I predicted in one of my many previous Activist’s Calendars that Mayor Arreguin wouldn't get the job done on July 26,and indeed council is meeting again this coming Wednesday morning, August 3, at 9 am. And not getting the job done meant that those of us dedicated to sit through until the end had a council marathon day, starting at 3 pm and running until 11 pm. It is unknown just exactly when the mayor decided to stiff the 4 x 4 Committee of Council and Rent Board Members , but it most certainly happened well in advance of July 26th. Arreguin scheduled a special meeting on ballot measures for 3 pm on July 26th, but left the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance on the Council regular meeting agenda at 6 pm as the second to last item—a strategy to kill it. Here is how the maneuver played out. 

As you read through the steps, be aware that Arreguin is a member of the 4 x 4 Committee and voted for the measure he decided to tank. The 4 x 4 Committee consists of four Councilmembers and four Rent Board Members, with the mission to work collaboratively on housing issues of mutual concern. The four council members are Arreguin, Taplin, Harrison and Robinson, and the four rent board members are Simon-Weisberg, Alpert, Johnson and Kelley. 

By leaving the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance on the regular evening agenda, instead of moving to take it up with the other ballot measures at the 3 pm special meeting, Arreguin could run out the clock, using the hard stop at 11 pm to kill the ballot measure without so much as even bringing it up for discussion. let alone a vote. 

It was a plan that a friend and I missed as we were texting earlier in the evening, groaning about how Councilmember Kesarwani was allowed to blather on and on when there were still items on the agenda for action, and not a peep from Arreguin to bring the meeting discussion under control. 

It was getting close to the goal of running out the clock, but not quite there, when Arreguin skipped over the ballot measure and pulled Hahn’s item on the City website out of order to finish the job. Hahn can always be counted on to talk endlessly. Arreguin used the excuse that Hahn was going to travel the next day. 

At 10:58 pm, when it was obvious the clock was about to run out without action on the ballot measure, it was Robinson, not Arreguin, who asked for a vote to extend the meeting to 11:45 pm. Kesarwani, Taplin, Wengraf and Droste all voted against extending the meeting. A super majority is required to extend the meeting, so with four “no” votes in the bag and Arreguin with the last vote in the roll call, he could vote for the extension, giving the appearance of wanting to take up the ballot measure for action without any actual risk of having to follow through. 

Agenda items that are not addressed automatically go to the Agenda Committee for rescheduling. The Agenda Committee won’t meet again until the last week of August to plan the September 13 council meeting. Ballot measures have deadlines that must be met to be included in the November 8 election which means that pushing off the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance Ballot measure until September kills it. 

All this, to avoid sending a ballot measure to the voters that contained eviction protections for tenants in “Golden duplexes” (one unit of two in a duplex owner-occupied as a principal residence) and to add an equal number of rent controlled units in new construction when that construction project demolished existing rent-controlled units. 

You might be asking why go through all this to block a measure that offered protections to tenants? Berkeley is 57% renters, and this ballot measure, which the Chamber of Commerce, the real estate industry and Golden duplex owners gathered to protest at the July 12, 2022 council meeting, would very likely pass. and therefore must be kept out of the hands of the voters. 

Evidently Arreguin decided he needed a way out to keep the real estate industry happy, and what better way to kill the Ballot Measure Amending the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance than by running out the clock after most of the City had given up for the evening and gone to bed? You probably wouldn’t know what happened unless I took the time to write about it. 

You can go the July 26 Regular meeting agenda item 31 to read the full ballot measure and supplement responding to the July 12 council discussion. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-council/city-council-agendas 

Back in the day during the “Tax the Rich” rallies, we used to talk about politics, candidates for office and the difficulty of sorting through all the BS to figure out who actually had values, a moral core that wasn’t hollowed out with ambition. We never did have an answer, but following behavior is a good clue. 

The Police Equipment and Community Impact Statement was moved earlier in the evening to be considered in September. And, the parcel tax to fix the roads and sidewalks was killed in the 3 pm meeting in favor of having one big General Obligation Bond ballot initiative to send to the voters 

As for the City website, it is a mess, with no action taken before the council meeting abruptly ended. The city manager, Dee Williams-Ridley compared the complaints about the new city website to objections to a new business logo. This kind of trivialization of links that are broken and documents that are lost into the ether is not like seeing a different picture (a logo) associated with a business. Endless searches in Records Online to find documents that used to be a couple of keystrokes away is not somehow the same as a new logo for a familiar business. Such a comment demonstrates a complete disregard for legislative staff and the public; an unfitness for doing the job, for which this city council awarded this city manager a 28.11% raise of $84,732 more than her previous salary. This also demonstrates the unfitness of Mayor Arreguin, who proposed that enormous raise for the Berkeley City Manager, the manager of the smallest city in land mass and 11th in population among thirteen city and county administrators surveyed. 

I took a break and watched the PBS Frontline special Facing Eviction. Emily Benfer from the Eviction Lab described eviction this way, “Housing is foundational to resiliency the same way education and employment are, but if you knock out that one pillar, your housing, your home, then you can’t access any of the others.” 

The Thursday presentations at the Mental Health Commission: Achieving an Adequate Standard of Living for People with Serious Mental Illness and/or Substance Use Issues and Disorders, really dove into the impacts of homeless camp sweeps, especially for people experiencing homelessness. It’s not just the few sentimental items that get tossed with the sweeps, the very documents the homeless need to get assistance end up in the belongings carted away by the City as trash. Medications are lost too. Most important, sweeps break the contact, the link, case managers have with the homeless person. 

Sweeps are a major setback for caseworkers and the homeless. It is probably difficult, more like impossible,l for those of us reading this Diary in comfort to think of encampments that are seen as squalor as home and community for anyone, but when the most important pillar of resiliency, housing, is pulled away, even what we may consider trash becomes precious for someone who has nothing. 

Margaret Fine described sweeps as a “horrible thing.” Andrea Pritchett gave three solid suggestions: 1) provide cell phones so the homeless could maintain contact with the case workers who were trying to help them, 2) provide staff with tablets so they could instantly update records when in the field and 3) council to identify safe/safer encampment locations where service providers can regularly provide services. 

The Ballot Initiative to Tax Vacant Residential Units should come back on Wednesday. This time I hope council can see clear to pass it so we as voters can decide in November. There is an apartment building near me that has been vacant for decades. This city that likes to call itself progressive should be doing everything possible to get these older buildings back on the market as available housing. They certainly will be cheaper than $3397 for a 461 sq ft studio at THE BLAKE. https://www.blakeatberkeley.com/floorplans/a4 

And all that we can do to stabilize the most important pillar of resiliency ought to be on the top of the list. It certainly wasn’t last Tuesday evening at 11 pm. 

Nicole Kurian, Legislative Director, Californians Against Waste, gave an update for the Zero Waste Commission of bills to watch. SB 1046 regulates the pre-checkout bags (the plastic bags used for fruit, vegies, bulk goods, etc, AB 2046 reduces packaging in all those online orders delivered to our doors and SB 1013 requires a redemption payment for every beverage container. They all sound good, but like all bills at the end of the session, we shall see what passes. 

The Transportation and Infrastructure Commission grant application turned out to be for the Marina, and it didn’t require a vote from the newly blended commission of what used to be the separate Transportation Commission and the Public Works Commission. The application only required a presentation, not approval by the commission. 

This is a sorry state of affairs. The least functional side of these two commissions is now in charge. The Public Works Commission turned out incredible work and analysis. The few times I tuned into the Transportation Commission, I was struck by the capacity of the commission to be at the same time dysfunctional and oblivious to the fact that not everyone is going to bicycle everywhere. Some of us like our intact bodies, and others of us can’t bicycle for a wide variety of reasons. 

I like listening to the Thom Hartmann podcasts. In a normal week there is usually a one-hour segment with someone from Congress taking questions from callers. The slot is often filled with Mark Pocan from Wisconsin or Ro Khanna from Silicon Valley. It’s always interesting, and then there are the callers from all over the country making comments on the politics and the discussions of the day. Most often when I listen to the people calling in, I think, “you need to read more books.” It is why I like to finish my Diary with what I just finished reading including the audiobooks read to me. 

Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell by Tim Miller, just released in June, is the kind of book with enough substance, but not too heavy to play while doing mindless tasks or to fill time while travelling. All of the five libraries I use have it and San Francisco just added 31 copies of the audiobook. As the title suggests it is entertaining, but the underlying questions of why people stuck with Trump and then ran back to him are answered with proximity to power, job, money, ambition and being in the club or really the cult. 

The book I read with substance which drove me to take pages of notes in my reading journal is One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse, published in 2015. 

This book is absolutely fascinating as Kruse pulls together how the invention of a Christian America took hold in the 1930s and 1940s with James W. Fifield, the minister for the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, leading the charge, catering to the LA millionaires. Fifield started the College of Life, radio programs and speaker series to send the message that wealth is a sign of God’s blessing. His messaging success covered his generous salary, butler, cook and chauffer. 

Fifield placed an ad in the LA times decrying the New Deal with the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, Norman Vincent Peale, California Institute of Technology, UC, Stanford, U of Florida and the Princeton Theological Seminary all jumping on the bandwagon. Hollywood joined in with Cecile B. DeMille, Disney and others promoting the selective religious message. 

President Eisenhower and Evangelist Abraham Vereide started the national prayer breakfast in 1953 which continues to this day. Evangelist Billy Graham hovered through several administrations. Falwell, Robertson and others followed threading religiosity through our government. And, J. Walter Thompson the Madison Avenue ad agency, was an early promoter of the new rituals. 

The mythology of the United States founded as a Christian Nation was meticulously debunked in the Supreme Court decision of Engel v. Vitale on school prayer, June 25, 1962, in the opinion by Justice Hugo L. Black. But that meticulous historical opinion from sixty years ago blocking prayer in schools did not stop the Christian Nation myth nor did it stop the recent opinion from Justice Gorsuch in the 6 to 3 decision, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, on June 27, 2022 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a high school coach leading post-game school prayers at the 50 yard line. 

Christian Nationalism has taken root, and the tentacles are visible in the January 6th Insurrection, the Trump cult, the Tucker Carlson show, the Supreme Court decisions and the adulation of Viktor Orban for starters. 

Next in my stack is the Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart. 

(and please support Grace Underpressure with a donation :-)