Don’t miss the Dia De Los Muertos festival in Fruitvale on Sunday

I have this friend who’s always making fun of my affinity for what he calls “19th century entertainment.” For him, parades, fireworks, and festivals are a relic of a time when people didn’t have the internet, cable TV, or Wiis to entertain them. I think that’s sad.

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Friday movies at the Dunsmuir Hellman Historic Estate this summer

It makes me sad sometimes to think about how rarely many of the really cool things in Oakland are experienced by our residents. I can’t tell you the number of Oaklanders I meet who tell me they have never visited the Oakland Zoo or Oakland Museum. I confess I’ve never actually been to the Chabot Space and Science, except to drive around the parking lot a couple of times. And it was only a few weeks ago that I managed to make it to Children’s Fairyland, which, I swear, is amazingly cool and is like, my new favorite place in all of Oakland.

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New and improved Crimespotting

I’m sure most of my readers are familiar by now with the extremely cool website Oakland Crimespotting, which provides attractive, user-friendly, and fast loading incident maps, offering Oakland residents a visual picture of what kind of crime is being reported in their neighborhoods.

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What I learned on my Thanksgiving vacation

Eighteen years ago, my family moved from southern Louisiana to a quaint little town of less than 30,000 people just north of Houston. Back then, the big controversy in those parts was about whether the soon to open McDonald’s would suck all the charm out of this homey little community. A number of vocal residents felt that this was just not the sort of business we wanted in town, and that if it were allowed to open, it would mark the first step on the road to becoming just another corporate hellhole suburb.

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Anti-prop 8, pro-equality rally at City Hall on Saturday

The passage of Proposition 8, which eliminated the right of same sex couples to marry in California, put a serious damper on what should have been an amazing election night for many of us. While 52.2% of California voters said yes, we can take maybe a little bit of comfort in the fact that bigotry isn’t quite so much in vogue in our neck of the woods – 62.2% of Alameda County voters said no. (Just for fun – our no vote was bested only by Marin, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma Counties, and we tied with Mendocino County.)

It was a banner day for intolerance, not just in California, but across the country. Read more

Free Wi-Fi at the Oakland Airport

Wow! How often do I get to write about something in this City that I’m just completely over the moon about? Like, never. Until today! Starting today, the Oakland Airport is going to be offering free wi-fi! Free! Read more

Records, ROAR!

So, I’m assuming everyone’s already read all about the package of administrative reforms (PDF!) proposed by City Attorney John Russo and City Auditor Courtney Ruby in the newspaper, so I don’t really need to get into it that much.

Their reform package, like De La Fuente’s, might be seen by some, as Nancy Nadel suggested in her inane statement (PDF!) on the Edgerly matter, as “opportunistic power grabbing.” I wouldn’t characterize it that way – I mean, both packages are certainly opportunistic. But when you, like De La Fuente and Russo, have been trying for years to get anyone to listen to you and nobody will, then you’d be a fool not to seize a scandal like this as maybe your one and only chance to get people to take reform seriously. As Russo said last week: Read more

Talking seriously about election reform

I particularly enjoyed the comment Len Raphael a while back on my post about term limits, so much so, that with his permission, I’m republishing it here as a post of its own.

I wouldn’t necessarily endorse every single thing he suggests, but overall, he successfully pinpoints what the most serious barriers for challengers in our municipal elections are and proposes measures that would ameliorate some of the problems. If people are serious about local electoral reform, these are the sort of things you need to be talking about. Such reforms would do a hell of a lot more to help people outside of the local political establishment than term limits. Enjoy: Read more

Re-enchanting the World through Art

So I posted about the world’s largest chalk drawing yesterday, and went down to the site myself last night and again this morning. OMG, it’s the greatest thing. I easily spent an hour just walking around the drawing and looking at all the different things the kids have done. I got an opportunity to talk to Mark Wagner, who conceived of the project in 2003 and has spent the last 2 years working to make it happen. And he’s done an amazing job! They’ve brought in literally thousands of children. Every elementary school in Alameda has been out to the site (and they all got there on the AC Transit bus #63) to draw. He’s a wonderfully nice guy (he even went out of his way to come compliment my childish looking drawing), has worked incredibly hard to coordinate the project, and I think he’s really brought something valuable to the community. Read more

Walking patrols in commercial districts

Wow! I expected my post about private security would generate a lot of interest, but not nearly this much. I wish so many people wanted to read about the candidate forums! That comments section is getting a little long, so I’m going add a few more thoughts, and give people a fresh place to be angry.

Anyway, the City Council approved the program last night, with no comment or discussion on the item.

I am very much in favor of using redevelopment funds to improve public safety, and I would like to see other redevelopment areas look at funding similar patrols. Hiring private security firms to provide the patrols doesn’t have to be a permanent solution. I know that Rebecca Kaplan has suggested previously that Oakland explore a program based on the Atlanta Ambassador Program, and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Sean Sullivan talk about it as well, but I’m not 100% on that. Anyway, I know the suggestion has caused some confusion, with at least some people interpreting her plan as simply an expanded version of Jane Brunner’s Oakland Ambassadors plan, which involved paying at-risk youth to hang out at BART stations and walk people to their cars. They aren’t the same.

First, the Atlanta Ambassadors are adults, they are well trained, and they are full time City workers. They are unarmed foot patrols wearing distinctive (and kind of silly looking) helmets who walk downtown Atlanta. People can stop them and ask for directions and such, and they provide eyes on the street for the police, who they maintain radio contact with. During the first year of the patrols, downtown Atlanta saw a 60% reduction in crime.

I said yesterday in response to my first enraged comment that I’d be equally happy with the new patrols if they were unarmed, and I’d like to amend that now to say that I would prefer it, since it eliminates what appears to be most people’s objections to the program. Uniformed walking patrols, whether they have real power and authority or not, have proven to be an effective deterrent to crime – that’s why BIDs and neighborhood associations are hiring them. They provide eyes on the street for the police and discourage loitering, street drug dealing, and other low-level offenses that drive people away from commercial districts. There’s no reason that we couldn’t hire our own walking patrols that would work with the police (but not be staffed by sworn officers) instead of using a private security company. These positions would be more expensive than outsourced patrols, but cheaper than regular police and require less training. Philadelphia did it, and it’s been a huge success.

Dellums announces $3 million grant from Kaiser Permanente to fund school-based health centers in Oakland

So, something like 90% (or maybe more) of what I write about about Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums on this blog is critical. Part of this is because I see relatively little in the Mayor’s performance to date that merits praise. But part of it is also that when something good does come along, I have nothing to say about it. If I don’t feel that I have something worthwhile to add to the discussion, I don’t see much reason in writing about a subject.

Take this (PDF!) for example:

Mayor Ron Dellums will join Kaiser Permanente representatives, elected officials and community partners to announce a multi-million dollar grant to fund school-based health centers in Oakland middle and high schools.

The mission of school-based health centers is to provide comprehensive clinical and social service programming while simultaneously developing primary prevention programming based on best practices in public health, youth development, and academic enrichment.

Far too many school communities in Oakland continue to suffer from striking health care disparities. Compromised access to quality health care in concert with a number of factors has contributed to disproportionate rates of violence, respiratory illness, childhood obesity, untreated mental health issues, sexually transmitted infections, and poor chronic disease management.

While campaigning, Dellums spoke frequently of creating wrap-around services for our public schools. He referenced this specific initiative during his State of the City speech.

So…I think this is good. Great, in fact. I agree with the Mayor that health care, especially for children, is important. And Dellums should be proud of the achievement. I quoted the entire press release above, so you can see that I don’t really have any details to discuss. Um…anyway, good on Dellums for this one.

And that is why you rarely see positive posts here at A Better Oakland.

Want better information about Oakland development? Vote for CityPipeline.com on the Knight News Challenge

Ryan Tate, real estate reporter for the SF Business Times and author of the hospitality industry blog Covers has applied for a grant from the Knight News Challenge. His idea is awesome. From the grant proposal: Read more

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