Tonight was a planning commission meeting on the West Berkeley Project (again) where the staff was asking for more direction prior to writing new language to be considered at a public hearing for the Supplemental Environmental Impact Report. The SEIR was written because the original EIR (which the City Council certified) was so deficient that a group of people sued. Anyway, I didn't think tonight's meeting was all that important for us to go to, but I was wrong. The weight of all the usual (and a couple of new) West Berkeley suspects speaking I think encouraged the commissioners to stand their ground a little in face of what the developers (also all the usual suspects) want. Also, I got the idea that they were somewhat miffed by how much the City Council had changed things around, ignoring much of their hard work... Patrick Sheehan was replacing Patty Dacey tonight. It's not clear to me how temporary that replacement is, but it'll be interesting to see if he's there for the public hearing in two weeks. I thought Victoria Eisen did a good job of running the meeting. She seemed more organized and crisp than the previous chairs have been.