William Brand, Oakland Tribune, March 19, 1995
Neighbor's Video Reveals Problems at City Corporation
Yard
For years residents around the city's maintenance yard
on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley have complained about the noise and
traffic created by hundreds of official cars and trucks zooming in and
out to refuel, for repairs and just to park.
But the situation never changed until L A Wood, who lives
across Bancroft from the yard, and his friend, Carolyn Erbele, made
a video.
Neither are professional filmmakers, but the 12 minute
production, filmed by Erbele and narrated by Wood, tells its story effectively.
It traces the history of the city's 4.9 acre corporation yard from the
day it opened in 1916 to accommodate Berkeley's first truck. It was
a time when the city staff numbered 150, including a blacksmith and
many horses.
Today, Wood says in the video, there are more than 500
city vehicles (and 1,500 employees) and a 24-hour fueling station. The
video graphically shows city trucks belching smoke and turning the adjacent
quiet residential streets into noisy corridors.
The videomakers solutions: reduce trips, extend a West
Berkeley electric bus route to include the yard so employees can ride
to work and move the fueling station to the more isolated Second Street
transfer station.
Out to lunch
So far, the video has been played to the City Council
and many times on the community cable access station, Channel 25.
And the situation has started to change.
First, 40 gardeners, who used to drive their trucks out
of the yard, every morning, come back every noon for lunch, then drive
out again for the afternoon's work, stopped coming back for lunch. Now,
according to Berkeley Public Works Director Vicki Elmer, drivers of
several of the yard's largest trucks have stopped coming back for lunch.
Elmer confesses than when she first heard about a video
being made about the city yard, she was nervous. "But it wasn't
hostile. It was very supportive to us," Elmer said. "We had
been thinking about ways to improve productivity in the face of tight
budgets," she said.
The videomakers' idea of reducing trips meshed perfectly
with the city's effort to be more efficient.
Got their attention
By cutting out the trip to the yard for lunch, the city
saves 45 minutes of transit time per gardener, Elmer said. That's between
a 12 and 18 percent improvement. And, of course, we cut out more than
40 trips a day in and 40 trips out of the yard. So that's a help to
the neighborhood.
Not bad for out of pocket costs of $300, Wood and Erbele
say with sly smiles. The video was their third; the first covered storm
water runoff, the second took a shot at UC-Berkeley's now-abandoned
plan to put a toxic waste storage facility in Strawberry Canyon.
Wood said they decided to do the video out of frustration.
I talked until I was blue in the face about this at open mike at the
City Council," he said. "They don't really want to hear from
anyone."
"When we showed the video, Mayor (Shirley) Dean even
said, 'This is the most innovative use of open mike time.'"
"That's why we did it. We got their attention."
