In April 2025, Alameda County completed an evaluation of the BYA cannabis education contract documenting significant failures: the advertising campaign was never produced; the peer education program trained students but they never led sessions for other students; and reported counseling numbers were unclear as to how many clients were new versus drawn from BYA's existing caseload. The California Board of State and Community Corrections nonetheless certified that Berkeley had "met all grant obligations."
Despite this evaluation, in June 2025 the Berkeley City Council voted to reauthorize a $106,000 soda tax grant to BYA for its Urban Agriculture and Team Nutrition Program. No discussion of the reauthorization has been identified in meeting transcripts, which is consistent with the item having been passed on the consent calendar — a block vote without individual deliberation. Berkeley has also continued BYA's after-school and counseling contracts since the 2010s, and BYA has received $125,000 annually from the Reimagining Public Safety initiative since fiscal year 2023.
The county evaluation was available to council members and city staff before the June 2025 reauthorization vote. No council member is documented as having requested the evaluation, cited its findings, or moved to condition the reauthorization on a performance review.
The county evaluation documenting BYA's failures was completed in April 2025. The soda tax grant reauthorization passed approximately eight weeks later. No council member is documented as having referenced the evaluation or moved to condition renewal on a performance review.
If the reauthorization was a consent calendar item — which the absence of transcript discussion suggests — then the accountability failure is institutional rather than individual: the city processed a renewal without surfacing available evidence of the contractor's performance problems, and no member intervened. The score reflects a shared failure of a body that had access to relevant information and did not use it. It does not reflect a judgment about any member's intent.
When the Chronicle documented BYA's contract failures, Bartlett — as the council's longest-serving member and one with a documented household connection to the subcontractor — offered the lowest possible bar for scrutiny: "Maybe there's a world where they could still fulfill the missing elements." He proposed no review, no recovery of funds, and no acknowledgment that the program had failed the people it was meant to serve.
This is scored separately from Incident A (his personal conflict of interest) because it addresses his conduct as a council member responsible for contractor oversight, not as a private party whose household was financially entangled. A member with his tenure who responds to a documented contract failure by suggesting the contractors might yet succeed — years after the performance window closed — is not performing oversight. He is providing cover.