www.sfgate.com Return to regular view Berkeley boycott all bark, little bite Not much evidence of economic impact Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, October 30, 2001 ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/30 /MN61669.DTL
Feathers are still flying over the campaign to choke Berkeley businesses as punishment for a City Council vote against the bombing of Afghanistan, but evidence of net losses to the city is hard to find.
Under the glare of national TV and newspaper attention -- and the weight of nearly 900 passionate e-mails and letters that have swelled tonight's City Council information packet -- the struggle seems to have turned more political than economic as opposing sides vie to deflect blame for an outpouring of anger from around the country. Many people vowed, as one Southern California man put it, "never to spend another damn dime in Berkeley!"
But reports of several contracts and meetings said to have been canceled because of the narrow council vote turned out to be false, and the many individuals who pledged to withhold business were partially canceled out by some people who said they'd give the city more business.
As reported by The Chronicle, for example, an employee of Tsunami Visual Technologies in Fremont sent an e-mail to Mayor Shirley Dean saying the firm was canceling a contract with a Berkeley company, but Tsunami's vice president said that no such contract existed and that the young employee who sent the e- mail "allowed his patriotic emotions to get the best of him."
And random checks by The Chronicle found some cases of customers' vowing to stay away from Berkeley restaurants but very little or no change in actual business since the council resolution was passed on Oct. 16.
To hear Councilwoman Dona Spring tell it, the two people who raised the boycott alarm -- Mayor Dean and Rachel Rupert of the Chamber of Commerce -- sound like a cross between Machiavelli and Chicken Little.
Spring, who sponsored the anti-bombing resolution and who is painted as Osama bin Laden's soul mate by many of her anonymous e-mail critics, said Dean's and Rupert's early boycott warnings helped promote the boycott and turn it into a political weapon against Spring and the four other leftist City Council members who approved the resolution. Dean, a liberal Democrat, belongs to the minority centrist faction on the nine-member council.
"I feel that the boycott-Berkeley campaign was publicized by the mayor and by Rachel Rupert in an effort to help the mayor's re-election campaign, to the detriment of Berkeley businesses," Spring said.
Dean, who said she had a stack of 2,000 letters and e-mails about the issue on her desk Friday, called Spring's charge "just ludicrous. . . . Ms. Spring really needs to wake up to reality."
Reid Edwards, chairman of the board of the Chamber of Commerce, said, "The Berkeley chamber is not involved in electoral politics." He said the chamber had received more than 1,000 e-mails, the large majority of which vowed not to buy Berkeley.
But actual losses were hard to confirm. Edwards said he preferred not to name examples of lost revenue, explaining that businesses were reluctant to talk "because they're concerned about it snowballing, and they're concerned also about retribution by members of the council."
The most frequently cited example is Ashby Lumber, which reported losing a $60,000 contract, but it declined to name the contractor.
The cancellation of a large banquet at Spenger's Restaurant and sharp reduction of another did occur but were falsely attributed to the council vote,
said Spenger's spokesman Tom Walton.
Calls and e-mail to two people reported to have canceled plans to buy Berkeley real estate were not returned.
FUTURE BOOKINGS The Marina Radisson Hotel said a 250-person banquet on Nov. 30 for the ROTC program at the University of California at Berkeley had been canceled because of the council vote, but the ROTC commanding officer, Navy Capt. Lee Rosenberg,
said the reasons were the expense and a schedule conflict.
Radisson general manager Brij Misra said the "real impact" was not loss of existing bookings but future decisions not to book at all.
Ace Hardware co-owner Bill Carpenter said half a dozen e-mails and some people who came into the store vowed to boycott, but he also said he hadn't yet seen a decline in sales.
And at Alko Office Supply, manager Claudia Blandon said, "All I know is, a man came down from Marin to buy files because he heard about the boycott and wanted to support Berkeley."
Spring said that e-mails she had received from the Bay Area had been evenly divided between positive and negative, and that she had received a hundred postcards from a counter-boycott "Buy Berkeley" campaign.
Dean's office said her e-mails, from both near and far, had overwhelmingly opposed the council vote and favored a boycott.
One boycotter who wrote to Dean, Piedmont commodity broker Ed Pacult, said in an interview that Berkeley would no longer receive the roughly $1,000 he spends there each month on dining, shopping and Volvo repairs.
Asked about the charge that the boycott unfairly punishes Berkeley merchants, many of whom do not agree with the council majority, he said, "I'm not going to do it a long time."
The man who vowed not to spend "another damn dime" in Berkeley, Phil Scott of Ridgecrest, next to the Mojave desert, said in an interview that he usually visited Berkeley three or four times a year and that the boycott "is the only way I know of that can make any kind of impression."
He did allow that he might make an exception for Bette's Oceanview Diner.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
COMPLETE TEXT OF BERKELEY RESOLUTION Here is the full text of the five-part resolution passed by the Berkeley City Council majority on Oct. 16 in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the subsequent U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan. Voting in favor of all five parts were council members Margaret Breland, Linda Maio, Maudelle Shirek, Dona Spring and Kriss Worthington. Mayor Shirley Dean voted for Parts 1 and 5 and abstained on the rest. Abstaining on all parts were council members Polly Armstrong, Mim Hawley and Betty Olds.
-- Condemn the mass murder of thousands of people on Sept. 11, 2001, and express our profound grief at the atrocities last month that killed thousands of innocent people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, and acknowledge, honor and support the heroic rescue efforts on the part of dedicated police and fire departments, and the city, state and federal governments.
-- Ask our representatives to help break the cycle of violence, bringing the bombing to a conclusion as soon as possible, avoiding actions that can endanger the lives of innocent people in Afghanistan, and minimizing the risk to American military personnel.
-- Urge our representatives to concentrate all available resources on bringing to justice all of those who were complicit in last month's violent attack, and work with international organizations toward the same end.
-- Urge our representatives to devote our government's best efforts in collaboration with governments throughout the world, to addressing and overcoming those conditions such as poverty, malnutrition, disease, oppression and subjugation that tend to drive some people to acts of terrorism.
-- Request that we engage in a national campaign to lessen our dependence on oil from the Middle East and to commit to a nationwide conversion to renewable energy sources such as solar and fuel cells within five years.
E-mail Charles Burress at cburress at sfchronicle.com
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A - 13