Public Commons for Everyone update

About 50 people showed on March 13th regarding the mayor's Public Commons for Everyone. 20 of them many of the directly impacted homeless many of them street youth came earlier before the city council as I asked them to but left before the item was opened up for public comment at 9pm.

A couple of the young women punk rock youth held up signs which got captured by the local tv news cameras and in the Daily Cal. Now a small group(lawyers Osha Neumann of Community Defense Inc. and Jim Chanin of the American Civil Liberties Union, myself(Michael Diehl), Dan McMullan of Disabled People's Outside Project and Lisa Stephens) met last Friday at Osha's office at his behest. We decided to set up meetings with potential swing votes on the Berkeley city council to lobby basically against the punitive aspects of the mayor's initiative we have met with Linda Maio, have set a meeting with Darryl Moore and some of us also will be talking or have talked with Laurie Capitelli, Mayor Tom Bates and Kriss Worthington(who voted against referring the initiative to the city manager and the commissions). We will also be going to the Homeless Commission (meeting Wednesday April 11th at the North Berkeley Senior Center, public comment at 7pm), the Human Welfare commission on Wed. April 18th and the Mental Health Commission on Sat. April 14th between 3 and 4pm(probably at the Berkeley city college).

On Tuesday April 24th at the B.O.S.S. Administration office the Berkeley Community Coalition( a coalition of homeless services and other nonprofits) will be meeting to discuss the mayor's initiative. Paul Boden of the Western Regional Action Project will be a special guest and there is a move to link the housing issue to the Public Commons for Everyone issue.

On Tuesday March 13th the Berkeley city council voted 6 to 3 to refer Mayor Tom Bates' "Public Commons for Everyone" proposed initiative to the city manager Phil Kamlarz and city staff as well as to the Berkeley-Albany Mental Health Commission(which I am on and which I have been the chair of) and the Homeless Commission to bring back to council in early May.

The mayor is talking about restrictions to limit/ticket people for sitting on the sidewalk too long. Two earlier efforts to ban sitting on the sidewalk in the city shopping districts were successfully defeated in 1996(where it had been part of Berkeley's Measure O which was overturned in federal court) and again in 1998. I was quite centrally involved in the cmapaigns to stop the implementation of these anti-sidewalking ordinances. The mayor's vagueley worded initiative talks about restricting long time sitting on the sidewalk and only citing those who refuse mental health or substance abuse services in a sort of carrot and stick approach. His proposal makes at this time no budget allocation to provide more money for funding these services.

The mayor did talk about going to the voters to get more funding for providing these services. Advocates such as myself complain that present funding is quite inadequate for the needed mental health and substance abuse counseling and the special needs housing to get people off the streets such in the countywide Everybody Home the mayor has been instrumental in getting the cities of Berkeley and Oakland and the county of Alameda. We argue that without more concrete proposals for funding a signifigant increase in fiscal resources available the mayor initiative provides "compassionate" lip service that justifies the violation of homeless people's civil and human rights(under the UN charter).

As I said then to the city council treatment can not be coerced. This is coupled with the University of California hiring a special consultant for $100,000 to come up with a plan to redesign People's Park so that supposedly everybody feels welcome in what feels like Orwellian 1984 newspeak that seeks to obfuscate the reality of increased coercive measures to remove the unsightly presence of poor and homeless folks from the economically upscale supposedly socially progressive in a way that seems warm and fuzzy to assuage the guilt of bourgeios liberals who want to be able to shop and increase property values without being disturbed by the clear visibility of great poverty on the city streets and in its parks.

If this "Public Commons for Everyone" initiative is indeed passed in May there is already organizing effort to get enough signatures to stop its implementation until it can be voted on by Berkeley voters. Those voters in 1994 did vote for the anti-homeless Measure O with 54% support in part due to the deceptive campaign linked to former mayor Measure O supporters Shirley Dean and Jeffrey Shattuck Leiter(one of the largest business landowners in town)that convinced many voters they were voting for more homeless services.

At the city council meeting on March 13th Jim Chanin who is the local lawyer representative for the American Civil Liberties Union said the ACLU as with Measure O (successfully) plans to go to court to stop this new proposed problematic street behavior ordinance that the mayor did tell voters during his reelection campaign last fall he would push. Already the police are being puahed by city staff and the merchant associations such at the Downtown Business Association, the Chamber of Commerce and the Telegraph Avenue Business Improvement District to cite homeless people with dogs for not having plastic bags required for doggy doo, for illegal posseassion of milk crates and shopping carts and having stuff on the sidewalk as an obstruction to foot traffic on the sidewalk. There will be a need to step Copwatching activity to document and help Osha Neumann's Community Defense Inc. legally challenge these citations.

-Michael Diehl
adversary359@yahoo.com
510-472-6192