Eleven letters from 2017

John,

I've done some work on fleshing out an infrastructure presentation that I would like to discuss with u. It needs some critical review.

Do u have some time this month to meet?

Also, I'd like set up some meetings with campus folks to see if we can get some help.

Nathan Brostrom is interested in meeting to discuss the issue later this month.

Gordon

Treva,

I know about the April 4th meeting and will check with Ray about attending.

I would still be interested in talking with you about undergrounding the entire city in a 30 – 40 year period and whether or not there would be economies of scale to bring down the cost from the $740 million quoted in the Harris Report of July 2016.

I believe that I know how to finance about $300 million of the costs, but we need to get the costs down by a factor of two or have utilities partner with the City if financing the undergrounding of the entire city.

John and I would be willing to stop by your office if you have 1/2 – 1 hour to talk, if you have the time.

Gordon

"Tonight at 7:30 Gordon Wozniak and I are presenting the billion dollar bond for Berkeley Infrastructure to the League of Women Voters."

Eric, haven't seen you since we were at the Goldman School seeing Bob Reich.

Please consider helping guide a huge effort to join the Berkeley campus and the City of Berkeley in spending $2 billion dollars in new bond revenue to completely redo Berkeley infrastructure.

I talked to Bob Reich two weeks ago about this, and he has offered to help on the new plan. So have many engineering faculty, so has Carol Christ, the new Chancellor, and so has Jesse Arreguin, the new Mayor, and the City Council.

Two parallel tracks to implement: design and issue $2 billion dollars in infrastructure bonds; create the Berkeley2050 plan to spend the bond — accelerate and unite Berkeley infrastructure planning and projects, both campus and city.

This new $2-billion-dollar idea — Berkeley2050 — joins the UC Berkeley Campus and the City of Berkeley in rethinking how to rebuild all Berkeley infrastructure: water, sewer, storm water, undergrounding, street resurfacing, lighting, sensors and controls, conduit placement, sewer laterals, net-zero energy and water technology, energy distribution, and gigabit Internet everywhere.

Nathan Brostrom, CFO for University of California statewide, agrees that Berkeley is severely underbonded, and supports the plan devised by Gordon Wozniak, who served on the City Council for 12 years, to aggregate all the streams of City revenue, and use that revenue stream to back the issuing of a $2 billion dollar bond. Nathan has passed two 100-year bonds for UC statewide.

We just passed a Berkeley $100 million dollar bond in November, Measure T-1, for infrastructure. Setting priorities to spend it made everyone aware we need to go beyond patchwork fixes, and unite on a common, long-term plan. Gordon analyzed all past bonds, and has come up with a way to self-finance capital infrastructure.

Gordon and I have drafted an outline of the financing, and an overview of how to spend it. We presented to the new City Council three weeks ago. They liked it.

We want your advice.

We're setting up a City Infrastructure joint task force… This is a special chance to unite all Berkeley engineering expertise, Haas financial expertise, LBL environment research, and City implementation and capital planning. We could try the most advanced new materials, construction techniques, and engineering, drawing on the world's number one public university engineering designs.

Hope to talk soon,

All the best,
John

Here's what Gordon and I presented to Berkeley City Council four weeks ago.

We pointed out that the only way to get the attention of Berkeley faculty was to have a pot of gold. And we got them to commit that if the pot arrived, they would commit to implementing your ideas.

So, onward. With a big pot, we need a big plan. The $100 million from Bond T-1, that passed with 86% of the vote, is already allocated to putting a lot of short-life-span asphalt on the streets.

Nathan Brostrom agrees that City of Berkeley is severely underbonded, thinks we can raise between one and two billion at historically low interest rates, and I've used that big golden number to get Carol Christ, David Sedlak, Paul Alivisatos, Bob Reich, Laura Tyson, and many more to think that a tiny city like Berkeley, with an oversized pool of scientific and engineering talent, could spend that amount of money in a way that could be a template for all of Rockefeller Resilient Cities, all Bloomberg cities, all Clinton Foundation cities…

No electrons, no water molecules, leave the closed cycle of Berkeley. Phonons and photons, yes. But we build the chemical bonds and massage them.

John

Looks June 16th, let's come to my house for lunch… See you all then.

Tom

Paul. Thanks for talking today. We'll hookup for lunch next week. I want to introduce you to John Gage who actually introduced me to your book. He took the Drawdown concepts and did an overlay on what we are doing in Kibera based on your template. John wants to share some data with you.

Thanks so much,
David

Team,

Gordon, Larry, Margo, and I met today to discuss prep for the meeting with Jesse on August 24th at noon. We agreed to prepare a handout and it will include:

• Build from Jesse's announcement to launch vision 2050
• Summarize infrastructure today
• Where do we want to be in year 2050?
• Use of triple bottom line and community engagement
• 1st year activities
• Mayor's task force

Ray and Margo will draft the handout and will share with our team via email. We will also identify speaking points for our team members.

Gordon will take the lead in the discussion. We can all attend, although Jim will be out of town. We will meet for lunch following the meeting to debrief.

Ray

A different approach, worthy of discussion, perhaps in context of our current explorations of community banks? Asset accounting might even be our first step toward asset management……

The Hidden Wealth of Cities — to find it, a new book says, localities need look no further than their roads, airports and convention centers.

Hi Ray,

You did a great job on the handout. I have only a couple of suggestions for your consideration. They are marked in red in the attached Word document.

Gordon

Just met with our new Berkeley mayor about forming a Berkeley2050 Task Force to model Berkeley — all energy flows, all water, all information… to design our future infrastructure.

Take mapping to a new level of detail. Estimate costs of retrofitting 35,000 structures for resiliency. Move to local, decentralized water treatment.

Start projects prioritized by Paul Hawken's Drawdown methodology: impact on gigaton removal.

Will be very interesting.