Opinion: Tom Bates, smoking and me

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Is there any proposal so suited to Berkeley’s hyper-progressives than the recent anti-smoking/homeless/car plan by Mayor Tom Bates? The gist: Bates wants to ban smoking on Berkeley’s streets ostensibly to force its homeless population (who, in his words, ‘almost always smoke’) off sidewalks and into support services. To fund the pumped-up policing this would require, Bates wants to increase parking meter prices by 50 cents an hour and install several new curbside meters near a popular Berkeley supermarket. Of course, the freedom-loving progressives on the Berkeley City Council, according to member Kris Worthington, will give Bates their OK.

My immediate reaction is, why would a city like Berkeley need to use homelessness as a pretext to ban smoking on its streets? Granted, Calabasas’ homeless situation doesn’t begin to compare to Berkeley’s, but the L.A. County city banned smoking in public last year simply because the habit is a ‘public nuisance.’ I’d bet my meager savings account that Berkeley residents would have supported an anti-smoking plan that doesn’t rely on the homeless bogeymen. Besides, you can already get cited in Berkeley for smoking within 20 feet of a door, vent, window, etc.—which practically bans smoking on most sidewalks already. Why can’t Bates just tell his cops to enforce the existing law on smoking when it comes to homelessness?

Notice above that ‘Bates’ and ‘existing law’ appear in the same sentence—a segue to the ‘me’ part of this post’s title. In 2002, the day before he was elected mayor, Bates scooped up about 1,000 copies of a newspaper that endorsed his opponent and dumped them in the trash—obviously a major free-speech no-no (and against the law). The newspaper was UC Berkeley’s student rag, The Daily Californian, and the unsigned endorsement that enraged Bates to the point of making free-speech faux pas was penned by yours truly, during my tenure as the paper’s opinion editor. (If you read the endorsement, keep in mind I was just starting out as an opinion writer.)

So it seems as if Bates has recovered from his own run-in with the law enough to the point that he’s comfortable curbing the freedom of his own city’s residents—by passing a law. Only in Berkeley.