Election Section

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín has changed the slogan of his campaign for State Senate. For months, the home page of his campaign website featured this:

A State Senator as Bold as the East Bay.

But as of January 16, it said this instead:

Proven, Progressive. Problem-Solver

The change is regrettable. The old slogan invited parody, viz:

A State Senator as Sold as the East Bay.

In 2016, when he was still a councilmember, Arreguín could legitimately claim to be bold. Back then he had the integrity and the courage to challenge the growth machine. That year he ran for mayor and won as the anti-Establishment candidate. He soon had a political conversion experience and switched to the pro-growth side. All along he’s called himself a progressive.

In 2010 Arreguín’s predecessor in the Berkeley mayor’s office, Tom Bates, told the Daily Californian: “Nobody knows what the heck it means to be progressive anymore.” I commented: “Bates might have been exaggerating, but he certainly wasn’t complaining: his four-term mayoralty owes a great deal to the murkiness of the progressive tag, which, his demurral notwithstanding, routinely embellishes his campaign literature.” Now Arreguín is following Bates’ suit. Unsurprisingly, Bates has endorsed Arreguín’s Senate bid. 

Appropriating Mario Savio’s legacy

But what really galls me is Arreguín’s invocation of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. In an op-ed posted by Berkeleyside on January 12 under the headline “Defending democracy in the face of incivility,” Arreguín first deplored the behavior of “a small group of individuals [who] have resorted to an intense campaign of harassment and abuse to the point where they bullied an elected official out of office, silencing the voices of the majority that voted for him.” He was referring to now-former Councilmember Rigel Robinson, who, citing “various forms of harrassment, stalking, and threats from members of our community,” on January 9 resigned from the council and ended his mayoral campaign. The harassment reportedly included death threats. 

Arreguín compared the intimidation of Robinson to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol “by those who refused to accept the democratic will of the people.” Observing that “democracy can be messy,” and that “diverse” communities “are inevitably going to have differing views on how to handle the various issues we face,” he opined: 

“It is up to elected officials to navigate through these differing views and work with all stakeholders to create a path forward....Unfortunately, we are witnessing a rise in those who threaten to shut down the people’s business in an attempt to overrule democratic decisions....We must embrace civil discourse, even if we fundamentally disagree. But a line must be drawn when violent tactics and attempts to silence others are used.” 

To underscore the last point, the Berkeley mayor cited Savio’s “famous speech on Sproul Plaza, in which the Free Speech Movement leader said: “disobedience ‘doesn’t mean that you have to break anything,’ rightfully fearing that violence would undermine this movement.’” 

Yes, Savio disavowed violence. But unlike Arreguín, Savio didn’t equate civility with decorum. 

Notably, Arreguín did not cite the most famous passage from Savio’s speech: 

“There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it—that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!” 

The machine that Savio and his comrades wanted to shut down in 1964 was the University of California, Berkeley. What triggered the FSM was UC’s suppression of free speech on campus. 

Now as then, the University was also the most powerful institution in the city of Berkeley. For decades, the school’s ceaseless expansion has threatened the town’s livability. Today, that threat has metastasized, thanks to the support of elected officials such as Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (see AB 1307), Senator Scott Wiener, and, yes, Mayor Jesse Arreguín. 

Far from throwing himself on the gears of the UC growth machine, Arreguín has oiled its wheels. And he’s done so by practicing the quiet form of incivility that operates behind closed doors. 

Greasing UC’s gears

In 2019, the city sued UC over its latest Long Range Development Plan. As David Wilson and Dean Metzger wrote (hereand here) in the Berkeley Daily Planet: “The big issue has been the expansion of the Berkeley campus from an estimated 31,800 students in 2005 to 40,955 in 2018, and with a further projected increase to 50,000.” 

UC is exempt from city and county property taxes, but not from other taxes and fees. The school uses the city’s fire services, police services, and sewage and storm water transport and treatment services. “In 2019,” Wilson and Metzger reported, “an independent analysis funded by the City estimated that in 2018, goods and services provided by the City to UC cost local taxpayers a total of $21,415,000.” 

In July 2021, the city secretly settled the lawsuit. Studying the settlement agreement (which is apparently no longer on the city’s website) and extrapolating from the 2018 figures, the only ones that have been made public, Wilson and Metzger estimated that Berkeley taxpayers’ subsidy to the UC will amount to $349,108,399 over the sixteen-year life of the agreement. 

That’s not the only problem. The settlement agreement states that the city will “avoid litigation over certain pending and future University projects.” In other words, the city will not contest UC’s further expansion. 

Consistent with its capitulation to UC over the Long-Range Development Plan, since the school was sued over its plans to house 1,100 students on the People’s Park site, the Arreguin council has submitted two amicus briefs in defense of UC (reported here and here). Neither brief had a public hearing. Both were written and submitted in secret. This is a peculiar form of taking “public decisions.” 

Jesse Arreguín is no Mario Savio. The Berkeley mayor descends from a different political lineage, one that includes, among many others, Tammany Hall's George W. Plunkitt. If Arreguín changes his campaign slogan again, he might use Plunkitt’s best-known line for his theme: “I seen my opportunities, and I took ‘em.”