Economy
At the Occupy Oakland encampment at Snow Park near Lake Merritt, cooking equipment that used to serve hot meals in the middle of the camp is gone, and the library and clothes donation area are a shell of what they once were–but, since the evacuation of the Frank Ogawa Plaza Occupy camp this Monday, the number of tents at Snow Park has been growing.
Oaklanders voted Tuesday to reject three ballot measures, which would have imposed an $80 parcel tax on homeowners to hire more police officers, extended the deadline for police and firefighter pension payments to stabilize the city budget, and changed the city attorney from an elected to an appointed position.
On October 26 representatives from three of Oakland’s public elementary schools –ASCEND, Learning Without Limits, and Lazear—presented petitions to the school board to convert into charter schools. Closing the five schools, by the school district’s estimate, would save about $2 million. But if these three schools become charters, the district could lose as many as 1000 students from its rolls, pulling more than $4 million from OUSD.
Oakland North asked Oakland residents their thoughts on Mayor Jean Quan’s handling of the Occupy Oakland demonstration.
Three weeks after the OUSD board voted 5-2 to close five elementary schools—Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park and Santa Fe—and relocate or merge several other schools, parents and staff affected by the closures are working to figure out what they will do. Their array of “options,” which will be handled by “transition coordinators,” includes no guarantees.
The Oakland City Council approved new requirements Tuesday night that would grant local businesses exclusive rights to demolition and remediation contracts for the Oakland Army Base redevelopent project.
All three Oakland city ballot measures failed to pass in a special election held today. Of a total of 196, 851 registered voters, only 49,058 (24.92 percent) cast a ballot.
On Tuesday afternoon, about 400 people marched to the UC Berkeley campus from Frank Ogawa Plaza, which was the home of the Occupy Oakland camp from its inception October 10 until November 14, when the camp was shut down by police in an early morning raid.
A new round of funding from Kaiser Permanente, just announced today, could allow more low-income and uninsured Oakland residents receive help managing chronic diseases, like diabetes.