Berkeley Measures Nov 2014

As usual, Berkeley has a bunch of measures. I wrote up two of them separately (YES on D! NO on R!), but the others are here:

YES YES YES on D: Berkeley vs. Big Soda

See my special writeup on this one: 

Yes on F: Support Berkeley Parks

This is a pretty easy "Yes" -- I wish the council could just do it themselves, but they can't. Thanks to Howard Jarvis folks, this requires a 2/3 vote of the people. This would fund Berkeley parks by adding $0.021 per square foot to the property tax. I like that it is a progressive tax. There appears to be support across the board (all councilmembers, gobs of candidates and organizations). Opponents appear to say we should fix all the problems with Berkeley's city budget before allowing any more tax increases -- I disagree. For more info, see www.healthyberkeleyparks.com.

Yes on O: Clean Up City Charter

This is a clean-up amendment to the city Charter to make election provisions comply with recent court rulings. I wish the council could just adopt this without a vote, but apparently they can't. There is no opposition.

Yes on P: Berkeley says Corporations aren't People, Money isn't Speech

This is a very simple measure. The entire text is in the ballot question. If passed, Berkeley would be encouraging the United States to amend the constitution to say that corporations don't deserve the same constitutional rights as people, and that the right to free speech doesn't mean the right to spend money. Passing this -- as Berkeley certainly will -- is a symbolic statement that we don't like the Supreme Court's 1976 decision that money is speech and their 2010 "Citizen's United" decision that corporations have the same rights as people. There is no opposition.

Yes on Q: Berkeley says Work should be flexible

This is another advisory measure. It asks the City to tell the state and federal governments that we like recent legislative proposals to allow government employees the right to request flexible work arrangements. It also asks the Council to adopt a similar ordinance for the city, with fine-tuning to recognize the city's situation. I like flexible work arrangements. The legislation they refer to appears to be reasonable -- employers can say no based on business reasons, small businesses are exempt. So this seems like a generally good idea. There is no opposition.

NO NO NO on Berkeley Measure R: Protect Berkeley's Downtown 

See my special writeup on why you should vote NO on R to protect downtown Berkeley and make it better.

Yes on S: Approve Redistricting map

Berkeley has to complete redistricting every 10 years after the census. We're late. A 2012 initiative (that I supported) changed the rules, originally set in 1986, to require that the next redistricting even out the variations in population between districts.

The proposed new district map appears to have done that. There's very little variation in total number of people from district to district, much less than in the current district map. I don't know if this is the best redistricting map anybody could have come up with. I don't know if there were great other options proposed, or that could have been proposed. But the map looks reasonable. There are no districts that go meandering all over town, the way some truly "gerrymandered" Congressional districts look. In a few places, the districts have squiggles that keep an incumbent in his/her district. But Berkeley's redistricting rules say the new districts aren't allowed to draw any incumbent out.

There seems to be a group of students, affiliated with ASUC, who feel happy that this redistricting has created a "student district." I'm not sure I see that, but then again, I'm just going on my anecdotal knowledge of where students live. I have a colleague who served on the California redistricting commission a few years ago, and she talked about how complicated it was to balance all the competing interests and still make a map that looked reasonable.

The opponents' arguments are not convincing. They say the map protects incumbents -- but I think it is required to. They say a No vote would empower a Citizens' Independent Redistricting Commission, but there's no such thing. And their language sounds very exaggerated ("gerrymandered", "backroom deals", "broken laws"). I can't see any evidence that there's anything truly wrong with this proposed district map, so I'm voting Yes on S.