Environment
With its daytime temperatures peaking in the 60s, San Francisco seemed like an unlikely place for outdoor ice skating last Wednesday. Yet there they were, almost a hundred visitors from all over California—skating in a circle around a frozen swath of Union Square.
What would you expect to find in a farmers market? Fruits, vegetables or fresh local produce? How about a goat that poops and pees at will? Well, you got one on Saturday morning, at the North Oakland Farmers Market. Oakland resident Crow, brought along his Oberhasli goat named Prema — which is often mistaken for a giant dog — to show the neighborhood how to milk a goat.
Over the past year, Alameda County residents have called in a rising number of complaints about opossums, skunks, raccoons and other small animals invading their backyards—all signs that human clashes with wildlife might be on the rise.
It was barely 3 p.m. at Hoover Elementary School in West Oakland, and the strawberries at the Tuesday farmers’ market were almost sold out. Hoover is just one of 25 schools part of “Oakland Fresh,” a recent OUSD effort aimed at providing fresh, locally grown organic produce for parents to purchase when they pick their students up from school.
Thanks to a $4 million grant from the California State Parks Department, which City Slicker Farms was awarded on November 8, the parcel will soon be transformed into a community farm and park. Although the department allows organizations up to eight years to get their programs established, Finnin estimates that City Slicker Farms will break ground for the community farm at the end of 2011.
While it seems as if summer skipped the Bay Area this year, on Monday Oakland got a taste of August heat. Temperatures climbed as high as 80 degrees from Bake Sale Betty’s to the Grand Lake Theater, and the warmth lingered into the evening. But don’t worry—a local weather expert says this mini heat wave is nothing to get hot and bothered about. According to San Francisco State meteorology professor Jan Null, an area of high pressure over Nevada is…
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.