The answer is simple: City Hall has not prioritized streets and sidewalks for decades. The current City Council does not own all the blame for this, and has, in fact, increased funding for street repairs over the last few years, but it has not been enough. We are now in such a deep hole that, according to the City’s own 2023 report, even if City Council were to meet its commitment to raise street maintenance funding to $8 million/year from the General Fund (up from $2 million/year between 2012 and 2022), overall street pavement condition would continue to decline. 

If we want our streets and sidewalks fixed any time soon, we simply must pass Measure EE.

Before we worked to get 4,300 signatures from Berkeley voters to put Measure EE on the ballot, we reached out to those who developed Measure FF. They told us they weren’t interested in a consensus measure that focused on what we need now. Instead, they told us they wanted more money to build cycle tracks on our main traffic corridors, like the controversial one proposed for Hopkins Street. We couldn’t agree to this.

Measure EE guarantees that none of the money can be used for cycle tracks. Over its lifetime, Measure FF will cost over 50% more than Measure EE, with funds going towards many purposes other than fixing our streets and sidewalks. Measure EE is focused on paving ALL the streets that aren’t rated in good condition – starting with the streets in the worst condition – and fixing ALL the sidewalks and pedestrian pathways.  

Measure FF aspires to bring streets to good condition on average, which would leave many streets in a deteriorated state. Measure FF provides some funds for sidewalks and pathways and would raise at least $100 million in additional funds for vaguely defined “safety” purposes that could include controversial projects such as closing off Telegraph Ave. to cars and building barricaded cycle tracks on major streets and through commercial corridors.   

Measure EE requires that street reconfigurations be evaluated before more are approved and creates an oversight body that is independent of the City Council to ensure that the City implements the measure as intended. Measure FF's oversight provision is toothless, relies on a commission hand-picked by Council, and envisions that the commission will evaluate city staff design work rather than oversee proper implementation of the measure. Other major differences are summarized in this table.

The one that receives more votes prevails.

Most, if not all, commercial leases are structured such that parcel taxes are immediately passed through to tenants. Measure FF, with a higher tax rate on commercial properties, hurts our struggling small businesses.

Yes. Measure EE is focused narrowly on fixing our streets and sidewalks to benefit the entire community while minimizing people’s tax burden. Measure EE will bring all our streets to “good” condition, starting with the worst ones. We used the city’s 2022 Pavement Management Program Update, dated March 2023, to estimate the cost of bringing all our streets to good condition. Measure EE includes an inflation adjustment provision that ensures the tax will keep up with rising repair costs.

Because badly deteriorated streets are so expensive to fix, the City has essentially abandoned them, choosing instead to maintain streets already in good condition. So, Measure EE provides additional funds targeted to fixing our worst streets. Berkeley spends more than $15M/year to maintain our streets, drawing from county and city gas taxes and the City’s General Fund, as well as prior city parcel tax measures. 

Once Measure EE brings our worst streets into repairable condition, the City should be expected to maintain them.

Yes. According to a December 26, 2022, Berkeleyside article and BFBP's correspondence with city staff, the City estimates that $47.5 million would fully fund sidewalk repair, including all ADA violations. The estimated $53 million provided by Measure EE covers that and, in addition, provides enough to repair and improve all pedestrian paths, based on estimates provided by the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. 

While homeowners will continue to be legally responsible for sidewalk conditions by state law, nothing prevents the City from paying to keep our sidewalks safe. With the dedicated revenue from Measure EE, the City will have the funding it needs to relieve homeowners of this cost, just as Albany does.

Measure EE clearly states that tax revenue must be reduced in proportion to reductions in the City’s General Fund for streets, preventing the bait-and-switch practices we’ve seen with other taxes. In addition, the sponsors of Measure EE kept the measure simple and specific so that voters know exactly what it will and won’t fund: it will fund street, sidewalk and pathway repair, and improve our bicycle boulevards; it won’t fund barricaded cycle tracks on our major city streets that would create barriers for the disabled, delay first responders, and remove parking that will harm our small businesses. 

And we added an independent oversight body – not one controlled by City Council – to ensure that it is implemented just as it is written.

Hundreds of Berkeley voters have endorsed Measure EE, including former Berkeley elected officials and city commissioners as well as neighborhood associations, small business owners, cyclists, and disability advocates. 

Measure EE has attracted this support because the campaign is a fully grassroots effort fueled by voter concern over the City’s failure to fix our streets and sidewalks. Over 80 volunteers took matters into their own hands collecting 4,300 signatures to put Measure EE on the ballot.

Cycle tracks are physically separated lanes intended for bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, and e-scooters. Berkeley has recently built cycle tracks on Milvia, between Hearst and Blake, lower Gilman, and on Bancroft, Fulton and Dana (the “Southside Complete Streets Project”).

Measure EE explicitly does not allow funds from the tax to be used for cycle tracks because cycle tracks have been proposed in locations that don’t even meet Berkeley’s own guidelines. In addition, cycle tracks slow down first responders and take valuable parking our merchants need to survive. 

Much of the City’s street maintenance budget is being spent on cycle tracks, which are expensive (the Southside project cost $16.5 million, half of which came from city taxpayers), rather than fixing the 42% of Berkeley streets that are in “poor” or “failed” condition. That’s why Measure EE funds can only be used to fix our streets – including Berkeley’s quiet bicycle boulevard network, which many cyclists believe is safer than cycle tracks on busy major corridors – and sidewalks, redressing thousands of ADA violations in the process. 

Measure EE also requires the city to follow the evaluation and reporting requirements in its own 2012 "Complete Streets" policy prior to allocating more transportation funds, since no studies have been done to see if the new infrastructure is safe and increasing bike ridership, or how it’s working for the disabled community.

Hopkins is clearly not the right place for a cycle track and it would NOT BE SAFE for cyclists, pedestrians, or people in wheelchairs. Perhaps most importantly, the City approved the plan despite a huge community outcry and without checking whether the cycle track would allow for safe emergency evacuation. 

None of the money raised by EE can be used for cycle tracks and those of us who back the measure want this to be a very clear message to our leaders to start listening to community feedback and stop building infrastructure that disenfranchises the mobility impaired and people who need to drive to appointments and the grocery store.

Measure EE is focused on fixing broken streets, sidewalks, and paths, because broken pavement is dangerous to the entire community: pedestrians, bicyclists, those in wheelchairs, scooter riders, and vehicle drivers. In addition, Measure EE will improve the safety of Berkeley’s bicycle boulevard network of traffic-restricted streets that already provide the safest, lowest-traffic routes for bicyclists by funding additional traffic calming measures. 

Measure EE also funds the highest priority pedestrian safety projects, which are identified in the City’s 2020 Pedestrian Plan and include Safe Routes to School projects. 

It is also important to note that the City must implement a new California “daylighting” law prohibiting parking or stopping a vehicle along a curb at least 20 feet from a marked crosswalk, to make roadways safer for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers. Since the largest cause of collisions with pedestrians is the failure of drivers to yield at crosswalks, improving lines of sight so that pedestrians can be more readily seen will complement the effectiveness of this measure in improving pedestrian safety.

Measure EE establishes an independent oversight commission using the Redistricting Commission as a model. Under that model, the City Clerk randomly selects eight members of the public (one from each council district), and those members select five "at-large" members. Any resident (if not employed by or under contract to the city) can apply and cannot be replaced by City Council. The role of the oversight commission is to ensure that the city carries out the intent of the measure, including spending funds as specified, repairing worst streets first, and developing performance metrics for our street investments. As with the Redistricting Commission, the oversight commission must be provided with an adequate budget to carry out its duties.

Unlike all other city commissions, except the Redistricting Commission, Measure EE’s oversight commission is not hand-picked by City Council Members, who can remove commissioners at will. The commissioners are not picked because they have expertise in street planning, since their job is not to second guess staff decisions. They are picked because they are citizens who have met basic residency requirements and have applied to be on the commission. That’s what makes it a citizens commission and allows it to operate free of political influence.

The city's 2012 "Complete Streets" policy requires evaluation and reporting of transportation investments, but such evaluation has never, apparently, been done nor metrics proposed. Measure EE requires the city to follow this policy's evaluation requirements prior to allocating transportation funds. 

Specifically, it requires the city to: (a) Develop a baseline of use by vehicles, pedestrians, bicycles and micro-mobility devices; (b) Develop and use metrics to assess the impacts of improvements; and (c) Perform an annual programmatic evaluation of recent expenditures and the net impact on mobility in the city. It will be the job of the independent oversight commission to see to it that this requirement is met on projects funded by Measure EE.

Measure EE also requires the City to increase public input as it develops the five-year paving program by holding at least three workshops annually in different areas of the city to augment the regular meetings of the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission.