Culture Change e-Letter #63

A David Brower Memorial Parking Garage for Berkeley?

by Jan Lundberg

On May 18, 2004 the Berkeley, California City Council moved towards approving a seductive, eco-groovy proposal to build a $47 million complex called the David Brower Center.  The developers are working with interested groups that include collaborators of the late David Brower, who was the first executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth.

Practically everyone is for this two-building complex, including Brower’s son Kenneth Brower, author of The Starship and the Canoe.  Environmental organizations such as Earth Island Institute (co-developer and David Brower's last organization), with $5 million in assets, and the Rainforest Action Network, with a $2 million annual budget, want to be new tenants in the Brower Center.  Low income housing would be featured.  However, there is a major fly in the ointment: a parking garage would be built underneath, and the implications are troubling.

Another problem is that Strawberry Creek, running down from the University of California under the street, is so close to the construction site and poison run-off. And there’s a major earthquake fault nearby; a building’s structural integrity is compromised by putting it on top of a parking garage (housing a hundred gasoline tanks called cars). And there may be Indian artifacts in the soil to be disturbed and desecrated.

If the parking garage is built, before it is contaminated with cars its use could be changed to a cold storage spot for food and wine.  Or growing mushrooms.  What a pity if the garage were utilized for just enough time to pollute it thoroughly before the oil supply-crash hits — after which people must walk, bike and use urban spaces wisely.

The City of Berkeley, besides its willingness to honor Brower and have a fancy building to attract visitors, is banking on parking revenue from the Brower Center.  So the city is giving the land away for free to the developers, representing a $5 million gift.  I told the Council before its vote that the parking revenue would be blood money, because “we stand against war for oil and believe there should be ‘No Blood for Oil.’”

The land is already a huge, ugly parking lot, filled mostly with commuter vehicles whose owners don’t bicycle or utilize the buses and Bay Area Rapid Transit trains. Developing such a place for a green-certified building complex is laudable, but the Brower Center would still be attracting about the same number of polluting cars that consume oil. In addition to many nonprofit groups at the Brower Center, there would be green commercial tenants as “anchors.”

"As we are in an age of global warming caused mostly by fossil-fuel burning," I said to the City, “this illustrious Council can do better.  A parking garage for this center is not ‘green,’ as David Brower would agree.”  Allowed only two minutes, I also said “David Brower was an Advisor to the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, a project of the Sustainable Energy Institute which I head.  Berkeley is choked with cars and guzzles petroleum.  Just as adding to the car’s infrastructure creates more traffic congestion, disaccommodating cars decreases traffic congestion, as has been found in European cities where car-free centers have been created.” 

One of the environmentalist principals supporting the Brower Center development and its parking garage told me afterwards “It was a show-stopper for you to give those comments.”  He was apparently worried my comments would be taken seriously and that the development could thus be delayed or modified so as to derail it.  He was disturbed that I had not taken into account the many mitigations he said were undertaken to lessen the car and oil factor.  I told him and Earth Island’s executive director that “somebody (me) had to say those things.  The planet is being killed and war for oil is out of control.”  The head of Earth Island told me that David Brower had used a car almost every day and, as if it was an indulgence that Brower supported a paving moratorium, Brower supported many causes.  But I'm told that one of his causes was his walking around Berkeley a lot.

We can nevertheless be sure David Brower would not want a parking garage constructed under a building to honor him, nor would he want the creek ordinance waived as suggested by a Council member.  In these times of ecocide and denial over the effects of the car, David Brower would call for instead a rewriting of the city zoning laws requiring parking.  He certainly would not want to feed the city’s coffers with drivers' parking fees when greener alternatives for travel are available.  There could be parking for disabled people only. 

My main purpose in attending the Council meeting was to give my two cents’ worth of advice in pointing out that the global peak in oil extraction is occurring now, and because of the ramifications, the world is going to experience its final petroleum crisis soon.  I would have also mentioned transportation alternatives, but this was covered by the Gray Panthers representative and by Council member Linda Maio who recognized the need for car-free living.

The sidewalks at the Brower Center would be of minimum width, which means little of nature’s greenery would be present.  However, after the oil crash and the drop off in car use, the roadway would be available for pedestrian use as it should be now.

The problem we are facing, when we witness environmental groups compromising and spinning (even if only so very rarely) while they certainly maintain their funding, is that the world is out of time. We can’t pretend the car-oriented infrastructure and the oil economy will go on and on. We have to address the problems and stand on our principles – today. For without vision and clarity of our message and mission, the true alternative to this destructive culture will not be demonstrated – until the system collapses. A sustainable future has no place for a parking garage, even if the building is the most progressively green ever devised ("platinum certified," in this case). When an extremely rare, visionary warrior for the Earth – David Brower – is being honored, who is really qualified to represent his vision and stature in a business deal? Are his equals present, at the ready, and objective, in all matters possible?

Besides just scrapping the parking requirement as would befit a truly progressive city, an alternative Brower Center concept could be for today’s $5 million parking lot to be turned into a community organic garden on half the space, and on the other half there could be some Earth-friendly structures serving the environmental movement and housing its workers.  If the tenants and workers pledged to be car free, the City of Berkeley might allow no parking places.  And the depaving activists are ready!

However, the City is already getting blood money from the parking lot, and without a strong protest movement to cease this and declare war on the car, such revenue will not be denied until the oil virtually dries up or the Earth is burned up in climate change.  

The David Brower Center development makes headway, and the final plan will probably be approved this summer.  The vote on May 18 was 7-1 resolving to authorize negotiating for the Development and Disposition Agreement, but a public hearing in July 2004 has been added as part of the scrutiny of the contract whose drafting has just been approved.

 *****.

A shorter version of the above article was printed in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 2, 2004, and can be viewed at the Chron's website. 

Send a comment to the City of Berkeley (email: clerk@ci.berkeley.ca.us, fax (510) 981-6901) and tell the Council Members that, for example, you would more likely visit a David Brower Center and the fair city of Berkeley if they did not represent the same old oil, fumes & road hog paradigm. 

For green city/building design expertise see www.ecocitybuilders.org of Oakland and Berkeley, California - Richard Register, President, author and illustrator.  Readis recent response to the public debate over the David Brower Center, Design flaws of David Brower Center plan

Jan Lundberg publishes Culture Change for the nonprofit Sustainable Energy Institute which was founded upon his petroleum industry experience at Lundberg Survey Corporation.

See James Doherty, Culture Change's Bike Warrior Blogger:
TO THE BERKELEY CITY COUNCIL  /  POGOLAND

From Gar Smith
The-Edge publisher and former Editor of the Earth Island Journal

David Brower's comments on automobiles

Hi Jan, here are some of David Brower's comments on automobiles.  I think Ken Brower would agree that if Dave wanted any kind of transportation in the bottom of the Dave Brower Building, it would have been a rail and mass transit station.

From an obituary on Dave's death: 

As a man who disliked cars, Mr. Brower added, "We can, upright people that we are, rediscover the foot; we can save a place to walk in, and an antelope, too." 

"Brower," Mr. McPhee wrote, "has computed that we are driving through the earth's resources at a rate comparable to a man's driving an automobile a 128 miles per hour, and he says that we are accelerating. He reminds his audiences that buffalo were shot for their tongues alone, and he says that we still have a buffalo-tongue economy. "  `We're hooked on growth.  We're addicted to it.  In my lifetime, man has used more resources than in all previous history.' 

from Restoring Hetch Hetchy 
By David Brower 
Excerpted by permission from For Earth's Sake: The Life And Times of David Brower (Salt Lake City, Gibbs-Smith 1990) 

Mountaineer George Bell, when he was working at Los Alamos and heard people joking about taking down Glen Canyon Dam, said, "Oh, I think we have something on the shelf at Los Alamos that can do that."  His solution, alas, would result in excessive radioactivity.  What else? I would suggest that we turn it over to the freeway builders.  They make a practice of moving, or rather, removing mountains whenever mountains are in the way of automobiles.  A concrete mountain should present no insuperable problems. 

XXII. THE HORACE M. ALBRIGHT CONSERVATION LECTURESHIP
November 11, 1981 University of California, College of Natural Resources Department of Forestry and Resource Management Conservation and National Security David Brower 

In 1910 Charles Richard Van Hise wrote in The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States, " . . . the period in which individualism was patriotism in this country has passed by; and the time has come when individualism must become subordinate to responsibility to the many." 

He realized that "we cannot hope that we shall be able to reverse the great law that energy is run down in transformation, or that we can reuse indefinitely the resources of nature without loss." 

He wondered what changes in social structure would result "when people begin to feel pinched by meager soil and the lack of coal." (He had already concluded that the greatest use of petroleum would be as a lubricant, and he had not contemplated that automobiles would use any.) And his text ended with a familiar line: 

"Conservation means 'the greatest good to the greatest number -- and that for the longest time.'" 

Earth and the Great Weather: THE BROOKS RANGE 
by Kenneth Brower foreword by David Brower 
Berkeley, California March 25, 1971 

The least we can do, if morality and ethics are still in our fiber, is to plan a thousand years of amenities for our progeny while they mind our nuclear garbage. 

So a thousand good years, and an aim. Mere survival is not enough in the world we seek. Our institutions need to accommodate an optimistic vision of man's future, to believe that if the golden rule is all right in religions, it should not be avoided in life. 

A thousand year plan for oil, with particular respect for the immediate foreground in Alaska, would recognize the contribution of those who discovered the North Slope oil resource, appropriately cover the costs they cannot cover, reward them, pay the state for storage underground, then record the oil reserve as part of the inventory to be budgeted to last a thousand years. The Plan would contemplate that oil may one day serve a more important purpose than fueling automobiles and supersonic transports. Precipitate exploitation would be discouraged and extravagant use would be prohibited. Study of potential dangers of removing and transporting the oil in and across fragile ecosystems would be exhaustive and not an exercise in salvage ecology. The costs of perfecting spill-proof transportation would be met and development would await the meeting, the oil remaining safely stored underground until then, in situ. Whatever the costs were would be passed on to the user, who has always paid the costs anyway although he has not always known it. I f this materially raises the price, that increase in itself would make economically feasible the development of more efficient oil using devices. We would pollute far less because pollution would be too wasteful and too expensive. This would be a residual advantage and a welcome one, since the Plan would not expect oil to be available for a millennium, but also would expect the air to remain breathable for the duration. Applied to pace, the Plan would encourage people to slow down and live, to take time to look for the real show, heeding Robinson Jeffers: 

But look how noble the world is. 
The lonely-flowing waters, the secret keeping stones, 
The flowing sky. 

Dave's pitch for rail and mass-transit
Not Just an Extraordinary Marriage of Convenience 
By David Brower - From the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment - Millennium Edition.

Isaiah, usually one of my favorite biblical prophets, had little use for the bar, ("If wine is mockery, strong drink is raging"). Over the years, I have found bars to be quite useful; in fact, I would not be writing this article today if not for a fateful encounter at a bar in Eugene, Oregon with several members of the United Steelworkers of America. These locked out "road warriors" from Kaiser Aluminum had come to the environmental law conference last March to meet the longer haired members of the Maxxam Fan Club, but I think we all came away from the bar that night with visions even bigger than joining forces against the worst corporate villain in recent memory. If we succeed in our mission to tear down the corporate-driven myth that you can't have quality jobs and a healthy environment, we will have Charles Hurwitz to thank for bringing us together. 

It is up to us to prove wrong people like the Maxxam spokesman who called our Alliance "an extraordinary marriage of convenience," questioning why Steelworkers would work with "radical eco-terrorists whose mission is to destroy jobs, not preserve them." This is the wedge that large wealthy corporations have successfully driven between labor unions and environmentalists for too long. This has allowed corporations and their friends in government to divide and conquer, shipping jobs overseas and blaming the environmentalists. This Alliance will put an end to this, getting workers and environmentalists on the same page, working toward our common goals. This Alliance allows this old man to dream again, of a world where we do more than slow the rate at which unions crumble and species vanish forever. 

We have allowed ourselves to be divided because we lacked the vision to have it all: meaningful, well-paying jobs and a beautiful, healthy planet to live on. I accept USWA Region 11 Director David Foster's challenge to "make sustainable jobs a product of environmental protection," and I have a few ideas for how to make this happen. Pay attention and steal my ideas freely if you like them, because at 87, I shouldn't count on being around long enough to make sure they get done. Remember the words of the Johann von Goethe: 

"Whatever you can do, or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." 

Boldness has been my calling card since my days as a world class mountain climber, back when it didn't take much class. It takes boldness to challenge the largest corporations in the world and their law-making body, the World Trade Organization, to include democracy, human rights, and environmental protection in trade negotiations, and that is exactly what this Alliance is up to. We can make sure Seattle is the last gasp for the old thinking of profit and free trade at any cost to workers and the planet, and begin some new thinking. 

A guidebook to the necessary new thinking on jobs and the environment has just been put out by Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins entitled, "Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution." The first Industrial Revolution brought us the notion of labor productivity, the goal being to get more and more work out of fewer and fewer people. This led to many innovations, including labor unions to protect these workers who noticed that they were doing more and more work with less and less pay. Since then we have seen about a 200-fold increase in labor productivity and the nation has prospered often at the expense of workers and the natural world. Isaiah may have been talking about this kind of economic growth when he wrote, "Thou hast multiplied the nation, but not increased the joy." 

What "Natural Capitalism" recognizes is that labor is no longer what we are short of, at six billion people and counting; and that the Industrial Revolution we need is in resource productivity, the goal now being to get more and more value out of fewer and fewer natural resources. In other words, we can stop downsizing our workforce and start downsizing our impact on the planet (and still make a profit, if you like that sort of thing). The book is not so much urging old-style corporations to change as it is telling them they are being left behind by hundreds of 2 businesses that are now making profit and making sense. By strengthening our Alliance, we can help hasten this shift and create the sustainable jobs of the future. 

A specific place the Alliance can make a difference is in ending our war against the atmosphere. In the early part part of this century, the automobile industry, specifically General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tires, set about buying up railroads and dismantling them to eliminate competition, for which they were fined a collective $5,000. With no remaining transportation alternatives in so many areas, Americans began to use automobiles, gasoline, and tires as never before. The dismantling of the U.S. rail system as an alternative to building more superhighways and sprawl development has also given us modern marvels like the Tracy [California] tireyard fire, where millions of old tires have been burning since August 1998 with no hope of putting them out. 

Giving people the opportunity to rediscover rail can spare us from sprawl, gridlock, and return us to the days I am old enough to recall when air was still worth breathing. 

Several generations have been needlessly denied the opportunity I had in 1915 at the Panama Pacific Exposition to fall in love with trains. Today train technology in Europe and Japan can do amazing things with speed and versatility, but the essential train experience of being able to write, sleep, drink, talk, and walk while traveling remains the best yet invented and we in the United States are now largely deprived of it. What will it take to rebuild rail? A lot of steel and a lot of steelworkers for one thing. We must move in the direction of creating these jobs that actually help make the world a more livable place for our children at the end of the day. If the corporate mindset does not allow for such thinking, our first job will be to change some minds. 

Railroads are just one example of where the environmental movement can advocate for restoration and redesign, rather than just bitching about what is being done wrong (which we are all quite good at). Paul Hawken and others have said that we need to "redesign everything" in light of what we know about the threats to the natural world and human health. This will take a lot of work, and will create meaningful, sustainable jobs for many years to come. It will also be fun. What are you ready to redesign? I think the world may be ready for an operable car seat belt for starters. What's next? Wise cartoon strip hero Pogo once said, "We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities." In my mountain climbing days, any peak declared "insurmountable" was climbed within the year. Onward to [the Winter 1999] Seattle [protests against the WTO]!

Design flaws of David Brower Center plan
by Richard Register

I see it as ironic largely by accident, that the large number of parking places proposed for this building is due to the fact that it is essentially built upon an existing parking lot.  This is largely true in the case of Library Gardens too.  But in this case, the Dave Brower Center, the whole thing is on top of a previously existing parking lot.  Parking lite is better than what would be the traditional number of parking spaces for the planned new uses, but still, the planners of the David Brower center had plenty of time and people like myself and others, who they approached, who suggested car-free by contract for the new housing and office space.  Then they ignored us.  The other element regarding parking they could have gone for: make whatever parking is a holdover into "convertible parking", that is, make it with high ceilings for eventual remodel to accommodate housing or shops. 

So in sum, the Earth Island Institute planners of this project chose to ignore the following ecological features: 

1. Car-free by contract new units and office spaces, 
2. Convertible parking for the transition times, 
3. More variety in building height, including a portion higher than they are proposing in the present version, so that solar passive accessibility would be possible (terracing toward the sun), 
4. More variety in building height so that a view to the big redwood tree on Haste that Dave Brower planted as a child would be celebrated (it's kinda odd they completely ignored that one too - I have a small tree I offered to donate that is from a seed from the Dave Brower tree itself; it's about two feet tall and two 1/2 years old now), 
5. Shops on the roof or terraces so that there would be rooftop accessibility for the public. 

All in all I'd hoped the Dave Brower Center would be part of an overall movement toward the ecological city.  In this it falls way short. Being lEED certified, it makes it only a small step toward that status; to say the least, that's been done before! Way before! We need some real progress here. 

Setting aside the parking that's already there is something the city staff planners will consider as rigidly as their tradition is. I believe parking stimulates disastrous dependence on cars and oil at a time when oil is about to peak and suddenly grow very expensive, then unavailable. But given the panic business people feel in Berkeley about existing parking disappearing, I'd accept replacement convertible parking with a time table for transformation of the space to other uses tied to, say, the rising price of gasoline: as gas gets more expensive, 25 cents, by 25 cents, more parking spaces have to be retired.  At some point people will begin catching on, even business people with their worries about losing money on risky change.  Oil shortage change will put all of us at risk in dozens of ways, some unforeseen and some exceedingly nasty. But then, at best, even with convertible parking, the project would still be strictly car lite and far from car-free. 

It seems to me that Dave Brower, who I knew a little and brainstormed with periodically every couple years since I met him in 1972 at the United Nations environmental conference in Stockholm, was extremely imaginative and hence, the real disappointment with this project is that there is so little imagination in it.  As far as lower income housing goes - hooray! But it really should have been car-free - and with those other ecological features. 

In a word, this project is just plain too lame to be built as a celebration of Dave Brower and his formidable contribution to conservation and ecological consciousness in this country and around the planet.  Maybe the building can be changed.  I hope so. 
Richard

From James Doherty, Culture Change's Bike Warrior Blogger:

TO THE BERKELEY CITY COUNCIL - and the greater Berkeley Community:

Please reconsider the submitted design of the new David Brower Center (DBC) 
and postpone the Disposition and Development Agreement (DDA until the 
Berkeley community has had a chance to review the plans and consider alternative 
designs.

Parking for up to 120 automobiles underneath the proposed David Brower
Environmental Center (DBC) will severely exacerbate:

1.        Construction costs, yet this is a center for affordable, sustainable 
housing, as well as nonprofit ecology work;

2.        Earthquake risks, including risk of collapse of the entire structure onto
the parked cars as happens routinely in California earthquakes, such as Loma
Prieta, Northridge, and Paso Robles;

3.        Noise pollution to offices and workers and residents in the DBC;

4.        Toxic fumes pollution to offices, workers and residents in the DBC;

5.        Lifelong Heating, Ventilating, Air Conditioning, and Maintenance expenses
in attempting to cope with 2 & 3, above;

6.        Lifelong liability and fire insurance costs, which skyrocket after each
new earthquake in California exposes the risks, including fire risk, of
having cars and gasoline tanks driving in, out, under and around the support
structures of the lower levels of such buildings;  (The city of Hayward lost 
its city hall to this; more recently, the city of Paso Robles lost almost
all its civic buildings to this risk.)

7.        Risks of Terrorism and Saboteurs, with car bombs of various types having
already been used by anti-environmental extremists.

I.        Whereas, The requirement that such parking be installed from “the ground
up” in an Environmental Center is a travesty of the principles of living and
working lightly and sustainably on the Planet Earth;

II.        Whereas, This proposed Center is in memory and honor of David Ross
Brower, considered the Archdruid and founder of the modern environmental
movement, a man who fought roads, paving, and the impacts of automobiles for
three generations, including his opposition to the construction of the Golden Gate 
Bridge;

III.        Whereas, A design mandating cars to be driven in, out, under and around
the David Brower Center is thereby an insult to the memory of this Distinguished 
Citizen of Berkeley and the Planet Earth;
 
IV.        Whereas, The planning and design process for this “environmental”
parking lot has been largely closed, secretive, and poorly noticed to the
community to date, yet Berkeley wants a reputation for democracy and
openness in its planning process;

V.        Whereas, The City of Berkeley has built a progressive reputation for
restricting and limiting automobiles, with innovative programs to do that as
well as to encourage bicycling and other transportation alternatives; yet
mandating automobile parking at the David Brower Center pushes in the
opposite, stale, and embarrassing direction of encouraging automobiles;

VI.        Whereas, The City of Berkeley and the University of California have
begun planning for a large scale hotel/convention/museum arts district
Complex to be added to downtown Berkeley in the near future, with a better
designed, more secure and centralized parking facility to be built within a
very short distance of the David Brower Center; and

VII.        Whereas, The Developer of the Library Gardens announced on February 10,
2004 that 120 parking stalls will be added to that development, effectively
replacing the 112 stalls now at the Oxford site just two blocks away from
the proposed David Brower Center,

I respectfully suggest a public review and revision of the David Brower
Center Parking mandate, given the changes in century, city administration,
and overall planning for downtown that have taken place since the Shirley
Dean era mandatory parking preservation ordinance was passed.

POGOLAND

One of David Brower’s favorite maxims was drawn from Walt Kelley’s Pogo
cartoon strip: “WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US.”

This seems utterly applicable to the situation with the proposed dumb design
of Berkeley’s DAVID BROWER CENTER, with respect to the ridiculous mandate of
bulldozing parking for 120 private commuter cars underneath the center. 

To do so would insult and squander one of Berkeley’s greatest resources, the
memory and legacy of its perhaps most famous, globally renowned and
respected citizens, David Ross Brower.

 With approximately 2,000 new car parking stalls already in early stages of
planning for the vicinity of Downtown Berkeley/UCB, the current plan of cars
underneath and surrounding on all four sides the “car-free” affordable
housing proposed at the David Brower Center, is absurd on its face.

 Attempting to bulldoze an ultra-expensive underground cement parking garage
for commuters underneath this site adjacent to the Berkeley BART station is
unaffordable, unwise, undoable, insulting, unnecessary, expensive,
polluting, obsolete, ugly, noisy, dangerous.  This plan will produce only
the result of encouraging cars and surrounding the site with a gridlocked
mess by the year 2010 – a year this complicated, controversial, impractical
center might actually get around to being built by.

It is a 1980s era BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES type plan that will only delay
and deadlock the planning, and it is important to note Berkeley, like the
rest of the world, has actually crossed over the turn of the spigot, er turn
of the century, and it is no longer 1980 with dollar a gallon gasoline.

With environmental heavies like Randy Hayes, and many other fabulous and
wonderful individuals lining up to beg the Berkeley City Council to “just do
it,” the phrase from Walt Kelley’s POGO that Brower loved to recite so much,
seems to be in full force on this project:

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US!

I realize people will propose idiotic compromises in the name of getting this “done,” 
such as mandating the only cars to be parked under the center should be “green” 
cars like Buy-Ol’ Diesel and Hype-for-Cars; but in honor of the Arch Druid, 
I vehemently oppose such absurd compromises in honor of a man who regretted 
compromising and in his later years became dead set against killing the cause 
and the planet, just more slowly, with such compromises.

And in fact, in honor of the man who so much regretted “being reasonable”
with such compromises, I am proposing closure of the easternmost blocks of
Kittredge and Allston,  just ONE lousy block on each side of this site being
closed to any traffic except that of existing uses, which do not mandate
that these blocks accommodate through traffic, since each street ALREADY
ENDS at Oxford Way.  This would cost the city yet another 50 or so parallel
parking spots, but that’s a drop in the bucket with 2,000 more new parking
stalls proposed nearby.

 And the joy of creating Berkelely’s first CAR FREE ZONE where citizens could
WALK AND ROLL without fear of being turned into roadkill, would give
Berkeley the cutting edge it SAYS it wants in such arenas as Street
Reclaiming and Strawberry Creek Daylighting.

YES, AND an automated bike locker could be added to the site, see
www.fujitech.com/2ringpark .  Doing so would create a major tourist
attraction for Berkeley as this sophisticated automated elevator driven
bicycle/scooter secure storage system would be the first of its kind in the
US, if Berkeley acts quickly; they have already been built in Fuji, Japan
and elsewhere overseas.  Why has this option been ignored?  Will it take a
lawsuit to get the city to consider it?

Will it take a lawsuit to get anyone (besides  savvy councilmember Wozniak)
to notice or care that the current plans for the site violate Berkeley’s own
general plan, in addition to violating the Strawberry Creek Conservation, 
Daylighting, and Protection ordinance?

Cordially submitted,

James G. Doherty
May 22, 2004

Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 3387 , Santa Cruz , California 95063 USA
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