Fixing the Creek Ordinance
The Creeks Ordinance has great intentions, and must be updated in order to fulfill those intentions. It addresses pollution, flooding, sinkholes, restoration of nature, appropriate building near creeks, and public works maintenance issues. There are a host of more advanced creeks ordinances which other cities have passed in the 15 years since 1989.
I think the short answer of what needs to be done is this: The City Council should immediately appoint a stakeholders committee made up of creeks advocates, homeowners, engineers, other experts, and members of the community, as suggested repeatedly by the Urban Creeks Council and others. The City Council should not delay- we're wasting time during which people with different interests and experiences could be meeting and coming up with novel ideas with which to solve the points of contention.
Here are some of the points of contention and some of my ideas of how to deal with them.
1. Property owners should be allowed to rebuild after a disaster on their property, but not within 30 feet of the centerline of an existing creek or culvert. The only exception is if there is nowhere else on the property on which to fit a house with a similar footprint/square footage of interior space. Temporary building permits for sturdy post-disaster shelter should be granted after an emergency, but permanent construction should go through an expedited yet still regulated process. The overbuilding which happened in the Oakland Hills is a negative situation we should learn from in order to make sure something similar does not happen in Berkeley after the next disaster. The temporary structures- perhaps prefab housing?- should be re-approved every 6 months during the rebuilding process to ensure neighborhoods aren't stuck with such temporary housing permanently. Based on the statement written and spoken at City Council meetings this spring and summer, it's clear to me that our city government wants no part of a "taking" of private property. Post-disaster, the city will have enough costs and problems to deal with.
2. Restoring open, existing creeks and repairing crumbling culverts should be additionally seen as disaster preparation/disaster avoidance activity. Flooding, mudslides, sinkholes, and sewage leaks are caused by overflowing creek and culvert channels, as well as damaged culverts and blocked creeks. Sewage lines are also being overloaded by the decaying culverts, which means there are occasional rivers of raw sewage in the hills- a clear public health danger. Private property over decaying culverts will sink into culverts if those culverts are not repaired/replaced, meaning much more costs in the future.
3. Private culverts and creeks are currently the responsibility of the property owner. Public culverts and creeks are not. Creeks on private property can certainly be tended/restored by volunteer creek activists (and are currently, which is wonderful!), so culverts are the more pressing problem. Since many property owners cannot afford a few hundred thousand dollars to replace a section of culvert, perhaps there's ways in which the City can help. Since about half of the existing crumbling culverts are on public land and therefore the city's responsibility, a straight subsidy, even of a % of the total cost, is not realistic. However, the city could help residents get low-interest long-term loans or other fiscal help through bundling together neighborhoods in need.
Perhaps more lucratively, the City could take the approach of point #2 and go for FEMA/disaster prevention grants and treat the crumbling culverts under private property as impending disasters. The culvert where Strawberry Creek emerges behind the Strawberry Creek Lodge is a perfect example of a deteriorating situation. The chunks of concrete and the massive erosion of the banks is currently undermining North Valley Street and is clearly visible from street level. The 8 properties directly over that culvert will sink into that culvert over time. Do we use a decent amount of monetary prevention now or do we wait and deal with entire properties destroyed by sinkholes, erosion, and flooding? Also, much of the areas involved are in officially designated flooding areas, which apparently helps with their eligibility for disaster aid.
In the meantime, we need to fix public culverts for the same reasons and possibly with similar methods.
4. Realistically, creeks in culverts are not going to be opened any time soon because it costs too much to do so correctly. The only exceptions will probably be when there's outside money (as in the UC Hotel project) or when a collapsed culvert is judged worth converting to an open creek by the property owner. That said, the long-term view of creeks demand that, for reasons ranging from beautification to flood control to pollution control, the more culverts which revert to being open creeks the better off our city will be. We should therefore continue to treat culverts as buried creeks for zoning/rebuilding purposes.
5. Property values are a concern for selling homes- in part because many property owners who bought houses over culverts had no idea that they were over a culvert at the time of sale, let alone about the dangers of the current crumbling culverts. A culvert which is now required to be revealed to prospective buyers will assumedly lower the home's value- but not revealing it and having the home collapse 5 or 10 years later is not fair to the buyers. It's as if an earthquake fault had suddenly appeared under a home- except earthquake faults are not repairable. Culverts are, and if the issue of rebuilding after a disaster is handled appropriately by the City Council, there is minimal damage to sale value if a culvert is replaced or repaired or opened up to daylight. Heck, if a creek is opened up to daylight that should greatly enhance the property value!
Respecting the Community Plan for Solano Avenue -- A Response to Barbara Witte
As Barbara Witte acknowledges in her recent letter to the Berkeley Voice, the Solano Avenue Planning Ordinance "does limit the number of restaurants" on Solano. Since the Ordinance was the result of a year-long process in which the entire community participated, this should not be shunted aside as unimportant. Yet the variance given to La Farine sidesteps this. If the local community wishes to alter the ordinance, then they should work with the City and the business community to do so. If not, then we should stick to the plan that our community came up with.
I am strongly in favor of direct community involvement with business and housing development, hence I am in favor of community-wide plans like the Solano Avenue ordinance as opposed to allowing developers a free hand in shaping our city. My position on this has nothing to do with the pros or cons of any specific business, nor do I have any business interests in the area.
Finally, I'm mystified at Witte's comment about our "deteriorating" restaurant scene- how bad can it be if so many businesses are competing to join it? Sounds like a healthy (and delicious) scene to me!
Responses to the Questionnaire of the Bicycle Friendly Berkeley Coalition
1. Non-bicyclists often say they are afraid to bicycle on Berkeley's streets because the streets are so dangerous. What would you do to promote safer streets so that bicyclists feel safer sharing the road with motorists?
We need to complete the bicycle boulevards so that bicycle lanes go through destination districts as well as between destination districts. Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley is especially dangerous and must be resolved as soon as possible.
We need to implement a serious local “Share Our Streets” program. We can improve our streets and sidewalks by encouraging civility, common sense, and safety for users of all methods of transportation. We should defeat polarization based on transportation choices, and encourage cooperation and coordination between all of us. After all, most of us do not solely use a single mode of transport. For instance, many of us switch from being a pedestrian to being a bicyclist to being an automobile driver within the course of an average day. Others of us switch from being wheelchair users to being automobile drivers daily.
2. Often with bicycle projects there are competing needs to accommodate motorists, such as maintaining traffic flows, parking, and vehicle access. What do you think is the right balance between improving streets for bicyclists and maintaining conditions for motorists?
There must be a balance of non and low-polluting transportation (pedestrians, bicycles, wheelchairs, electric/hybrid/biodiesel vehicles) and auto/truck traffic. Realistically, our state and federal governments are systematically starving our public transit systems, so we cannot count on increased public transit services as a reliable alternative to auto use. Although pedestrian, wheelchair, and bicycle methods are preferable to any polluting transport method, there are many necessary uses for autos, paratransit vans, and delivery trucks. We should continue providing for safe, energy-saving, and efficient traffic flow for all transport methods. For instance, traffic roundabouts (with clear instructions for all users like ‘everyone entering roundabout yields to traffic already in the roundabout’), are common sense, cost-effective traffic calming devices which serve all transport methods. The surrounding community can help defray maintenance/beautification costs by donating materials and labor for plants/gardening on the roundabouts.
3. There is a lot of pressure to use public funds to build a new downtown parking garage. There are also many other worthy, unfunded projects in downtown Berkeley to improve transit service, pedestrian safety and bicycle access . As a Council Member, what leadership would you bring to this issue?
We need to bring the innovative bicycle parking cage @ Berkeley BART aboveground and fund it for longer periods of daily operation. We should expand other on-street bicycle and motorcycle parking, and keep both types of parking free/exempt from parking permits/parking meters in order to encourage both extremely efficient modes of transport.
Safe, accessible downtown parking is vital for the following groups: families with small children, the physically disabled, seniors, regional patrons of arts, regional shoppers/diners, people with large and/or multiple packages, and people who live in the hills beyond the reach of scheduled/convenient/reliable public transportation. Also, parking is vital for business deliveries, home deliveries, other economic purposes, and a huge array of cultural and social purposes. We should keep the current stock of vehicle parking and require replacement parking for any lost parking due to development in business districts. Parking is a shared responsibility of public and private interests. Innovative ideas like a parking assessment district would provide alternate funding sources for otherwise prohibitively expensive spaces. After all, Hink’s garage was built by a private company and maintained for decades through a business assessment district.
