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Although three of the seven board members are up for re-election in November, only one seat is being challenged. Incumbents David Kakishiba and Christopher Dobbins have no opposition, and so will automatically retain their school board seats. But Gary Yee, the current board president, has an opponent who is also a longtime adversary—former teachers’ union president Ben Visnick.
The race for California governor is heated, and polling very closely. The UC Berkeley Vis Lab and the UC Berkeley Knight Digital Media Center takes a look at campaign contributions to Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman.
Ten candidates, one mayoral race. As November 2 approaches, which of these candidates is making an impression on the people of Oakland? Twelve days before the 2010 election, Oakland North went to the corner of 51st street and Telegraph to find out.
Of the ten people running for mayor in Oakland this fall, Arnold Fields—Arnie to his friends, and if you’re voting in Oakland, he considers you a friend—may be the candidate whose campaign most resembles his life before politics. Between appearances on the campaign circuit, Fields still pulls double duty as a real estate broker and as the owner and operator of Revolution Café, a West Oakland coffee shop and bar that doubles as his campaign headquarters.
At 30, Young is the youngest of Oakland’s ten candidates for mayor this election season. On a crowded ballot, where the candidates are predominantly in their 40s, and clawing for ways to set themselves apart from one another, his drastic age difference draws attention. “No one can relate to the youth better than the youth,” he says. “Youth is strength. It’s untapped resources that Oakland has yet to use.”
Two measures on the ballot this November give voters the chance to decide the future of public safety funding in Oakland. If either Measure BB or Measure X passes, the city can again collect funds for a slew of public safety programs that currently have no revenue to support them.
In Oakland, the school district had to cut $122 million from its budget this year, and teachers have not gotten a raise in nearly a decade. Some folks are trying to change that. They’ve put a measure on the ballot that would create a 54-cent per day property tax to raise teachers’ salaries. To learn more about how the measure would work and what the benefits to Oakland students might be, Lillian Mongeau caught up with one of the measure’s biggest champions, Jonathan Klein of Great Oakland Public Schools.
Absentee ballots were once used mostly by ex-pats, military families and diplomats strewn across the globe. They voted from far-away locales by filling out ballots at home and mailing them in, while the rest of the population spent a chunk of the day standing in a long line to cast a vote at their neighborhood poll. Now, in California, the mail-in ballot isn’t just for those abroad—it’s for everyone.
Oakland mayoral candidate and local businessman Greg Harland hopes to address the majority of Oakland’s problems—high crime, unattended street maintenance, and increased parking fees and fines—using business sense.