Measure U: Haven’t We Done This Before?

The ballot described a deferred-maintenance proposition: repair, renovate, replace, or reconstruct aging infrastructure and facilities, including sidewalks, storm drains, parks, streets, senior and recreation centers, and other City facilities and buildings.

That is the proper starting point for evaluating what the voter bought. The later project-selection processes occurred after the voter had already authorized the debt.

And T1 did build substantial useful infrastructure. The City reports 39 completed Phase 1 projects and identifies numerous completed street, park, facility, stormwater, pool, and waterfront improvements. The criticism in this quiz is not “T1 did nothing.” It is that the voter authorized a broad pot of debt whose eventual project portfolio could change materially after approval while still passing the formal audit test.

The December 2020 Phase 2 list assigned $6.75 million of T1 money to accelerated annual street paving. That contribution was reduced by $2.8 million in 2023. In 2025 the remaining $3.95 million was removed from the T1 project list. Berkeley took two separate bites at this apple, two years apart, each one its own occasion to reconsider.

Streets were demonstrably part of what the public expected T1 to address. The City's explanation that other funding had become available for paving does not answer the accountability problem. Voters had separately authorized additional money for streets. A reasonable voter would expect that new funding to increase the amount of street repair Berkeley could deliver, not to erase a previous commitment and release those bond dollars for other priorities.

In other words, Berkeley treated a later source of street money as permission to backfill T1 rather than supplement it.

Paving is the clearest single example, not the only one. Several T1 projects that contemplated physical construction were funded only through design; the September 2025 rewrite proposed limiting existing projects to design rather than construction, added projects that had not been used to build public support for the bond, and freed roughly $6.283 million for reallocation.

T1’s policies and procedures manual explicitly described a “robust public project selection process” and a “robust community engagement process.” Measure U’s development record again invokes a “robust community engagement and survey process.”

So Measure U’s use of “robust” is not a new safeguard. Berkeley has already tested what that assurance means in practice.

“Robust” can describe effort, intensity, or volume of activity. It does not define an outcome, metric, threshold, or decision rule. Effort can masquerade as rigor.

Measure U’s audit can test whether expenditures comply with the bond’s broad authorized purposes. But Measure U does not give the auditor a binding voter-approved baseline of specific projects, quantities, completion dates, or outcomes against which to measure delivery.

So the audit can answer: was the money spent for an authorized infrastructure purpose? It cannot, by itself, answer: did voters receive the particular projects and outcomes used to build support for the bond?

That distinction matters because T1 already showed that the public-facing project portfolio can change after approval. Measure U’s audit does not solve that problem.

Financial compliance is not the same as accountability to the original voter-facing bargain.

Yes. The legal framework expressly permits projects not identified in the public process to remain eligible if they fit the broad authorized purposes.

T1 showed that a publicly discussed infrastructure portfolio can change substantially after voter approval. Measure U does not respond to that history by narrowing later discretion. Its public-facing project framework remains non-exhaustive, while the legal authorization permits spending across broad infrastructure purposes.

The flexibility that mattered under T1 is still present under Measure U.

Substitution is not inherently improper, and a project list that can never change is its own kind of failure. The criticism is the absence of durable voter-level rules governing material substitutions, cancellations, and design-only conversions.

Measure U asks voters for three times T1’s borrowing authorization, but it does not add the voter-level protections that T1’s history suggests were missing.

It does not create a binding original delivery baseline. It does not require heightened review before a publicly prioritized project is materially reduced or cancelled. It does not distinguish planning or design from recognizable physical delivery. And its audit provisions do not require an auditor to compare the final program with the voter-facing package used to build support.

Measure U is not merely another infrastructure bond. It repeats the core governance architecture that Measure T1 already tested.

Measure U cannot be rewritten after voters approve it and still become the bond voters were originally asked to authorize.

Council can adopt later policies. Oversight bodies can review spending. Auditors can test compliance. But those later actions are not the same as placing durable voter-level delivery rules into the measure itself — a future Council can amend an ordinary Council policy.

Measure U therefore has to be judged as written:

• broad infrastructure authority;
• a nonbinding and non-exhaustive project framework;
• substantial later Council discretion;
• no binding original voter-facing delivery baseline; and
• audits that do not require comparison against the original public project package.

Berkeley needs infrastructure investment. That is not a reason to repeat a governance design whose weakness Measure T1 already demonstrated.

T1 revealed the defect. Measure U had the opportunity to correct it. It did not.