Public Comment

Look how far we’ve come in thirty years. In 1993 the movie that won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture was a fictional story that brought joy and laughter about a father dressing up as a female housekeeper to be close to his children. Twentieth Century Fox Blue Wolf Productions gave us that 1993 movie Mrs. Doubtfire with Robin Williams dressing as a female housekeeper.

2023 gives us state legislative bodies set to outlaw drag shows, female impersonators, men dressing as women and women dressing as men. Lawsuits, fines and prison are the vision of Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia. Tennessee banned “[M]ale or female impersonators who provide entertainment for a prurient interest…” Florida has the anti-gay bill and Missouri bans women lawmakers from showing bare arms. As a female the right to control my own body hangs by a thread even in states that enshrined access to abortion. Are they coming for my jeans next?

Looking back over the last week what stands out are “branding,” limiting public participation in city council meetings, the Bird Safe Ordinance crossing a major hurdle and a re-do of University Avenue on the table. The cost of picking up garbage will go up for most of us, Berkeley is divided on living with COVID-19, owner move-in evictions into one unit or a single-family house will be allowed and COVID-19 commercial eviction protections are over. Berkeley’s COVID-19 emergency ends March 31, 2023, the international and national investors got their in-lieu mitigation fee pushed back to the 2020 rate and a sliding scale discount for buildings with less than 10,000 square feet of living space (as only in the units, not the hallways, mailrooms, etc.)

Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf sit on the Agenda Committee. These are the three who decide the order of the regular council meeting agenda, what should be scheduled as a special meeting, what should be referred to a committee, and what should be rescheduled to a future meeting. Mark Numainville, City Clerk, gives the rules of what can’t be postponed, and Dee Williams-Ridley, City Manager chimes in with changes and for which agenda items she requests a delay in order to write an opposition, known as a companion report.

Arreguin holds the committee power, which is how the hottest agenda item of the February 28 City Council meeting, limiting public meeting participation, “Reforms to Public Comment Procedures at meetings of the Berkeley City Council”, was scheduled as the very last item of that night, and how a presentation, “The City of Berkeley, Employer of Choice Initiative” from Dee Williams-Ridley, City Manager, stayed on the action agenda in the middle of the evening instead of being scheduled as a special meeting. 

It took Arreguin over three hours into the February 28 City Council meeting, and after that use of one hour and twenty-minute of “Employer of Choice Initiative” time, to concede that he needed to re-schedule the proposed changes to public comment to become the first action item on March 14. 

The public was not allowed to speak on the re-scheduled item, but Councilmember Robinson said that he had changes he was going to suggest to his supplemental, the published alternative to former Councilmember Droste’s original proposal, put forward before she left the Council. That proposal suggested researching limiting the number of people who could speak and allowing just one comment period at the beginning of the meeting to cover the whole action agenda, every item on it. 

Robinson’s mention that he was going to suggest changes is exactly why the public pushed so hard for the current procedure, where council begins discussion on an action item and makes suggestions for changes/modifications before opening for public comment. Whatever changes Robinson has in mind are still not published, but now the March 14 agenda item-20, on “reforms” to public comment, is a merged single document with redlines combining the Droste and Robinson separate items into one. 

Whether Arreguin knew in advance or it “just happened” that the Employer of Choice Initiative would turn into a lengthy presentation and discussion, it certainly looked like a maneuver to soften the resistance to limiting public comment on agenda action items into one all-inclusive statement. 

“The City of Berkeley, Employer of Choice Initiative” is an interesting story. Williams-Ridley has decided that the way to solve the “great resignation,” the ongoing difficulty of filling vacant City of Berkeley positions is to is to drop $450,000 into the pockets of the consulting firm Municipal Resource Group (MRG) for “branding” and “social media” In order to figure out how to attract desirable employees. 

This started as a contract for $87,675 with Municipal Resource Group (MRG) on September 13, 2022, with the assignment of assessing the impact of the “Great Resignation” on Berkeley to make recommendations to improve employee recruitment and retention. 

On December 13, 2022, at the regular council meeting before the agenda for the evening began, Williams-Ridley, City Manager gave a 24-minute presentation on “Workforce Analysis – A Hiring Crisis Amidst The ‘Great Resignation.’” No discussion of the presentation was allowed. Arreguin cut off Hahn before she said a word, directing her to contact the city manager for any questions, and asked that the presentation be forwarded to council. The December presentation ended with Williams-Ridley’s promise to return in January with a full report. The “Employer of Choice Roadmap” last Tuesday produced by MRG was apparently the missing “full report”, and that is not all that is missing. 

In the “Roadmap”, the Power-Point slide on employee retention, listed under “What employees are seeking” is “capable and caring supervisors and managers.” As for caring managers with Williams-Ridley at the top, I remember the heated comments from city employees advocating for the city administration to pick up the city’s share as negotiated of the PEPRA contributions (California Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act effective January 2013). One employee stated that word gets around, that the ongoing failure to implement the negotiated PEPRA contributions and ensure employees receive the correct pay would affect hiring. 

Some employees were never made whole. This doesn’t settle well when the city manager, the person who was doing the foot dragging for months on implementing the agreement between the city and the unions, got her November 2021 $84,732 raise. Employees who earn far less are just asking to be paid fairly. 

In the battle to pass the Fair Work Week Ordinance, providing protections to workers earning less than twice the minimum wage (under $70,684.40 per year), Williams-Ridley and La Tanya Bellow, Deputy City Manage, with their generous salaries of $386,160 (Williams-Ridley) and $310,150 (Bellow) fought the ordinance that would provide protection to the City of Berkeley’s lowest paid workers. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-11-06/article/50047?headline=A-Berkeley-Activist-s-Diary-Week-Ending-November-6-2022--Kelly-Hammargren 

If vacant positions according to the Employer of Choice Initiative are creating a hiring crisis, impacting community service and job satisfaction, then doesn’t such a condition deserve more engagement from city council and the public than dropping $450,000 on a consulting firm for “branding” and “social media” with a slide-deck presentation in the middle of a heavy city council agenda? 

And just how is it that Berkeley has strayed so far from its history that a “branding” marketing plan is needed to attract employees? 

Berkeley, which once was noted for the Free Speech Movement, is now looking at how to limit public participation to just what it can get away with under the Brown Act. Berkeley, which was once a hub of diversity, has dwindled to only possibly 7% Black. Berkeley, which once was a hub for the arts, is rapidly pushing the arts out of West Berkeley. 

Berkeley which used to be a center for film, a city where people traveled from all over the Bay Area to see documentary and foreign films, has only the Elmwood and BAMPFA left. Demolishing the Shattuck Cinemas, the California and the Regal UA means a loss of twenty film screens in total. The mixed-use apartment buildings taking their place are going up just as pandemic restrictions fade. 

The view of the “Golden Gate” will be gone too. Soon the sunset view from the Campanile will be the 25-story mixed use building at Allston and Shattuck. The view of the Campanile from the pedestrian/bicycle bridge over 80/580 will be instead a view of 600 Addison a new biotech complex next to Aquatic Park. 

My favorite Berkeley spot that is still left, Monterey Market and the little strip of businesses along Hopkins, are the target of the bicyclists and City Transportation Manager Farid Javendel. Councilmember Hahn was all in with turning the street over to bicycles until she was hit with the blowback from the neighbors and the broader community.  

The Planning Commission met Wednesday, March 1, 2023, in-person for the first time since March 2020 before a room filled with supporters of the Audubon-recommended Bird Safe Ordinance. Not one meeting attendee spoke in support of the city staff’s Bird Safe Ordinance Proposal, presented by Justin Horner, City of Berkeley Associate Planner. The Sierra Club Conservation Committee rejected the staff proposal on Monday February 27 in favor of the Audubon Society’s alternative ordinance and the Planning Commission followed on Wednesday with a few strengthening tweaks.  

The RoadMap slide of “Strengths” of Berkeley listed, “A reputation for being forward thinking, creative & entrepreneurial”, and yet the ineffective proposed Bird Safe Ordinance based on out-of-date known to be erroneous concepts came out of the bowels of city administration. 

It was not the city staff that produced the Bird Safe Ordinance based on science that passed unanimously by the Planning Commission on Wednesday. The Bird Safe Ordinance based on science came from the work of Glenn Philips, Director, Golden Gate Audubon Society with the two subcommittee members Alfred Twu and Christina Oatfield. It was the public who stood to speak on the research demonstrating the importance of bird safe glass, the impact of glass and reflective surfaces on the bird population, the decline of the bird population and how the research is done by the American Bird Conservancy to classify the effectiveness of different treatments. 

Around 1 billion birds die each year in the U. S. due to collisions with windows/glass/transparent barriers. 

Philips from Audubon spoke to the hazards created by the built environment. Any glass that is larger than 4” in any direction is a hazard for birds. Birds see the reflection of the sky and trees. When transparent materials are used as freestanding glass walls, barriers, balconies, rooftop appurtenances, and other like situations the glass is invisible to the bird as it tries to fly through and crashes instead.  

The most famous bird deaths in Berkeley are the peregrine falcons which nest on top of the Campanile. Lux, one of those falcon babies, died from a collision with glass in an enclosed balcony on the UC Berkeley campus. I suspect the death of the falcon father, Grinnell, started with a glass collision before his falling toward the ground and being hit by a car in downtown Berkeley. 

The new Planning Commission chair responded to on my letter where I described a bird hitting a window at my house and dying in my yard. In the letter I dispelled the myth that window treatments on the inside like levelers or curtains prevent bird deaths. There were levelers inside my house where the collision occurred. I invited the commissioners to help install the bird safe film on my windows on Sunday around noon (rain cancels). 

When the public sat down and the commissioners began the discussion, the first words from Commissioner Oatfield were that the city staff presentation wasn’t what the subcommittee recommended. Alfred Twu spoke numerous times in support of the Audubon Bird Safe Ordinance dispelling misconceptions and answering questions. 

Constructing bird safe buildings is something we can fix. 

The Bird Safe Ordinance passed by the Planning Commission included a phase-in for buildings that are 50% or greater affordable units until 2025 and replacement windows until 2028. While bird safe glass with permanent glazing or etching for the birds to see is the best solution, we can make our windows bird safe with exterior screens or bird safe film though those solutions will require replacement during the life of the building. I learned at the North Berkeley Housing BART site tour on Sunday, developer Bridge Housing has a project with bird safe glass. 

Though in the end the ordinance passed unanimously and all of us on the bird safety side are very pleased, it was concerning during the discussion how a couple of commissioners sat waiting to be spoon fed by city staff, especially when that spoon feeding, if had been accepted, would have denied the science. In this case the scientists were in the audience and they had their turn to speak. The experts were called on. 

It is too often that city council members dismiss the research and study from the public and look instead to the city staff reports that are designed to support a particular agenda. It is this situation that contradicts the supposed strength of Berkeley as forward-thinking and makes the proposal to limit public comment even more worrisome. 

If you are wondering why it took from November 12, 2019 to March 1, 2023 to get the Bird Safe Ordinance through the Planning Commission, the city manager’s footprints are all over this, according to an earlier reveal from the city staff at a public meeting. 

Monday evening the council extended the COVID-19 Emergency Response for 60 days; this is about extending the housing eviction moratorium for 60 days after the COVID-19 Emergency ends. 

Tuesday the council started at 4 pm with the presentation and discussion for two hours on the zero waste rates, basically the cost of picking up our garbage. No votes were taken, but the bottom line is that the rate for all the smaller containers are going up and that includes the 32-gallon size container which 56% of the city residences use. There won’t be any change for the large 96-gallon container, and the 64-gallon container won’t change for several years, but then those rates are already more than double and triple the fee for the 32-gallon containers. Long term residents/homeowners pay the waste fee on their property tax twice a year; more recent residents pay monthly. 

This is late and long already, University Avenue, COVID and my latest reading will have to go in the next edition.