A Hiss Here, A 'Dis' There

Piedmont’s council chambers were overflowing Monday night with partisans intent on the most contentious issue in town: the Blair Park athletic field. For the most part, good decorum was observed.

But there were exceptions.

The chambers have audience seating for 40 people. The crowd spilled into the main corridor and a conference room across the wall, where there were computer monitors receiving a live video-audio feed from the council chambers.

At the beginning of the comment section, four representatives of groups and alternate plans were granted 10 minutes each by the council. Other speakers were limited to three minutes each, with Mayor Dean Barbieri enforcing time limits, asking speakers to bring it to a quick conclusion when time was up.

One of those granted a 10-minute segment was Clarence Mamuyac, an architect and leader of the Piedmont Recreational Facilities Organization, the proponent of the primary Blair Park plan before the council.

Mamuyac explained the benefits of recent PRFO changes that reduced the impact on the environment: a pedestrian bridge plan reduced to a crosswalk, a second field deleted in favor of a “glade” area and new stairs as a convenience for walkers along Moraga Avenue ascending to the soccer field (also for use by baseball).

As his 10 minutes ran out, Mamuyac was denying allegations that the berm from the field to Moraga Avenue would be too steep for plantings. He showed slides of other Piedmont parks with landscaped banks as steep. As the 10-minute buzzer sounded, Mamuyac asked for five more minutes.

That set off hissing around the chamber audience.

“Honestly, we want no hissing or booing,” Barbieri told the audience. “We won’t tolerate this behavior.”

Later, development opponent Ralph Catalano used his three minutes to deliver his suspicions that the session was scripted. “There’s a deal at the base of this and we want to know what the deal is,” said Catalano.

Catalano went on to say it was suspicious that PRFO fund-raiser, and major donor, Steve Ellis in earlier remarks had mentioned the council was “going to vote on this tonight” hours before the council actually did. (One option before the council was to stand pat with an undeveloped Blair Park.)

The Ellis citation drew a ripple of applause from the audience before a stern look from the mayor stifled it.

It was around 2 in the morning, with tempers getting short, when council members were exchanging ideas on the wording of a resolution to support the PRFO plan while developing traffic safety alternatives to the pedestrian-activated light at the Moraga Avenue crosswalk. Many speakers had mentioned the Planning Commission’s Feb. 24 focus on the need for deeper study of traffic safety in voting unanimously against the PRFO plan.

Early Tuesday morning, Councilman Jeff Wieler said, “This is completely out of their area of responsibility. They’re not traffic engineers. They’re not geotechnical engineers … I reject the Planning Commission decision … I don’t think their conclusions have any validity.”

There were a couple of gasps from the crowd, which had dwindled by 2 a.m.

Someone said, “That’s incredible.”

Councilman Garrett Keating responded, “They all have credentials to address elements of the design.” The commission, he said, applied the design principles of city code and the city's general plan to the Blair Park application.

“I would not discount the Planning Commission,” concluded Keating, who a few minutes later was the lone dissenter in the council vote forwarding Blair Park. Keating argued for a more definite and thorough traffic safety study than the wording of the council resolution seemed to indicate as it passed at 2:47 a.m. Tuesday.