Green

Berkeley voters choose direction for downtown

November 3, 2010 12:49 pm by Frances Dinkelspiel

Berkeley voters overwhelmingly approved a new downtown plan Tuesday, paving the way for construction of five new tall buildings and a denser, transit-oriented community.

Voters passed the controversial Measure R with 64% of the vote.

“I was floored that 64% of the people voted the way they did,” Mayor Tom Bates said Wednesday. “It said to me that people understand global warming. If we want to reduce it we have to have people living downtown, near transit.”

But opponents of Measure R downplayed the significance of the advisory measure and said that if the council eventually adopts a downtown plan that is too controversial, they will take it back to voters.

“It’s a meaningless measure now just like it was when it was proposed,” said Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who opposed the measure along with Councilman Jesse Arreguin. “It doesn’t actively adopt any policies. If the City Council adopts controversial things in their downtown plan, what’s to stop the public from referendum-ing it again?”

Measure R was only advisory, and Bates said it will probably take the Planning Commission a number of months to come back to the council with a detailed plan. There are numerous issues to be worked out, including the fees involved in the fast track “Green Pathways” part of the plan, the open space fee, as well as the fee to opt out of building affordable housing and instead pay into a fund, among other issues, said Julie Sinai, Bates’ chief of staff.

The public will have an opportunity to weigh in on various parts of the plan as it goes through the approval process.

For more details on Measure R, look here.

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  • EBGuy

    Berkeleyside, how about a vote breakdown by district (or precinct?) Inquiring minds want to know…

  • http://www.davosnewbies.com Lance Knobel

    The full, detailed breakdown of the vote is made available when the votes are certified, which will be in about 30 days, according to the Registrar of Voters.

  • http://www.davosnewbies.com Lance Knobel

    That said, given that the percentages hardly budged last night as various precincts reported, I don’t think you’d see a wide variation. There might be some micro-pockets of anti-R voters or other variations from the norm, but that’s the most you could expect.

  • Eric Panzer

    There is a minor typo in the third to last paragraph where it says Measure A rather than Measure R.

    Perhaps y’all were just paying an oblique homage to the No on P signs.

  • Tom from Berkeley

    Measure R was a polarizing issue this year. I think most of us who are a bit removed from the measure would agree that a lot of time, money and effort was spent arguing the point (it was an exhausting exercise blogged about for several months culminating in a vote whose result now appears to be something that in the future will be revisited, again debated, again called into question, continued to be blogged about, etc etc).

    The money and time/effort spent on the campaign (and by this I mean spent by both the pros and the cons) could have easily been used toward something most readers of this blog may say is of “better use”. I’ll provide just a simple idea for the next time we contemplate a protracted and costly debate over this matter. Idea = pick an intersection in Berkeley that is in most need of a crossing light / agree to donate the $100 or so thousand it will take to get this on the ballot / debate about it and instead divert those $ toward this civil effort). Allow both sides to take credit for the good civic deed that was done (the crossing light), and as a side issue ask them to continue to commit to working together to figure out what “low hanging fruit” there is in the downtown plan that they can agree with. Take those “low hanging fruit” out of the equation and being their implementation. In time, the matters that remain (that are perhaps more challenging at the present to deal with) may not seem so challenging now that the sides will have worked together for some time (and perhaps have installed a number of traffic lights at needed crossings)

    Just a suggestion – maybe way too simplistic, but what the heck