Incoming mayor apologizes for trashed newspapers endorsing opponent

Friday December 06, 2002

By MICHELLE LOCKE
Associated Press Writer

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) Incoming Mayor Tom Bates apologized Friday for an incident in which about 1,000 copies of a university newspaper endorsing his opponent were trashed during the recent elections.

``I deeply regret my involvement in the activity. I was tired on the last day of a difficult campaign and I made a mistake. There's no excuse for it,'' Bates said Friday. ``However, my job is to work as hard as I can to make Berkeley a better place. That's what I was elected to do and that's what I'm doing.''

Bates, a former state assemblyman, won the Nov. 5 election with nearly 56 percent of the vote to incumbent Shirley Dean's 42 percent.

The copies of The Daily Californian were taken Nov. 4, the day the paper endorsed Dean. The student newspaper reported that about 90 percent of the papers were recovered from trash cans in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, which happens to be the birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement.

Campus police have forwarded the case to the district attorney's office, said UC Berkeley Police Capt. Bill Cooper. Prosecutor John Adams said he will decide what to do with it sometime next week.

Three of four students who said they saw Bates throwing away the papers held an informal news conference at Sproul Plaza Friday.

``We're all kind of shocked,'' said junior Steve Sexton. ``It causes us to question what he would do behind closed doors at City Hall.''

Sexton and the other three students are affiliated with the California Patriot, a conservative campus publication. But Sexton said it wasn't bias that motivated them to speak up.

``We're a conservative student group. We're certainly not going to lie to help elect one liberal Democrat over another,'' he said.

Dean, who, like Bates is a Democrat although she is considered to be closer to the center, said she was ``absolutely astounded'' by the affair, but would need to learn more about the facts before suggesting a course of action.

``He painted himself throughout the whole campaign that here was a man of years and years of integrity who was running a positive campaign, et cetera, et cetera, all of which was simply not true,'' she said. ``I'm appalled, I really am, but what can be done about it I don't know.''

(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)