Although protesters occupying UC-owned land in Albany took down their camping structures Saturday, they declined the final offer from UC Berkeley administrators to completely cede control of the land and enter negotiations.
On Friday, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer and Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance John Wilton issued a statement informing the protesters that they had until Saturday at 10 a.m. to decide to dismantle the entirety of the encampment in order to enter discussions with the campus.
The statement invited two encampment representatives to a Saturday meeting facilitated by College of Natural Resources Dean Keith Gilless to begin working out the details about how to continue urban agriculture on the land alongside faculty, staff and student research, provided the protesters dismantle the encampment.
Spokespeople for the encampment informed several campus administrators at 9 a.m. Saturday they would not completely leave the land. Occupy the Farm spokesperson Anya Kamenskaya said they will remove camping-related structures but continue to stay and farm the land. She said some protesters will camp outside the fence surrounding the tract though they had not yet worked out details as to how that would work.
“We’re moving our living infrastructure off-site to be painfully obvious that the issue isn’t camping,” Kamenskaya said. “The issue is farming — making sure people have access to the farm, allowing farmers and the community to come out and support us by planting and watering.”
Kamenskaya said the protesters decided to not attend the meeting because they felt it was restrictive — it was not to be an open meeting nor was it to take place on the tract. Instead, she said the encampment will hold an open house Saturday at 5 p.m. to which they are inviting the local city and UC Berkeley communities.
She added that protesters are building a “slide of sorts” in order to help people enter the tract, which was sealed off by UCPD on Thursday.
Campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof said he was disappointed and frustrated with the protesters’ decision because the campus was willing to move forward with the goal of the occupation — urban agriculture alongside research agriculture.
“We’re hard pressed to understand why they continue to violate the law, violate our property rights, violate what is an essential value to the university — which is academic freedom — the ability of our faculty and students to continue their work uninterrupted,” Mogulof said.
Mogulof said the administration and UCPD are following the guidelines detailed in the recently published draft of the Edley-Robinson report. The report presents 50 UC protest policy recommendations mostly focused on expanding communication between protesters, police and administration as well as exploring all possible peaceful solutions. However, he said time is running out before the campus must act in order to ensure researchers can plant their crops on the tract.
“How it happens is up to them,” Mogulof said. “They have the opportunity to vacate and stay off property, and if they do that, we will have a peaceful solution.”
Christopher Yee is an assistant news editor.
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I also live in Albany and I don’t embrace the idea! Nor my neighbors. This has been the most ridiculous protest I have ever seen. These guys are not only misguided but they are also misguiding the people. And I don’t understand why UC Regents is waiting for ?
UC began with 140 acres. The keep cutting the pie in half, researchers and the community compromising with development as UC sells off the commons. Now we’re down to 10 acres, with 5 going to Whole Foods and other corporate interests. Soon the whole pie will be gone.
1. Be aware that the university has been invited to more than one OPEN meeting and they refused to attend. The last one had 75 community members waiting to dialogue with UC but of course they prefer closed meetings where their lawyers can do their bidding. What does that tell you??
2. Professor Altieri has farmed there for 31 years and was completely comfortable with sharing the land. There were only 3 others using it besides him. One post-doc who was strictly interested in his grant running out and didn’t want to piss off UC and two dept. of agriculture affilitated persons who naturally would side with UC.
3. I live in Albany and my neighbors embrace the idea, something they have hoped for for years!
You be aware that university is inviting the occupiers for negotiations for weeks! Waiting for their idiot decisions. Let me occupy your house, saying that ohh you have a beautiful house and you don’t know how to use it. Then, I will give you one condition – I will move out in case you give me a room ????
Are you aware that the UC researchers working the Gill Tract have tried for years to get UC to allow urban farming on the property? UC has been presented with several formal proposals. Now we see that if the professors had included a big-box retailer in their proposals, they may have gotten some traction.
Are you aware that any decisions over development of the property must also involve the City of Albany who have been in discussions with UC over the future of Gill tract for over two decades? Who care whether a few out of towners like you want an urban farm, the city of Albany wanted a Whole Foods on a site NEXT to Gill tract, so let them have it. No one cares what you want, the community has decided, so leave them alone and quit acting like spoiled children.
While I find the UC administration contemptible, generally incompetent and utterly dishonest,
I fail to see what might be accomplished by this action at the Gill Tract.
This pointless endeavor is fucking up the work of individual faculty, grad students and post-docs, is by comparison only a minor pain in the neck for the UC as an institution, and is destined to end with the UC taking control of the land.
It should be clear to everyone by now that the protestors were never interested in urban agriculture or helping the community – heck, most of them, including their spokesman, don’t even live in the community. Their refusal to negotiate pretty much proves it. What they want is a confrontation with police so that they can get in the news and garner support. UC played this entire situation right by slowly pressuring them. I just hope that UC follows through with the lawsuits and gets these idiots to pay for all the trouble they’ve caused.
Let’s hope those misguided, naive, condescending communists are forcibly removed not only from the grounds of the Gill Tract, but from the city limits of Albany. Occupiers are lazy, jobless, priviliged white kids who either have liberal arts degrees or dropped out of community college. If our country was run by drooling idiots as big as the Occupiers, nothing would get done (or farmed). Good riddance.
a) evidently you are an uniformed fascist ideologue.
b) our country is already run by drooling idiots: Jimmy Dimon just lost $2 billion b/c the politicians on both sides of the aisle are too chickenshit and too beholden to ‘bankers’ to re-instate a separation between commercial and investment banking and to enforce existing criminal law.
*uninformed, fixed.
though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if you were a brown-shirt
Let me guess, by the looks of your username you’re an Occupier? What’s it like subscribing to a “movement” that’s bound to fall apart due to grossly misguided members who are just angry at society?
I imagine you drive everywhere isolated from the people around you. So terrified and afraid of society, you are only more then willing to hand every public space away to prevent the possibility of civic participation. Rather you prefer a controlled environment that is designed by the corporate sphere, one that allows you to avoid authentic interaction. You are more comfortable with an illusion of freedom.
People have the right to be angry and outraged, that is human. They also have the right to defy a system that is unjust, that is the story of America.
Damn, how did you know I was wearing my fascist uniform?