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Lazamataz is fading away!
Posted on 04/29/2011 8:08:00 AM PDT by SmithL
In an era of fiscal austerity when cities all over the Bay Area are reducing library hours, shedding library staff or closing libraries altogether, a small band of preservationists is actually fighting to stop a new library from being built in Berkeley.
The Concerned Library Users is using the language in a 2008 voter-approved bond measure as the basis for a lawsuit filed last fall to halt the city from tearing down the south branch library on Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
Because Measure FF, a $26 million library bond measure, makes no mention of demolition, the group contends that none of those funds can be used to tear down the library. Specifically, the bond was approved to renovate, expand and make city library branches seismically safe and accessible to people with disabilities.
The group has raised objections to razing a building it says is historic.
...
That's not how Max Anderson, the councilman representing south Berkeley, describes them.
The group consists of 34 people, is all-Caucasian and includes several members who live outside Berkeley, Anderson said. Only two live in the neighborhood where the library would be built, he added.
Even more galling to Anderson, who is African American, is that the group has employed legal tactics used in the civil rights movements to protect the plaintiffs' identities and block a worthwhile project in a predominantly minority community, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Get your popcorn.
I love shadowy leftists.
Grew up with them... They are so cool... It is amusing to watch them as they fall to the right.
The problem since the end of the Civil war is the inability of the Democrats to grant such sanction to those freed from their plantations.
That is the reason we see what we see. Control, nothing more. Peev them off, get them to act up, and provide a necessary control mechanism that their population will demand.
And every last mother loving one of them will vote for you to do it to them again.
Short-sighted. A genuinely historic building should be kept in its neighborhood context.
That said, I'm not sure I'd agree with this "shadowy" group that a mid-60s modern building is genuinely historic.
It seems to be trendy now, amongst some preservation groups, to try to save modern architecture that IMO is, was, and always will be crappy.
I suspect the gov't official who is angry with this "white" preservationist group, probably stands to gain from the demolition and construction contracts. Either he or his peeps.
Short-sighted. A genuinely historic building should be kept in its neighborhood context.
That said, I'm not sure I'd agree with this "shadowy" group that a mid-60s modern building is genuinely historic.
It seems to be trendy now, amongst some preservation groups, to try to save modern architecture that IMO is, was, and always will be crappy.
I suspect the gov't official who is angry with this "white" preservationist group, probably stands to gain from the demolition and construction contracts. Either he or his peeps.
Could be a high maintenance building. Lots of older buildings take a lot of utilities and labor. Of course, many buildings get built to send money to favored contractors.
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