Economy
Hundreds of residents, workers, and commuters who visited the downtown fair during the busy work lunch hour. Community members representing a dozen East Bay Area nonprofit organizations had set up informational tables in the center’s walkway area to encourage residents to volunteer and make donations. Participating groups included the Alameda County Community Food Bank, Girls Incorporated of Alameda County, Habitat For Humanity of the East Bay, and Reading Partners, a national organization that uses volunteers to tutor children.
In one of the most expensive local mayoral campaigns in recent memory, you get what you pay for—at least when it comes to first-choice votes. According to voting and campaign finance data compiled by Oakland North, the distribution of Oakland residents’ first-choice votes in this year’s still-undecided Oakland mayoral race directly reflects the spending by each of the candidates.
One week after Oakland voters defeated Measure L, a parcel tax that would have boosted city public teacher salaries, members of the city’s public education community are frustrated and disheartened. “I’m pretty disappointed, because it almost made it,” said Sam Davis, an adult education teacher at Manzanita SEED Academy in East Oakland. “It was so close.”
At Tuesday night’s meeting, the Oakland City Council approved a major contractor to implement a municipal ID card system, almost a year and half after passing an ordinance allowing the city to issue the cards, and also voted to increase the number of cannabis producer permits in the city from four to eight.
Five days a week, a long chrome truck pulls up to EBMUD’s wastewater treatment plant. It lifts its hydraulic-powered trailer bed and proceeds to dump 40,000 pounds of what looks like thick sewage into a giant underground mixer. Strangely, it smells … good. Not what you’d typically imagine for a sewage plant.
With construction on the Caldecott Tunnel’s long-awaited fourth bore almost a year underway, on Monday night City Council President Jane Brunner and several other city officials met with a group of Oakland residents just three miles from the tunnel to weigh the merits of a series of smaller construction projects they hope will ease any increase in traffic resulting from the tunnel’s expansion.
Now that the ash has settled on California’s latest marijuana ballot initiatives, Oakland’s industrial cannabis policy—the nation’s first—can move forward, beginning with the city council’s meeting tonight.
After an election season filled with debate over Oakland’s public safety funding woes, voters passed Measure BB Tuesday by a two-thirds majority. The measure’s approval means the city will continue collecting parking and property taxes for police, fire and violence prevention programs.
Measure L, the $195 parcel tax that would have raise money for teacher salary increases, was receiving 58 percent approval in early returns tonight, with just over 10 percent of precincts reporting. But that fell short of the two-thirds supermajority required in California to pass any new tax increase.