Economy
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.
Oakland company Back to the roots grows mushrooms in recycled coffee grounds from Peet’s — and now thanks to their home mushroom kit, you can, too.
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.
John Russo is getting ready to pack his bags on June 10, ending his 11-year term as Oakland City Attorney to start his new position as Alameda City Manager on June 13. In this exclusive interview, Russo looks back on his time in Oakland, including six years on the city council, and talks about the city’s budget problems, gang injunctions, and the vote he thinks he got wrong.
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.
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.
A giant excavator was parked in the yard of a motel near the MacArthur BART station on Monday afternoon, where dozens of people were taking pictures with the machine that may soon start tearing down the motel rooms. The MacArthur Transit Village project will eventually transform a 7.76-acre site near the MacArthur BART station into a mixed-use area with new housing units and retail shops, along with restaurants and possibly a day care center.