Development
The Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission voted 6-4 during a meeting on Wednesday afternoon to request the organizers of a community garden in North Oakland to obtain a $2,900 Conditional Use Permit from the city’s Planning Commission in order to continue their operation.
Residents representing Oakland arts groups, libraries and redevelopment projects pled with councilmembers at Tuesday’s night City Council meeting to find alternatives to making drastic cuts to help close the city’s $58 million budget deficit.
Bay Area residents may soon begin to see ads for a new program that allows homeowners to better insulate their houses while getting a considerable of rebate for doing the upgrade. After an 11-month pilot program, the full version of Energy Upgrade California—a statewide effort to promote energy efficiency—is now going full throttle. Homeowners who hire participating contractors to retrofit their houses as part of the Energy Upgrade California program are eligible for a reimbursement of up to $4,000. The…
Nearly 30 years ago, in 1983, Dan Fontes was under Highway 580 at Harrison Street in North Oakland painting on a massive round concrete highway support beam. With cars speeding by, he diligently worked on his piece of art: a realistic depiction of a 30-foot tall giraffe craning its neck up toward the freeway. As Fontes painted, a police car pulled up…
On Friday, all five Alameda County supervisors and the county administrator convened, not in their downtown meeting room, but beside a construction site at Highland Hospital to celebrate the groundbreaking of the hospital’s Acute Tower Replacement Project. A dozen ceremonial shovels were placed next to the podium, while several excavators were doing the real work on the other side of the fence.
The Port of Oakland just secured $18 million in federal funding for its harbor deepening project, said the port’s spokesperson Marilyn Sandifur on Wednesday. The funding is going to help the port receive maintenance dredging services from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in fiscal year 2011.
Most people may not know that the carpets in Alameda County’s General Services Agency’s office in downtown Oakland are partially made from shredded recycled plastic bottles. They also may not know that over 25 percent the power used at the Santa Rita jail comes from solar panels. These, along with other energy efficient and recycled materials projects, are part of Alameda County’s green purchasing policy. The idea is for the county to buy and use as many green products as possible in order to save water and energy and reduce waste.
Gigantic 10-story tall ships that stretch three football fields long line the wharf at the Port of Oakland. There’s constant movement as big white cranes load and unload colorful shipping containers on and off the boats. Most of the ships look pretty much the same, equipped with lifeboats, pulley systems and flags hoisted on the decks. But one vessel has something different: two thick cables, which look like over-sized extension cords, that hang off the side of the boat and connect to the dock.
Equipped with whistles, banners and plastic noisemakers, hundreds of people crammed into the City Council Chambers on Thursday evening to voice their concerns about the city’s proposed budget cuts at a special hearing held by the city officials. The crowd was so large that many had to be relocated to another hearing room for safety reasons.