Public Comment

You’re already being bombarded with phone calls, mailers, and (soon) machine-funded slate cards trying to tell you exactly how to vote by Nov. 8. I’ve attended too many candidate forums, as an individual voter, so you don’t have to. I now offer you these a-la-carte suggestions. 

Please mix and match, do your own research, and decide for yourself. Also, anywhere I say “we,” I mean “I” or the consensus of the Cinque family, not any publication hosting this. I address mostly races that are realistically contested and/or controversial in our precincts. 

Statewide Propositions 

Prop. 1, Reproductive health-care access: You bet. 

Props. 26 and 27, Gambling: NO to both. The constant TV/cable ads assaulting us since before the June primary show a spending level unprecedented even for California’s bloated, corrupted initiative system. Which, in turn, shows the obscene amounts of money that existing casinos are already extracting from gullible people. You can wager that I’m no Puritan, but the victims include people with serious gambling addictions, whose lives get shattered by debt. No expanded gambling, period. 

Prop. 28, Art and music in schools: Yes. In their recent rush to turn every kid into a future software professional – let them eat “STEM” – schools need to stop neglecting the creative and collaboration skills that nurture truly successful software pros. (Or, really, success in any future profession.) 

Prop. 29, Dialysis clinics: No. Round 3 of the SEIU’s attempt to influence two big dialysis chains' staffing, at the ballot box. We’re tired of this. We respect the SEIU’s organizing skills, and we don’t like the duopoly – but corporate-style abuse of the initiative process doesn’t look any prettier when the special-interest funder is a union. We’re voting with the medical professional associations warning (yet again) about clinic closures, higher costs, and physician shortages. 

Prop. 30, ZEVs and firefighting: No, similarly based on special-interest taint. We love the idea of accelerating electric- and hydrogen-vehicle conversion for individuals who need subsidies. But here, the millionaires who run Lyft are targeting other millionaires to fund the fleet investments that Lyft (and Uber) are already required to make, by state law. That’s what investors are for – and this is corporate welfare, which also potentially shortchanges schools. 

Prop. 31, Flavored tobacco “products”: Potheads, vote your conscience. This would be a no-brainer Yes, if it hadn’t included vague language that could outlaw your favorite flavored rolling papers. 

Alameda County Measure 

Measure D, Agricultural land: Yes (Qualified ). This makes highly technical amendments to the original Measure D, which was written to keep East County land in farming, and has helped curtail urban sprawl. The “new” D authorizes more and larger building on ag land, and would substantially help at least one Livermore winery. But we’d rather see vineyards there than more subdivisions. 

Berkeley Measures 

Measure L, Loose, larded infrastructure bond: NO. Teach the City Council not to abuse Berkeley residents' support for affordable housing. When staff polled the public earlier this year, housing was the only issue that approached (yet still didn’t reach) the threshold for approving a bond. But instead of offering voters a separate vote on a housing bond, Mayor Arreguin led the Council in cynically larding up a single mega-bond with ill-defined infrastructure and “traffic-safety” spending. 

The City has already wasted far too much money on too many expensive, destructive prestige projects. This mega-bond simply gives this (and future) Councils a $650 million slush fund to endow whatever whims they might want to spend our money on, with no real constraints or oversight. The only Measure L language you really need to read is this: 

“These dollar amounts are estimates and are not a commitment or guarantee that any specific amounts will be spent on particular projects or categories of projects.” 

Amid record inflation and soaring interest rates, this is the worst possible time to borrow or spend freely. Tell the Council to come back in two years with separate, cleanly written bonds, each addressing well-defined purposes. 

Measure M, Vacancy tax: Yes. Vacancy taxes elsewhere have been effective incentives in getting idled housing back onto the market. M includes reasonable exemptions for principal residences, and for properties being repaired or renovated. We wish this measure more narrowly targeted multi-unit speculators. We wish it also applied to storefronts that commercial landlords keep shuttered, to demand unreasonable rents. But we’ll take it. 

Alameda County District Attorney 

There are very good reasons why Terry Wiley, current Chief Assistant DA and Equity Division Director, has been endorsed by the mayors of 11 out of 14 Alameda County cities, prominent civil rights attorneys John Burris and Benjamin Crump, and Oakland NAACP President George Holland. Wiley, who prosecuted the Oakland PD’s abusive Riders, is also the first prosecutor ever honored with a Civil Rights award from the National Bar Association. He’s measurably improved equity in the DA’s Office’s operations, and he now offers a focused plan to reduce regional crime by targeting known high offenders. 

And Wiley is the only qualified candidate for this office. 

In Oakland, two people are being murdered on an average day. And that lethal violence has spilled into schools, and into Berkeley. Other crimes have spiked across the county. 

This is no time to flirt with limousine liberals' darling, Pamela Price. She’s a private attorney who’s never prosecuted a crime. She’s never run an office of more than four people. (The DA’s Office employs hundreds of people, and prosecutors there unionized specifically because of Price’s previous run.) Price has been accused of serious misconduct by a past client. And she offers no plan to reduce unacceptable crime levels – mostly just a constant smirk. 

You don’t need to buy into the excesses of “broken-“windows theory to acknowledge that getting lower-level crooks off the street can tamp down both the match and the fuse that spark lethal violence. Prosecuting crimes is right there at the core of the DA’s job description, but Price – like flamed-out San Francisco anti-prosecutor Chesa Boudin, and Murder City Philadelphia’s failing Larry Krasner – basically doesn’t want to do it. Vote for Wiley. 

AC Transit Director, At-Large 

Incumbent Joel Young can claim support from the bus drivers' and mechanics' union, as well as successes in funding clean hydrogen fuel-cell buses and sustaining service levels and affordability in difficult times. 

Another reason to re-elect Young is his opponent, Alfred Twu. Twu is an extreme pro-development advocate, with a day job as an architect (yes, that spells conflict of interest), and no transportation expertise. He’s made bizarre proposals like deforesting part of Tilden Park to build subdivisions – Twu apparently didn’t get that Joni Mitchell was being critical when she sang "took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum." 

After two ill-considered appointments to Berkeley commissions, Twu is seeking a toehold in elective office here. There’s no better time to tell him to go back to the drawing board – literally – at his day job in the private sector. 

Berkeley City Council 

District 1: Rank Elisa Mikiten, then Tamar Michal Freeman. District 1 deserves a doer and a listener, and Mikiten is both. Where others talk, she’s actually gotten affordable housing built. She’s distinguished herself as Planning Commission Chair, and through a long career as an architect, planner, and disabled-access advocate/consultant. 

Incumbent Rashi Kesarwani doesn’t deserve re-election or even ranking. She’s been combative, ideologically extreme, contemptuous of constituents, ineffective, and dishonest about her role in sabotaging Planning Commission consensus around BART housing plans. She’s also dodged at least one recent forum. If you can’t tell the truth, you can’t face your constituents, and you avowedly care less about them than about developers and theoretical people who might want to live in Berkeley – you don’t deserve a second term. 

District 8: Rank Mari Mendonca, Jay Wu, and (if you like) Peter Bruce DuMont. Mendonca offers District 8 new progressive representation, and a refreshing multiracial perspective. She’s advocated effectively for renters on the City’s Housing Commission and Rent Board, and is passionate about preventing displacement. 

The one candidate who doesn’t deserve ranking is the one boasting endorsements from much of the current groupthink Council, Mark Humbert. His implicit case for election is that a white male San Francisco lawyer would add valuable perspective to the Council. 

His explicit case is even worse, conveying that he’d extend the aloof, elitist conduct of retiring incumbent Lori Droste. Humbert touts his eight years on the Transportation Commission, and his role in developing the 2017 Bicycle Plan. Anyone who’s observed that commission (now abolished) knows that it was a dysfunctional, undemocratic mess. That bike plan was nutty – it encouraged the mangling of the Hopkins/The Alameda intersection, and of Milvia Ave. downtown, both of which have since been targeted for rollbacks at yet further expense. In forums, Humbert seems obsessed with “traffic safety” – meaning, he’d encourage more of these novel hazards. We feel safer with Mendonca. 

District 7: Aidan Hill. He’s running the kind of optimistic, grassroots, people-first progressive campaign that we once saw – and will never see again – from now-entrenched Mayor Arreguin. This student-rich district could use representation from someone who visibly cares more about tenants than about developers. 

Berkeley School Board (3 At-Large) 

We’re supporting Reichi Lee, Jennifer Shanoski, and Tatiana Guerreiro Ramos. BUSD students, parents, and teachers deserve energetic School Board members who are directly engaged in improving our schools. In this race, there’s lots of talk about closing the achievement gap, and weird endorsements from officeholders – all of which have flowed too easily. These three candidates are passionate, and they distinguish themselves from the rest of the field by talking not just about equity, but about encouraging all students to strive for excellence. 

Lee and Shanoski both have multiple endorsements. Ramos runs a tutoring business, and has been a steady advocate for her three ADHD kids in Berkeley schools. She’s now running an outsider campaign on behalf of kids who (like lots of us, once upon a time) don’t fit into standard peg holes. If she’s too outside for you, incumbent Ka’Dijah Brown is a safe choice, although neither inspiring nor new blood. 

We’re baffled by the multiple endorsements for Mike Chang, who failed to win election in 2020, and seems no better qualified for this office now. He’s an enforcement attorney with a federal civil rights office, where I’m sure he does good work. But he shows no experience with the nuts and bolts of making schools or school boards work. He also manages to talk like both a lawyer and a bureaucrat, to the point where he actually seems bored with his own dry rhetoric. If you want School Board meetings to be snoozefests full of blather like “systems in place” and “in a timely manner,” he might help you get to sleep. 

Rent Stabilization Board (5 At-Large) 

Nageene Mosaed, Soli Alpert, Vanessa Marrero, Ida Martinac, and Nathan Mizell are the five candidates endorsed by Berkeley’s 2022 Tenant Convention, and we’re voting only for them. 

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