What could be more fun than watching "progressive" candidates in Berkeley duke it out over how to improve the city’s business climate?

One city council candidate, George Beier, has an 11 point plan, including ideas such as such as building a "People’s Café" in Berkeley’s (in)famous People’s Park and creating a "Free Speech Trail" to point out historic free speech places on Telegraph Avenue. Now, that’ll really draw new companies and jobs to their wacky city! 

Berkeley residents are still reeling from the closure of their beloved Cody’s flagship bookstore on Telegraph Avenue.  While they would love to point the finger at the big retailers, they have only themselves to blame for the loss of this independent bookstore.  Telegraph can be a nasty place, with dirty buildings and sidewalks and lots of homeless people.  Berkeley has more upscale, safer feeling shopping spots, such as 4th Street (where a smaller Cody’s doing just fine) that people are choosing to shop instead of Telegraph.

The incumbent Beier is running against has his own grand ideas on how to make Berkeley a better place to live:  give city employees a free pass, dubbed Eco-Pass, that allows them to ride public transportation for free.  How Berkeley of him!  Wouldn’t you think anyone who works for the city of Berkeley would be so personally committed to ending pollution and global warming that they would choose public transportation over driving a single-occupant car that the city wouldn’t have to bribe them to use mass transportation?  I guess those Berkeley city workers don’t really walk the walk, now do they?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.