Berkeley Has Plans To Revitalize Telegraph Avenue

BERKELEY, Calif. (KCBS)  -- The Berkeley City Council is giving a green light to a plan aimed at reversing the decline of Telegraph Avenue.

It includes measures to deal with what merchants say is a small, troubling group of vagrants and the mentally ill which drive business away.

Berkeley's Mayor told KCBS Reporter Henry Mulak that it's troubling to see what's happening on the doorstep of one of the nation's most prestigious universities.

"[The vagrants are] yelling at people, or insulting people, or aggressively panhandling people," Mayor Tom Bates said.

Merchants agree with Mayor Bates about what they say is a small, hard core group of people that are frightening their business away.

"We do have a fair amount of homeless people," Bates said. "What we don't want is, we don't want people to feel that they are being disrupted by the homeless."

Therefore, the City Council has agreed to a plan to get more police on the street, and ask the University of California to get their police department involved as well.

"Merchants come and sell on the sidewalk, and people come from all over the world to telegraph, and there's a lot of people there," Mayor bates told KCBS. "So we just want to make sure that people understand it's not just for students and tourists, but it's for everyone who lives in our community, to feel safe and comfortable there."

The plan includes not only more officers, but also putting more social workers on Telegraph Avenue and surrounding streets.

"What we're really trying to do is say 'look, we;ve tried this piecemeal in the past, what we need now is a whole collection of things to do all at once," Mayor Bates said.

This is one of the first measures in the plan to deal with a thirty percent decline in tax revenue from the Telegraph Avenue area over the last sixteen years (adjusted for inflation). Nearly two-dozen storefronts are now vacant there, and the other parts of the plan include measures to attract business back by offering incentives, including a streamlined permit process and grants for improving storefronts.

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