Hello everyone. If you could please quiet down take your seats. Thank you very much.
I'm calling to order the Berkeley City Council meeting. Today is Tuesday, September 15th,
2026 and it is 602pm. Can we start off with the roll please? Okay, calling the roll. Council member
here. Yes, Sir. Want to. We have folks at one. What is the absent. Try to. Is here. Okay. I'm here. Blackby here. I'm a part here. I'm very present. And Mary she here. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Okay. It is.
the first meeting of the month and the first meeting back from recess so we
will start off with the land acknowledgement statement read by
councilmember O'Keeffe. Am I still the vice mayor? Yes, Vice Mayor O'Keeffe. Just curious, just
curious. Okay, I will read the land acknowledgement now. The city of
Berkeley recognizes that the community we live in was built on the territory of
the Huichun, the ancestral and unseated land of the Tochenyo speaking Ohlone
people, the ancestors and descendants of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda
County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to all of the
Ohlone tribes and descendants of the Verona Band. As we begin our meeting
tonight, we acknowledge and honor the original inhabitants of Berkeley, the
documented 5,000 year history of a vibrant community at the West
Berkeley Shell Mound, and the Ohlone people who continue to reside in the
East Bay. We recognize that Berkeley's residents have and continue to benefit
from the use and occupation of this unseated stolen land since the City of
Berkeley's incorporation in 1878. As stewards of the land regulating the City
of Berkeley, it is not only vital that we recognize the history of this land but
also recognize that the Ohlone people are present members of Berkeley and
other East Bay communities today. The City of Berkeley will continue to build
of relationships with the Lajean tribe
to create meaningful actions that uphold the intention
of this land acknowledgement.
Thank you very much Vice Mayor.
Now since this is the first meeting back,
we will also say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Please stand.
Okay, so we have a couple of ceremonial items
starting with the America the Entrepreneurial Proclamation.
So if I could please have Elinor, oh, there you are.
Come on up.
All right, so earlier this year,
I attended the US Conference of Mayors
where I learned about America the Entrepreneurial,
a campaign to renew our nation's entrepreneurial promise
in honor of America's 250th anniversary.
Thank you so much, Elinor,
and the entire Office of the Economic Development Team
for your tremendous work
in supporting our businesses and entrepreneurs.
The theme for my State of the City Address,
which is next week on September 23rd,
is doing business in Berkeley.
So it's very appropriate that we're doing this today.
Celebrating Berkeley's entrepreneurial spirit
through America the Entrepreneurial 2026.
Whereas as America marks its 250th start-up birthday
in 2026, we must celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit
that built our nation, states and cities,
forged by starters, makers, doers and dreamers
who pursued a better future.
And whereas entrepreneurs are essential
to fostering economic prosperity,
creating homegrown jobs, raising incomes,
generating wealth, building stronger communities,
diversifying goods and services,
and reducing inequality and poverty.
And whereas entrepreneurs have played a critical role
in revitalizing the city of Berkeley,
and it is fitting to publicly recognize
and celebrate the vital contributions of entrepreneurs
to the prosperity and wellbeing of our community.
And whereas the Office of Economic Development
in the city of Berkeley serves as a non-regulatory entity
in the city that supports all Berkeley businesses
and entrepreneurs from ranging industries.
And whereas the city of Berkeley is home to UC Berkeley,
over 370 innovation startup companies
and many local shops and restaurants.
It values entrepreneurs, businesses and startups
with the continued work of office of economic development,
the Berkeley startup cluster and business associations.
Now, therefore be it resolved that I, Adina Ishii,
Mayor of the City of Berkeley do hereby proclaim
that celebrating America the Entrepreneurial
will allow the City of Berkeley
to continue encouraging more entrepreneurship
across the city and celebrate its entrepreneurs
and entrepreneurial spirit throughout 2026
during our nation's 250th birth year.
Thank you so much, Mayor and Council, as we learn.
My name's Eleanor Hollander.
I'm the Manager of the Office of Economic Development,
or OED, here in the City of Berkeley.
And it is a great pleasure
to receive this proclamation,
our mission in the Office of Economic Development,
and our remit, which encompasses the commercial
and cultural institutions in our entire city,
ends with the sentiment of wanting entrepreneurs
and established businesses alike
to feel welcome in Berkeley and thrive.
From our innovation startups that find resources
and community in our Berkeley startup cluster,
which is a unique partnership between the National Lab,
our university, our Downtown Business Association,
our Chamber of Commerce, and of course the City of Berkeley,
To our brick and mortar establishments,
nestled in our diverse commercial districts,
our office is here to support accessing the city services
and celebrating their service to our community.
In addition, I wanted to take a moment to recognize
and commend our long-standing entrepreneurs in Berkeley,
those with businesses in operation for 25 years or more.
Soon we'll be rolling out our legacy business program,
acknowledging these Berkeley businesses
who've been practicing their craft
and demonstrating creative entrepreneurship
for more than a quarter century.
And many more for an actual century.
It's an incredibly unique and immense opportunity
to work in a city and a community
where both the new and the old,
the young and the wiser, we won't say older,
entrepreneurial establishments can thrive side by side.
People can continue to discover
what makes Berkeley so special.
Like our local marketing campaign,
hashtag Discover It in Berkeley says,
This is a special place where in the same day
you can discover a new element on the periodic table
or a vintage find in one of our many
fine establishments in our commercial districts.
It's really a tremendous opportunity
that we in Berkeley can feel proud of our entrepreneurs
and in this business community.
So thank you again for honoring and nurturing this group
and we really appreciate the spirit tonight.
Okay, so for our second proclamation this evening,
We have recognizing September 2026 as hunger action month.
Councilmember Bartlett,
did you wanna read this proclamation?
Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.
So I think that Andrew Crispin
from Berkeley Food Network is here.
Yes, would you like to come up and receive it?
And this was requested by Councilmember Bartlett's office.
Thank you so much.
Happy birthday.
Approach.
Recognizing September 2026 as Hunger Action Month.
Whereas the City of Berkeley recognizes September as National Hunger Action Month.
A nationwide effort to raise awareness and inspire action to address food insecurity and hunger in our communities.
And whereas external factors such as federal legislation in conjunction with the high cost of living,
especially of food in the Bay Area, have exacerbated food insecurity.
Individuals experiencing poverty must often choose between vital expenses
including rent, health care, and food. And whereas the city of Berkeley acknowledges
the struggle of individuals and families in our community experiencing food
insecurity and hunger, we encourage our residents to on a helping hand by
supporting one of the community organizations in our city working to
create greater food sovereignty by volunteering their time and treasure.
and whereas the work of groups such as the Berkeley Food Network, the basic
needs food pantry, inside housing formerly known as the Berkeley Food and
Housing Project, resource reorg, and village of love as well as all their
volunteers and supporters are critical to the ability of everyone in our
community to thrive and whereas these organizations and countless other
organizations mutual aid organizations and caring individuals provide direct
services, food and other resources for those in our community who need it. Now
therefore be resolved that the Mayor Adina Ishi on her birthday no less, Mayor
of City of Berkeley does hereby recognize September 2026 as Hunger Action Month in
the City of Berkeley. You're here. City Council Mayor, audience here. My name is
Andrew Chrisman, I'm the Executive Director of Berkeley Food Network and I
am so honored to be in a community where we recognize food as a basic right and
are taking action to make sure our neighbors are fed. Thank you for this
recognition. Thank You councilmember for bringing that up for for proclamation
this evening. Okay we are now moving on to City Manager comments and I think our
city auditor is also here. Oh yes and then after we will have our city auditor.
Okay thank you Madam Mayor I'd like to make a few comments about the Harrison
Street, encampment, the corridor, and the potential community impacts. This morning
as many of you know we began closing the encampment to everyone there except for
the seven people who Judge Chen ordered us to continue working with on
disability accommodations as well as people living in RVs. The city is
required to carry out this work in accordance with court orders including
requirements to offer replacement survival gear, provide packing assistance
assistance and stored belongings,
they're not hazardous or contaminated.
Additionally, the court ordered the city
to exempt disabled individuals from the city's
space-related constraints as long as they proposed
locations that met specific criteria identified
by the court.
The city has ordered to evaluate areas in the city
that the Berkeley Homeless Union and individuals
living in the encampments identified for relocation.
The city has received numerous complaints
about areas in the city, mostly centered around 9th and Camellia 4th and Camellia and 2nd Street
where individuals here already have or are considering relocating. The city did not suggest
these locations or any location as a sanctioned or approved encampment place and the city's
hands were tied in evaluating these locations as only certain factors such as path of travel
could be considered. Not the general impact on surrounding communities. The
city does not suggest locations for people to camp nor does it nor does the
city approve locations for encampments. We know that living outside lowers life
expectancy and our goal is to end unsheltered homeless homelessness by
moving people indoors, not moving them around on the street, which is why we've
pursued programs like our Berkeley Care bridge program and applied to the state
for millions of dollars to expand housing opportunities for people living on the streets.
The Berkley Homeless Union is demanding sanctioned and city assisted relocation to alternative
encampment sites. This is part of their demands. A federal Judge Chen who oversees these suits
has ordered the city to consider any location suggested by the Berkley Homeless Union. We
were ordered to go to these locations and assess them against our various city codes
and regulations governing belongings and tents in the right of way. We were
disallowed by the judge from considering the overall size of the tent
encampment in this analysis. Any location that did not violate federal
state and local rules such as 88 passage on the sidewalk interference
with driveways or parking meters or fire hydrants and other similar
considerations was imposed upon the city by the court as a place to which
people could relocate. We are actively arguing against this in court and we are
appealing this ruling to the Ninth Circuit but the appeals process will
take months. It's also important to understand that if violations of any
relevant state or local law other than this base limitation in the city's
policies are found to be present at any incumbent locations we can enforce but
we must follow our own policies and procedures in so doing. The city will
continue to vigorously defend its interest in court. The city's abatement efforts were
not halted today despite many filings by BHU today to try and stop that abatement on an
emergency basis and our city attorney's office who I think appeared in federal court earlier
today and defended the city's abatement efforts. Thank you. Thank you Mr. City Manager. I also
just wanted to say that you know this was a very long, complicated, and painful
process and I understand that it needed to happen for real health and safety
reasons. However, I also want to be clear as you stated that clearing the
encampment is not by itself a solution. It doesn't end anyone's homelessness. It
just changes where the immediate problem of homelessness is visible. Our real goal
and the only thing that actually solves this is getting people into long-term
long-term stable housing and I remain committed to that work.
We'll have our city auditor come up with comments. Thank you.
Good evening, Mayor and Council. I just wanted to briefly highlight a new special report
from our whistleblower program, the evaluation of workplace relationship policies, which
is item number 14 on tonight's consent calendar. This report is a good example of how information
received through the whistleblower program can identify broader risks and
issues even if it does not lead to an investigation. In this case we received
a report concerning a romantic relationship involving a manager and an
employee and the potential for perceived favoritism. The conduct described was not
prohibited under current city policy so we did not investigate the reported
relationship. Instead, we use the information to conduct a broader policy
review. So what did we find? We found that Berkeley's current policies do not
address romantic dating or cohabitating relationships when they intersect with
hiring, supervision, and other employment decisions. The city, therefore, does not
have consistent requirements for disclosure, recusal, or managing potential
community in the city of
Oakland, San Francisco.
We also found that Berkeley's
policies are more limited than
approaches used by nearby cities
of Oakland and San Francisco,
which does address a broader
range of personal relationships
and provide additional tools for
managing conflicts of interest.
This report also connects to a
recent contract audit that was
released where we recommended
the city's framework. The city's
framework is a framework that
allows staff contractors. In
disclosing personal, professional
and business relationships.
Both reports highlight the
importance of identifying
relationships that could create.
Or appear to create conflicts in
city decision making. It's
important that we take steps to
prevent any scandals or
corruption involving workplace
relationship that may be a
conflict of interest. We made
3 recommendations to strengthen
the city's employment of near relatives policy
and provide training following the policy development
and labor relations process.
Our third recommendation addresses
a broader governance issue.
The city manager's administrative regulations
do not govern all elected officials, charter officers,
appointed officials, boards and commissions.
We therefore recommend that the city consider,
the city council considered nepotism and cronyism provisions
in the municipal code, so that appropriate safeguards
can apply more consistently citywide,
and also that we can be more consistent
with Oakland and San Francisco.
The item on tonight's consent calendar recommends
that council ask the city manager
to implement recommendations one and two
consistent with the management response,
and recommendation three to the agenda and rules committee
to consider whether and how to pursue
that broader policy I'd mentioned.
I finally want to thank HR and the City Attorney's Office
for their assistance with this report.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Madam City Auditor.
I really appreciate all of the work
that you do and your team.
Thank you so much.
We will now take public comments on non-agenda matters.
All right, so we'll draw five names from the drum
for in-person speakers, I have one minute each,
and then we will go to the first five hands raised
on the Zoom.
While you're polling that, I did just wanna say,
since it is also the first meeting back of the month,
we will take public comment by employee unions after this.
So if there are any employee unions here
that would like to speak, just so you know, you're on deck.
Okay.
So the five names are Gina Reger,
Jason Martins, Alana A, Cheryl, and 8th and Harrison.
So come on up whenever you like, any order.
Go ahead.
Good evening.
I was here on the evening of July 28th for the Hopkins issue
and the day before, as I had mentioned when I spoke then,
I sent the city council, the city manager,
and the city attorney an email with correspondence
between me and Chief Sprague regarding alternative one
and the class four bicycle lanes.
I think Council Member Treggab, you were the one
who queried Sprague at the meeting
to find out whether he had in fact signed off
or approved or whatever word you want to use
for the Hopkins class four bike lanes.
And I pointed out that the memorandum that Kesserwani,
Ishii and Humbert had submitted,
had the version one of the bike lane
from the fights meeting of April 15th
and not what was currently being discussed.
And you went ahead and voted nonetheless.
the city. Thank you. Thank you.
whether or not they need them.
We need to be clear, if something is required,
a company that submits the RFP does not meet
and does not meet that requirement,
they should be rejected.
It should not just lose points and stay in the process.
These required items include the city owns its data.
The city is notified if there is a data breach
with financial penalties for improper sharing.
The technology is set to protect privacy by default.
The technology meets the city's security and privacy rules.
The company follows criminal justice information services
or CJIS requirements.
The company follows Berkeley's sanctuary policies
and limits access by federal immigration agencies.
These are recall requirements for a reason,
many clear answers from you about why they are being scored
as points instead of being treated as requirements.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm for the question, the city manager.
since we don't have this up, I'm gonna just,
oh, you got it?
Okay.
Great, thank you, I was just gonna ask for that.
Welcome back, I hope you all had a great recess.
I was there this morning and witnessed the abject failure
that was the encampment at 8th Street in Harrison.
It was horrible to watch.
I don't know if any of you,
have any of you ever gone to an encampment eviction?
It is traumatizing.
It's traumatizing to watch.
It's not only traumatizing the people
who are getting evicted.
It's traumatizing to the community members
and to our city workers.
It's an abject failure of imagination,
a failure of society, a failure of kindness,
and a failure of this city.
How come we don't have a safe,
stay sanctioned encampment in Berkeley?
How come we don't?
There's an empty lot behind my house
that's been empty for over 30 years.
I know there was a referral to the city manager,
but we, that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about someone championing a place
for these unhoused people who are our neighbors
and who are our community,
and no one up here on the dias, none of you,
not one championed it.
And that's why we had what happened today.
It's a failure.
Thank you, Alana.
Let's flip the Berkeley City Council.
Alana, thank you.
Flip the Berkeley City Council, that's right.
Y'all should be ashamed
because I was also down there this morning at 7 a.m.
and what was happening, bulldozers,
look like Gaza, in a way.
People living with trash, mice, no toilets, no water,
no dumpsters, just cops and bulldozers and public works
people.
Ragu, what did he do?
Absolutely fucking nothing.
He didn't help people.
He wouldn't even let people in that were press
because they didn't want people to see.
They were so special,
they even put smoking trash in the dumpster
and then it burst out into flames.
Don't you know that when there's smoke, there's fire?
Thank you, Cheryl.
No, you're not, I'm not done.
Your time is up.
You all need to do better.
Cheryl, your time is up.
You need to find services and do better
and not traumatize folks that are living on our streets.
They deserve better.
Thank you for your comments, Cheryl.
Cheryl, your time's up.
All right, nobody claiming the last speaker card, or?
Well, who wrote 8th and Harrison, okay?
I did.
I'm at 8th and Harrison every single week.
And I can barely look at all of you.
The mayor, you claim that this is your top priority.
Why aren't you speaking out?
Why aren't you doing more?
All of you, all of you, all of us
have a responsibility to do something.
Berkeley deserves better.
There are elders who are distraught, animals terrorized.
People have had to go to the hospital
because of the trauma that has gone on before,
as you know, June 4th of last year,
when the police threw smoke bombs into people's tents
to get them out.
People did not forget that.
You are all complicit, especially the city manager.
Yes, people were not helped.
Immediately the city went against what the judge...
Thank you. The mayor has a PR. I know my time is up. Your time is up as well.
Kit Saginaw is the first speaker on Zoom. Can you hear me?
Yes, go ahead. Thank you. Along with Katherine Huchding, I'm asking for a clear answer about
how the city is reviewing and scoring bids for the current Public Safety Technology RFP.
It's really important to notice that some items listed as required, but companies are
still being given points based on whether they meet them. We need to be clear, if something
is required, a company that does not meet that requirement should be rejected. It should
not just lose points and stay in the process. The required items include that the city owns
its data. The city is notified if there is a data breach with financial penalties for
improper sharing. The technology is set to protect privacy by default. The technology
meets the city's security and privacy rules. The company follows Criminal Justice Information
Services, or CJIS, requirements, and that the company follows Berkeley Sanctuary policies
and limits access by federal immigration agencies. These things are called requirements for a
We need clear answers about why they're being scored
instead of treated as requirements.
Thank you.
Next is Rocky Chow.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Yes, I would like to cede my time to, oh.
Hello?
Are you there, Rocky?
Rocky, your time is running out.
Is there someone you want to cede your time to?
He muted himself again.
Rocky, if you wanna speak, you can unmute.
Maybe we'll just move on to the next.
All right, next is Jerry.
Yes, hello, this is Jesse Sheehan at the chess club.
You can hear me?
Yes.
Hello, I wanna thank Judge William Chen for ruling
that the city of Berkeley did in fact break the law
as it relates to homeless services.
And that was before your government, Mrs. Ishi.
And it was one person, Peter Radu.
And he's still with your government
working for Mr. Paul.
Paul, why is Peter Radu still on your staff?
You had a federal judge say he broke the law.
It has opened our city up to litigation.
He broke the law.
Never has a person stayed on city staff that broke the law.
Ms. Ishii, I'm greatly disappointed in you.
I'm going to sit on your campus,
on your alma mater every day until your reelection.
If Peter Dues stays on that staff every day,
I will work to make sure you're not reelected.
Thank you, Jesse.
Next is a caller with a number ending in 2-1-1.
Hi. My comment actually addressed to Eleanor Lander.
Are you kidding me?
Have you walked down Telegraph Avenue,
Shattuck Avenue, University Avenue?
There do have the stores are vacant.
What you have done to our business is because of many
of the doors, you have, I actually have many of the door
of credit lines available to me.
I get five, 10 calls every week from different finance institutions.
And what is worse, what you call the citizens of Berkeley, they have
nowhere else to go to do what we have done.
You should all be ashamed of yourself.
And really mayor, he's very disappointed.
He just followed Aragon and Bates as some of the worst mayors in Berkeley history.
Terrible.
I will call again.
I'm not done with you yet.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks.
Next is Margarita.
Yes. Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay. So yeah, I'm a student at UC Berkeley,
also getting me and other students politically engaged,
and other students notified me of the question of
whether to lift the ban on chemical weapons like tear gas, smoke.
I'm so sorry, but we're actually not addressing this at the moment.
We're currently taking public comment
on not agenda matters only.
My bad y'all.
My bad.
That'll come later in the agenda.
Okay. I misunderstood.
No, that's all right.
Next is Deontology.
Hello.
Yes, go ahead.
Yes, I'd like to give my time to Derek Wallace.
I think he's in the audience.
Oh, there's Derek.
All right.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
Hey everyone.
Hi city council.
I'll make this quick.
The doing business in Berkeley thing,
the reason I'm here is that I'm a tenant at Evans Manor, which
used to be known as Barrington Hall.
We have a lot of problems.
We've gone to the rent board and have got no help,
so I'm here asking if the city council will start up
some kind of commission about not just our building, Evans
Manor, but we're owned by the Berkeley Student Cooperative.
And we are suffering through conditions of extreme mold,
asbestos, rats, roaches, trash piling up.
They're not securing our facilities.
So people have been coming in, stealing packages,
assaulting people.
We would like the police to get involved.
If anybody is watching this also, any journalists,
we have some really juicy stories
where you would not believe the stuff that's
happening in the building.
We've already had one tenant die.
Others have been hospitalized.
And it's getting to be like emergency status.
Can we have, can anybody grant me their minute also?
Is that a thing?
Yeah.
Is that cool?
Somebody that has to have it.
Yeah.
So this is off-agenda comments, so you
can't do that at this time.
But if one of my staff has a card to give you,
then we'll follow up.
Thank you.
Well, I'm going to reach out directly to Cecilia
since she's my.
That's fine.
Then my staff will also come and talk to you.
Excellent.
Thank you.
OK.
Last speaker is Jessica.
Hello.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Hi, thank you.
Yeah, so I'm just here to let you guys know
about what has happened at 8th and Harrison Street,
which is totally illegal.
None of the city staff wanted to follow the judge's order,
which is actually engaging the interactive process
to talk about the disability accommodations for people.
BHU filed them on time.
The notice says filed by September 14, and I did that.
I followed many times, and the ADA coordinator
did not even respond at all until late in the evening.
and then basically the city moved in
without actually providing the accommodations
that were required by the court.
So just so you know, you will be held in contempt.
And the fact that you keep doing this,
this is repeatedly being done.
This is the third time that a person has been swept
without their accommodations.
This is not acceptable.
So I just ask you to please refrain from doing this action
and to please refrain from keeping city staff
that want to violate the laws.
Like it is clear, it has been written,
so please pay attention and please do the best
that it is for everybody in this community.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So we can move on to the employee union public comments.
Thank you.
Are there any public comments from employee unions here?
Any employee unions?
If there's any designated representatives
of employee unions for public comment online,
you could raise your hand.
I don't see any, so we can move on.
No. No, it's not a representative of an employee, okay. No, we can move on. Okay. Thank you very
much. Okay, we're moving on to the consent calendar now. And so we have an urgent item
that's been brought before us this evening. Go ahead, Council Member Black. Madam Mayor,
Thank you for the indulgence and I'll be very brief.
There's some copies on the back table.
We each have copies.
We're bringing this item
because the agenda committee meeting for this,
because council meeting met on the 24th.
And at that time we did not have this information.
There are eight wildfire resiliency bills
that pass the legislature at the end of August.
They're awaiting the governor's signature,
which he has to do or veto by the 30th of September.
These are eight bills that would really help
here in Berkeley, as well as communities across the state.
They're dealing with the wildfire crisis.
They cover areas including funding for homeowners
and financing for homeowners
that are doing welfare mitigation.
There is an innovation unit that would test
and deploy emerging wildfire technologies,
support for our county coordinators,
work on home hardening and grants to communities
that are doing wildfire mitigation work.
On behalf of the city council,
we've drafted eight letters that the mayor
would send to the governor,
asking for him to sign these bills.
It's a package that's been supported
by a great advocacy group called Make A Fire Action
that we've been working with,
that is working on good wildfire policy
in California and across the country,
and they've been very supportive
of what we're doing here in Berkeley.
I sent a letter that was co-signed
by 250 residents in D6 over the weekend
along the same lines.
And so we're just trying to sort of up the anti
with the governor and urge him to support the bills
and sign them before the end of the month.
So we'd like to move this to consent
as an immediate action item.
And I appreciate support from my colleagues.
Second.
Thank you, the mayor for co-sponsoring.
Thank you, council member.
Okay, we have a second.
Can we take the roll on that please?
Or actually, is there any opposition
to putting this onto the consent calendar.
Okay, we will do that then.
Thank you very much.
Are there any council comments on the consent calendar?
Council Member Trangup.
Thank you, Madam Mayor, and happy birthday.
I'm very excited to see items one and two
on today's agenda.
Thank you to the economic development team
for advancing our work on restoring Berkeley's
Civic Center and the Maddelsch Shirek building.
I also would like to acknowledge
the Downtown Berkeley Association city staff
and everyone who assisted,
including my own District 4 team
in bringing more light to our wonderful arts district.
The catenary lighting project on Addison
will undoubtedly bring even more vibrancy
to this already incredible destination.
Other items deserve to be uplifted,
especially in Berkeley,
a city of environmental and climate leadership.
And these include item 14,
supporting a neighborhood decarb pilot project.
Shh, folks, please.
I'm grateful to our environmental and climate commission
and my commissioner, Daniel Tahara, for initiating it.
And I'm also very proud of our city
for standing up to call yet again.
In item 19, we're expressing our opposition
to the handling, storage, and transport of coal
and petroleum coke in the San Francisco Bay region
and the East Bay.
We're also expressing our strong support for AB 40,
which will require stronger environmental protections
against coal projects like the one being proposed in Oakland.
This week, I'm pleased to bring on the consent calendar
Renaissance Part Two to the Council.
This item focuses on solving problems
that we hear about regularly from residents and businesses,
commercial spaces and buildings that
remain vacant, unfinished, or difficult to bring back
into active use.
My office and I have worked extensively on this
and have been submitting referrals
to tackle commercial vacancies in our downtown
and other commercial districts since my first day in office,
partnering with stakeholders such as local merchants
and cultural organizations, property owners,
community members, and city staff,
just to name a few,
to understand the myriad economic factors
that have exacerbated these challenging issues.
I hope this work will help us address
some of the persistent commercial vacancy issues
we see throughout Berkeley,
and make it easier to bring these spaces back to life.
I would like to express special thanks
to my Chief of Staff, Olga Balotina,
for helping to usher this item
onto tonight's consent calendar.
And of course I want to thank my co-sponsors on this item
who have also been thought partners every step of the way.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
I have a timer here on my phone, just FYI for folks.
Moving on, oh, it's not really working,
but we'll move on to Council Member Humbert.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Yeah, my little device says I'm number 29.
So thank you and happy birthday.
As to number 16, which is council members,
Kessarwani's item asking for a report
on construction related costs and added costs.
I would like to be added if I might as a cosponsor.
We'd be delighted to have you as a cosponsor,
Council Member Humber, thank you.
Thank you.
And then number 19, I noticed that's
the Council Member Trig00b's renaissance item.
I don't know if you have any room,
but I'd love to be a co-sponsor if you do.
I wish we did.
We have a full house on that item,
but thank you for your support.
That's because it's a salutary item.
Thank you, Council Member.
I have others if you'd like to co-sponsor any.
And I'd also like to thank Auditor Wang
for her whistleblower report.
Thank you, Auditor Wang.
That's it.
Thank you very much.
Councilmember Luna Parra,
and then we'll go black a bee, Kesser Wani,
and then if anyone else, let me know.
Thank you.
I wanna thank the city auditor and her team
for the great work on the report and recommendations.
Thank you.
I also wanna thank Councilmember Kesser Wani for item 16,
and I'm wondering if I can also be a co-sponsor.
Yes, we have room, thank you.
And on item 19, I want to thank Councilmember Traeger
for bringing this forward and for the community organizers
who have been fighting so hard to pass these resolutions
and defeat Trump's proposed coal terminal.
I encourage everyone to reach out to the no coal
in Oakland campaign if they want a yard sign
or wish to volunteer with these efforts
to keep our air breathable in the East Bay.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Councilmember Blackaby.
Thanks, Madam Mayor.
Just wanted to highlight item five on the consent calendar,
which is a contract for fire aside.
This is a really great software program we've been using,
the fire department's been using to track the work
that individual residents are doing to do fire mitigation.
I guess we're on the fire beat right now.
We at last report of the 1400 homes in the Ember zone,
more than 600 are already on the path to zone zero
and home hardening compliance, which is amazing.
And this software helps the city track
all that really great work.
Folks, can you have your conversations outside, please?
Thank you.
And in addition, the Chipper program,
which are also fireside supports,
has supported more than 2,400 pickups
and removed 6,000 cubic yards of hazards vegetation
from Berkeley homes.
So I just want to double click on this
because it's been a really successful program
and it's really key to the work
that's being done in the hills.
I want to thank Councilor Tragob for item 19,
strongly support Assembly Bill AB 40 and oppose the handling storage and
transport of coal in the Bay Area. I also want to thank him for allowing me to
co-sponsor the Renaissance Act. Anything that we can do to revitalize downtown
and our business districts is really important to me. And very briefly, I just
wanted to comment on the city managers comment on Harrison Street. I just
wanted to thank city staff for all their work today and every day.
We had a serious public health and safety crisis in Harrison that had to be addressed.
That's going to take a multifaceted response to deal with it.
But the situation is not sustainable.
The status quo can't continue.
We had a serious public health and safety crisis in Harrison that had to be addressed.
Cheryl, please.
That's going to take a multifaceted response to deal with it.
multifaceted response to deal with it.
I'll also just comment that staff has been working
for weeks and months to identify
and make reasonable accommodations
for people with disabilities.
The judge set a September 1st deadline,
which we met and have been working
and conferring in good faith.
Notwithstanding efforts by BHU to wait
until the very end after the deadline
to file new requests.
So look, this is a difficult problem
and I understand that there are a lot of strong feelings,
But I also want to say staff's been working really hard
on this.
I also want to say that we live in a community where everyone
deserves access to public spaces.
That includes children playing sports at nearby fields,
employees walking sidewalks to get to work,
and artists making their way to pottery classes
in and around Harrison.
We can't allow a situation like this to reform
once abatement is complete.
That's not a win for public health, for public safety,
for the unhoused individuals, nor the rest of our community.
it just resets the same crisis.
So I'm committed to working with council colleagues,
the city manager and our community partners
to find durable solutions for housing for our neighbors
and making policy changes to make sure
we don't end up dealing with another large encampment
that poses a health and safety risk down the line
for neighbors and businesses,
housing, unhoused families, kids, and seniors.
I'll also just make a note,
we need more financial support from the county
and from the state to help us fund the programs
that will help house more people in Berkeley.
We are a generous community,
but we also have limits on our fiscal capacity to help.
Folks, please.
So this has to be resolved.
It can't just be moved around,
and I'm looking forward to working on it.
Let Councilmember Humbert, Blackley, finish his,
let Councilmember Blackley finish his statement.
I appreciate the spirit with which people
have received my comments, it's been great.
But this is a difficult problem
and we can't allow the status quo to continue
on Harrison or any place else.
And it's about putting people in housing,
it's also about making policy changes
that don't allow a situation like this to come back.
So thank you.
Okay, we have council member Kesserwani
and then council member O'Keeffe
and then council member Bartlett.
Thank you very much, Madam Mayor.
And thank you, Council Member Blackaby,
for your comments about the Harrison Street encampment.
I also wanna just take a brief moment
to thank the city manager and all of our city staff,
including Berkeley Police, Fire, Public Works,
Neighborhood Services, and our city attorney's office.
Mr. Budnegan, are there any other departments
that I missed in that list?
Okay, so I just want folks who are watching
or here to know that it is a whole city response
to address unsafe encampments.
And we initially sought to close this encampment
in January, 2025.
It's now September, 2026,
because of the litigation that was brought forward
by the Berkeley Homeless Union.
And some of those points have been valid
and I'm glad that the city is addressing them.
And I do want to express my support for what the mayor said
that closing an encampment that is unsafe
because of leptospirosis and fire hazards
is only one part of the significant and massive
financial investment that Berkeley has made
into longer term solutions like shelter,
transitional housing, and permanent supportive housing.
We are proud to host two home key sites in district one,
and I always note that I have always said yes
to those solutions.
At the same time, I can't say yes
to an unsafe, unhealthy encampment
that is unsafe for the people who are staying there
intense and unsafe to the people who need to work there
or need to do business there.
So I know we can do better,
and I agree that this is a regional challenge
and it does take more than one city
and some other cities are stepping up.
I'd love to see some other cities that haven't step up more.
So thank our city staff again for the tremendous work
that has been put into that over nearly two years.
Shh, folks, please.
It's actually been more than two years,
but the immediate period of two years.
So okay, so I did want to, for item 15,
This is supporting the Gilman District Merchants Association.
I'd like to add Council Member Terry Taplin
as a co-sponsor.
I wanna thank again Council Members Humbert and Luna Pada
who are co-sponsoring item 16.
This is requesting a study on housing fees
so that we can get an understanding
of how much discretionary added cost
is being added to each unit that we're creating in our city.
And I do finally, I wanna thank Council Member Tragube
for the resolution opposing coal,
and I was very proud to be able to co-sponsor it
as one of the two council members
who has the rail line running through their district.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Council Member O'Keefe.
Thank you, Madam Mayor, happy birthday.
Just a couple brief comments.
I really wanna thank Council Member Tragube
for allowing me to co-sponsor Renaissance.
it's a really, really important and much needed initiative.
So thank you very much.
And also thank you for the cold one.
It's great too.
And that's actually all I have to say.
All I had to say was written down,
but I do kind of spontaneously just want to really thank
council members, back of being castor,
wanting for your comments just now.
I think it's very important that we as a council
really respond and show our support for city staff
in everything they've been doing.
and I actually especially want to thank
Paul Buttigieg, Paul Buttigieg, Paul, for Buttigieg,
sorry, I'm really tired.
I've made that mistake before, just never on public.
Sorry, city manager, Buttigieg about
for the really excellent summary you made,
it was really helpful, important that the public
understand the process and the gravity
with which we treat this and the amount of work
that's gone into it, so thank you so much for that
and for your and all of the staff's efforts.
And I also want to really thank
the city attorney's office,
Freeman Brown for all of the work
because it's been an incredible amount of work
that you guys have put into it.
Just making sure that the process is law abiding and fair
and actually possible to carry out.
So thank you so much to all of your staff as well.
Those are my comments.
Okay, Council Member Bartlett.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Really quickly to call out on the number
the first item here on the consent calendar,
the grant application for the planning grant
for the Civic Center rebuild.
Really exciting stuff, it's been a long time coming.
Those are wonderful, wonderful buildings there
that are in deep, deep need of repair
and looking forward to this work.
And I'm 13.
Really curious to see how this plays out
and we've looked at this for years now,
the neighborhood decarbonization pilot.
Really excited to see that, very exciting.
It's come a long way.
We can see how this rolls out, I want to help this one.
20, your Renaissance, Councilman Triguev, really good work, you know your
district is being responsive to your needs and all our needs in our
commercial districts with getting the storefronts activated, thank you. And I
last want to thank Councilman Blackaby for your these excellent fire letters.
Happy to support this item here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any other
comments from my colleagues? Okay I will just add number 13, supporting a
and neighborhood decarbonization pilot project in Berkeley.
Thank you so much to the Environment and Climate Commission
for bringing this letter of support
for us to consider this evening.
This pilot project is an excellent way
for our city to continue its journey
towards electrification and reduction of emissions.
Based on 2023 data, I wanted to share this
because I thought this was really impressive.
Greenhouse gas emissions declined 41%
since the 2000 baseline in Berkeley.
And for items 19 and 20,
the both the coal and renaissance items,
thank you so much to council member Tragob
for leading the no coal and renaissance items.
Renaissance, it's important that the city
continues to address ground floor vacancies,
prevent blight, and encourage activation
of our commercial districts.
This is something that my office is focused on,
so thank you for bringing it forward.
Okay, we are going to public comments
on consent calendar or information items only.
If you have a comment on that, please come on up.
We're gonna bring a mic over to the table.
There you go.
Okay folks, if you can keep it down
so we can hear our public comments, please.
Thank you, go ahead.
Hello, my name's Nicholas Elizabeth Baby.
I'm strongly opposed to any use of tear gas
or other chemical weapons.
Oh, I'm so sorry, but this is something
that's not on the consent calendar.
So when we get to the tear gas item,
we will allow you to come up and speak during that time.
Thank you.
Who is next?
Andrea, are you next?
Okay.
Thank you.
Sorry about that.
No, no.
I'm getting an extra minute from Erica
and I'm getting one from Senate.
I'm getting one from Steve.
You hang on your minute.
Some of you I tried to contact this morning
from the encampment suite.
For those of you for whom I had any kind of number,
I reached out, because what I was witnessing
was an obvious and willful violation of a court order.
I'm sorry, which item are you speaking on?
I'm sorry, let me connect it to, I'm sorry.
I'm super psyched that the Maudel Sherryk
for the renovations and Vets Memorial,
because I remember how we used the Vets Memorial
to support unhoused people.
In contrast to what I saw this morning.
So I'm super happy about that, about the renovation.
I'm super unhappy about what happened this morning
because it was a willful and intentional violation
of a court order.
Peter Radu was flagged by Jessica.
We all were like, wait, there's a court order.
Wait, you've gotta come.
He refused.
the police, all they were interested in doing
was stopping us from documenting.
And that documentation is really important.
Because if the judge is saying,
you can't take people's vital possessions,
and so somebody's gotta be there to observe what they took.
And so when the police willfully,
under the direction, presumably, of the city manager
or his designates, that's an intentional violation
of a court order.
Now, nobody here wants people to live in squalor.
Please understand, we want that resolved in a real way.
Not kicking it down, not to where people are going
to die on our streets, as has been happening,
and the cold hasn't even set in yet.
What's going to be happening is people
are going to be dying, because those individuals,
council member, those people that
have behavioral health issues, they're not sloppy
because they're just casual.
There are people who are disordered.
There are people who are psychotic.
There are people who are drug addicted.
And that when you separate them from that little tiny bit
of community and support that they have
and tell them to live on some traffic barrier,
find some, when they're all get separated,
what's gonna happen is they're gonna die.
Or they're gonna go to jail.
You'll be able to get them caught up in the justice system
and they'll be sent to John George
or they'll be sent to Santa Rita's psych ward
or something like that,
you won't have to worry about them anymore.
You can set about the business of having festivals
and this kind of thing, beautification projects,
but they'll be dead or in jail.
And that will be on our conscience.
That is not who Berkeley is.
That's not who we're trying to be.
And because some of us here think that racial disparities
and marginalized people, if it's out of sight,
and you don't have to worry about it,
but the rest of us do.
And we would like you to worry about it with us.
I'm upset because I'm concerned,
where is the commitment to warming?
I hear you talking about the challenges of housing,
but we've got a triage problem.
Where are they gonna go when the term, when the rate?
I have one more minute.
No, I only got three minutes.
I want one more minute.
No, I need my minute.
Thank you.
Go ahead.
And so what I'm trying to say is that if it's there
in the budget, please alert me.
Show me where, when the rains come,
and somebody is sleeping in a tent, and they're soaking wet.
Can you tell me where to send them?
Where do they go?
Because hypothermia is a death sentence in some cases.
So what's your plan?
And that's what I'm not seeing in all this, in the budget.
And I'm seeing this kind of casual like congratulating your city staff when they willfully violate
a court order.
That's a great job done when they intentionally obstruct the rights of the people to document
what their police, what the police that we pay for are doing.
How can you congratulate that?
How can you pat yourself on the backs?
So we want to see a commitment.
Give us the Vets Memorial Building.
We'll take it.
you real nice and we'll do a good job but nobody wants to live in squalor and
please respect yourself otherwise. Thank you. Thank you. I have a minute from from
Russ and from Paul Blake so I should have three minutes and three minutes
please yeah I also I'm speaking on 15 and also one I it hurt my heart to hear
all of you defend and say what a great job your staff did. Not one of you was there.
Not one of you was there. So what are you talking about? You know who is there? Moni
G who's running for District 1 to replace Rashi. May it be so. And she was there and
she was witnessing the failure. Okay. We have that empty lot I mentioned. I've surveyed
my neighbors. They're all down to have a safe stay sanctioned encampment. The ones
I've talked to, everyone is really open to it.
Let's be imaginative, let's be creative.
Let's reweave the social safety net instead of bringing in bulldozers,
and I too felt like I was sort of in Gaza.
It was traumatizing.
Okay. That's my first thing I wanted to say.
The second thing, of course we don't want coal in Oakland,
and I just find it interesting that there are some council members who will likely vote for
tear gas who are on those diets who are sponsoring that item.
Wow, curious hypocrisy perhaps.
I don't know. The final thing I want to talk about is the Renaissance.
Clearly, we need to revitalize the downtown and it's been a couple of years.
It's been years and years and we have more empty storefronts, not less.
There are still an open gaping pit on Harold Way.
There are blocks and blocks on Shattuck that are vacant,
that are blighted.
And so this is, yes, less than two months
before there's an election.
And so I just want to say, great, yes.
Give the city manager more work to do and more studies.
We don't need more studies.
We need pop-ups.
We need creativity.
We need events.
We need not paid for events.
Pride was paid for here.
Berkeley Pride was a paid thing.
And then the next weekend, there was another paid thing
in Civic Center Park, how are we gonna rejuvenate
and have like public space that we can bring
the community into if we're having people pay for everything?
So there are many things that could have been done
over the past couple years and certainly should be done,
not more studies to vivify and bring our downtown
into like a lively place.
So I still have 30 seconds left.
Thank you for listening and we can do better.
We can do better and we will do better.
We are gonna be voting in November 3rd.
Everybody, if you don't know about
flip the Berkeley City Council, check it out.
We've got great candidates and these are candidates
that are going to be centering the needs
of those of us who live here, who work here,
who study here, as opposed to the developers,
which is this item on housing.
Thanks, Solana.
That's for the developers.
Thank you.
Okay.
Next person, come on up, the person with the mask, the black mask.
Yep.
Thank you.
Okay.
And folks, just a reminder, this is public comment for consent calendar or information
items only.
So we have an action calendar, but that will come later and that has the item that's on
to your guests.
Okay, thank you.
Good evening. I mean it camps. I think I have three additional minutes from people in attendance.
Okay, hold on one, two, one second.
I don't see.
Oh, thank you.
I'm here to speak to item five.
The $410,000 fireside contract.
governor. As to the fireside contract, first I support fire safety, but just
because a contract is arguably relevant to fire issues in the hills doesn't mean
that the contract should be on the consent calendar and rubber-stamped in
short order, notwithstanding your, you know, passionate defense of it. But at a
time when the council is really looking at closing fire station four and asking
for really massive amounts of money for the city, I think the council should be
showing it can ask tough fiscal questions and not be rubber stamping big
contracts like that. Second, let's talk about the fireside contract itself. Show
of hands how many of you have actually read the contract with fireside I have
and for those who haven't it's essentially a contract again for the
software that tracks each property owners compliance with fire mandates
and whether you've read the fireside contract or not I also hope that you've
read article one section one of the California Constitution the so-called
called privacy amendment of the constitution
and the cases that interpret it.
I'll boil it down.
An intent of Article I, Section I
is to prevent the government from stockpiling information,
of your private information of the,
people of the state of California.
In fireside, not only do you have the government
stockpiling the information,
but you have the government's stockpiling information
in a database that's managed by a private entity.
And that private entity fireside is interoperable
with a whole bunch of other private entities
who are apparently making money off of our information too.
So that looks like it could be
one big constitutional violation.
So even if you're enthusiastic about it,
it does have other ramifications
that I think you should look at.
And yes, the fireside contract does pay
little bit of lip service to privacy,
but hardly the kind of express use restrictions
and confidentiality protections
that you would expect to see in a database law of this kind
if you're serious about informational privacy.
So I'd ask that you take this item off the consent calendar
and read that contract really carefully
with someone who really understands article one,
section one of the California constitution
and the cases that interpret it.
I'm going to briefly address the urgency letter
to the governor and what's missing in this packet
is are the bills themselves?
What are you voting on?
Have you read each of those bills?
I've read a bunch of them, you know, quickly.
And it seems like the city of Berkeley is already on record
in support of some of these bills, as is fireside,
which stands to make some additional money
off of this whole industry here.
And the question is, do you know what you're voting on?
Because some of these bills are really good
and it's the whole packet.
So do you really know what's in each one of them?
and they really do impact 1400 residents like me.
And the question is whether they all meet your criteria
that you know about and really evolving fire science
and what it is and or is it just in the past.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I have a minute and can I get two?
Okay, I have three minutes.
So that makes four total.
So, again, we'll all start with the no call.
Yes, no call.
There's so much asthma and we still have COVID
and all these other illnesses.
And can you pay attention, like I'm over here,
that we don't need to have coal coming through Berkeley,
Oakland, Richmond, anywhere.
We don't need coal.
We need to get away from fossil fuels.
Climate and fossil fuels is on Friday,
9 a.m. to noon, cmtf.org, join us.
And again, the encampment, that was a travesty.
Really, you should all be ashamed.
The trauma induced, I mean me, I wasn't, I'm not unhoused.
But you know, a lot of people are one paycheck away
or one social security check away from being unhoused.
And what are you gonna do?
And that's connected to one of the consent calendar items?
I am.
And I have my, don't take up my freaking time, okay?
I didn't authorize that.
I want my time back that she took.
So people need services, help.
They don't need to be enforced and traumatized.
They were supposed to be given tents.
They were supposed to not,
you were supposed to obey the court order,
which was violated.
Red Good just did whatever he wanted to do.
Just swept the whole street
and they're supposed to go back tomorrow.
You can call that off.
Why can't you just go there and help clean up
and get people visited once a week
to help them with whatever help they need.
Do you even know who lives there and what their needs are?
Yesica does, and a lot of people
that were down there this morning did.
They knew the people that needed ADA compliance,
and they tried to tell people, but they did not listen.
They were preventing folks from being up close
and personal to witness and record.
What kind of crap is that?
That sounds like fascism.
That's what's going on in Gaza.
The same thing.
They live in tents, there's no trash pickup.
You could remedy it by having dumpsters and regular pickups.
You could remedy it by having showers down there
once or twice a week.
There's lots of things you could do to help people,
but you don't care.
You know that.
You should try to make it look like you do,
because we care.
None of you were there.
I was there.
I've been there before.
How many times have you gone down there
and tried to talk to people, or fed people?
I went down there a couple weeks ago with a tray of food,
and gave it to folks.
That's what they need.
They need water, they need showers, they need services.
They need compassion and empathy.
They need love.
They are our community.
Free Palestine, free us all from the evil
and white supremacy that all of many people are holding.
F***.
Good evening, my name is Ariella Grinnett,
District 3 Berkeley resident.
And speaking on behalf of the Berkeley 350 hub tonight
about the consent calendar item number 19,
thank you so much for authoring and sponsoring the resolution
against coal in the East Bay.
It's really insane to think about mile-long trains
trundling through dense urban areas,
exposing hundreds of thousands of people to pollution.
It's also really insane to think about the greed
and the greed at this time of the corporations
trying to expand coal production and shipment.
We just can't burn any more fossil fuels
if we're gonna have a livable future.
And in particular in Berkeley,
we have so many very special recreational areas.
our neighbors live near the train tracks.
Thank you so much.
Parks and businesses, so.
Appreciate your time.
You'll have a terrible impact.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Glenn Turner.
I'm in district five
and on the Berkeley Behavioral Health Commission.
And I wanna thank you for sponsoring the no coal
because we know that's poison, poison, poison.
However, I'm deeply distressed
about the lack of a safety net.
I'm seeing more and more money going towards
prisons and jails and police activities
and not to the safety net that we are sadly lacking.
I'm very concerned that this winter
we're gonna have a disaster.
Where are the shelters?
Where are the people?
Is it okay to just throw them in jail
like they said it was okay?
And so Berkeley is just gonna arrest people
and throw them in jail.
You know what they do in jail?
There's no John George for the mentally ill.
They just go to jail.
They put violent people together to punish each other.
So jail is not the answer and how.
And a city-wide convention.
Thank you very much.
Your time's up.
Thanks.
Good evening, Madam Mayor, city council members.
Paula Laverde, the five.
I am commenting on item 20, the Renaissance part two.
not sure what happened to part one.
This is a referral.
It is a no action.
It's all talk and no action.
Just more burden to the city manager.
There's no accountability mechanism or deadline.
The referral doesn't specify when the city manager
must report back what the metrics of success by meet.
There's nothing there.
There's no meet, no meet.
A talk, a list of nothing, of nothing.
But hey, you're congratulating yourselves
because you can claim now that you've done something
during an election season.
So I just feel kind of upset that the city manager,
the city has a lot of work to do
and here's just another pile of stuff to look on
and maybe come up with a recommendation.
That's just a joke, thank you.
Thank you.
Hi everybody, my name is Donald Simon.
I'm the president and co-founder of Save Berkeley Shops.
Appreciate you providing some time here to speak.
I'm here to speak on the Renaissance measure.
Definitely applaud the investigation of those issues.
It obviously would have been a lot more preferable
if that investigation would have been done
before the circumstances that gave rise
to the current blight situation
that we're experiencing downtown and elsewhere.
But nevertheless, I do applaud the fact
that you are referring this to the city manager.
But I think it's important to realize,
oh, and I have one more minute from Mr. Alpert there.
So apologies, I should have said that at the outset.
there. This problem happened because the city encouraged up zoning without
having measures in place to deal with these very predictable outcomes. And
there are some things that we think you guys already should know what you can
do. We spent the last year talking to development attorneys into developers
to understand the dynamic that gives rise to these cold shells, these vacant
storefronts and just to touch on a couple items because you guys have to
deal with the whole city and don't expect you to have all these things in
mind. Stole projects, the best way to deal with that is don't issue a demolition
permit until the developer provides proof that they have the money and the
contractor lined up to proceed. Regarding warm shell, as Jordan Klein will tell you
and he acknowledged with us when we spoke with him recently, the warm shell
requirements are unenforceable to any project that uses the state density
bonus. It can be waived. The solution we've given you, which is our community
zoning proposal. It grants up zoning only to projects that agree to do the things that
are in the public interest, beginning with avoiding this downtown type ghost town but
also dealing with things like affordable housing, family housing, and beyond. The most important
thing, however, is let's learn from the mistakes of the past. Do not up zone any more neighborhoods
until you've got information back on this referral
and incorporated those solutions to.
Thank you very much.
Good evening, Anne Marks, I'm with PG&E.
I wanted to comment on a few things.
First of all the Renaissance work I think is a really interesting project
and has a lot of technical pieces and so I want to say how much I appreciate it
having an open conversation to figure out some of those pieces because
they can be very complicated in terms of how we think about undergrounding
um uh electrical distribution lines. Um second thing I want to talk about is the decarbonization
pilot project. I really hope that happens um and PG&E will be delighted to partner with you.
I think uh you know decarbonization electrification is the future and so whatever we can do to support
it we will. Um and then finally I wanted to um to thank um Councilmember Black if we're
bringing forward these um wildfire bills. Wildfire is obviously a huge concern of PG&E's. It is not
not just a humanitarian and environmental crisis,
but it threatens the viability of the utility itself
and our ability to do any construction
on new service projects like the ones
that we hope to do when we connect all those businesses
in downtown Berkeley.
Yeah, Anne.
Hi, my name is Megan Waksbras,
I'm a Berkeley resident in district one
and I'm speaking on item 19.
I want to thank the council for adopting this resolution,
opposing the handling of coal in Berkeley
and along the length of the East Bay.
I'm proud to say that there recently ended a rally
with about 200 people outside at university in Bonaire
of opponents of this coal terminal,
which is a blatant attempt to hijack our port
to prop up a failing coal industry.
I'm the parent of two children,
one attends camp and birthday parties at brushstrokes,
and the other plays soccer are only a few hundred feet
where these tracks and coal,
tracks where the coal trains are likely to pass.
If the terminal is built and the trains are routed
through Berkeley, as they likely will be,
these trains will cause my children to breathe
increased toxic dust and particulate matter,
and those effects will only be worse
for the children and family of West Oakland
who live in proximity to the terminal
where the terminal will actually be built.
This is an act of solidarity with those individuals
who have suffered from environmental jut.
And you just.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Whoo!
And thank you to all the supporters that are here.
Okay, hi.
I am Julie McCray I am the acting secretary of the district merchants association. We are a group of individuals who've been working together for the past 10 years to get our district up and running help support our businesses and I am not the best speaker so our fabulous treasurer wrote a nice letter and I'm going to read that. I'm writing as treasurer of the GUM and District Merchants Association and as someone who has been part of the district for several years now on the GDMA board.
I've watched the impact this district has had on Berkeley
and over the past four years,
I've seen the street fair develop
into an anchor for the district,
bringing neighbors, artists, and businesses together
in an incredibly positive way.
I'm asking you to pass item 15
because this investment will do something important.
It puts substantial capacity behind a young organization
that is already proving what it can do with very little,
very, very little, just people really.
the city manager's control. I
think maybe we need to do
something similar. I'm kind of
raising the alarm on this with
the shelter plus care program.
I don't know if any of this is
been brought to your attention.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
I'm a very good friend of mine.
formerly homeless, here there in camp,
has his housing through the Shelter Plus Care Program.
Actually, like very close to your guy's office.
Shelter Plus Care has not paid his portion of the rent this past month,
so now he's facing a three-day notice to vacate.
I would like to say that this is the first time this happened.
This is my friend who's a senior,
he's overcome addictions, incredible artist, just a great guy.
He informed me that this happened in the past.
For six months straight,
shelter plus care program didn't pay their portion of the rent and then it
was back paid all at once so I don't know who's administering shelter plus
care but the amount of stress when you've been on the streets to then
finally be housed by the city that claims to care for you and then can't
even please guys thank you yeah thanks we'll look into it thank you council
members my name is Aiden Hill I'm a candidate for Berkeley City Council
District 7 first happy birthday Mary she I want to thank you for your
supporting Berkeley Food Network. They have helped us tirelessly since
People's Park community members were displaced and I am grateful that you
have supported the work so thank you. City Council, City Manager who is not
listening. Waking people up violently at 6 a.m. is a human rights violation period.
It is cruel, it's inhumane, it has no place in this city. I'm speaking on the
consent calendar as a whole because these items are about governance, they're about
resilience and public safety. You have aging services, climate emergency
responses, and basic care infrastructure. But on 8th and Harrison, the city's
still choosing to manage an unsheltered crisis. Real quick, do I have three more
minutes? Thank you. I should have asked in the beginning, I apologize. But the city's
still choosing to manage an unsheltered crisis without a sanctioned encampment.
That's cruel. That's a policy failure.
I led the people's first sanctuary encampment model on the homeless commission at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
You worked with encampments from 10th Street to the RV encampments at the marina, to People's Park, the Hear Their encampment all across the city.
I made sure community voices were heard at the table.
I yielded my time so people living outside could speak for themselves.
A version of that framework was later passed by council members Kessarwani and Bartlett.
It's part of the public record, the people's first sanctuary encampment model, thank you.
So this is not an abstract idea, Berkeley already has a record, it already has a framework,
it already has a path to act, and I've been with the People's Park community members every
single step of the way through disinvestment, police brutality, ecological destruction,
displacement, and the long aftermath. I was there on day one, helping people move their
belongings into the roadway in, now University Homes. So when I speak about sanction encampments,
I'm not speaking from theory. I'm speaking from years of direct work with people who
were displaced, criminalized, and forced to survive your policy failures as the public.
If we can coordinate departments for climate resilience and senior services,
wildfire preparedness and transportation,
then we can coordinate a humane,
sanctioned encampment response with sanitation,
safety, services, and clear accountability.
This is a climate emergency,
and in a climate emergency,
shelter, sanitation, food access,
and public space are basic dignity.
They're not side issues.
They are the work you choose to do
when you take these seats of power.
Berkeley can't talk about resilience in one item and then tolerate displacement,
denial, and delay in another.
I'm asking this council to act on the record,
use the tools already developed in the city,
set the standard for human dignity.
If Berkeley is going to talk about renewal, let it be real.
Let's have a real renaissance,
not just with new buildings and new plans,
but a city that protects people before crisis happens,
not after harm is already done.
I look forward to working with the city government,
our staff, our commission members and community members
to make Berkeley's policy match the values it claims.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Hello, speaking on item 16.
Do you have an extra minute?
the city. So thank you. So.
It's something that we've
done a lot of times and that's
something that we've been
having a lot of times and
you know quantifiable in a
spreadsheet but it would have
been informative nonetheless.
It's insane to me that we're
still that we're you know
putting money towards all these
things. And we're like oh we
don't have any money we don't
calendar is worth funding. It would be a lot easier to fund all of them if you
weren't spending so much of the city's budget on an out-of-control police
department that violates court orders. Control police department that violates
court orders and eats up an inordinate percentage of the city's budget. And when
the city has to pay out for lawsuits due to the police department's actions. It
seems to always come out of the general fund rather than the police budget which
is where it should come from. I don't think you see the unhoused as our
neighbors. I don't because if you did you wouldn't be able to stomach having
them violently uprooted at 6 a.m. Sweeping homeless encampments doesn't
actually fix the squalor that they live in kessarwani you don't actually care
about this you don't care about them you're even crocodile tears that's all
they're not going to be any safer, you know, pushed out scattered to the four
wins. I work for BUSD, we have homeless students. Imagine if you were a family
living in an encampment and at 6 a.m. the police busted down your tent, threw
away your belongings, threw away your belongings. The police supposedly
care about violations of property rights but not if you're homeless. So cut the
police budget and we could probably afford to house our neighbors and pay
for all the other things we want to do and that would prevent crime instead of
always reacting. Good evening my name is Daria Ruble. I'm a resident of District 1
and a candidate for city council there. I want to thank Igor Chirigib for
authoring the no coal resolution and I encourage all of you to approve it.
Sounds like it's gonna happen but I'm just so proud to live in a city that
stands up for our environmental rights for the for an end to a fossil fuel
destruction of our planet and I think it's a wonderful resolution well worth
supporting. Thank you very much. Thank you Dario. Are you waiting in line for
the city. So I'm going to go.
I'm going to go ahead and put
the city of the city of the I'm.
I'm here to give comment on the
item on tear gas chemical weapons.
And I'm here to give comment on the
item on the toxic particulates are
produced by corporations or wielded
by our own cops against our
residents your cops flooded the
streets with tear gas in
retaliation for the BLM protests
to the point where people couldn't
open their windows. There is no
way to use it in a controlled way
or to prevent the spread of an
aerosol no coal no toxins in our
air no tear gas and folks who are
here for the cold please stay to
give comment on the item on tear
gas chemical weapons in favor of
Okay.
Yes, I applaud you on the consent item,
and I want to say as to the Renaissance item,
I think Paula made a really excellent point
about there are really good points here.
This is really laid out really well,
but there are no target dates
for it to return back to Council.
And I think Council should really think about sometimes
when we put these items, or you put these items forward,
that there really be some date set for to return,
because as you all know,
the city manager's office is piled up with referrals.
And as you all know,
you annually discuss all these referrals
and how are you gonna prioritize them,
but they all sound very important when they're first raised.
And so I think that's something that actually
those objectives are something you should keep in mind,
something should return so that the public knows and you all know you're
moving forward on your item and it isn't just lost a pile of items and I've
experienced that from commissions too. Thank you Carol. Okay we've got six
hands raised online so I'd like to take these and hopefully finish our consent
calendar before we take break. Okay the first speaker is Allison. Hi yes can you hear me? Yes okay
give me one second sorry I'm calling in from my phone okay my name is Allison I'm a PRW commissioner
but not speaking on behalf of the commission. I'm commenting on item number 12. First and foremost
I want to state that I support ferry service and I support authorization to apply for this
grant.
What I do not support is building large surface area parking lots on prime waterfront land.
Instead, we should build a multi-level parking structure in a less prime and more central
location with funding from Weta to serve its riders.
This grant program is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase clean transportation.
Construction of a 450 capacity large surface area parking lot is not in alignment with
that. Even if some portion are EV charging, this parking plan will not reduce emissions.
It incentivizes car use and affirms resilience on fossil fuels. Decisions to me today will
shape how residents experience the shoreline for generations. And my hope is that Berkeley
chooses a future that we prioritize in front of you and your time is up.
Thank you for your comment. Next is John Caner.
Council. Hello Mayor and Council. Happy birthday, Madam Mayor. I am speaking of number one, the grant application for Civic Center as for the community for cultural civic center thanking staff for doing that work and we need to keep that project moving and going. We're part of the grant, the application. Number two, want to thank Councilmember Trega and the city manager and staff for the Catenary lighting project. It's really going to make a big difference on Addison Street.
We are working with all the
property owners and I want to
thank the fire department for
working with us on that also.
And then on item 20, the
renaissance project, the
thanking councilmember Trago and
I think we all agree, we don't
want to have a repeat of what
happened on Center Street with
the boarded up buildings.
We are hoping they break ground
very soon.
We also don't want to repeat an
empty pit like on Harold Way.
to fill and activate our storefronts and all of this.
Thank you.
Bye.
Okay.
Next is Della Luna.
I guess I wanted to speak about something
that I'm noticing tonight.
There were two at least council members on the dais
that spoke about the encampments
and they weren't interrupted or redirected.
And then when the public attempts to speak about that issue,
we then get redirected.
So it's a little confusing also
since the city manager spoke about it,
it's not clear when the public would comment
on that city manager's report.
But I just wanted to follow up on some of those comments
made on the dais tonight.
Speaking about the status quo.
And I just wanted to say that you all are the status quo,
that you are condemning.
And then another council member brought up
in regards to the encampment about rats and rodents.
But again, the city of Berkeley was in charge
voting control, I believe, for the past few decades and the responsibility was only passed
to Alameda County July 1st, 2026. So again, those problems that you all were trying to
highlight about the encampments actually lead directly back to you. And I just wanted to
say that. Thank you.
Next is Jessie.
Yes. Hello. Thank you. I'd like to comment on 20. You know, the renaissance and revitalization
of our commercial districts, you know, this is what I've been trying to do on telegraph
out of the pandemic. And, you know, and I was attacked repeatedly by Peter Redoo, throwing
away my furniture, finding the business owner and the building owner that we were sitting
in front of, finding Ken Seragon, an icon in this town. He would find him for letting
us sit in front of his building Peter redo get rid of that guy off of this city staff
Missy she thank you. Okay. Next is a caller with a phone number ending in 385 press star
six to unmute person calling in with a phone number ending in 385 press star six to unmute
if you wanna give public comments.
All right, well, we'll move on.
Next is M. Jones.
Hello, I'm actually calling about something
that's not on the agenda, so am I in the right?
No, I'm sorry, we're currently only taking public comment
on consent calendar and information items only.
For the whole nighter for this.
So later on in this evening, after the action calendar,
there is a section of the agenda that also takes public comment for items not
list on the agenda. Okay. Thank you. All right well that that concludes the the
public comments for item people on those. Thank you. Is there a motion to
approve the consent council. Madam Mayor real quick could I have two other co-sponsors
which I had to get a chance to do on the wildfire item. Council member Humber and
council member O'Keefe for which I feel a wildfire emergency got so moved what
that changed now second thank you is there any with a cosponsors again O'Keefe
and Humber thank you sorry councilmember Bartlett did you have something you
wanted to add very quickly just everyone to mention incentive a prayer for the
law administration board it's dissolving it's been around for decades and it was
originally set up to deploy federal funds to loan to small businesses and
underrepresented communities like South Berkeley and West Berkeley and it was
really really great. I served on it years ago with Miss Hollander and it's sad to
see it go, but apparently no one showed up to join the Commission and they'd
meet for two years and so this is a call out to the community. I love your passion
on the issues, I support everything you believe in, but I wanted to do a step
further and joint commissions because we need we need people to be really
involved and it's important for this to go on and as a result we're losing this
board although I do want to recommend the group we're giving it to is good
working solutions but it is it is not us so thank you thank you okay so is there
any objection to approving the consent calendar with the changes that we've
We've made this evening.
Okay, the consent calendar has passed.
Thank you all very much.
Thank you all so much for coming
and for your comments this evening.
We are gonna take a 15 minute break
before our action calendar.
Thank you.
We're ready.
Yes.
Okay, all right.
Hi everyone.
Thank you so much for your patience.
All right.
Oh, okay.
You all are welcome to line up if you want to,
but just be aware it might be a minute.
So, because we're going to have Council Member Kesirwani
present her item, and then George,
if you also want to present the letter for 21B.
And then we have online Kathy from our,
who is our Interim Director of Police Accountability,
and then also online is Josh,
who is our Chair of the Police Accountability Board,
and they're both available to answer questions,
but if we could just bring them up, Mark,
just so I can,
just so you can have them at the ready,
that would be great.
Kathy Lee and, yeah, Josh Kayataya.
Perfect, thanks, Josh.
That was helpful to have you raise your hand.
And ODPA must be Kathy.
Wonderful, thank you both.
Okay, all right, so we are gonna go presentations,
questions for all parties involved,
and then we will take public comment
and then we will do council comments
and then any further deliberations.
So, okay, go ahead, council member.
Thank you very much, Madam Mayor.
I want to thank the members of the Public Safety Committee
who heard this item earlier this year
and the members of the public who came
and gave public comment at that meeting.
I wanna thank members of the public who are here tonight
and on Zoom to give public comment.
And I wanna thank our police chief, our deputy chief,
and our captain who are here to answer questions
and provide more detail on this item.
I wanna explain the circumstances
under which this ban was put in place.
I think only two of us on the dais today
were here at the time.
It was June, 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic
when no vaccine was available
and Black Lives Matter protests and marches were happening.
And there was concern about the respiratory impacts
of COVID-19 combined with tear gas, pepper spray or smoke.
Six years later, we now have a vaccine
that is widely available with high uptake.
I believe it is important for this council
to reconsider the limited use of these less lethal tools.
I believe the reason why is because they can keep
both civilians and police safer.
I wanna be clear about how narrow this is in practice.
Over more than 40 years, BPD's special response team
has used tear gas exactly once
during a barricaded subject incident in the early 2000s.
This item recognizes it's used to open by
the special response team
and only for barricaded subject operations.
High risk warrant service where a subject is suspect
is actively presenting a threat of death
or serious injury or hostage situations.
Those are the only potential uses.
Crowd control is expressly banned.
And this is intended to prevent the loss of life
in these low probability, high lethality events.
For instance, an armed suspect barricaded
or firing from a position of cover.
So our officers have every less lethal tool available
to avoid an armed confrontation and save as many lives
as possible.
Our police chief has told me that she is not aware
of any other agency with a ban on the use of tear gas
for an armed barricaded suspect,
which is the only use we are asking for tonight.
We are also asking the council to lift the moratorium
on smoke and OC spray for use only in violent
crowd situations to interrupt active violence,
create distance between opposing groups
or allow officers to respond to a specific act of violence
from a single individual, for example.
Where these tools can prevent injury or death
to civilians or officers, again,
by offering a less lethal tool.
All three tools remain governed
by policy 300 on use of force,
policy 303 on control devices and techniques
and policy 428 on first amendment assemblies.
These policies and state law under penal code section 13652
write real limits into how these tools may be used.
They cannot be deployed against individuals engaged
only in passive resistance and they cannot be used
solely because of a curfew violation of verbal threat
or non-compliance with a directive.
de-escalation must be attempted first.
That is expressly written into the use policy.
And use must be targeted at individuals engaged in violence,
never fired indiscriminately into a crowd.
I wanna thank the police accountability board
for their engagement on this item.
I understand that they are online and available.
And I wanna speak to the concerns that they raised
about the infrequency of past use
and the liability associated with chemical agents.
I'd suggest that infrequency actually supports
this narrow reinstatement rather than the status quo.
A tool used once in 40 years restricted
to a specially trained team is not a tool
that invites casual or frequent use.
And that is our department's history on this.
Those are the facts.
Okay, folks, you're gonna have an opportunity
to strengthen transparency beyond what existed
before 2020, and I'm gonna make that more clear
with an amendment to the resolution.
But what we have stated in this report
is that whenever a public summary of a deployment is posted,
the department must now notify the city manager
who will bring that information to both the council
and the police accountability board within 10 days.
I do want to acknowledge the fear that these tools
could be used outside the specific
and limited purposes proposed here.
I believe in police accountability
and we have real mechanisms to enforce it.
There are supervisor authorization requirements,
mandatory use of force reporting
and review by the chief of police
and the reporting and public posting requirements
I just described.
Those mechanisms exist precisely so that any use outside
our strict policies can be identified and addressed.
Thank you very much and I look forward to comments
questions from my colleagues. Thank you I'm so sorry I meant to say that the
supplemental will then be presented by council member Blackaby Soko and I can
say for the record I'm in full support of the supplemental amendments thank you.
Great thank you. I'll be brief I also wanted to thank the Department of
Leadership and the Police Accountability Board for working together on compromised
language that would bring more clarity to these very limited situations where
we are the department should have the ability to consider the use of tear gas
in these very limited circumstances. My supplemental tries to add that clarity
to the language of the resolution so we've I'm just going to kind of make
some I'll show you those changes we sort of eliminated the other potential high
risk situations it's just at suspect shooting at officers during warrant
service hostage rescue situations and armed barricaded suspects we made that
more clear. And then in the resolution itself, this is the language that had
jointly been worked out with the department and with the Police
Accountability Board, again thanks to the Chair and Vice Chair of the
Accountability Board, the Director of the ODPA and the Department leadership. So this
is the language that they had kind of worked on together that says be it for
the resolve that tear gas shall only be used upon approval by the instant
commander, special response team. Here are the three very specific situations
when it could be authorized if feasible before it's deployed issuing verbal
warnings taking steps to ensure that suspects in a controlled contained area
and then we added in we removed this sort of other tear gas piece because
we've made it clear up here and then continue to define the circumstances for
smoke and OC spray directed to report on the use of tear gases defined in policy
300 and policy 428 and then directed to update policies as necessary to reflect these new requirements. So this is
really just codifying
Your agreement that had been had been reached between the PAB and the department putting it in the resolution
So it's here for our consideration and that's I think summary. Thank you very much
Yes, and I do really appreciate our police department working with our police accountability board
I think that's exactly the kind of partnership that I know the council really wants to see
so thank you all and thank you online those those of you that are online okay
George would you like to come up I'm giving George five minutes to speak on
this to present his letter thank you I'm appearing on behalf of the and at the
request of our chair pastor Dwayne Phillips who's apologize he couldn't be
here tonight this is something that we voted on six months ago so yeah some
things have changed. You've passed some of the other items we were talking about. I want
to lay the groundwork for why good policies, well-attended policies, and oversight are
not enough and why we just don't want to go there with these chemical weapons. So our
recommendation is, number one, retain the existing 2020 bans on chemical weapons, CS
and OC, tear gas and pepper spray.
Request the city manager,
and this is our positive suggestion,
engage in academic institutions such as UC Berkeley,
UCSF or Stanford to study the health impacts of tear gas
and other chemical weapons, potential short, sorry,
potential short and long-term impacts on vulnerable
populations and possible alternatives to the use
of chemical weapons that provide officer safety,
Suspect, safety and safety to the general public.
So this was all voted on and supported
by the full commission.
So speaking directly to tear gas, pepper spray and smoke,
the commission recommends that council retain the ban
on CS and moratorium on OC and smoke for four reasons.
One, CS and OC are dangerous weapons
that are properly considered less lethal,
not non-lethal and we should use the correct language.
They can kill people.
CS and OC are particularly dangerous
to the health of people with disabilities,
especially respiratory or environmental sensitivities
and also those suffering from mental or behavioral disorders.
To go into a little depth on, sorry.
A little bit of science.
Over decades of research, scientists
have shown a strong potential harm from CSUs, tear gas,
in policing.
An Oakland Police Department policy
warns chemical agents can produce serious injuries
or even death.
And officers are to use the minimum amount
of chemical agent needed to obtain compliance.
Further, the use of hand-thrown chemical agents or pyrotechnic
gas dispersal devices may present a risk of permanent loss of hearing or serious bodily
injury from shrapnel.
Where's my clock?
You've got two minutes left and a little more.
The tear gas is an incorrect term.
It makes the CS seem trivial.
It's actually not even a gas, but an aerosol made up of ultra-fine particles or UFPs.
Aerosols are dangerous to lung health because according to the U.S. National Library of
of medicine, the small size of UFPs
allows them to penetrate deep into the respiratory tract,
causing effects from mild respiratory issues
to lung cancer, neurological diseases, and so forth.
They link in an ultrafine particulate matter exposure
to increased hospital admissions and premature deaths
among vulnerable populations.
want to jump to the issue about the effect of just having
these and relying on policies.
In December 6 of 2014, BPT drove a largely peaceful march
almost a mile down telegraph from the UC campus
to the Oakland City line.
The direction from BPT command to the officers
was get them running.
This is documented.
To implement the direction, officers shot less lethal projectiles into the crowd,
hit marches with batons, and launched some 50 cans of CS gas, such a large amount
that they nearly exhausted their supply.
I'm not making any aspersions against the department or the officers.
It's just human nature.
When you have a tool, you're going to use it.
And you're going to find ways to use it that are not necessarily within.
But it's inaccurate to say we have a great record.
There's real big problems with it.
And it was in 1991 with the People's Park Police Action.
And they developed a rule.
It said no crowd could be forced to move faster
than they were reasonably capable of moving, which
is exactly what they did in 2014.
The Physicians for Human Rights.
Sir.
OK, well, call me back if you have any questions.
if you were to talk about thanks.
I appreciate it.
Folks, they've already submitted a letter,
so we also have the letter, thank you.
Okay, the letter is in the packet
and you're welcome to take a look at it.
Okay, so does anyone have,
I'm not giving them five minutes right now
because they're here to answer questions.
So are there any questions from any of the council members?
Yes, council member Bartlett.
Thank you, Madam Mayor, and I thank you because we want to bring this forward.
And thank you for your your work with the PAB and your alternatives.
I guess there's a couple of operational questions historically for the for the team here.
I guess, you know, since the ban in 2020,
can you think of an incident where the lack of tear gas resulted in injury
or some sort of harm or prevent and safe resolution?
or rather were for us to use higher levels of force.
Thank you for your question.
So tear gas, as we've talked about,
is intended for high-risk incidents
that occur infrequently and can have serious consequences.
We've had three incidents over the past couple of years
that could have resulted in the need for tear gas
had we had it.
The first one, we had an incident in May of 2024
where our special response team served a search
warrant on a residence.
The individual inside was believed to be armed
and refused to come out.
The team contained the area and attempted negotiations
for more than an hour.
Negotiations were unsuccessful, but the team ultimately
used other tactics and were able to bring the person out safely
without further incident.
Had those tactics failed, tear gas
could have been considered as a next option.
Its use would not have been automatic.
the tactical commander would still have needed
to evaluate the threat, the urgency of the situation,
the people who might be exposed,
and the physical environment as to whether or not
it would be reasonable or proportional.
We also had on June 11th of 2024,
SRT served a high risk warrant for a shooting suspect
who was believed to still be armed
when officers attempted a contact with the suspect
both over the phone and over a loudspeaker,
the suspect did not respond or acknowledge officers.
SRT utilized other tactics,
and after 30 minutes the suspect
and other occupants exited.
While this resolved peacefully,
tear gas would have likely been
one of the next tools considered.
Ultimately, a firearm was recovered
from inside that residence.
Folks, come on, you will have time for your public comment.
Please don't interrupt, please go.
Thank you, Mayor.
On April 13, 2025, VPD responded to a domestic dispute
where a female was heard saying that she couldn't breathe.
Officers attempted to contain the occupants
of the apartment who refused to exit the structure.
XRT was activated and requested to the scene.
Prior to their arrival, an officer-involved shooting
took place, and the suspect was taken into custody,
and the other person was recovered safely.
If SRT had arrived, they would have
had to manage an armed suspect inside
with a potential hostage, for a variety of reasons,
tear gas would have been considered as a tool
to help safely resolve that situation.
OK.
Thank you, Captain.
And I guess another question is, in terms
of these situations where a person is barricaded, right?
And I guess you alluded to what was done,
but what are some alternatives we have
when someone is barricaded?
So when someone is barricaded,
typically we have a number of options.
We'll contain the scene, attempt to negotiate
if the circumstances allow for that.
Understand that the circumstances
may not always allow for that.
If there are acts of violence that are occurring,
if a suspect is shooting at the moment
that officers are there,
they may not have the option
to contain the scene or attempt negotiations.
Aside from that, our tactics are very, very limited,
besides actually going into a structure
where we're going to reduce the distance between the officers
and the suspect, and go into an environment where we don't
have control of the inside of an environment
if we're going into a house.
And you're talking about an armed barricade.
And so the level of danger is heightened,
both for the suspect and the responding officers,
and the likelihood of an armed violent confrontation increases.
OK, and then how would you, in that situation,
how would you deploy the CS into the barricaded environment?
I guess, in my memory, the tear gas incident
that we engaged on many years ago before the 2020
was the marches right with the flood of the streets on Shattuck.
And then there's the micro use where you spray in someone's face to disarm them.
But what is the delivery mechanism for, you know, inside a barricaded room or apartment
through a door?
Sure.
So typically, that would be a hand thrown device.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, our parliamentarian is sort of working.
councilmember Taplin is next and then councilmember Humbert. Thank you very
much and thanks everyone for being here. So during negotiations with an
armed barricade subject could you walk us through the steps that you take
during those negotiations and at what point at what point do you realize or
think that it's gonna escalate beyond a acceptable threshold? So we have
specially trained personnel that go to schools designed to train our
negotiator element. So our folks that have extensive training in that and they
would, those specially trained personnel, a group of them would work as a team to
try to identify what the key issues are and how we can safely resolve an issue.
If they're able to establish communication with someone who's
barricaded, they would work with them to identify what it would take to
to help get them to come out,
identify what potential concerns they might have
and how we could safely resolve the situation.
And then through those efforts,
set up a plan for that suspect to safely come out
and be taken into custody.
Unfortunately, that doesn't always work out that way.
And so if the negotiators are getting information
that things are escalating or that their efforts are not
successful after a reasonable amount of time
and evaluating other risks or potential risks,
the instant commander would have to weigh a wide range
of circumstances to make a decision about what
the next most appropriate tactic would be.
Things they consider are the threat and necessity.
So is there a need to act immediately
or is there time to or are there other tactics
that haven't been applied that might help resolve
the situation.
Identify in terms of their calculus, persons at risk,
both inside the building itself and surrounding the building
as well as risks that the situation may pose to officers,
other involved community members, the suspect themselves.
Alternative tactical operation options,
so identifying what other options they might have
and what is most likely to resolve this situation
peacefully and with minimal or no harm to anybody involved.
Environmental factors in terms of if they're weighing
the use of tear gas and how that environmental factors
would impact how effective that tool would be
in resolving the situation.
Support resources for mitigation, so ensuring that we have
Berkeley Fire Department and other resources available
to address any potential harms associated with the situation.
And finally, a risk benefit analysis,
determining whether the proposed deployment
is likely to improve the situation
or create additional risk.
Thank you very much.
Council Member Humbert and then Council Member Blackby.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
And I really just have one question.
We heard earlier, an assertion that the 2014 Marchdown
Telegraph Avenue from Berkeley through to Oakland was peaceful.
And I don't remember that it was peaceful.
My recollection was that there was significant violence involved
in that march.
Can you address that?
This would be directed to BPD.
Yeah, we would not classify it as peaceful.
There were dispersal orders given.
There were acts of violence where individuals
had to be rescued using a rescue task force
with fire department personnel.
There was extreme vandalism.
So to that end, I would not classify it as peaceful.
Were there instances of Molotov Cocktail syndrome?
Council member, can you give me a second?
Folks, please, come on.
We need to be able to hear the answers to these questions.
I would really like to get to the public comments.
So if we could let this part finish,
we will get to you and you will have time
to give your comments then.
Thank you.
Yes, there were also multiple cocktails,
as well as bricks, various other items thrown at officers.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
That's what I recall from the reporting of that night.
Thank you.
Council member Blackaby.
Thanks, Madam Mayor.
Just to get to the nub of it,
I think we know tear gas is very harmful, dangerous,
when misused.
That's true.
But I think the whole question of this
is, how does it materially change the risk?
Because we're talking about safety of officers, of suspects,
and to others in the harm's way when
you're in these sort of barricaded situations
or hostage situations.
When you have the possibility of using tear gas
or when you don't, could you talk
about how the risks change and if you have to confront a suspect with tear
gas or without, how does that change the situation potentially make it safer
again for the suspect as well as for the officer as well as for other people who
might be in that same proximity. You talk about a little just about those
trade offs and how this makes it safer. Sure. I think I'll start and then I'll
pass it to Captain Oakes. Generally the individual who we are attempting to
communicate with has a say in what's happening.
And where we have an armed individual
who is refusing to come out,
or for whatever reason is committed to doing harm,
it is a viable tool that we could use
that we can get into very small spaces
to encourage the individual to cooperate
with whatever the directives are.
So absent that, our officers are forced to
potentially have a lethal encounter with an individual that we may not have otherwise
had we had the tool?
Yeah, so basically this tool impacts the environment and makes, gives us the option potentially
of creating an environment that the suspect wants to come out of, right, and we're in,
the suspect has control of a, if they're barricaded in a structure, they have control of everything
inside that structure.
We may be able to contain it, but we have no control over what's going on in there.
One way to influence a suspect's behavior to get them to come out on our terms is to
use this tool.
When they come out, we have the benefit of distance and we're able to dictate some of
the terms of how that person is going to come out or where they're going to come out from
a distance, from a position of cover, in a way that reduces the risk of all involved.
With that greater distance, provides more time in decision making, time to give direction
to the suspect, and then time to be able to safely bring that person into custody.
Conversely, if we don't have that tool, we have to go into the house, we're now compacting
that distance, reducing the amount of time, and entering into an environment that's controlled
by the suspect, greatly increasing the likelihood of a violent encounter in these kinds of circumstances.
So this tool reduces the potential for a violent encounter
and results in a more likely safe outcome
for everybody involved.
Again, this is a tool that's not designed
to be used, except for as outlined in this policy,
under the most serious circumstances
where, as police officers, we don't
have the option of leaving.
We have to resolve these situations.
we are required to resolve these situations.
So that's the whole story.
And in those situations, if you proceed into a situation
where you have a confrontation and unbalanced,
officers decide, hey, we need to basically resolve this.
We can't wait this out any farther.
There are other issues here.
There are other people potentially
that are being held against their will.
We need to move to sort of close the situation down.
In that case, they are relying on their sidearms,
their lethal.
I mean, that's sort of the range that you head
into at that point when you're trying to defend yourself
in that situation.
And so it feels like a lot of our policies, use of force
and others, are trying to avoid at all costs
having to resort to that kind of confrontation,
that kind of conflict.
And this is another tool that sort of is reducing
the necessity of having to go to,
I mean, having to use lethal weapons, lethal force,
these sorts of situations. Sorry, can we just keep it on questions if we can as
much as possible? Thank you. Chief, can you talk to, and I know you can't
predict the future, but speak a little bit to kind of what you would forecast
in terms of infrequency of future use. I mean, looking at these situations, we
just identified of maybe three situations over the past number of years
where maybe it would have been in the mix, but maybe would not have. Can you
you talk a little bit about what you anticipate,
again, we're not holding you to a number,
but just to give people a sense of the frequency
that we're talking about here.
Right, I mean if you look at historically
how long we've had access to this tool
and how long the ban's been in place,
it's a very infrequently used tool.
We look at, around the region,
we see a handful of times a year
where these tools are used.
We can't predict the future,
and as the deputy chief and the captain shared,
we don't have complete say
and how these incidents unfold,
the other individuals involved did
and have a lot of say about where we end up.
And so I don't anticipate it significantly increased uses
beyond what we've seen for the last 40 plus years.
And you know, based on the very limited situation
that we're looking at in the return to this language.
Okay, last question, can you remind us,
what would the process be in the moment
for when it's actually authorized?
How does that decision making process work?
Who's authorized to sort of make that call?
So that would be the incident commander who's on scene
and working with the tactical operators.
Okay, great, thank you.
Thank you, Council Member O'Keefe, do you have questions?
Yes, thank you.
My question, I had this question earlier,
but I'm gonna ask it anyway,
even though I think the new language
from Council Member Blackaby actually addresses
most of my concern.
I think the issue is we want to allow this,
or we're asking to allow this for a very specific,
hostage, violent, barricaded situation.
And we very much do not want to allow this for crowd control.
And so the thing we want to make really clear,
as clear as possible, is, is there
any hypothetical scenario where the two things could be,
those two principles could be in opposition?
And so my question is, is there anything you can imagine
where, let's say, somebody has taken a hostage in a crowd,
and the crowd is maybe expressing
First Amendment, having some First Amendment activity,
or something like that?
Can you speak to that possible next?
I know it's unlikely, but I think
this is the main concern that a lot of us have up here.
So if you could help us understand,
where is that boundary between the situation
that this is what we're trying to allow it for and other situations where we don't.
So I think the key distinction is why tear gas is being used and who it's directed at.
So to that end, in the situation that you described, it can't be used to disperse or
move or for crowd control. So just because the crowd is there, there's disorderly behavior
that would be a good idea.
So if there was a more isolated
criminal conduct that wouldn't
justify it in itself.
So if we're talking about a
clearly defined credit critical
incident that is near crowd we
would still have to go through
our checks of when can it be
used so we have a barricaded
suspect or hospice hostage
be considered as a tactic directed at the specific and dangerous person not
the crowd. So the presence of uninvolved people would obviously heavily away in
that decision. Okay thank you and I think there is it does say that there's
verbal warnings etc like people wouldn't be caught unaware that this was
happening is that is that right okay thank you and I know that's kind of a
really specific thing but I think that's where we need to really like get as much
clarity as possible when those two things are potentially in conflict. If I
I'd just add something, please.
So in those circumstances,
if we're dealing with an armed barricaded suspect,
then there's gonna be danger,
and we're gonna wanna get the crowd away from that.
And so the likelihood of those two events overlapping is,
I don't see that happening.
Beyond that, then, if you look at the proposed language,
there's language that specifically says,
reasonable steps to ensure the suspect
is in a controlled, contained area,
and that non-suspects provide the opportunity
to leave the area.
So between that and the specific language
that addresses not use for crowd control,
I think the language is pretty tight
and it's very clear in terms of what the expectations are.
Thank you, yeah, I agree.
I agree, it's a big improvement anyway.
My other question has to do with mutual aid.
I believe, I remember this coming up,
I think in the Public Safety Committee meeting
that this, our current tear gas policy being out of step
that we're trying to do is to
make sure that we're not in a
good position. So I think that's
a good question. And I think
that's a good question. And I
think that's a good question.
And I think that's a good
question. And I think that's a
good question. And I think that's
a good question. And I think
that's a good question. And I
think that's a good question.
And I think that's a good
question. And I think that's a
good question. And I think that's
a good question. And I think
that's a good question. And I
think that's a good question.
And I think that's a good question.
And I think that's a good question.
And I think that's a good question.
And I think that's a good question.
that we're trying to do is
actually managing the crowd
leaving the direct crowd
management to the Berkeley
Police Department. And our
policies applying. Pursuant to
a before 81 another
jurisdiction can't come in and
use one of these tools in a
manner that is not prescribed
by local government.
In our local policies as we've
written them correct. Thank you
very much. My questions thank
you any other questions from my
I don't know if this is for the police department or for the city manager, but can you define
how homeless encampment abatements are defined? Is this a, if there are multiple tents or
one tent, how does that affect the definition of the term? As far as the use of tear gas?
Yes, in the use of tear gas, but in this recommendation, that tear gas should not be used during homeless
and homeless encampment abatements.
Do you have a definition of homeless encampment abatements?
Yes, so there's a citywide response
to an identified homeless encampment
and an abatement is set where you have partners
from working via neighborhood services.
So you have Public Works, Parks and Rec,
and Brooklyn Police Department out there.
That's how we would identify
a homeless encampment abatement process.
If you had an individual who was barricaded in a tent
that happened to live in a tent
that was a very good idea. So if
the case was not a violation of
the law that the case was not a
barricade situation occurred.
That fit one of the other
criteria is and it was not part
of a homeless encampment of
tool for that kind of response. So just to clarify, so as long as the the
person in sleeping outside is not being forced to move out of that, like if the
goal is not to get that person to move. That's correct, so tear gas would not be
used as a tool to get someone to vacate an area. Thank you. Thank you very much. I
I just thought of a question.
How are we considering people with disabilities
when we're giving verbal warnings,
particularly people in the deaf community?
Yes, a great question.
And it's one of the really important jobs
of our negotiator team.
So as we begin an operation like this,
we have a whole team of detectives and negotiators
who are working to try to obtain information.
Now what do we know about this address?
Is this something, you know,
what do we know about the individual we're in contact with?
And so, yes, we do phone calls
and we do phone calls and we
use both LRAD, so very loud
speakers, we do phone calls into
the residents, so we do the
research to get local phone
numbers and try to get cell phone
numbers and do a couple of
different methods of
communicating before we move into
that, so text 9-1, texting
situation, yes, and we will try
to throw a phone in with texting
capabilities and things like
that, so, yes, there's a lot of
attempts made to engage that
individual and gather information
questions and so we will now take public comment
on items 21 A and 21 B.
So if you have any comments, please come on up.
And if you are getting a minute CDT from someone else,
please try and organize that beforehand
so we can move through our process
and I'll invite our next speaker up.
And as always, you're welcome to encourage,
find, to clap and applaud for folks, but please don't boo.
It's disrespectful.
Russell, come on.
All right, thank you, everyone.
Go ahead.
Hello, my name is Abbott.
I live in District 6, and I'm here to support 21B
and ask that 21A, the ban on chemical weapons, is not lifted.
My intuition tells me that when we lift a ban on chemical
weapons, we're going to be using more violent weapons
against our neighbors here, which just does not seem right.
But I do respect the nuance and complexity of the situation.
I understand that many of you who
may want to lift the ban to see that there are complicated times
where we may need to use these chemical weapons.
Thus, as a student at UC Berkeley,
I asked us to support the idea that knowledge
is a prerequisite to just action.
Therefore, I think 21B should come before 21A
because it allows academic institutions
to understand the effects of chemical weapons
before we lift this ban.
Even if you can make a clear, concise argument in the future
that the ban must be lifted after the study is done,
I think understanding the harm that can be done
more deeply and how it will affect the community
is very important and please consider the UCs
able to do this study and like help.
Say thank you.
Thank you.
Good evening, Madam Mayor and Council.
My name is Jason Martins.
I don't think I really have anything to say
that you haven't heard already.
I'm just here to be another voice of dissent.
Chemical weapons are banned by 193 countries,
including tear gas,
but we're considering allowing them in Berkeley,
and that is just really deeply shocking to my conscience,
and I think it's a very immoral thing for us to do.
Thank you.
Thanks, Jason.
Greetings, good evening.
My name's Leah Martins, I'm a local parent of three,
I'm a resident of District Three.
I'm also the pastor of Haven Berkeley Faith Community
here in Berkeley.
And I'm here to support the proposal
from the Peace and Justice Commission.
I encourage you to retain the ban on chemical weapons.
Last January, I had the opportunity
to travel to Minneapolis as part of a coalition
of hundreds of faith leaders
who traveled from around the country.
We were there to learn, bear witness,
participate in the citywide general strike
in the day of action during the height
of the ice surge in Minnesota.
And on the day of the general strike,
our small group had multiple encounters
tear gas being deployed throughout residential neighborhoods in
Minneapolis. At one point I actually got out of a car that was probably about
half a block from where the tear gas had just been deployed and I was so
overwhelmed by the intensity of the experience and its effect on my body
that lasted for several hours I was amazed. Incidentally within 24 hours of experience.
Thank you. Sorry, Heidi what's dead? Thank you very much. I'm sad you didn't bring a
The song for us today.
Thank you.
There is a mic coming your way.
Thank you for your patience.
I'm Nicholas Elizabeth Baby.
I'm very concerned.
I'm Nicholas Elizabeth Baby.
He's turning it up so that we can hear you better.
Give it up for Keith.
Thanks Keith.
Okay.
I'm Nicholas Elizabeth Baby.
I'm very concerned about the use of chemical weapons
by the police.
I support 21B, there needs to be a full understanding
of the conflict that caused, especially to disabled people.
As someone who has multiple disabilities,
I don't attend protests generally
because I'm afraid of the use of chemical weapons.
I know that they're not,
that this policy would not allow use of tear gas
for crowd control.
But if the police have a tool,
they're going to be tempted to use it.
And something that they, if they feel threatened,
they might decide that there's imminent risk of injury
or death when there really isn't.
Additionally, a specific example of domestic violence,
I've experienced domestic violence and being tear gassed
along with my assailant would not have helped.
Thank you, come on up.
Our next speaker.
Hello, I'm Sally Nelson, District 4, happy birthday.
Why are we even thinking about allowing the spraying
of harsh chemicals on people?
Along with the harsh chemicals is enough lead
that is likely 80 times the amount considered to be normal.
Aren't the laws and ordinances passed in Berkeley
supposed to be in line with the US Constitution,
including the First Amendment.
I urge you to vote no on removing the ban
on the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and smoke.
And while there was some comment
that there had been no tear gas sprayed
on any peaceful protestors,
my memory is that sometime since the year 2020,
that the students at UC Berkeley
that were sitting, UC Davis were sitting peacefully
in protest and they got pepper sprayed,
or pepper sprayed tear gas, I'm not sure.
But that's just something to consider.
Thank you.
That it's been happening.
Okay, thank you, and thank you for voting no.
Thanks.
I have two extra minutes to raise your hand.
There was somebody else.
I see one minute.
Well, can someone else give me a minute?
Oh, a second person in the back.
Okay.
So in 2020, I made the friendly amendment
to ban outright tear gas.
It was a unanimous, do you know what that word means?
Unanimous to ban it.
It wasn't just because it was COVID,
although that was why it was on the agenda.
But when I said let's ban it outright,
it was because everyone in the room wanted to ban it.
Who wants to ban tear gas and pepper spray?
Most of the people in this room want to.
I can recall the last time most of the people
wanted to then too.
So we have COVID, people have COPD, people have asthma,
and it's kind of hypocritical if you're
in support of not having coal and the dust
and the particulate matter come through Berkeley,
yet you want this particulate matter to be in our lungs too?
What sense does that make?
Absolutely none.
We don't need that.
People are immune compromised.
There's all kinds of reasons.
And once that gets into the air,
You cannot control it even if it is a contained area.
It seeps through the walls.
It seeps to, and it gets on people's clothing.
This is not okay.
It was a unanimous vote.
That I understood, and when Wayne Grove tried to ask
the chief, what did he say?
She asked, what would you use if you didn't have tear gas?
I guess we'll have to shoot people.
that's what he said. They're armed and I don't mean these kind of armed. They
have weapons. They don't need tear gas. They shouldn't be afraid. That's their
job. They signed up to do that. They don't need tear gas. We don't need to be
harmed in any more ways that you are harming us. It's harm just to come to
this council meeting and listen to all the bullshit that goes on.
To witness what I witnessed this morning was very traumatic.
Not just for me,
but for everyone that was there.
You have no idea, and that's sad.
You need to ban, keep the ban enforced.
They don't need tear gas,
they don't need any more weapons.
They need to cut the budget and-
the city council. Thank you. I'm.
or acknowledging and upholding the ethical duty to serve the diverse demographic of all
Burke-Hellings, which ironically you should have been made aware of during your mandatory
ethics training as required for every elected. The history of discrimination specifically
when it comes to policing in America and in Berkeley specifically requires you to make
a responsible and ethical decision to not place the discretion of the use of such harmful
weapons in the hands of our police. It is additionally concerning following the future
of our city's leadership to allow our Berkeley Voted Police Accountability Board to maintain
autonomy to do their work in completing vital investigations around accountability and justice
for our citizens.
Thanks Mari, thanks for your comment.
So this is just a word about how CES has been used in the past.
Acron dinosaurs roamed the Earth, you know, there was this war in a place called Vietnam.
People would take shelter from bombing.
would be herded sometimes into enclosed spaces.
Sia's gas would then be pumped in.
Everybody died.
Thank you.
I had a minute, and I thought I had a second minute,
but I didn't see the hand.
They might have left.
Oh, there's a second minute.
Sorry.
This was one.
This was the second.
Two.
Oh, thank you.
Two.
We have a maximum of two extra, correct?
You can have three.
have up to three because I have a song to sing and I don't sing very well. This
person is gonna give up their their comment for you so thank you person in
the green sweatshirt thank you. My name is Moni Law, Cal of M, peace activist
since the sixth grade and I'm here to speak up for the first amendment in our
constitutional right to protest without being clubbed, gassed, or shot at with
bullets, probably bullets.
♪ Ella Baker was a freedom fighter ♪
♪ And she taught us how to fight ♪
♪ We're gonna fight all day and night ♪
♪ Until we get it right ♪
♪ What side are you on good people ♪
♪ What side are you on ♪
♪ I'm on the freedom side ♪
♪ What side are you on good people ♪
♪ What side are you on? ♪
♪ Harriet Tubman was a freedom fighter ♪
♪ And she taught me how to fight ♪
♪ We're gonna fight all day and night ♪
♪ Until we get it right ♪
Now to my speech.
Tear gas is a chemical agent that harms people's health,
many permanently and disproportionately black people.
As I exercise, and I've learned this in law school
and practiced law for 25 years,
we do have this thing called the U.S. Constitution.
And in the public square, we have the right to protest.
99% of people were protesting peacefully
in December of 2014, as was I.
Despite my peaceful protest under the student guide,
I'm a student of Gandhi and Dr. King
and other peace activists, I was clubbed in the back.
Flash bangs thrown at my feet.
Cal students who came up to me had been clubbed.
People were later gassed that night,
and we filed a federal court class action lawsuit.
The name of that case, you can look it up,
is Law versus the City of Berkeley.
I did not ask to be the name party as the plaintiff
and someone else settled and law came up
as Law versus the City of Berkeley.
December 6, 2014, someone spoke, I think,
erroneously and maybe they weren't there.
It was a peaceful march, starting at UC Berkeley,
going down the street, going downtown,
having a die-in downtown, very peaceful, very creative.
When the police made all the mistakes that they did,
and mind you, they made many and they admitted,
Berkeley, California Highway Patrol,
Oakland, Alameda County Sheriff and Pleasanton
were our mutual aid.
They brought the gas, large parts of it,
and we used so much, they don't know how much in discovery.
they used up all the tear gas there was
in the public streets of Berkeley.
They pushed students mainly who were on the street
near the campus, going home to their dorm, back to Oakland.
They clubbed people, they clubbed an elder,
they shot in the knee a tourist,
and they clubbed a minister.
When you escalate violence,
It is only going to get worse with tear gas
filling the skies and the streets.
So please don't vote for this.
Please do the right thing
and don't institute an additional weapon
that will harm people more than it will help them.
Thank you.
Thank you, Moni.
Council members, I was also there
and I noticed that, oh, I'm sorry,
I have a couple of minutes.
I'd like to get a minute.
And I had a minute there.
And I got on the roll.
Somebody help me out.
Well, what I want to do is I want to correct a little bit of history because I see you
shaking your head like, no, there was violence, there was violence and I'll tell you how that
happened.
We at Cop Watch, we did a really deep dive into that, the incidents of that night, primarily
because I got tear gassed as well and pushed down into Oakland and I was not violent.
I'll tell you what happened, earlier in the night, see, and this is endemic, this is indicative
of what are some of our fears related to this art.
Earlier in the day, people had been marching around,
and they stopped in front of the public safety building.
An elderly man, I can show you the video, was not,
the officers were trying to move the crowd back,
and some officer, bam, they hit an old man,
he fell over his dog, he hit the ground.
The crowd looked like, what the hell?
Why are you beating up old people?
And so that escalated things.
something was thrown.
Another something, another bottle was thrown.
Officers escalated.
The whole situation escalated.
There was violence.
Then when the police started,
what can I say, clubbing and pushing and so forth,
things escalated.
And so that marched around and so forth.
It got to Bancroft and Telegraph and they stood there.
That's where I joined the march.
That's where I caught up with it.
It was a completely different protest
because people were there for like half hour or an hour.
And what happened is the helicopter overhead
started to attract Cal students.
It was a completely different crowd.
And that crowd was like sitting on the ground
because they were kettled in a few blocks on telegraph.
People were laying around and waiting
and the cops were waiting and so forth.
And then when the cops finally got it together to like,
move, move, that's when they started deploying tear gas.
And that's when the fog of the tear gas was so thick
and then they started shooting munitions.
And it was gross.
And none of the cops have ever been held accountable for that.
There was never any honest reflection about that.
I do defy you to find any indication of Molotov.
That, really, I'd love to see if you have that,
because we looked for it.
But what I also want to tell you is this,
that BPD right now has a problem
of not following its own policies,
as evidenced by this very morning.
Well, we were trying to,
and it wasn't even a bit of policy,
is about the constitutional right to observe.
We have that right.
And this department doesn't agree
with that part of the constitution.
Because over and over again,
we're being prevented from watching.
Now that may seem like a small thing to you,
I think it's a big thing.
But it is an indicator that if we cannot get
that small thing from them,
if we don't have consequences
or an accountability structure that actually works.
What I see here sometimes is you guys kind of create
this fiction of like, well, we'll tell the police to do it
and they'll do it.
And they'll come here and tell you they did it.
But those of us who are out there actually watching
for years, for decades, there's a very different story
where time and time again,
these folks are not held accountable.
They come and tell you some happy story
and you guys seem to enjoy that for the most part
because that fits your narrative.
But I don't see you guys out there on the streets
actually seeing what's actually happening.
And if you did, I don't know that you could
actually hold them accountable.
You know, we could go back to the drug,
let's go back to when Cary Kent was stealing drugs
from the drug, from the drug rocker.
We didn't hold him accountable.
Scandal after scandal with these folks.
And now you wanna put more chemical weapons in their hands?
And they're gonna come and they're gonna come
to our protest and say somebody threw a bottle
and they're gonna pepper spray folks,
and you're gonna believe their story.
So that's why we're here.
We're trying to get you to understand
there's a completely different reality
that you're not engaging with.
If you'd like to,
fuck off.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello, my name is Joza Nahuaq.
I'm a UC Berkeley student
and a Chicana and Native American activist.
I participate in demonstrations
because I believe protest is an important part
of our democracy.
This isn't just about expanding police authority
to use chemical agents.
This now has to do with what can this lift mean
for people who are exercising their rights to protest
and for communities that have historically experienced
discriminatory policing.
If the council authorizes this lift,
our community deserves and demands clear limits,
transparency, and strong accountability
if those limits are violated.
My concern is giving police the discretion
to determine whether a crowd is considered a threat.
I don't want the ability for us to protest
to depend on whether an officer decides
that our presence as a crowd has become threatening.
Also, I'm not sure if it's a part of your job
to be scrolling on your phone
instead of listening to your.
Thank you. I might need a second minute. Okay my name is Glenn Turner and
listening to the police respond to your questions city council members I
realized that they kept talking about this situation where not crowd control
because they've got some sort of cleanup for that but what they're looking at is
is somebody barricaded inside.
And so when would this ever happen?
That they couldn't, you know,
I would much rather see crisis intervention training.
I'd like to see a specialized care unit that we got rid of.
I'd like to see some other tools
that oh, some tear gas will keep us from being trigger happy
and shooting these people or piling on them
and killing them with a crowd of people
like they did K. Lebore.
So I'm wondering, like, why are we spending this money
on this, guess what?
What is the probability of this situation
of somebody barricaded in, blah, blah, blah,
that it's likelihood of 0.01 or less?
You know, so what is all this money,
you know, all these trainings, all this stuff,
all this hoopla, when actually that time and money
and interest should be sent into
crisis intervention training,
it should be sent in specialized care units,
it should be set in on settlements
and helping the people who say
might be under some delusional situation
where they feel like they're paranoid.
And seniors can get paranoid dementia too.
They take seniors away very carefully
when they get paranoid dementia.
But when other people get paranoid dementia,
they throw them in jail.
That's the answer, bam.
We want them in jail.
We want them handcuffed.
We want to throw them down.
We don't want to give them any medical treatment.
We should be aiming for support and treatment,
crisis intervention.
Thank you.
I think I have one minute from, thank you.
So I just want to emphasize again
that these are aerosolized chemical agents.
So they are super concentrated, particulate chemicals.
They are designed to spread rapidly through the air.
They are compressed into tanks in order
so that when they explode,
they can more effectively spread
throughout the immediate and far reaching environment.
They are made to obstruct breathing,
inflame lung tissue eyes and other mucous membranes.
They're chemicals and they have unclear
long-term health and environmental effects.
Your definition in writing may say limited use
or barricaded individuals, but these are airborne.
You can't impose rhetorical limits on chemicals
manufactured to explode from a compressed canister
or a tank.
Pepper spray and tear gas settle
on closed walls and surfaces.
These cause long-term reproductive damage.
There is no reason to release species chemicals
into the environment or expose people
to chemical warfare agents.
Also, I just wanna add,
I think it is very, very shocking in this year of 2026
with a BLM flag hanging behind you
to let the cops call black lives matter protests violent.
I can't believe that.
We are in 2026, we already had hundreds
endless protests about police brutality.
And yet the city council is sitting here
and nobody called that racist out, not a single person.
I was there all night getting tear gassed,
treating people who were tear gassed,
who were on the street bleeding
because cops had beat the crap out of them.
Random students who were trying to go home
who got caught up in the gas and then were beaten
and had nowhere to go.
And then I got home in the morning
and there were all these news outlets
reporting on the violence of protesters.
Not a single one, not a single one
reported on all the people who were injured
in the streets and left.
Not a single one.
And they all made up these same lies
about the Molotov cocktails.
I want you to know there were none.
I was there all night, all week.
I was your guest every night.
There were not.
Span it.
Good evening again, my name is Daria Ribble.
District one candidate for city council.
And I wanna thank Madam Mayor for spending today,
your birthday and so many days in service to the city.
But I'm very concerned.
So, you know, I believe in compromise.
I believe in listening to all sides
and moving forward with solutions.
I believe that it is important to listen deeply
and to think about compromise.
But in this instance, I have listened
and I hear no reason for compromise.
The police department has not demonstrated
a real need for these chemical weapons.
And as many speakers before me have said,
there are many documented reasons
not to move forward with this lift.
the city of Davis. I'm not a
I believe that people have a right to resist state violence.
I believe they have that right to resist state violence with force, if necessary.
You know who didn't go to a whole lot of protests though?
My dad didn't save him from being tear gassed.
Over 50 years ago, there was a protest right here in Berkeley against the Vietnam War.
tear gas was used. But that's the thing about tear gas. Gas weapons by definition can't
target individuals. They're gas. Once they're deployed, the wind decides where they go and
who they target. My dad wasn't part of the protest. He was standing in line to register
for classes at Cal. And so he and a bunch of other students who were also standing in
line to register for classes at Cal, which you had to do in person those days,
had a chemical weapon deployed against them because they just happened to be in
the area. And that's the thing. It doesn't, it doesn't, these are chemical agents.
They don't just dissipate as soon as the incident is done. They remain, they linger.
As for hostage situations, you know the most famous hostage situation in which
tear gas was deployed was it was Waco. The hostages ended up dead too. Other people
have already, can I get another minute? Thank you. Other people have already gone
into the long-term lingering health effects on respiratory as well as
reproductive health. This police department, this police department, which
We've heard about the various incidents.
Taxgate was never resolved.
They violated a court order this morning.
They violate people's rights all the time.
They threw me to the ground for arguing with one of them.
You want to give them chemical weapons?
The first chemical weapon used in World War I, in fact, banned from use in war under international
law with only paper policies preventing them from using them when they're not supposed
to.
This police department?
Are we living in the same reality?
You know who protests?
Students, including high school students.
If you vote for Ashley's choosing to deploy chemical weapons against our kids.
Hi, my name is Mimi and I live in district eight.
I was in this room on July 28th for the entire public comment about Hopkins street.
You could cut the tension in this room with a knife every almost everyone felt strongly
that they were on the right side of that issue.
I was struck by how difficult your jobs
as council members are,
making decisions on issues like that
where our community is divided.
This issue is not that.
I joined the committee meeting
and a council meeting on this topic earlier this year.
And 100%, every single Berkeleyan who spoke,
hundreds of comments,
they spoke passionately and eloquently
against reinstituting tear gas.
The people of Berkeley are begging you
not to reinstate these tools.
I do not understand how you can rationalize
acting in total opposition to your constituency.
Thank you.
Thank you, come on up.
I'm speaking in support of 21B.
Hello council, my name is Reina Wagner.
I'm a fourth year at UC Berkeley
as an active member of community,
both on campus and off campus.
The thought that I would leave the city
without looking out for the future students,
community members, and unhoused people
did not sit right with me, so I am here.
The police have used undue violence
in so many instances for so long,
and no matter what we do,
there's no clear intention for change.
If they sprayed us in the 90s, 2014, and 2017,
they'll spray us again.
The parameters given around
intended violence slash fear for life.
This will not stand up if this action is allowed.
Once authorized, this will be used out of policy.
We are not violent protestors.
We never have been, we are students and friends
and parents and loved ones, old and young,
we are people trying desperately to make change
for the betterment of our collective future.
Please, the police will find a reason to use it.
If you let this pass, please at least think
of the permanent scars on students' lungs and eyes
that you are allowing to happen.
Okay, thank you.
Tear gas is a chemical weapon.
It's designed to induce pain.
calling it a tool is a euphemism.
It's sort of like calling an enslaved person a ranch hand.
Pain compliance is the deliberate use of pain
to force a person to obey an order,
and this meets the definition of torture.
So whenever anybody says tool, we
should say tool for torture, because that's really
and I'd ask the rest of the audience,
if you hear somebody say use the word tool,
say for torture out loud.
That's what it is.
And if torture is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
If torture is not wrong, any degradation of human beings
in the name of security is permitted.
The logic of torture not only reflects,
but promotes the acceptance of whatever
it takes paradigm of police power.
Once torture is accepted, anything goes.
And we should not underestimate the power
that the city council of the city council's blindness
to the suffering of the enemy, which is us.
The 20th century cultural myth
that the police first concern
is the protection of the public,
as opposed to its original, which was property rights,
has in recent decades slowly morphed to a policy
where their first concern
is protecting the lives of the police.
This transformation has become embedded
in police best practice policies,
which are used to justify needless killings
because a police officer felt threatened.
The excuse for assaults on suspects
designed to provide the optimal protection of police
from imagined threats.
And I stress that, imagine.
To rationalize pain compliance inflicted on protest crowds
uses potential threats to police authority.
It doesn't even have to be a threat just to their authority.
Along with this change in priority,
it's a change in verbiage where we start calling them
a first responder, a transformation initiated
by the ruling class to engender a high degree of police
loyalty to the rulers and property. Give another minute. Somebody thanks for your comment. Okay. Grace. This transformation was initiated by the ruling class to
engender a high degree of police loyalty to the rulers and property owners by establishing via policy that general public that the general public are second class
citizens to the police who are free to act with impunity,
whose actions are always justified by their fear
for their own safety, or that they maintain order established
by the ruling class.
Police actions, no matter how racist, sexist, homophobic,
or brutal, are justified.
And this was the same bargain originally given
to the slave patrols to sanctify their use of torture
and lynching of slaves.
the city of the city of the. I'm.
that you should not be giving them more weapons
to use against us.
At every protest, it's not the protesters I fear,
it's the police.
Also additionally, earlier this month,
I tested positive for COVID despite being fully vaccinated
and the city of Berkeley texted me.
A guide from the CDC telling me to follow it.
This guide reads, at the very top in bold,
this guidance is no longer in effect
and for historical purposes only.
We, our city is in a budget deficit
and the city of Berkeley texted me a historical document
when I had COVID maybe put some money there.
Thank you for listening to me.
Thank you for your time.
Good evening, everybody.
I became involved with Berkeley Cop Watch 49 years ago
as a result of what happened in the Sproul Hall,
the UC campus of all things.
Students there were pepper spray,
they were beaten with clubs.
I said, no, I'm not gonna stand for that shit.
So I joined Berkeley Cop Watch.
In 2014, 11 years ago, I was a participant in Black Lives Matter marches that were going on,
and as a result of what happened in 2014 and 2015, I became a legal observer for the National Lawyers' Guild as well.
Now, I think it's all of what happens today.
At Lakeland Harrison, well that was brutally attacked
by a Berkeley cop.
I will be legally observing by the judge's orders
within the protest.
Shut the wrong, I'm getting sick of that shit.
Fuck you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Joe Morassovic, I have a minute from Melissa in the back
And I have a minute from Gordon Gilmour.
Sorry, Melissa.
Oh, thank you.
A minute from Gordon Gilmour.
Oh, OK.
So Mayor, thanks for the question about the deaf.
To the BPD response, the deaf can't hear loudspeakers.
As far as texts, in deaf culture,
the deaf frequently communicate differently in writing.
And so in a crisis situation, you actually
need someone to be on call who can communicate in the language and communicate culturally.
And the response should have been an ASL interpreter on call familiar with deaf culture.
I'd like to share a San Francisco Police Department video that I saw at the 2025 CIT
International Conference. It was an actual video of a situation where they had to spend incredibly
long time deescalating a man who was holding a knife to his 80-year-old father.
Holding him hostage. They were able to get him outside, continue to deescalate him
while they continue to hold the knife. Deescalation often takes hours. It takes
skills. One of those skills that CIT officers are trained is to show
empathy and it takes a CIT certified commanding officer to be commanding the
shift. Now had that man that man that was holding his 80-year-old father been
tear gassed inside, his 80-year-old father who was medically fragile would
have also been tear gassed. So we have to consider that in hostage situations. We
could be tear gassing a child that's nearby, an elder that's nearby that's
medically fragile. And I came before council in 2014 from the mental health
commission when similar to this situation where you're considering
reinstating tear gas, they were considering the use of tasers. And at
that point council was pre enthusiastic about we need to give our police
department the tools they need. And that includes tasers. And when when I
appeared at that time in 2014, on behalf of the Mental Health
Commission, I presented that the studies I had researched
showed that the most vulnerable, medically and mental health
wise, people on both recreational and psychotropic
substances, were the most disproportionately likely
to be tased, and they were also the most likely to be harmed.
And at that meeting, they, council decided to send it out
to Stanford for a study.
And Stanford came back to a future meeting
where there was a target day
with the exact same findings.
And council did not implement tasers.
Tasers are banned to this day.
And so I'm hoping you will do the same.
Just consider sending it out to study.
the city. So I'm going to take a break after all of you who are in person speak go ahead.
I'm a resident of district one as people who write policy. I'm guessing you're familiar with Eugene Bardak's eightfold path
If you aren't familiar the first step is identify a problem
What's the problem you're creating fun
There's no problem to be solved here. You also mentioned violent crowds who gets to define violence?
Is shouting pigs
they need to decide whether or
not they're doing violence,
they will get to decide that.
When the police violate you
outlined, will the settlement
come out of their budget or
will it continue to come out of
the general budget?
Hi, my name is Michael and I
live in district six and I'm
here to tell you all that it
really doesn't make sense for
almost every allegation of police misconduct,
every complaint set in by the police oversight board
is ignored, dismissed, and rejected by the BPD.
This shows they don't hold themselves accountable
and they don't care about abusing their power,
which makes sense,
because police have always abused their power.
Ever since they were established as slave catchers
here in America in the birth of policing,
Ever since 1969, when the queer rights movement was born after they brutalized queer and trans
black and bound people in Stonewall, to the murders of black people represented by the
BLM flag behind y'all, to this morning.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Got two minutes over there.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good evening mayors and members of the City Council.
My name is Solly Alpert,
chair of the Berkeley Run Board speaking in my own capacity.
We do not need the Berkeley Police Department
to have every single piece of equipment.
We haven't had a hostage situation in Berkeley in decades.
And in the unlikely scenario that we have another,
I would hope the department would call a higher,
more specialized agency for support.
I don't want the Berkeley Police Department
to have or be trained to use tear gas, period.
During the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020,
we watched as cops in Minneapolis
across the country brutalized peaceful protesters.
One of those Minneapolis protesters
lost an eye when police shot him against their own policies
with a less than lethal piece of equipment in his face.
He now serves on the Minneapolis City Council.
The protester, not the cop.
During that same period in Berkeley, our city manager,
not the city manager, thankfully,
without consulting the city council,
declared a state of emergency and instituted a curfew,
restricting people's rights to protest.
It was multiple days until the mayor and council
intervened and forced the curfew to be lifted.
What is to prevent a future city manager
from declaring a state of emergency during a protest,
suspending these regulations, and using the tear gas
that they have in their possession on protesters?
We see time after time across our history
and across this country that when police have tools,
whatever their intended use for is,
They use them on peaceful protesters.
And you can't use smoke and pepper spray
against a specific person in a crowd.
That is not how physics works.
Gear gas and smoke are used in protests.
It increases the chaos and violence, not decreases them.
Protests become violent when police escalate them.
And it is entirely insufficient to give discretion
to individual officers to determine
whether an individual at a protest is violent.
We know what happens because we see it happen every time there
as a protest in this country.
Cops lie, invent a threat that does not exist,
and then deploy less than lethal weapons
on peaceful protesters.
We are told by you all and by our community
that our department is better, that our department is less
racist and less violent than the actions
we see across the country.
To the extent that that is true, it
is true because of the policies we have implemented,
that we have fought for as Berkeley residents
for decades through protests and actions and elections.
Do not take us back to the way it was.
Councilmember Humbert, you and I have spoken
a number of times about,
I know, about the threat
of the fascist administration in this country,
and I know you take that very seriously.
I don't want our police,
when our protestors in Berkeley are protesting Trump,
and his agents make it violent,
I don't want our protesters to be teargassed
by our own department.
Thank you very much.
I have a minute.
Yeah.
Oh wait, I can't, sorry, I can't see the business.
Thank you.
Okay.
Appreciate you.
Okay.
Madam Mayor and Council, Nathan Meisel,
running for reelection on the Berkeley rent board,
along with my slate,
but I will get to the topic of hand here.
This is about trust, and it is about our confidence
in the department's judgment.
I don't trust the department.
I've said so many times for many reasons,
many documented reasons.
And among that, what I will speak to tonight is,
first, I appreciate that you're incorporating
what the PAB sent you back.
But of course, the PAB sent you that back
because you said you wanted to go through with this policy.
So they got to craft something with the department.
So, but thank you for putting that in.
We're getting back to the point here.
This is the department that ignores the law all the time.
This is the department that when it comes
to public records, they ignore the law.
Department that when it comes to our charter
that the voters pass, they ignore the P.A.B.'s
responsibility, this is a department as a chief
that couldn't follow sexual harassment policy.
This is a department that over and over shows us
they will step over the law.
And there's no threats department says they use it once and 40. Why are we giving them back to them?
Why are we getting it back to them?
No, no one can give me a good answer. Well, there could be this hypothetical magical scenario where we do come on
This is the real world if some serious thing happens as someone just said go call the sheriff. Okay some crazy thing happens
I'm seriously manager. We'll suspend policy. Anyway, don't hand them back these weapons of war
that is what they are. And my real sincere hope is we keep in mind this is
one vote folks but a lot more is coming before the Council on Public Safety and
you will have to decide do you reflexively trust this department or
will you trust the voices of your community and the evidence has shown
police can't be trusted with these types of weapons. Thank you.
Good evening council and mayor I'm a Southside resident. There are a lot of
things that we can do to make the police's job easier
that we don't do because it compromises our human rights.
We can put this in every living room and warrant requirements
and make everyone wear a GPS tracker.
And that would make the police a lot easier
that'll make our community less safe, obviously.
Weapons might be useful for the police,
but they're dangerous for our community.
The police incidents, the police say these incidents
that might require tear gas uses are very rare.
And I agree, they are so rare that we don't need tear gas,
because even though these incidents are very rare,
we will always have tear gas, and this will be a risk
when we could potentially have it on protesters,
on people who could literally die from these lethal weapons
that are banned in international law.
Please reject these changes that undermine our human rights
and pass the Peace and Justice Commission's recommendation.
Thank you.
Hi, I have been an analytical chemist for 13 years. I wanted to highlight two papers
that provided this council regarding capsaicin weapons that should point to a NOAA 121A. In
more than tears from Hassan et al, it was shown statistically that women exposed to
tear grass have elevated chance to suffer reproductive health issues. The author suggests
the metabolism of capsaicin of the cyanide induced hypoxia
along with adrenal and thyroid dysregulation,
maybe the root cause of this.
In Paris et al. from our home San Francisco-based
American Academy of Ophthalmology,
ER visits and injuries from teagrass were described.
Corneal scarring, corneal epithelial defects,
total loss of vision, and death in cases of people
with underlying respiratory disease,
or even closed spaces just like described
of the captain here are reported.
Please trust the scientists who reject this ordinance.
I'd be very interested to see some of the quality records
on these.
I kind of doubt that they were tested to any standard
that would be considered safe.
Thank you.
If there's any chance that there's a minute out here.
All right, I'm gonna wing it then.
I'll be playing about the situation facing us.
It's easy to cast the first stone
when you're the last person who would be impacted
by this change in policy.
It is people like me, it's the student population
who will face the brunt of these attacks.
My name is Derek Rodriguez.
I'm not only a student at UC Berkeley, a community leader,
but I'm also an army veteran
and a part-time national guardsman.
If you resume use of chemical weapons,
perhaps I'll have no choice but to educate my fellow students
on how to neutralize CS gas or tear gas.
All you are doing is wasting time and money on resources
that aren't foolproof,
just putting the public in unnecessary danger.
And I know how fiscally irresponsible it is
to buy contracted equipment like this.
It's a racket from the private sector
to overcharge military and law enforcement
on inflated contracts.
Let's see you try and pull this shit
on a peaceful demonstration,
because I will be there and we will be undeterred.
You wanna waste money?
That's your prerogative.
Use it against harmless civilians?
We will truly make sure that money is wasted.
This is not a method to keep us safe.
This is a method to keep us down.
You can try and shut our demonstrations down
with weapons of war.
Always to the people.
Kelly Hamergren, I sent you an article which I hope you read from the Minneapolis Star
Tribune where people are told in Minneapolis not to put plants in the ground.
They need to have elevated planting because they are finding 1300 parts per million of
lead from the tear gas and chemicals used in Minneapolis.
but there's something else that I've been thinking about,
especially as I heard the example given tonight
and that was the book I read earlier this year
by David Epstein, and it's called Inside the Box,
How Constraints Make Us Better.
And I think the constraint of not allowing these chemicals
makes our police department better.
And so I would ask you to keep those constraints in place
because they took the time to solve the policy.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Mayor, members, my name is Aidan Hill.
I'm a candidate for Berkeley City Council seven
in this November, 2026 election.
And I'm asking you plainly,
keep Berkeley ban on tear gas in place.
I'm grateful for all the district seven residents
who have come tonight to make their voices heard.
Students deserve clear answers from their leaders
and all of us deserve a real voice in the governance
of a city that we all call our home.
I oppose item 21A and I support item 21B.
I believe council should strengthen that one.
Berkeley's faced this question before.
In August, 2022, during the conflict over People's Park,
the city council scheduled a special meeting
to consider the spending Berkeley's prohibition on tear gas.
The issue included concerns about mutual aid
and then Mayor Jesse Aragon canceled that meeting
and the prohibition remained in place.
People's Park showed what can happen
and how quickly events can escalate in one neighborhood.
Two minutes, Game House.
I thought I asked earlier, sorry.
No, okay.
Okay.
People's Park showed how quickly events
in one Berkeley neighborhood can escalate
and the University of California police is not exempt.
They do, in fact, use chemical weapons.
But tonight, Council is being asked to change its course.
21A would authorize the Berkeley's Police Department's
special response team to use tear gas in circumstances
involving risk of injury and death.
I understand that.
I understand the gravity of those situations,
hostage situations, armed barricades,
and threats of serious bodily injury.
Everyone should come out alive.
Council also has to consider what powers
become part of the policy once the resolution passes.
This item would not only allow a precedence
for regional actors and state actors
to continue using tear gas in our city,
but understand that the constituencies I represent,
they're often just 21 year olds
and many of them don't know the policies in place
and to see tear gas like we did at People's Park,
you have to understand the precedence that creates.
So I urge you to vote yes on 21 B, thank you.
Okay, we are gonna take maybe like a eight minute break
so that we can come back,
because I really wanna get to the public comment online.
And if you are online and you would like
to give public comment, please raise your hand
so we can get a sense of how many folks are online.
Thank you, talk to your neighbors.
You can talk to your neighbors outside,
or you can have a seat.
Okay, I'm gonna start calling people's names in a second.
Andrea, please sit down.
Thank you, Glenn.
Have a seat.
Okay, thank you everyone.
We are gonna now start taking, okay, council members.
We're gonna now start taking comments online.
Okay, the first commenter has a screen name
virtual meetings, you should be able to unmute. My name is Wendy Alphson from District 4 long-term
resident speaking on behalf of the Berkeley Friends meeting unanimously in support of
maintaining the current ban in the current form, the support 21B being adopted. If you do pass the
police accountability board definition, please also apply it to the pepper spray and smoke as well as
to the tear gas better yet leave the ban in place. Thank you.
Caller with a phone number ending in 2-1-1. Hi. Well, I lived here during the Beagle Park
and not only the police, I mean a sheriff, a county sheriff used it, they even have a
helicopter, a National Guard as well. My beautiful wife almost died. This gas is extremely toxic.
it can cause permanent damage, it also can cause lung damage as well, it can cause blindness.
And I had to take my ex-wife to Alta Base several times when the gas was fixed.
Also, in this case I'd like to pay tribute to Chief Butler, Merkle Breeze, ex-Breeze
Chief, who has saved my family and my life, and my family life, when one of our store
managers in San Francisco embezzled over a million dollars and he appointed two Merkle
policeman in front of my house in Euclid for two years at the cost of six thousand dollars a month
and with that I have a lot of respect in regard to Berka police but we have to keep the ban
on tear gas it is deadly it's deadly I lived through it I only lived in Channing and
Sanning away and and um Ellsworth only a couple of blocks from Beebel Park and it was dead.
your time's up. Next is Stephen Roble. Wait a second. Hold on. Name's jumped around here.
Stephen, go ahead. Yes, I'm Stephen Roble, District 1. I was actually at Berkeley
during the 2014 protests, and guess what I get to experience after leaving lab after 12 hours.
that was red eyes, itchy throat, and guess what? I don't think I was protesting in the lab.
So all this chemical toxins that are just in the air, they hit everyone and they linger for days.
And I experienced that. And as the police even said, they don't need this. There were three
incidents in six years where they claim they needed it, but they resolved it without having
tear gas. So why are we pushing for something that's not even used? Just because they want
to use it. Because if they'll have it, if they have it, they'll use it. And if those protests
are any indication, they want to use it because they feel good using it. Because it's easier to
use it and that you do use it for crowd control. Hello, can you hear me? When I first read the
headline, Berkeley City Council voting to reinstate the use of tear gas, I thought to myself that
sounds like something that a cartoon super villain would do and the fact that it's coming to a vote
in a city that prides itself on its progressive reputation is beyond laughable. As is common when
it comes to the Berkeley Police Department, they ask us to hand them the weapons they will use to
harm us while claiming it is all for our safety. We've already given far too much of our budget
to Berkeley Police Department. We don't need to give them access to chemical weapons too.
If you claim to care about your constituents and then turn around and vote to authorize the use of
chemical warfare against civilians, you are a hypocrite and I'll be waiting to see you
voted out of office. Vote no on 21a and support 21b. Thank you. Next Margarita. Hello can you hear me?
Just I don't know if I'm being heard. Hello? I'm sorry can anyone hear me? Hello?
I see the timer going but I'm not sure if anyone. Okay well okay um okay so I'm a student I left
class to come here and I thank you so I'm a student here at Berkeley and I'm in District 7.
I would like to add that Rocky and Rohan did give me their time so I have three minutes.
So the present yeah thank you okay yeah thanks for bearing with me so the presentation for 21A
said that they were keeping like the purpose of this was to keep communities safer but I don't
think that's the case as many other community members and council members insinuated because
the risk is higher than the reward of having something like this and as stated before only
three instances in six years is not worth all the money and time to deliberate on these things.
Thank you for being here and listening to all of us. The instance that they did want to use this
for was in threat of death or hostage situations but all I heard was putting tear gas into a closed
building. And from everything we've heard so far is that the
first thing you want to do when you have this chemical weapon on
or near you is to get away, you're supposed to take off all
your clothing, try to rinse your eyes with saline, people have
been desperate enough to use milk, it can lead to blindness
and just a lot of damage. It's less lethal, as stated by the
presentation from 21b. It was talked about like a way to
prevent harm would be to use police accountability. But as we have known that police accountability
after the fact does not prevent harm. And I don't think police officers want to be writing
more reports and justifying themselves. And someone's read like it's just a waste of resources.
I don't think we want to build a community and have these police officers resort to chemical
weapons as an alternative when we can already use de-escalation and these other practices.
Happy birthday Mayor, by the way, my birthday is on Friday also.
Police presence increases violence, as we've seen before, using a chemical weapon against
someone in the purpose that this is intended for, not on crowd control, but to people in a closed
building when we have skilled negotiators to deescalate does does not make sense. It's really
inhumane. I just like can't imagine someone being spray like tear gassed in a closed building,
running out what if the police officer says they're running out on a threatening manner and then
shoots them and then has to write this whole report like all of this could be avoided. And
it's I don't think it's keeping communities safe, even though 21A's presentation said that was the
purpose. And yeah, I mean, the instances that were like, if it's
not needed, they're specialized negotiators, like we, we could
do so much other things with our time. Yeah, I skipped class to
be here. So a class that I really enjoy, by the way, so I'm
already sure that y'all are going to vote to oppose this
one. I also don't think 21 B is helpful. Enough. Go back to
class.
Next is Marilyn.
Thank you.
My name is Marilyn Cleveland.
I'm a resident of District 4, a member of the Berkeley Friends
meeting, its Social and Environmental Action
Committee, and racial justice action team.
And I also speak for the meeting in that we support the Peace
and Justice Commission proposal to retain the ban on tear gas
in the moratorium on OC and smoke.
And we oppose 21A and support 21B,
authorizing a study of the impacts
of allowing the domestic use of these military weapons.
I'm an 81-year-old retired attorney.
I have feared the use of tear gas, OC and or smoke
at times when I wanted to exercise my free speech rights.
The use of these tools not only creates the health
and emotional damages that have been discussed,
but it inhibits free speech.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Rhea.
I'm a student at UC Berkeley.
This morning, the city and the police cleared
another homeless encampment,
taking away belongings from unhoused people
and like displacing them from one of the only places
that they had to be.
That is a form of violence.
People protesting against fascism, protesting against ICE,
protesting against genocide is not violence.
Shame on the city and shame on the Berkeley police department
for continuing to sweep homeless encampments.
And the concept that giving that same police department
chemical weapons will protect community safety laughable.
And that's why I haven't heard a single public comment
that's in favor of removing a ban on chemical weapons.
Vote no on 21A.
Thank you.
Okay.
Paola.
Hi, Paola D five.
I ask you to vote no on 21A,
vote yes on 21B, maintain the ban.
We're gonna be watching, lots of people are watching
to see who votes and how they vote
because we do definitely plan
to flip the Berkeley City Council.
We will flip you this year
and we will flip you in two years.
The community is speaking,
the community is telling you what it wants.
Many, many times the City Council does not listen to us.
We're asking you to vote no on 21A and vote yes on 21B.
Thank you.
Let's try.
Hello?
I don't know if I can be heard.
Hi, did you call on Maria?
The audio goes in and out.
I can't hear you.
Can you hear me?
Something's wrong with the audio.
Hello?
Hello, hello?
Come on now.
Can you hear me? I can't hear you. Can you hear me? Okay. Sorry. So I'm really scared.
We used to have a Department of Defense which has now morphed into a Department of War
because we want to protect ourselves and that is best exemplified by just eliminating
any possible threat, which certainly is up for, yeah, we are needing to come together and not
increase militarization. We don't need more weapons, we really don't, we need more peace.
And even on the best day, all of your thoughtful, very thoughtful, very eloquently
Explained plans and procedures mean there's no panic, there's no fear, and there's no,
you know, upset. But there's going to be upset. We are looking at a very dangerous transitional
time, and I'd rather Berkeley be a community of unity and peace and harmony. Please vote no on
any weapons. Thank you. Hi. Can you hear me? Great. My name is Carrie Sanders. I'm a district
three resident and I'm just I'm calling to urge you to support 21 B the study and vote no on 21
A the exception. I've been a Berkeley resident for over 25 years and have seen what can happen
when tear gas is used indiscriminately. I know people who are personally harmed by the use of
these weapons during peaceful protests. The Berkeley police are here tonight to ask you
to make an exception and yet these are the same people who ask the city council to allow them to
circumvent reporting requirements, very important reporting requirements on the use of other types
of similar weapons. We need accountability, we need trust and that just doesn't, that's just not here
and I'm not hearing that from anyone who is speaking tonight, that there's a feeling of
trust in terms of how these resources or weapons would be deployed. That's a start, that's a
starting point, a study is a starting point, that's where we are right now in this city, thanks.
Hi, I'm in a similar building, so I'm going to give you some kind of impression of that
to her, she goes, please, don't keep the ban on shere gas, there is no reason why
bans should be removed, I think it's fairly heinous, I think it's absurd, it's mind working
that you guys have to vote on this, because she just escaped the ban, she has no place
in America, because if we did see her, please, access to shere gas, it's not giving me but
it's too good to work, and it was fairly insane.
These cops, and I'm talking about the ones we have, and the ones who were serious about this
earlier speaking about it, they do not care about some of the life, they do not care about
drug justice lives. You are giving them a tool to torture, a tool to torture, and frankly,
in an era where court hearings, fascists, on the rise, if you can give the police taxes
to your desk, you are directly contributing to court hearings as a bathroom. And we will remember
vote no and for their guests please make the right call. Do your jobs please.
All right folks, please put your hand up there.
Take the rest around for a moment.
Okay.
Sasha?
Hi. Did you call Sasha?
It's fine.
I can't hear you.
And I don't know if you can hear me.
Whatever.
this is the one thing that people could hear.
You will still have your signs saying
that you're experiencing technical difficulties.
Okay, I think we might, I think we might.
I should be, I'm saying should be coming up in the caption.
Okay, Jordan, are you there?
Hi, can you hear me?
I'm just gonna hope you guys can hear me
and if the clock starts, then I know that you can hear me.
My name is Jordan Harger. I was born and raised in Berkeley. I love the city of Berkeley, but I'm
very concerned about the direction that the city of Berkeley is headed in at this time.
Using chemical weapons against your own community is absolutely horrifying, and one of the reasons
that the use of chemical weapons was banned was the fact that we were in a respiratory pandemic,
but I think it bears repeating, other people have already said this, that we are still in the midst
of a respiratory pandemic, people are still getting COVID every day. So if the logic of
the ban was to protect people's lungs during a medically vulnerable time, that time is
still ongoing. I'd also like to point out the fact that tear gas is literally an aborticent,
it can cause you to lose a pregnancy. And there's a reason why chemical weapons are
banned under international law. So I highly, highly recommend that you do not allow for
proliferation of chemical weapons in this city. Thank you. Hello, as someone else already pointed
out if there's a hostage situation then tear gas is of course going to affect the hostage so it's
not a realistic option then. Moreover, the police have stated that in the times they they thought
about using tear gas that they would have used it if they'd had the option. Not only did they not
need to, but they did not actually resort to more escalatory techniques as an alternative.
So that is a complete red herring. Don't green light chemical weapons, even if they're following
their own rules. It's not safe. It's not safe to people in the surrounding area. And we,
we, time has shown us, Simon time again, that we cannot trust them to follow their own rules.
So please vote down 21A and vote for 21B. Thank you.
I am a resident of District 1 and candidate for City Council. I don't see the timer going down,
so I don't think you can hear me. Oh, there we go. Okay. My name is Moni Gankopathay. I'm a
resident of District 1 and candidate for City Council. Happy birthday, Mayor Ishii.
I found the public comment tonight very enlightening. I hope that these comments and
facts are carefully considered by the council. The extreme harms of tear gas, the fact that
gas cannot be contained, the misuses of these weapons against peaceful protesters in our own
city, and the dozens of countries that have banned these types of chemical weapons should
be more than enough to lead us to the right decision. Please reject item 21a and maintain
the ban on tear gas in Berkeley. Thank you also to those who spoke up on behalf of the homeless
residents of Harrison Street. I urge council members to be present to see the consequences
of these decisions and the devastation that occurs when bulldozers tear apart people's
only shelter and belongings. We can do so much better. Thank you.
Yeah, just to mention that my ex-wife and beautiful lady,
you had asthma.
That was a deadly sentence when you have tear gas.
OK.
So we shut off that last speaker because they had already
spoken on this topic.
But if you have not yet spoken on this topic
and you would like to give a public comment,
please raise your hand.
Okay, we're gonna switch to the owl
and hope that the audio works there.
Okay.
Okay.
Now.
Turn off the,
okay.
Yeah.
Test, test, test. I'm reading on. Okay, ready now. That's my house. That's the school garden.
Okay, so we're gonna continue on with the video.
meeting. We're just going through the meeting now. Okay folks, I'm sorry. We're at the oddest
very quiet because we won't be able to use the microphones on the dais.
So we can't have any noise in the audience because we can't use the dais microphones
right now. So I'll start the recording again on the meeting. Now we're recording.
Second, will you extend in a second what extent to what time, to 12 p.m. okay on the motion to extend meeting 12 a.m.
Yes, yes.
Yes.
Yes.
No, no.
No.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
No.
Yes.
Yes.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
I don't think they can hear us on my audio, no, no, I think we're just using the our audio
I see it's coming from on the captioning like the zoom in Paris. Okay, so I'd like to motion to schedule a special meeting on Tuesday, September 29th at 4pm. That's the motion. Second.
Okay on the motion to schedule the special hearing a special meeting at 4 p.m.
on 29 for items 21A and 21B, council member Kester Whani? Yes.
Catherine Bartlett? Bartlett yes. Draga? No. Okey? Yes. Blacky? Yes. Munafara? No. Humber? Yeah.
Dami or Yishi? Yeah. Okay that motion varies. I do something, yeah, I don't think that this is the right way to have a meeting. I feel like this is going to be unfair.
So I was trying to hear it online I just feel like this is that I was not a good way to do it. So, I was much rather have a conversation when the public can hear us, I think that would be better.
So we'll schedule this right here and these items forward to September 29 that work.
Okay, so
Well, here we need to make a motion to adjourn or appear on agenda public comments.
See you again.
On agenda public comments.
Motion to adjourn is always in orders.
Almost to adjourn.
Okay, on the motion to adjourn, Councilman Besterwani.
Yes.
Chaplain Bartlett.
Yes.
Right up.
Right up.
Right up.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes. Yes. We can compare it. Thank you.