Berkeley Violates Their Sanctuary Contracting Ordinance
On October 5th, the city council approved a waiver to Berkeley’s Sanctuary Contracting Ordinance, giving the green light to a $6.5M contract for Motorola radios. Motorola provides services and technology to ICE, and Berkeley is prevented from doing business with them unless no reasonable alternative exists.
Does a reasonable alternative exist? Patently, yes. Unfortunately, this city council meeting was mired in theatrics and confusion.
The meeting began clearly enough with dozens of public commenters, all but one urging the council to slow down and do due diligence. Rather than take heed, Mayor Arreguin’s opening statement after the public comments was to doubt the need for a waiver in the first place. Arreguin went on to say that it is a subsidiary of Motorola who does business with ICE and wondered if that made the waiver a nonissue. It didn’t.
The City Manager spoke of the need to get a waiver in the “…interest of full transparency,” an ironic statement since the Motorola selection process was notably not transparent, with no formal bidding process or Request for Proposal (RFP).
When Councilmember Harrison asked the City Manager if an RFP was completed, she retorted that she didn’t need to get one. Then, the interim police chief and fire chief both claimed that there is no other entity, that they are aware of, which can provide compatibility and interoperability with the radio systems from neighboring municipalities. This led to many staff repeating that this contract had to be sole sourced. Unfortunately, this isn’t true.
Finally, Henry Oyekanmi, director of finance, thoroughly confused the matter. He stated “…solicitation was done and only Motorola came up with the bid.” However, he failed to indicate that solicitation was done eleven years ago. Based on this misleading information, Councilmember Kesarwani concluded “…so we did do a fair and open competitive solicitation.” No one bothered to correct her.
There is, in fact, at least one alternative to Motorola, from a company that does not do business with ICE. The letter below was sent to city leadership on October 6th:
My name is William Ballowe and I am the regional manager for northern California for the P25 radios and infrastructure from the EF Johnson division of JVCKenwood.
1) You do not have to buy Motorola radios. Kenwood P25 radios are designed for and are compatible with, and already operate on systems using the P25 standard protocol and interoperate with Motorola radios, whether encrypted or not.
2) Unlike Motorola, BK and Harris P25 radios, ours are not sold to ICE- purchasing our radios will keep the City in compliance with your laws and rules.
3) Our radios can be equipped as a standard option with the encryption asked for by CA-DOJ to protect individual’s private information, and still leave other channels ‘open’ to scrutiny.
4) […] Motorola has some of the oldest technology on the market at some of the highest prices. We encourage the City to obtain a quote from us before proceeding with this purchase.
It appears the City Manager is in violation of the Sanctuary Contracting Ordinance, section 13.105.030, which states that a waiver is granted only if no reasonable alternative exists.
We must demand our city leadership solicit bids for this contract in light of this letter.
This article was first published in the Berkeley Times on October 21, 2021.
