One page per issue Berkeley is actually arguing about. Each takes a position rather than a posture, sources every factual claim to a public document, and says out loud what I could not verify.
Not in 2021, 2023, 2025, or 2026 — through roughly $2 million in proposed spending with one vendor. The City Auditor and the Police Accountability Board have both now put it on the record. Bid it, then decide.
SB 79, AB 893 and AB 2011 set the floor on San Pablo, University and near BART — and the state density bonus can carry a project far above the local height limit: a three-story North Shattuck parcel produced an approved 8-story building, a 75-ft downtown parcel an approved 23-story tower. What the Council still controls — design standards, the feasibility math, tenant rules, and whether anyone counts what gets built — is the part nobody is doing. Write the standards first. Test the math. Count what gets built. A first pass at a hard problem, open to correction.
The county controls referrals to the other 264. The main homelessness fund is projected $22.8 million below zero by 2029, two three-year health plans share no scorecard, and the department running all of it doesn't publish a vacancy rate — and as of August, the encampment closure procedure is a federal court order. Measure it, then fund it.
The three-year behavioral-health plan passed on the consent calendar without discussion, the public-health plan's performance measures were published blank, and the one program Berkeley truly measures covers 66 people. Housing has a scorecard; health doesn't. Publish the numbers.
First chapter: the homelessness and behavioral-health money only. Five dated Council and committee decisions will settle the shelter beds, an unprogrammed $14.9 million, and the contracting rules — most of them on consent calendars and committee agendas. The full city budget gets the same treatment next.
Not cyclists against seniors. One street of fixed width and one response clock, where every foot and every second given to one kind of safety comes out of another — and the city has named all four tradeoffs in its own documents while quantifying none of them. No position for or against the adopted design: what's here is the record, the four stages between that direction and a shovel, and the open questions — including a 2012 city policy requiring before-and-after measurement with no implementation report I can find. Still collecting.
CS gas back for the Special Response Team under a written critical-incident definition; smoke and pepper spray back for crowds "involving active violence"; and a reporting scheme that decides whether anyone finds out. The crowd-control ban on tear gas stays in every version — the seam between "critical incident" and "crowd" is where the limits hold or don't. Six asks that make them enforceable before the vote.
Ridership assumptions, capital cost, and whether the waterfront is being planned as one place or as four separate processes.
Most campaign issue pages are written so that no sentence can ever be wrong. That makes them useless. These are written so that they can be wrong — with specific numbers, named sources, and an explicit list of what I couldn't confirm. If one of them is wrong, tell me, and I'll publish the correction on the page whether I accept it or not.
My work for twenty-five years has been verifying whether claimed results were real. That's the whole job I'm asking for on the council, and this is what it looks like applied to Berkeley.