Issue 17, August and a Bit of September 2015

More About Plan Bay Area:  The East Bay Corridors Initiative

BNC eNEWS readers will recall that Plan Bay Area, approved by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) in 2013, is meant to guide the 9 counties and all cities in the SF Bay Region in planning for housing, jobs and greenhouse gas reductions for a projected population increase of approximately 2 million people through 2022.  The Plan calls for local communities to designate Priority Development Areas (PDAs) where growth is to occur.  These PDAs are eligible to apply for State funding to pay for the development of local plans.  That’s how Berkeley received a grant of $750,000 to plan for the Adeline/South Shattuck Corridor.

Criteria for PDAs is minimal.  They must be:

1. within an existing community,
2. near existing or planned fixed transit or serve by comparable bus service, and,
3. in an area planned for (or is planning for) more housing.

Back in 2011, Berkeley designated six PDAs in our city:

1. Downtown
2. Telegraph Avenue
3. San Pablo Avenue
4. Adeline Corridor
5. University Avenue
6. South Shattuck Corridor

Then in April 2015, the Council entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between participants:  ABAG, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, and the cities of Alameda, Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Emeryville, Hayward, Hercules, Oakland, Pinole, Richmond, San Leandro, San Pablo, and Union City.  This MOU is titled “The East Bay Corridor Initiative” and its purpose is to define the:

shared goals and objectives of these local and regional agencies working collaboratively to enhance livability, mobility and economic prosperity within the Corridors, and establish the necessary administrative and governance structure to promote a cooperative relationship and for ensuring success of the Initiative.

Per the MOU, Plan Bay Area predicts Corridor PDAs will grow at a faster rate than the region as a whole and that compared to the region as a whole, residents of Corridor PDAs have:

• lower household incomes,
• suffer more from poor air quality and other adverse environmental impacts,
• are at higher risk during natural disasters, and are
• subject to displacement risk from rising housing costs.

In 2013, staff from the Participants divided the East Bay Corridor into two segments:

1. The Oakland-Union City Corridor:  Oakland, San Leandro, Hayward, Union City and Alameda County.
2. The San Pablo Corridor:  Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, Richmond, San Pablo, Pinole, Hercules and Contra Costa County.

Participants, ABAG and “other agencies” will engage in working groups regarding strategies for implementing local PDAs and “regional planning objectives for each segment of the Corridor.” The MOU goes on to state:

This will set the stage for engagement with city leadership, development of partnerships with the non-profit and business communities, and obtaining funding to carry out the strategies.

Frankly, BNC doesn’t know exactly what all of this means, and since residents were locked out, inadvertently or otherwise, of the opportunity to make comments regarding Plan Bay Area when it was first adopted, and then specifically locked out of access to meetings regarding the East Bay Corridors Initiative, it will be hard to find out.  However, we will try and certainly let you know as we go along.

BNC selects a Berkeley cultural treasure to feature in each eNEWS issue.  Since we started, BNC has expanded this section so that we now consider community organizations, businesses, activities, architecture, events, and people that make the City of Berkeley such a special place.  However, whatever or whoever is nominated for this section must reside in, or have a strong connection with Berkeley, and be nominated by a Berkeley resident who has no connection, other than that of an ordinary patron of, or a participant in, whatever is being nominated.  Submissions may be sent to bnc50@berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com.  BNC will notify the selected treasure.

Two events that occurred during the month of August in years past were nominated for inclusion in this issue’s Cultural Corner.  BNC couldn’t let August go by without mentioning both and recognizing their importance in our daily lives.  We think you will agree.

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On August 26, 1920, some 95 years ago, the 19^th Amendment, the Women’s Right to Vote, went into effect.

It all started back in Seneca Falls, New York at a Women’s Rights Convention held in 1848.  This was the first such convention of its kind in the U.S.  It was organized by Quaker women and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who wasn’t a Quaker) as a convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition, and rights of women.

Other conventions followed, and a movement began to grow to grant women the right to vote — something simply unheard of back then.  However, it would take some 30 years of hard struggle until a resolution granting that right was finally introduced into Congress in 1878.  It would take another 41 years after that before the resolution was passed by the House of Representatives on May 21, 1919 and two weeks later by the Senate.

All-in-all, between Seneca Falls and June 1919, the Nation had seen 71 years of parades, silent vigils, hunger strikes, civil disobedience, arrests, personal injuries, letter-writing, lobbying at all levels of government, holding up signs, and most likely hundreds of thousands of individual household arguments.  We all need to remember this when we think of the slow pace of government today, and we most certainly need to honor the courage and tenacity of those women who didn’t step back from doing the right thing, when it was against all of the social norms of their times and the dire consequences that men, but some women too, said would certainly descend upon the Nation if women were granted the right to vote!

By 1919, the women’s right to vote movement had made substantial gains, as 15 states had legalized women’s suffrage (nine of them in the West).  The honor of being the first state to do so goes to Wyoming in 1890.  They were also progressive enough to elect the country’s first female governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross back in 1924 when she was elected to serve out the term of her husband who had suddenly died in office.  Apparently the Democratic party in Wyoming was anxious to earn for their state the official nickname, The Equality State.  She served for two years, but then was defeated by a Republican at the next election.  Well, we digressed a little, but we didn’t want to leave you wondering what happened to this good lady after that, so just for your information, she went on to become the first female head of the U.S.  Mint, appointed in 1933 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Back to the subject at hand, even with those gains in 1919, getting the vote for women still wasn’t finished.  Hundreds of women were injured when they marched in protest on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.  Wilson favored women’s suffrage at the state level, but didn’t support a Constitutional Amendment because the Democratic Party was sharply divided, with the South opposing on the grounds of state’s rights.  In any case, the only Southern state to give women the right to vote was Arkansas.  President Wilson is believed to start having a change of heart when a 1917 referendum in New York State favored women’s suffrage and when he recognized the role that women played in World War I.  In January 1918, Wilson went in person to the House and made a strong and widely published appeal to the House to pass the resolution.  It passed but the Senate fell two votes short, until 1919, when it finally passed handily.  Yet even then, the task still wasn’t finished because the final hurdle of obtaining agreement of three-fourths of the states needed to be accomplished before the Constitution could be amended.

That would take another year, and then the fate of the 19th Amendment would be decided by Tennessee.  By the summer of 1920, 35 of the 48 states had voted to grant women the right to vote.  The number of states needed for a Constitutional Amendment was 36.  Four states were thinking about calling a special session, and three declined to do so.  One state, Tennessee agreed, but the outcome was very tense because the Tennessee Legislature was badly split on the question.  On the morning of the big vote, Harry Burn who had said he opposed the right of women to vote, was in his first term and the youngest person to be elected to the Tennessee Legislature at that time, opened a letter from his mother.  At the end of the letter, she added the words:

be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt^* put the ‘rat’ in ratification.(^* a reference to suffragist icon, Carrie Chapman Catt)

The vote was 48 for granting women the right to vote and 48 against, and it came down to the vote of one man, Harry Burn.  He cast the deciding “yes” vote and the rest is history.  The next day he explained to his colleagues:

I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.

The Resolution approved by the Congress was then ratified on August 26, 1920 as the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution.

To which, BNC says:  Thank you Mr. Burn!

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The second of the two events to remember and celebrate in the month of August is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s I Have a Dream Speech.  Considering what has been happening nationwide, and including the displacement and loss of diversity occurring in Berkeley and throughout the Bay Area, BNC thought it would be good to once more hear a part of the speech that was delivered on August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

More than 250,000 people gathered together on that day.  There had been previous discussion among the various speakers as to which one of them would speak last.  Many apparently felt that the reporters covering this event would have disappeared toward the end of the speeches because they had to file their stories, so no one liked the prospect of being last.  It didn’t seem to bother Dr. King, because he volunteered to be the last speaker.

The story is told that he talked with his advisors about including in his speech his “Dream” but they didn’t want him to do that, so he didn’t include it in his script.  However, as his speech unfolded with the strong and beautiful cadence of Black preachers, Mahalia Jackson is said to have called out to him, “Tell them about the dream!” So, at the spur of the moment and as he was moving toward the end of his remarks he said:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.  It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight;  “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.  With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.  With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day — this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Recognized as one of the Greatest American Speeches, it is fitting that it was given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  The entire speech can be found on the internet at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

It is time, to once more hear these eloquent words and dream the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr’s Dream.

As we have previously indicated, this Section will include not only reviews of neighborhood food businesses throughout Berkeley, but also news about food products or services that our reviewers find interesting.  On occasion, we might even offer a recipe or two.  Our reviewer will always be anonymous, and usually, a resident of Berkeley.  We accept reviews from our readers — send to bnc50@berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com and include your name and contact information which we will not publish.  We really would love to hear from you about that neighborhood gem that you loved, or even the one you didn’t!

The post for this eNEWS defines itself as a kitchen and bake shop and that’s the name of this restaurant that offers organic, seasonal, and locally sourced food for lunch and dinner and provides options for eating in, taking-out and catering.

Summer Kitchen & Bake Shop
2944 College Ave.
Berkeley, Ca 94705

510-981-0538

Hours:  Every Day, 11:00 AM — 8 PM
Closed most holidays

Summerkitchenbakeshop.com

Dinner at the Summer Kitchen Bake Shop is an inexpensive and delightful experience.  Located in the Elmwood Shopping District in South East Berkeley, it allows for a pleasant stroll along the College Avenue shops and neighborhood.  Parking can be difficult, but is worth the effort.

The restaurant is small, so getting there early is a good idea.  When our reviewer arrived at 5:30 pm there were still some tables available but very shortly thereafter the place was full.  There are only a few rustic tables and it is self-service.  Its relaxed atmosphere appeals to all ages, including families with young children.

The menu is not large, but extensive enough to provide a good choice.  They have:

Salads	Ranging from Star Route Farms Baby Greens at $7.00 to Kale Caesar Salad at $12.50
Soup	With locally available seasonal ingredients — $7.00/pint
Made-to-Order Sandwiches	Acme bread and homemade mayo Hearst Ranch Burger — $11.50 Apple Smoked Bacon — $11.50 Crispy Chicken — $11.50
Pre-made sandwiches	Diestel Turkey — $8.50 Sicilian Tuna Salad — $11.50 Organic Egg Salad — $ 7.50
Pizza	Margherita — $13.00 Hobb’s Pepperoni — $14.00 Brentwood Corn — $16.00 Organic Beech Mushroom — $17.00 House-made Fennel Sausage — $15.00 Black mission fig — $16.00
Nightly Dinner Specials	Half Chicken from Brick Oven — $19.00 Organic Becker Lane St. Louis Pork Chops — $19.00 Whole Wheat Spelt Pasta — $16.00 California King Salmon -$22.00 Organic Spaghetti with Hearst Ranch Meatballs — $18.00
Beers and Wines	Wine — $7.00 per glass, $21.00 per bottle and Beer — $5.00

The above is a summary of the menu.  For a more detailed description go to their website.

Our reviewer and party chose organic spaghetti and meatballs and a special pizza that was on the menu board.  The meatball dish was very good and the portion so large that the left over became next day’s lunch.  The special pizza was also very good and enough to bring home for a snack.  Baked goods were available for dessert and also got a thumbs-up from our reviewer and his date.

All in all, the food was excellent and reasonably priced!!

NOTE:  BNC Policy Regarding Letters:  BNC invites letters from eNEWS readers.  Letters and photos should be sent to bnc50@berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com and should be about issues of neighborhood interest.  Letters should be no longer than 500 words, although at times we will publish letters that exceed that length.  All letters should state the name(s) of the author and at least the general area where the author lives or the neighborhood group he/she is affiliated with.  That information will be published with the letter.  Letters should also include a phone number and e-mail address where the author can be contacted.  That information will NOT be published.  We ask for it just in case we have any questions, and, of course, we need to verify who it was that sent the letter.

BNC received a letter from one of our readers regarding electric cars asking for information about how many Teslas there are in Berkeley.  Well, BNC can’t answer that question, but we’ve never backed away from trying to find an answer to anything, so we started by just looking around to see how many electric cars we could spot on our streets.  Around the middle of August, we found a few Teslas in Berkeley and that made us even more curious, particularly when we heard that Mayor Bates has been declaring at Metropolitan Transportation Commission meetings that Berkeley will be car-less by some foreseeable date in the future.

We also made a few trips to Whole Foods on Gilman where they have a lineup of several charging stations for electric car owners to use while shopping for their groceries.  We’re sorry to report that we found very few electric cars in the charging stations there, but maybe that will change over time.  Berkeley is certainly planning for electric cars in the rebuilding of the Center Street Garage Downtown and in the discussion about scattering charging stations throughout the City.

However, as we got into this subject, we found some interesting facts regarding cars.  President Roosevelt was the first American President to ride in an automobile in public.  That occurred on August 22, 1902 and the car was electric no less! That certainly spiked our curiosity because we always thought that the electric car was cutting edge.  Not so, Scottish inventor Robert Anderson built an electric carriage in 1830.  It was powered by non-rechargeable primary cells.  Some 60 years later in 1891, William Morrison, of Des Moines, Iowa, built the first successful electric car, and in1897, New York City had electric-powered taxi cabs.  By 1900, about 4,190 cars were being manufactured in the US and a whopping 28% of them were electric!

While President Teddy Roosevelt was the first President to ride in an automobile in public, he was not the first President to ride in a car.  That distinction goes to President William McKinley who was given a private ride in a Stanley Steamer in September 1901.  The Stanley Steamer was on the market until the early 1920s.  While President Teddy Roosevelt became the first President to ride in a car and his administration actually purchased a steam-driven car for use as a “Presidential Automobile,” President T.  Roosevelt apparently made no secret of the fact that he preferred horses to automobiles.

Then in 1908, Henry Ford mass-produced the gasoline powered Model T that would set the standard for years and make the sale of electric cars no longer commercially viable.  This was particularly true after 1912 when Charles Kettering invented the electric starter that eliminated the not-so-user-friendly hand crank used in the first Model Ts.

Up until 1939, our Presidents had chauffeurs who drove them in standard production cars from U.S.A.  automakers.  The transition to limousines began in 1939 when the U.S.  Secret Service took delivery of a custom-made stretched version of Lincoln’s K-series model powered by a V-12 engine.  It was dubbed the “Sunshine Special” because it was seen most often with its top down.  The vehicle was customized for President Franklin D.  Roosevelt’s use with oversized rear-hinged doors to facilitate easy access for his wheelchair.

In 1972, Victor Wouk created the first full-powered, full-sized hybrid from a Buick Skylark.  He did it under a 1970 Federal Clean Car Incentive Program that was killed by the Environmental Protection Agency some four years later in 1976.

California got into promoting low emission vehicles in 1990 by approving a Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate that required 2% of the state’s vehicles to have no emissions by 1998 with an increased requirement to 10% no emissions by 2003.  Then, California turned it all around and weakened the requirements to reduce the required number of pure ZEVs over the next decade.  We can guess why this happened!

In 1997, Toyota unveiled the Prius, and in November 2006, Tesla unveiled its Roadster at the San Francisco International Auto Show with a base price of $98,950.  With Toyota on their heels, General Motors filed for bankruptcy protection in June of 2009 resulting in the elimination of models like Saturn, Hummer and Pontiac and the US government holding a 61% stake in the restructured company.  In August that year, the Nissan LEAF was unveiled, followed by the Chevrolet Volt and the Mitsubishi i MiEV.

Berkeley used to be recognized as the City with the most Prius cars, but the last figures we saw gave that honor to the San Francisco, Oakland area that tops the charts with a little over 9% of the sales of all Prius’.  We presume Berkeley is wrapped into that figure but haven’t been able to get either the number of Prius’ registered in Berkeley, or for that matter, the number of cars registered in Berkeley over time.

Anecdotally, BNC feels that while the City is pursuing a policy to get people out of their cars by approving development with either far fewer cars, over what would normally be required, or no cars at all, and encouraging walking and biking, there seems to be more and more cars on our streets.  We don’t know if this is fact, but we’d like to see some data.

What we have seen is that in August 2015, major newspapers reported that a nationwide study of traffic congestion by Texas A&M and the traffic organization, Inrix, revealed that Washington, D.C.  was the worst in the nation for time lost stuck in traffic.  Los Angeles took second place and San Francisco-Oakland was third.  The number of lost hours for these areas were found to be about double the nationwide average.  Moreover, researchers in that study created what they called a “Freeway Stress Index” and put San Francisco-Oakland at the top of the list.

We also note that the Monday, September 7, 2015 (Labor Day) main section of the West County Times has 22 pages.  Of those 22 pages, there are thirteen full pages, 59 percent, devoted to advertising for the sale of new cars!

Tis a sorry history with all sorts of unanswered questions such as how and who reduced California’s ZEV Mandate? What do people actually know about the impact on the environment by the cars they are buying? We will see what we can find out and let you know.  But, in the meantime, we all must take individual responsibility to reduce the amount of car emissions that are being pumped into the air.  Gasoline-powered cars pump CO2 into the air at a rate of around19 pounds of CO2 for each gallon of gasoline used.  However, we shouldn’t fool ourselves about the environmental benefits of ZEVs, as even ZEVs have a carbon footprint.

Manufacturing any car takes a tremendous amount of energy, even if it’s made in a plant using solar panels.  Different cars have different footprints and environmental benefits based on such factors of whether it was manufactured in a plant run by electricity derived from coal or natural gas;  how it was manufactured;  and what “extras” it comes with.  All of this is important, and highly complex to determine.  There is probably no exact answer, but there is some information that can be used to help guide the consumer when making a choice about buying a car, and what car to buy.  Unfortunately, that information is almost impossible for the consumer to obtain at this time.

One thing to consider is that since building a new car, even an electric or hybrid one, has a pretty big footprint, it makes sense to make cars that last a long time and abandon altogether the habit of buying a new car frequently just because the new car has more bells and whistles.  What isn’t recognized by many is that cars have a carbon footprint obtained from their manufacture.  This footprint is called its “embodied emission.” A car’s embodied emissions typically rival that car’s “exhaust pipe emissions” calculated over its entire lifetime.  For example, for each mile driven, the embodied emissions from the manufacture of a Land Rover Discovery that ends up being scrapped after 100,000 miles may be as much as four times higher than the tailpipe emissions of a Citroen C1.

Another example of this same concept is buildings.  What is the carbon footprint aka embodied emissions of an existing building as compared to the construction of a new building? How long does it take for the utility of a building to outweigh the cost of building it.  We may well find that, as with cars, it makes more sense to build buildings so that they last a long time.  This mode of thinking may well be just the beginning of our re-examining our wasteful habits of living.

But to get back to the matter of cars.  The important question is how many miles must a car travel before the energy of the gasoline equals the energy to build the car? Here’s a quote from Guardian US:

…unless you do very high mileage or have a real gas-guzzler, it generally makes sense to keep your old car for as long as it is reliable — and to look after it carefully to extend its life as long as possible.  If you make a car last to 200,000 miles rather than 100,000, then the emissions for each mile the car does in its lifetime may drop by as much as 50%, as a result of getting more distance out of the initial manufacturing emissions.

There are a lot of caveats in that quote, but our correspondent asking about electric cars has opened up to us a lot to think about.  To read the whole story about cars and their carbon footprint go to www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car

We’d like to hear comments from our readers about this subject.  Write us at bnc50@berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com and tell us if you think traffic is getting worse on the streets of Berkeley and why you think that is happening.

We’d also like to hear what you think about the idea of requiring a posting on all new cars showing potential buyers the ranking of that car in a range of carbon footprint groups that would be applied to all cars.  BNC thinks that’s a pretty good idea.  What do you think? We really want to hear from you.  We won’t publish your name unless we have your specific permission to do so.

In the meantime, BNC will try and get some data on the number of cars registered in Berkeley over the years as compared to population increases.