's the story of one small thing in a discouraging world that went really, really right.