It's time for you to help turn around Downtown Berkeley.

For a change there's something easy to do that will make a real difference. You don't have to contribute any money, join any group or attend any meeting.

All you have to do is not sign the petition now being circulated to cancel our new Downtown Area Plan. And tell your friends to also "just say no."

After four years of community-wide effort, seven of our nine Berkeley council-members (Anderson, Bates, Capitelli, Maio, Moore, Wengraf, Wozniak) voted to approve a new plan for Downtown Berkeley which will help turn around a downtown stuck in failure.

In Downtown Berkeley today, commercial vacancy rates have topped 16 percent, almost all retail businesses continue to struggle and restaurants continue to close, and only one new affordable apartment building has been completed in years. We need to do better.

Our new Downtown Area Plan will revitalize Downtown Berkeley. It encourages more Downtown residents and more affordable housing, supports a pedestrian plaza on Center Street, enforces new green building standards and provides for much-needed street-level amenities to make the Downtown more enjoyable. It's also essential to Berkeley's Climate Action Plan because it supports more residents living downtown near transit and daily-needs shopping-essential to our environmental leadership role as a "climate smart" city.

For many years the people now opposed to our new Downtown Area Plan have also opposed all previous attempts to accommodate more people in Berkeley-even though that's just what we need to build an equitable, diverse and environmentally responsible future for our city.

This time their scare tactic is "Manhattanization:" the specter of greedy "corporate developers" crowding our Downtown with a forest of "massive skyscrapers."

What's actually in the new Downtown Area Plan is something different. It limits "tall" additions over the next 20 years to a maximum of one or two buildings for conference-oriented hotels or housing, plus no more than 6 other medium-height buildings-two of which could be office buildings and at least four residential. It asks for significant returns from developers for public amenities, including public open spaces in the Downtown. This potential growth over 20 years is constrained to a district that takes up less than four percent of Berkeley's land-existing zoning limits would still apply everywhere else.

The conclusion the City Council reached is clear: the only way we can turn around the Downtown is if we can house more residents and workers in new green buildings to support local-oriented shopping and services, instead of just futilely waiting for business trade to come back from the malls and the Internet. Given that reality, when is doing nothing the "better and greener solution" for the Downtown, as the petitioners claim?

If the referendum succeeds, four years of hard community-planning work would be thrown away and improvements for the Downtown would be put on hold again. How would that help make the Downtown more successful?

Please join the City Council majority, Mayor Tom Bates, Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, State Senator Loni Hancock, environmental and labor groups and many of your own neighbors in opposing this unfortunate and short-sighted attempt to freeze Downtown Berkeley in failure mode. Say no to the deceptive referendum petition-and say yes to a better and greener Berkeley in years to come.

Tags: DOWNTOWN AREA PLAN