In addition to the continued debate on the repeal of Measure OO, the Oakland City Council tonight will also consider placing a $46 parcel tax (PDF) on the ballot to fund park maintenance and landscaping.
It’s unclear to me why the Council thinks yet another parcel tax is going to pass. People weren’t willing to pay more money for more police in November, and this tax wouldn’t give us more of...
The most interesting element to the upcoming meeting of the Central City East Redevelopment Project Area Committee (CCE PAC) on April 6 (Paton University cafeteria) is actually not officially part of the meeting at all.
PAC members along with anyone else interested will gather at 5:30 by Council districts. CEDA staff will also be available for these gatherings. While the PAC meetings often are focused on very...
Root causes this, demographics that. Why is it that one can’t ever point out that violent crime in Oakland is inexcusably high without getting an almost immediate response about how we just can’t help it? Do most Oakland residents simply not care because they aren’t the ones getting shot? Do they really think the problem is so inevitable that they’re resigned to living with it, as long as they don’t have...
Monday night saw the first community meeting for the Area Specific Plan for the Central Embarcadero area. The area stretches from Coast Guard Island to the Martin Luther King Regional Shoreway. The Area Specific Plan will build on the prior Estuary Policy Plan (PDF) and will set the framework for re-zoning the area. It also sets the vision for how the area should be twenty or forty years from now.
Except for the...
It’s amazing to me how obstinate so many of Oakland’s residents are in their complete refusal to acknowledge Oakland’s serious violent crime problem. Almost daily, I read or listen to various people assert that crime in Oakland is not actually that bad, that all big cities have crime, that the reason people think Oakland has a crime problem is because of media bias, that this incident or that could...