An Open Letter to Max Anderson from Robert Lauriston Jan. 20, 2006 Dear Max, As you know, the neighborhood had a meeting about Ashby BART development the other night. I guess you were offended that we scheduled it at a time when you couldn't attend, but you've been having private meetings on the matter for months and didn't invite most neighbors to any of them, so we're playing catch-up here. Anyway, if you'd been there it would almost certainly have been an unproductive evening of people venting their anger, you getting defensive, and everyone going home with harder feelings than they came with, which is the last thing anybody needs right now. I'm not sure you understand why so many people are so mad, so here are my thoughts on that. Unlike some of the people who spoke the other night, I'm sure you mean well. As a policy wonk, I know that the general plan calls for affordable housing or mixed-use development on the site, that the City Council passed a resolution in 2002 calling for housing on the site, and that the Ashby BART project was on the Planning Department's 2005 work plan. In that context, working with staff and nonprofits to get a planning grant for the project was a legitimate part of your job as a City Council member. Substance always trumps process: if you'd surprised the neighborhood with a grant for a new park or playground, rather than a for-profit mixed-use development, nobody'd be giving you grief about your back-room deal. But promoting appropriate development is just one of your responsibilities as our City Council representative. Another, more fundamental one is staying in touch with your constituents. The inflammatory contents of the Caltrans grant application and the indirect way the neighborhood found out about it suggest that you've been lax on that part of the job. A few examples: 1. The grant application says "a minimum of 300 units." Thanks to your time on the Planning Commission, you know that, spread over a 6.5 acre site, that would be about the same density as the Lorin Station project a couple of blocks down Adeline. But to most people, "300 units" sounds shockingly huge, and brings up visions of those five-story-and-up boxes that have popped up along Shattuck and University in recent years. If you don't want people to choke on the numbers, you have to provide drawings to illustrate the scale. 2. You know that Mayor Bates wrote the transit village development district law, and that his wife Loni Hancock recently amended it so as to allow cities and counties, for the year 2006 only, to create transit village development districts out of existing area plans, with only ten days notice and no public hearing required. As you must know from reading the Planet, many of us who keep track of that sort of thing connected the dots and assumed the mayor intends to convert one or more of Berkeley's area plans into transit village redevelopment districts, so we've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. In that context, a transit village planning grant application that includes a project area map of a quarter-mile around Ashby BART looks a lot like that shoe. 3. The city determined in 2001 that development at Ashby BART was not feasible, primarily because it would cost too much to build a garage that would provide the same number of parking spaces for BART commuters as the current surface lot. The only major change since that time is that BART has relaxed its parking policy so a project might be allowed to displace some commuter parking spaces. Surely you're aware of many neighbors' intense opposition to developments that put more cars on the street, and that parking and traffic issues usually dominate community meetings and ZAB hearings on projects in the area. 4. You know as well as anyone that much of the ground-floor retail space in the so-called mixed-use buildings that have gone up in Berkeley in recent years is still standing empty. Should neighbors welcome the prospect of a ring of mostly empty shop windows around Ashby BART? 5. The flea market folks say you met with them in September and told them about your development idea. Presumably they told you what they think about moving the market to Adeline Street: impossible. But the grant application nevertheless suggests that possibility. 6. A casual glance at the preferential parking permit stickers on cars in the Ashby BART lot shows that many commuters drive to BART from other parts of Berkeley. Obviously these people are major stakeholders in any development at the site, but they're given no consideration in the grant application, and their neighborhoods are not included in the grant application's project area. 7. Many neighbors feel that public participation in the Ed Roberts Campus permit process was a sham. When we first heard of the project, its location, size, use, number of parking spaces, and tenants had already been decided in private meetings with the city. The ERC partners put on dozens of public meetings, but public comments had only minor impact on design details. The ERC partners used grant money to pay for expert studies of the project's impact on parking, traffic, noise, and so on, but neighbors had no say in the choice of experts, and the resulting studies required few changes to the design. Luckily for the neighborhood the ERC found a good architect, and couldn't afford as big a project as they originally proposed. Whatever the intent of your grant application, it reads like a rerun of that process. By specifying details such as retail, 300 units of housing, 20% "affordable" units, arts space, and use of a private developer, it strongly suggests that the major decisions have already been made, that the expert studies the grant would fund would rubber-stamp those decisions, and that the public meetings would have no meaningful effect. 8. You, the mayor, Ed Church, and others were quietly working on this project at least as far back as September. The grant application was submitted on October 14. The first public announcement of the project was in a consent item on the agenda for the December 13 City Council meeting. Near the end of the grant application it says, "it is essential that the public be a part of the decision-making process from the beginning." What are neighbors who didn't hear about the project until December supposed to make of that? Like I said, I'm sure you meant well. But in politics, as in most things, good intentions don't guarantee you're going in the right direction. Robert Lauriston