My Diary is late again. After a political discussion with my walk partner, I realized everything that I took out in my editing had to go back in. So here we go.
My week was bookended by listening to Rachel Maddow’s new podcast Ultra on Monday and finishing with the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Friday, and spending the weekend responding to the Housing Element Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR). In between there was a Council meeting, a stack of city meetings, the January 6th hearing, the State of the City address by Mayor Jesse Arreguin and a Measure L forum with a debate between Mayor Arreguin and Jim MacGrath.
The Tuesday 4 pm Berkeley City Council special meeting was an attempt to quell criticisms of Measure L, the $650,000,000 in city bonds which will be spread over 48 years. We are supposed to feel reassured that the new to-be-created Affordable Housing and Infrastructure Bond Oversight Committee, staffed by the city’s Budget office, will ensure that bond money is well spent and that there will be an independent audit and reporting. It was all laid out in Arreguin’s resolution, which he declares is absolutely binding.
“Rock solid” resolutions are only as binding as long as there are five councilmembers’ votes to keep them, not five votes to undo them, and only if city officials have the desire to enforce them.
At the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce sponsored Measure L Forum, with Mayor Arreguin supporting L and Jim MacGrath opposing it, MacGrath described picking projects as a “food fight” and watohing the process which followed Arreguin’s resolution, it certainly looks that way.
The mayor’s resolution does not define any priorities or specific projects. That list, according to the resolution, will come from the Public Works Department, the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department, Health Housing and Community Services Department, Office of Energy and Sustainability and the Fire Department, all of which will send their prioritized (wish) lists with bond and funding sources to the “authorized commissions”: the Housing Advisory Commission, the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission and the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, where there will be robust public participation to develop recommendations to send to council.
Meanwhile the Affordable Housing and Infrastructure Bond Oversight Committee “nominated” by council (meaning council selects the members) “would create a policy and procedures manual that would include project goals and projection selection and prioritization criteria.”
So let’s try to get this straight: The departments submit their wish lists. The wish list somehow get to the authorized commissions, where we get to appear and plead our case in one or two minute bites for our desired project, which may or may not have made the list. The commissions are either swayed or ignore our pleas, while the commissioners add their own opinions and make their recommendations to the council. The oversight committee members meet four times a year and create their own list of how to decide on projects (from the policy and procedures manual created) which may or may not match the recommendations from the authorized commissions. This goes to the council where it meets this phrase in the Resolution, “Funding from the Bonds will be guided by the City Council’s plans and policies, as may be amended from time to time…”
Which, of course, makes sense. These bonds are going to be spread over 48 years with spending commitments made over 18 years. Things change, which begs the real question: why are we handing council $650,000,000 now?
More important, all this sounds like what we usually get: this is what we’ve decided–don’t you love it? Which from this corner looks like why projects are revealed only after handing over the money. All while endless volunteer hours add up while the consultants prepare their plans and reports at substantial expense.
To a comment passed on to me second-hand about being “parcel taxed out,” and therefore supportive of bonds like Measure L, because it isn’t a parcel tax: have you not figured out who pays for bonds? It is property owners. When future property tax bills come, the bonds will be added to the long list of Fixed Charges and/or Special Assessments in the property tax statement. The Measure O Bond fee for property owners starts in 2025/2026.
Bonds are based on assessed value, so new homeowners/property owners pay the most. Parcel taxes are based on square footage of improvements/buildings (BSFT). Occasionally, parcel taxes can be based on square footage of the parcel/lot/land (LSFT). Berkeley usually uses the former (BSFT). With parcel taxes, new and longtime property owners are taxed the same rate, depending on size, of course.
Low income senior households who own property (like the house they live in) are not exempted from the property tax fees for bonds. At least for parcel taxes, the way streets should be financed, low-income over 65 seniors can apply for parcel tax exemptions. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/PropertyTaxesFAQs.pdf
Why should streets be paid for with parcel taxes instead of bonds? Streets can start breaking down in as little as four years, but may last 10-15 years, while the bonds financing the repair are paid off with interest over 30 years. This is why bonds are usually used for infrastructure and projects expected to last decades and not for streets that need continuous repair.
Two things stood out from the Arreguin – McGrath Measure L debate forum sponsored by the Berkeley Chamber: Jim McGrath’s picture of street deterioration four years after repair and Mayor Arreguin blaming prior mayors for deterioration of the City’s infrastructure, sayng he had been mayor for only five years. Once again, I need to apologize for working on Arreguin’s 2016 campaign for mayor. In Arreguin’s speeches and literature, he bragged about all his accomplishments during his years on City Council. I know, it was part of the canvassing pitch. Arreguin had eight years on council as a councilmember and five years as mayor, thirteen years in total and now after thirteen years infrastructure deterioration is somebody else’s fault? https://youtu.be/AS4exMTwSys
On to the October 11 regular council meeting. The Fair Work Week and Harriet Tubman Terrace agenda items were postponed to November 3. The Council finally made it to the second item under Action at 9:00 pm: an appeal of the six-story multi-unit building at 2018 Blake. The appeal started with Jordan Klein, Director of Planning and Development, recognizing Sharon Gong, Planner , who would present the project for the city staff, for her “excellent work” and the hearing went downhill from there.
Councilmember Wengraf started the questioning on the project, noting this was targeted to students, and she asked questions about the density bonus: which units would be the two low income units and what would be the requirements? Vice Mayor Harrison was next, asking more about the density bonus. Questioning continued, about the number of bedrooms and group living requirements, as the city planning staff and Director Klein fumbled, clearly out of their league, unable to answer the council’s questions. It all dragged on until 10:50 pm when Harrison made a motion to stop and continue the appeal to another meeting, when the Planning Department could be prepared to answer council questions.
At 10:52 pm, there were still 171 attendees tethered to ZOOM, hanging on to comment on the Reconsideration of the Hopkins Corridor Plan. While most of the older and disabled callers were tuckered out, the Walk Bike Berkeley held on in large numbers to insist moving forward without delay with the current plan: removing parking and adding bike lanes in front of the shops and Monterey Market.
The meeting dragged on so long that even live transcription/closed captioning ended at 11:30 pm. It was after 12:30 am when Arreguin called on former mayor Shirley Dean. She was the last of the public to speak and came out strongly against the Hopkins redesign. The meeting finally closed at 12:42 am with a unanimous council vote to reconsider the Hopkins Street Plan just between McGee and Sacramento and to throw another $400,000 at the project.
The little bit I caught of the Homeless Services Panel of Experts (HSPE) meeting, Carol Marasovic, chair, has not let go of discounting the HSPE June 22, 2022 meeting, in which a motion to send a letter to Council denouncing the use of Measure P funds to balance the City budget rather than for new homeless services was unanimously approved by those present. Marasovic, who was not present for the vote, claimed again this week that June 22 wasn’t a valid meeting, stating it wasn’t properly announced and that such strong language in the letter passed by meeting attendees might offend some people (is the offended people the mayor who appointed her?).
The meeting was announced, and Paul Kealoha-Blake said at the HSPE October 12th meeting that he stood by the comments in the letter from June 22.
The Mayor read his State of the City speech Thursday evening before a half-filled room and a YouTube audience. You can watch it on YouTube. Just go to JesseArreguin.com to get a link. Other than the usual, reassuring the audience that everything is wonderful, so much has been accomplished, there isn’t much. If you weren’t tuned in to the Housing Element Draft Environmental Impact Report, being written to recommend adding 19,098 housing units to Berkeley, you might have missed that comment.
I didn’t follow my own instructions with regard to the Housing Element. I spent my weekend responding. Probably it’s a good thing I was out of time, as my response was already over 12 pages by Monday at 4:30 pm. The 441 pages of the Housing Element Update Draft Environmental Impact Report (HEU DEIR) basically declares that the impact to Berkeley of adding 19,098 new housing units and 47,443 more people to fill all these units is insignificant. The only thing that merited description as a significant and unavoidable impact was adding development in the hills and the Housing Element Update recommended that anyway.
The City of Berkeley’s Housing Element webpage states that State law requires submission of the report by January 2023 and then states that the timeline for adoption of the final draft is December 2022 – March 2023. The actual deadline is January 31, 2023 and as published in the San Francisco Business Times, “Any jurisdiction that adopts its Housing Element later than the January 31, 2023 deadline for this region will immediately be subject to loss of local zoning control, a punitive measure colloquially known as the builder’s remedy.”
At the presentation of the Housing Element Update Draft Environmental Impact Report to the Planning Commission, I asked why the report was written for 19,098 units when the Regional Housing Needs Assessment allocation is only 8934 units. The answer was “to push zoning code changes.” It now looks like with this apparent screw-up in the making , by missing the deadline, the City doesn’t need to go through all that messy changing zoning codes. The staff, consultants and council can just miss the deadline instead and the builder’s get their “remedy.”
Even if you are NOT a fan and can’t stand Rachel Maddow, you have got to listen to the podcast Ultra (it is free) https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra. The absolute first thing I thought as I tuned in was, I wished my dad was alive so I could ask him what it was like when the U.S. Senator from Minnesota Ernest Lundeen was killed in a plane crash in 1940 and found to have a speech he was going to give which had been written by a Nazi agent.
The podcast is about the embrace of authoritarianism, support for Nazis and fascism, the America First movement, the Christian Front, and the Senators and Congressman involved in the plot and the sedition trial of 1944, and denial that it all happened even though much of this made front page news.
There are so many parallels to today with the embrace of authoritarianism and the growing militias and violence. Even if you don’t listen to Fox, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or traffic in websites like Parler, Gab, TheDonald or Truth Social, Trump’s website, the conspiracies, hate speech and disinformation spillover and infect school boards, city councils, politics, the media nationwide with the same old tropes recirculating, replacement theory, antisemitism. We have escaped a lot of this in Berkeley, but these far-right movements are present in Southern California and inland and all around us.
Reading about prior attempted coups and the pull back to reason and democracy is not making me feel any better about the upcoming election. Most of us reading this lived through the assassination of JFK, 1968 and Watergate, but if we look at history, each attempted coup to overthrow the U.S. Government moves closer to success. Smedley Butler blew the whistle on industrialists trying to pull him in as a war hero to lead a coup to overthrow the U.S. government was in 1933. That is all detailed in the Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan Katz and precedes the next attempt in 1940 the subject of Ultra by just a few years.
Setting aside the little bit of grandstanding before the camera in Alexandra Pelosi’s film documenting the actions of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer during the January 6th rampage of the capital, watching it this time brought back how I felt that day, unbelieving this could really happen and at the same time taking in the horror of it all. The push back and slow walking from the Department of Defense on the recorded phone calls in the documentary shows we are only as secure as there are good people in the right place at the right time.
In closing, Talia Lavin does a much better longer review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present than I can do here, but no review can replace what is gained from reading the book. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/corruption-violence-and-toxic-masculinity-what-strongmen-like-trump-have-in-common/2020/12/23/bc58b076-40dc-11eb-9453-fc36ba051781_story.html
Ruth Ben-Ghiat lays out how Trump fits the strongman, authoritarian takeover playbook, demanding loyalty, shuffling and firing staff and cabinet members, giving family members positions of prominence and responsibility, self-dealing, corruption and the repeated embrace of violence and normalization of violence. Think about all those MAGA rally clips with Trump calling on his crowd to “beat him up,” name calling and demonization of the “other.”
Going back to January 6th, Trump’s demand to take him to the capital sounds ever so close to Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922. Mussolini had his fascist demonstrators and Blackshirt para militaries. Trump didn’t get his wish “I’ll be there with you,” to march to the capital as he declared on the ellipse, but Trump had his MAGA and QAnon demonstrators and the three militias, the Oathkeepers, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters storming the capital.
If you are prone to nightmares, don’t read the chapter on violence or at least don’t read that chapter at bedtime.
The best time to save a democracy is before it’s gone.
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