“Iacta alea est.” That’s what Julius Caesar is supposed to have said when he led his army across the Rubicon river in his bid to take over Rome. “The die is cast.” We’ve gone over and we can’t go back. The deadline for becoming a candidate for the Berkeley City Council was last Friday, August 12, and now not only have the dice been thrown, the hats are in the ring, Well, District 8 candidates got an extension to August 17 since incumbent Lori Droste isn’t running, but now their time is up too. And it turns out that hats in Berkeley are in short supply this time around. You can see the spreadsheet listing those who filed the required paperwork here: Lucky you. Finding it cost me three phone calls to city staff plus seven clicks guided by a pleasant fellow in the City Clerk’s office, the last of which produced a chart obscurely entitled “Roster of Candidate Activity.” Yes, the COB’s new web interface is as bad as they say it is, but when you get there this is an informative document. What can we learn from it? Well, we already knew that four council seats will be on the November ballot. It seems that no one has the nerve to challenge Kate Harrison, the darling of the progressive planning wonks who care about District 4, the downtown center of the city. That’s the one which has been most adversely impacted by the BUB Boom, aka the Big Ugly Box Boom, even though Councilmember Harrison has valiantly tried to control it. Next, we have the other heavily BUB impacted district, District 7. That’s the one that was set up by former councilmember Kriss Worthington and now-mayor Jesse Arreguin as a sinecure for ASUC leftovers who want to move slowly into the adult world. It’s the “student district”. What that means is that it has the lowest registration rate as compared to population, and the smallest turnout among registered voters in any council district. Apportionment is based on population, not numbers of actual voters. It turns out that most students don’t care much about voting in Berkeley. If you believe that, short of malfeasance in office, incumbency provides a massive advantage in any election, and I do, Rigel Robinson (former or perhaps current Association of Students of the University of California External Affairs Vice President) looks like a shoo-in, though his undergraduate days are behind him. He admits to liking tall buildings, and gets support, financial and otherwise, accordingly. Nobody is running against him either. Few students want to commit to staying in Berkeley for a four-year term as a councilmember, and there are few non-students in District 7, so Robinson attracted only one potential opponent, recent UCB graduate Aidan Hill. Hill is progessive, passionate and a good speaker. He shows up to speak at the Council Zooms (formerly known as meetings) and volunteers for leading edge progressive groups like Food Not Bombs. His best chance of winning would be getting a good turnout from long-term residents plus a weak turnout from the transitory students. The ongoing threat to People’s Park might play a role. Robinson views it as a great building site; Hill wants it to remain a park. UC snuck in under the radar and cut down many trees last week, climate change be damned, but further demolition and/or construction has been stayed by the appellate court until October. Sadly, Hill took out preliminary papers but failed to file, so Robinson will just coast into another term. Which leaves two more districts which seemed for a hot minute to be really up for grabs. These seemed interesting because they’re the only ones which might have tested the virtues and the vices of Berkeley’s ranked choice voting, since they have more than two candidates. Voters can specify not only their faves, but also their second, third and fourth choices if any. Let’s look first at District One. BART’s plan to turn its North Berkeley parking lot into a cash-register multiple development with a strong majority of profitable “market rate” (=expensive) apartments has gotten a lot of the folks in adjacent neighborhoods really roiled. Several new issue groups of various types, fueled by extensive social media and petitions, have been burning up the airwaves with their indignation. Their slogan is that it’s not simply a housing crisis, it’s an affordable housing crisis. Most of these voters believe that public land acquired by eminent domain should be used for public purposes, in this case especially for housing for low income residents. Their YIMBY opponents appear to believe that building high-priced apartments on the BART parking lot will magically trickle down to house people now living outside or in RVs in District 1. Incumbent Rashi Kesarwani is Miss YIMBY in person, a true believer in supply-side housing dogma. She was a headliner at 2021’s YIMBY Gala in San Francisco. She’ll get the votes of voters in her district who believe in building even more market-rate apartments—but how many of those does District 1 have? Another hot planning issue in District 1 is the transmogrification of the Hopkins neighborhood shopping area, primarily for the benefit of the bicycle lobby. Mobility-challenged voters are starting to get grouchy about the city of Berkeley’s trendy romance with biking—the picture backing the city’s new website is a glamorous shot of a fancy bike. The enthusiastic able-bodied, on the other hand, want more bike accommodations in traffic planning. Might this affect the election? For change-seekers, there are two good choices. Architect Elisa Mikiten has been on the Planning Commission and the Police Review Commission. Those who care about such things seem to give her a strong B+/A- on the former and a C+ on the latter, but I don’t myself know the details of her record as yet. Michai Freeman, a quadriplegic wheelchair user and a person of color, is someone I’ve often seen online as an active participant in various vigorous progressive organizations, especially the Disability Commission. If I lived in District 1, which I don’t, I would appreciate the opportunity of voting for both of these candidates in 1-2 order (not yet saying which is first). Which brings me to District 8, where I do live. Here there’s enough information online about those who have taken out filing papers to know what’s going on. First, there’s already a candidate’s website online which will tell you all you need to know about one of the candidates. That would be Mark Humbert, who presents as the proverbial Old White Guy, a long-time Elmwood homeowner who practices law in San Francisco. (By my standards, of course, he’s a youngster—in his late 60s.) Do you think everything’s pretty much fine in Berkeley right now? Then Humbert’s your guy. Looking at his website, you know where he stands, since he’s already lined up endorsements from the governing majority of the current Berkeley City Council, the folks that have brought us city government as we know it today. That includes incumbent District 8 Councilmember Lori Droste, who’s not running again, Mayor Jesse Arreguin, who’s got two more years on his second four-year term, and continuing councilmembers Susan Wengraf (who’s represented the Berkeley Hills since before many of this year’s voters were born), Ben Bartlett and Terry Taplin, plus incumbents Rigel Robinson and Rashi Kesarwani who are running this year for another 4-year term. Why do we even bother with elections? Those In Charge seem to have already anointed Droste’s successor. Nevertheless, I was very pleased to learn that at least two more excellent candidates had entered the fray and three more had taken out at least preliminary papers. Mari Mendonca is known to me as a sparkplug in Friends of Adeline, the active community which has come together in the neighborhood which includes the Ashby BART station and is now a prime target of for-profit developers. Mari’s a Berkeley High graduate, a contemporary of my daughters. Her home is situated in the bite out of South West Berkeley’s District 3 which was added to District 8 in the latest reapportionment to make the numbers come out right. She’s a renter, a tenant activist who’s been on the Rent Board. I see Mari sometimes at the Adeline Farmers’ Market on Tuesdays. Last Tuesday she asked me to sign her nominating papers, and I obliged, secure in the belief that ranked choice voting would let me vote for her in some order. The other promising candidate was Mary-Lee Smith, whom I met at a house party not long ago. She’s an attorney and a parent, a homeowner in the Bateman neighborhood. Unfortunately, Smith withdrew from the race at the last minute. Two more candidates filed on Wednesday for District 8, but I haven’t yet found out much about them. Googling produces no record of civic involvement for either. Mendonca would add a fresh independent point of view to a Berkeley City Council which increasingly seems to be in thrall to a staff which has forgotten how to get good things done and instead thinks up new bad things to do on a regular basis. Prime example: Hiring pricey consultants to create a plan to “monetize” Cesar Chavez Park. What else is the average Berkeley voter upset about? Maybe it’s the creeping tentacles of YIMBYism? Maybe it’s the BART towers? And did we mention potholes? Bicycles? Parking? People’s Park? Willard Park? Homelessness? It’s an endless list. All I know about this race is anecdotal: many voters just seem to think that It’s Time for a Change. At least in Districts 1 and 8 ranked-choice would have given these voters two excellent options to rank first and second with some prospect of getting lucky with one of them. But here we’ll deploy yet another cliché: the handwriting is on the wall, What we have now is a city council election where the candidates provide little opportunity for meaningful change: Two unopposed incumbents, another with incumbent advantage, though her opponents are creditable, and a fourth who’s the clear choice of the current council majority. Berkeley needs a real discussion of why fewer and fewer people want to serve on our city council. And then there’s that proposed $650 million bond issue which would go on the November ballot. It is already viewed in some quarters as the only opportunity to express displeasure with how the city’s being run…but that’s too much to talk about today.

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