Blake

Statement

by David Blake, Zoning Adjustments Boardmember

at the decision on Beth El Use Permit,

March 8, 2001

Several people have called to ask for the text of my statement at the Board hearing on the Beth El proposal March eighth (well, ninth). I wrote my thoughts out during the Board discussion (Lord knows there was plenty of time), revised and outlined them for brevity when I realized that I wouldn't get to speak until very late, and then spoke even more briefly and extemporaneously when it turned out to be 12:30 a.m. before I got the floor. What follows is a transcript of my original statement, amended by changes I made while revising and outlining.

Earlier in the night I had tried to intervene in a torturous Board discussion about whether the Board could write any conditions at all governing the extent of the Temple's use of the site. My purpose was to cut the discussion short, since it was obviously getting nowhere while consuming gobs of time (time that I had hoped to be able to use for my comments later). I had said that the Religious Land Use issue that staff had more or less threatened the Board with was a bugaboo, because any court applying it would be compelled to determine that the applicant had in some way been discriminated against, since the act was designed to protect religious institutions against discrimination. Because the temple's great political leverage in Berkeley had resulted in staff and the Board yielding on every conceivable issue and writing several novel temple-friendly interpretations of the law and zoning code, I didn't think anyone had to worry about the City having to defend itself under this act. (For which, understandably, I was roundly booed by the audience.) But there is lengthy precedent dealing simply with the separation of church and state which would preclude almost all of the conditions that Commissioner Capitelli was trying to find some way to create anyway. I said, in an effort to get Commissioner Capitelli to understand the futility of his approach, that the Board needed instead to consider the physical scope of the project in order to meaningfully limit its detriments.

Since I had been so loudly booed earlier, I began my statement with extemporaneous remarks, for which I have no notes, attempting to explain why I felt the Temple's political influence had strongly affected our decision. I said that in my years on the Board I had seen many members of different temperament come and go, but I had never seen the Board bend over so far backwards to ignore obvious detriment. I said that it seemed to me that no other applicant could possibly receive such favorable treatment, and thus it was my conclusion, though I had no tangible evidence, that the neighborhood had never stood a chance with the Board, because it was a Board determined from well before the first speaker stepped to the microphone to give the Temple everything it asked for. Which is political leverage in a nutshell.

Then I went into my statement. I have a lot of trouble with what the Board seems to be about to do tonight. I believe this could be a good project for this site, but that it has two major flaws. Though it is a large project, I believe it can fit this neighborhood without serious detriment.

I'd like to ask this Board to take the trouble to step back from the vast excess of process we have undergone for this project, and look at it again in its entirety for one minute to see what is so utterly wrong about the project's approach to parking.

The design of this project was driven by the difficulties presented by the presence of the creek. No building can be built within 30 feet of the creek's centerline, which makes most of the parcel unbuildable. The problem is that the temple has presented us with a project that is so large that there is no room for parking in the buildable area. They have proposed instead to park the cars their use will generate on the unbuildable portion.

The Board has expressed its displeasure with putting parking in areas that will be over the culverted creek, and would have to be removed if the creek were unculverted, and Commissioner Capitelli has suggested that the parking be moved to the Berryman Path area in a land swap between the city and the applicant that would move the path next to the creek. But even if that were legally imposable by us, which it isn't, it would place the parking next to existing homes, and as well would make Berryman's northern border a parking lot, not a very salutory solution.

There is no good solution--and that's because the parking belongs where parking always should go, with the building.

This is virgin land. We have all the power we need to build on it reasonably. We can't put the parking where it belongs, because the building is too large. I don't want to try to tell the temple how large or small their program should be. But I do know that they need to accommodate their parking in a reasonable manner. And in order to do that without harming the creek, they need to build a smaller project, or to put their parking underground.

Next month this Board will be considering an application from Peter Calthorpe for a mixed-use project three blocks south of the Beth El site, which will be providing 88 underground parking spaces a full story below the sidewalk. It will move about three times as dirt as it would take to dig out a similar amount of parking at the Beth El site.

There is nothing abnormal or unusual about asking an applicant to accommodate sufficient parking to support their operation in a manner that does no detriment to the immediate community. Nor is there anything AT ALL unusual, as one Commissioner has suggested, about asking them to redesign their project from scratch. That is why we are here, and what we do all the time.

The second major flaw in the proposed design is the Oxford frontage. I think the Spruce elevation, though it blocks views of homes to the east, will not be bulky in relation to the large and considerably upgrade houses across Spruce. But the building looms on Oxford well over its western neighbors, and the grade change makes it worse. This detriment is caused entirely by the applicant's insistence on having primary operations continuous on the top level without stairs or ramps, despite a 25-foot grade drop from Spruce to Oxford. Dropping the western part of the project eight feet would stop it from looming over Oxford.

Regardless of all these considerations, should this Board still approve this project as presented, I would like the applicant to think about a couple of things.

In his treatise on the eight levels of charity, Maimonides writes that the people of Israel can only be redeemed through charity. I bring this up because I think you need to consider whether you are acting in a way that, in Maimonides words, would give reason to suspect your lineage.

Rabbi Raj asked us, on the last night of the EIR hearings, to remember that it was the anniversary of Kristallnacht, generally accepted as the practical onset of the Holocaust. It was meant, I think I can generously say, to let us know that he feared that anti-Semitism was playing a part in this matter. I found it an unfelicitious metaphor. But you might think about a different event a few years after WWII, when we moved into a neighborhood where we weren't very welcome. We probably would have been better off if we had more carefully handled the local population's concerns. Bad decisions early on can lead to bad feelings that can last unto the tenth generation.

The worst part of your decision is that the act of charity you would commit by supplying good parking would most of all be of benefit to you. Years from now you yourself may want to open this beautiful creek, and you will discover that if you do you will have no place to park. You could address that problem and your parking shortfall now, and redress the biggest harm you are doing to this neighborhood, by undergrounding your parking.

-- Dave Blake