These quizzes turn that material into a quick, engaging way to understand the decisions Berkeley is making — and asking you to make.
Berkeley makes consequential public decisions without a consistent method for defining problems, comparing alternatives, understanding costs, and measuring results. This project proposes one.
Public decisions improve when we define the problem before choosing the solution, consider the full range of alternatives, compare costs and consequences over the whole life of a commitment, and measure what actually happens afterward.
Before asking how to pay for something, ask whether the City must ensure it happens, should pursue it with partners, or should decline, transfer, repair or stop it.
The goal is not less government. It is government capable of doing important things well.
What a recommendation should expose before a vote.
Prefer slides? View the short version.
Define the problem. Consider the choices. Understand their consequences. Find out whether the choice worked.
And yet Berkeley repeatedly makes consequential decisions without doing it.
These are recurring patterns in Berkeley's own record — not isolated episodes, and not problems that disappear when the officeholders change.
Berkeley routinely considers ways to raise more money while leaving ways to change what it spends in the box.
Berkeley assigns percentage cuts to departments instead of ranking work across the organization, so vacancies and department boundaries take the place of prioritization.
Conditions meant to stop or reconsider projects fail to trigger when the conditions arrive.
Raising new money creates a visible accomplishment; reallocating existing money does not.
Council scrutiny tracks present controversy better than the size or duration of the commitment.
A second budget cycle appropriates hundreds of millions each year. Council adopts it without discussion.
Public engagement often asks residents which option they prefer without offering “don’t do it” as an option.
Berkeley measures activity better than outcomes, leaving Council little basis for ranking programs.
Capital projects can advance without first establishing how their ongoing operations will be funded.
Decisions emphasize acquisition cost while pushing maintenance, subsidies and other lifecycle costs into the future.
Council meetings routinely stretch late into the night as elected officials hear hours of repetitive testimony, sometimes on matters over which the City has little or no authority.
What the 2016 voter got for $100 million — and why Measure U repeats the design.
Rather play it? Take the argument as a quiz — the short version, or the full series.
See the analysis →The consequential claims from the debate on Berkeley’s $300 million infrastructure bond, each checked against the primary record.
The consequential claims from the Wellstone Club debate on Berkeley’s half-cent sales tax, each checked against the primary record.
Expanding the choice set on a street-safety decision framed as a binary.
A ready-made public parcel sold while the City was searching for land.
A recommendation whose stated premise was contradicted on the record by the department that owned it, four hours before the vote.
Every department was asked for the same percentage reduction, even though equal cuts do not have equal consequences.
Across-the-board cuts reward each department for protecting its own turf instead of finding savings across the City.
How Berkeley can preserve public participation without surrendering its attention budget.
Berkeley has an economic-development office and a list of interventions. What it has not shown is a system that says which of them worked.
The City Attorney tells voters what a measure legally does. The City Auditor should tell them which promises are binding, measurable, and within the promised audit’s reach.
Short quizzes on the record behind Berkeley’s November ballot — Measures U, V and Z — with the primary source linked beside every answer.
Protect one service and the savings have to come from another. See what reprioritizing actually requires.
See what Berkeley’s upcoming tax measures mean for your own household — individually and cumulatively over time.
About this project. Built from Berkeley's primary record: meeting transcripts, agendas, votes, audits, budgets and audited financial statements. Figures are traceable to their sources; unsupported ones are removed.
Berkeley Decision Project and Council Scorecards are related civic projects. They share research and a commitment to documented evidence, but serve different purposes: this project develops better approaches to public decisions; Council Scorecards evaluates elected officials.