Berkeleyside31%
Berkeley taps ‘safe streets leader’ as new public works chief 42%
By Nico Savidge54%
7/15/2026, 7:45:21 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 19 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Appeal to Authority, and Optimism Bias, with Halo Effect as the most egregious example at 49.4% saturation with 197 hits. Analysis detected 1,009 faulty-reasoning hits from 399 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 46.2% and a BS Rank of 42% (12,353 of 21,168 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 58.40% of the article peer group.
Berkeley’s next head of public works led efforts to speed up street safety projects in San Francisco and oversaw road maintenance and parking enforcement in Oakland.
The Berkeley City Council voted Tuesday night to appoint Jamie Parks the director of the Department of Public Works, which oversees a wide range of local infrastructure, including street paving, city facilities and trash and recycling programs.
Parks will lead a closely watched department that is expected to ramp up street paving — the council last week approved a plan that calls for repairing more than 60 miles of streets over the next five years, a significant increase over prior years — and launch a raft of new traffic safety initiatives after voters approved a parcel tax in 2024 to fund those projects.
But new safety infrastructure can prove politically thorny in Berkeley, as in other cities, because it often involves devoting more of the road to bikes and pedestrians and leaves less space for parking and car traffic.
The bike and pedestrian advocacy group Walk Bike Berkeley cheered Parks as a “safe streets leader” in a newsletter Wednesday.
Ben Gerhardstein, a Walk Bike Berkeley leader, told the City Council on Tuesday, “Jamie has the background that the city needs right now to really advance our work to make our streets safe, accessible and smooth for all.”
Parks, who will start his new role Aug. 17, is today the assistant director of the Oakland Department of Transportation.
Before that, he managed San Francisco’s “Livable Streets Division,” where he led efforts to build 45 miles of new protected bike lanes and launched the city’s “Quick Build” program, which aimed to expedite construction of pedestrian and bicycle safety infrastructure.
Deputy City Manager David White wrote in a report to the council that Parks “emerged as the top candidate due to his strong record in municipal operations, capital program delivery, organizational improvement, and transportation safety initiatives.”
Parks will be paid $270,000 per year.
Council members said they were excited to work with Parks and praised Deputy Public Works Director Wahid Amiri, who has been the department’s interim head since the departure of former Director Terrance Davis in March.
“He stepped into a huge position and really did a great job,” Councilmember Shoshana O’Keefe said of Amiri.
“It’s an incredibly important position and he really nailed it.”
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100%flagged-word coverageBen Gerhardstein
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