It’s a family affair: She was once mayor of Berkeley. Now she’s headed to Sacramento to become the next 14th Assembly District rep, a job previously held by her husband. And now her husband is a top prospect to win her old job as Berkeley top dog. Nice storyline, eh? Apparently, some Berkeley progressives are hoping to make it a reality by persuading former Assemblyman Tom Bates to run for mayor. Bates’ wife, Loni Hancock, Berkeley’s mayor from 1986 to 1993, recently won the primary battle for his old Assembly seat.According to Berkeley City Councilman Kriss Worthington, who himself has toyed with the idea of a mayoral bid, he recently came across a petition being circulated during a meeting of the Gray Panthers trying to persuade Bates to run for mayor. Worthington, however, said he didn’t know who was behind the recruiting petition.
Before the election, this space reported that current Assemblywoman Dion Aroner might run for the honor of chairing six-hour city council meetings. But, with the resounding defeat of Proposition 45, which could have allowed state Sen. Don Perata to seek another four-year term, Aroner will likely vie for Perata’s seat in 2004 when he’s termed out of office. No doubt, Aroner would have been a formidable opponent to incumbent Mayor Shirley Dean — certainly more formidable than anyone else being mentioned as a possible candidate from the left.
But if there’s anyone more formidable than Aroner, it’s her mentor. Bates spent two decades in the Assembly representing this area and is well known and respected. The question is: Is he either masochistic or bored enough to do it? Bates couldn’t be reached for comment before our deadline. But a Bates confidant doubts he would: “He’s got to be cognizant of how aggravating the job is from his wife.”
As proof, we offer this example: Two weeks ago, Berkeley said goodbye to Andrew Thomas, a much-beloved civil servant who deserves credit for bringing the city’s General Plan back from the brink of ruin. It was Thomas who assumed the task of rewriting the plan in 1999 after the Planning Commission rebelled against a draft that would have allowed twelve-story buildings to be built downtown. But rewriting is not a complete description of what Thomas accomplished. He mediated disputes between various factions and, when he was done, walked away with nearly everyone admiring his honesty and evenhandedness — no small feat in Berkeley politics. The city council even adopted the plan’s housing and transportation components last December, on the eve of a state deadline.Thomas’s departure temporarily brought the staff of Berkeley’s advance planning department — the part that works on long-range policy — down to zero. The city’s other advance planner, Karen Haney-Owens, took a mysterious leave of absence from the department several months ago, and has not been heard from since. Thomas says his reasons for taking a similar job with the city of Alameda are: more money, a 36-hour work week, and that holy grail of professional perks for parents with young children, flex time. He says he’s sorry to go. “I’ve loved working in Berkeley,” he says. “I feel I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of respect from the community.”
But not everyone in his position shares his enthusiasm for Berkeleyans. Off the record, some planners grouse about the city’s abnormally large number of planning gadflies and their sometimes less-than-subtle efforts to depict city planners as lackeys of big-time developers. Planners are trained to build buildings, the reasoning goes, and if nothing were ever built, they’d be out of work. Why wouldn’t they favor the likes of swashbuckling developer Patrick Kennedy over a handful of querulous neighborhood activists?
With no staff, the Planning Commission’s work was brought to a screeching halt. But help is on the way. Into the fray steps Tim Stroshane, late of the city’s housing department. Stroshane, a trained urban planner who has worked on housing policy and homelessness for the last eight years, will assume Thomas’s duties on April 8. 7 Days reached Stroshane as he was moving his personal effects from his old office to his new, and he’s jazzed about the job. “I’m eager to get back to doing the things I’ve been trained to do,” he says.
Stroshane says his first priority will be to shepherd the remaining elements of the city’s 2001 General Plan through the city council. Then he’ll turn his talents toward the Southside Plan, the document meant to guide development in the Telegraph Avenue area. The Southside Plan, which the commission had hoped to deliver to the council this summer, has been discussed and punted around for the last eight years. Interested parties — residents, businesses, UCB students and administrators — are calling for an end to the madness. Thomas’ flight to Alameda will inevitably set the Southside timetable back somewhat.
So: crisis averted, right? Not quite. Carol Barrett, the city’s new director of Planning and Development, made a presentation on department staffing to the Planning Commission last month, and the picture is somewhat grim. Incidentally, Barrett’s recently published book, Everyday Ethics for Practicing Planners, can be read as a prescient rebuttal to the notion that planners are only concerned with ramming developers’ projects through.
Fully one-quarter of the city’s planning staff — which includes a redevelopment agency and current planning, which deals with specific proposed projects — is vacant, she said. The department has a hard time recruiting and keeping planners. No one knows precisely why, but many suspect that it’s mostly for the same reason the city lost Thomas: planners work long hours and are paid less than their counterparts in other Bay Area cities. With the upcoming slashing of the Berkeley city budget, this is unlikely to improve.
Barrett is looking at ways to reduce the staff’s workload, and hopes to merge the advance and current planning departments so that work can be shifted around when it starts to pile up. But there has been resistance from inside the department, where some employees evidently fear that it will mean more work for them. Barrett insists this is not her intention. But planners are only human, she says, and they fear change: “For a lot of people, both in the community and on the staff, their comfort level unfortunately includes a lot of whining.”
Of course, sometimes whining works: A handful of leaders in Oakland’s Chinatown have been making a lot of noise in opposition to the proposed Alameda Point development, for fear that the build-out would dump massive amounts of traffic from the Posey and Webster tubes onto already-congested Chinatown streets, endangering pedestrians and decimating businesses. The city of Oakland took up their cause, and now it looks like the city of Alameda has heard them loud and clear.
Alameda recently sent notice to Oakland that it plans to limit the scope of the $2 billion project on the former naval base. The notice proposed a reduction of 2.9 million square feet of light industry, business park, and office space as well as a decrease of 121,750 square feet of marina-related industry. However, it also plans to add an additional 456 medium-density residential units and preserve 430,500 square feet of industrial warehouse space.
“We are pleased that they are considering a smaller alternative,” said Willie Yee, senior advisor to at-large Oakland councilmember Henry Chang. “Whether or not the reduction in density is enough to not significantly impact Oakland — that remains to be analyzed.”
Of course, it’s entirely possible that the apparent concessions to Oakland were actually just a concession to the current realities in Bay Area development, where office space overflows but residential housing remains surprisingly strong. In any case, Oakland officials will meet with their Alameda counterparts on April 10 to discuss the development before Alameda revises its Draft Environmental Impact Report, which was originally released in November. It was that document that first sent Chinatown into panic; it projected that the build-out would generate an additional 53,000 vehicle trips a day.
Then again, sometimes it doesn’t: It sure was gratifying to see the East Bay’s major dailies finally notice the ridiculous antics of Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown‘s appointees to the school board. On March 18, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson called on Brown to get rid of appointees Paul Cobb and Wilda White, citing Cobb’s latest mau-mauing over the issue of whether to spend $5 million on a charter school for “social justice” at Castlemont High. A week later, the Oakland Tribune chimed in with a front-page story on the endless bickering that has paralyzed the school board meetings. “By all accounts, the addition of three appointed members to the seven-member elected body created a feud on the board that has consumed a large amount of the combatants’ time and energy the last two years,” Trib writer Alex Katz wrote.
What’s this? Could it be that Paul Cobb and Wilda White are divisive clowns who have reduced board meetings to circuses? Don’t get us wrong; their buffoonery is causing real harm, and any public discussion of them is welcome. But it would have been more welcome if these stories had run before the Oakland mayor’s race — you know, when they could’ve done some friggin’ good? Why wait till Brown’s untouchable before embarrassing him with the truth?
Struck out: When last we left the strange case of Rucker v. Davis (“Collateral Damage from the Drug War,” October 17, 2001) it didn’t look good for the plaintiffs. In 1996, four elderly Oakland Housing Authority tenants were given eviction notices after their relatives or friends had been caught on public housing property with illegal drugs. The evictions had been handed down as part of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “One Strike And You’re Out” policy, established earlier that year with the aim of reducing drug use and other criminal activity around public housing projects. The four residents sued, arguing that they had been denied due process, and that just because they were the family member named on the lease, they shouldn’t be punished for the behavior of younger relatives who had brought drugs onto the property without their consent or knowledge. After all, losing a rent-controlled apartment in the East Bay market is a pretty steep price to pay for someone else’s mistake, especially if you’re a senior on a fixed income. The OHA allowed the plaintiffs to stay in their homes as the case worked its way through a lengthy series of appeals, in which each level of the judicial system seems to favor a different side of the debate.
The end, though, seems to have finally come. Or has it? Last week, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld HUD’s one-strike policy, ruling that the government is merely acting like a landlord which has the right to remove a problematic tenant. But the four tenants may not have to pack their bags right away; authority spokeswoman Lily Toney says the Oakland Housing Authority has promised to review each case. If the friends and relatives who caused the original problems are gone, the leaseholders may be given a second chance at bat. A decision could be made as early as this week.
