Oakland Council Passes Budget with 7 votes

From a Twitter feed, Oakland's City Council just approved its budget, complete with cuts and layoffs - with seven votes. More later.

East Oakland Sports Center Breaks Ground; Congrats To Councilmember Larry Reid

The East Oakland Sports Center has been a goal of Councilmember Larry Reid for a decade. Now, it's going to be a reality. This is the Oakland Tribune's account:

OAKLAND — Plans for a 25-meter East Oakland swimming pool and athletics center, in the works for decades as planners struggled to raise the cash to pay for it, finally broke ground Monday.

The ceremony marked the beginning of construction for the East Oakland Sports Center, a $24 million project at 9175 Edes Ave., at Brookfield Village Park.

"It's the community that dreamed of this place, and that dream, those people are responsible for why we're finally building it," said Councilmember Larry Reid (Elmhurst-East Oakland), whose work many credited as responsible for the project's long-awaited arrival.

Community members began pushing for the project in 1976, when a neighborhood pool closed and children began swimming in a nearby estuary, community representative Jacquee Castain said.

"It was so nasty and contaminated," Castain said. "Kids were talking about being Olympic gold-medal swimmers but we had nowhere to learn."

"A lot of kids from East Oakland still don't know how to swim," said Melvin Landry of Oakland's Office of Parks and Recreation. "If you don't get in a pool when you're young, you're not going to get into one when you're older."

Clarence Mamuyac, principal of ELS Architecture and Urban Design and the person in charge..More

BART's possible strike - a view from the street

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On YouTube.com

With BART's deadline to reach a new union contract or face a worker strike extended to July 9th but still coming up on us fast, I took to the streets to learn what the public thinks about this possible event.

What I found was that many claimed they didn't even know of the possibility, but of those who did they all believed it would "severely cripple" transportation service in the Bay Area. I didn't tell those I talked to that the average BART union worker's salary was $115,000, or that the public ridership took in an average of $55,000, as that would be leading the witness. I wanted to learn what was on their minds and you can see that in the video.

But people not being informed about this? That's crazy. But I encountered a frightening number of people who were not informed. It's not that they don't care, but I think they see themselves as powerless to do anything one way or the other, and so stay out of the debate. Many didn't know that BART workers wanted a three percent raise or that BART police couldn't strike for that matter.

This sets the stage for a massive public outrage when a group of people (us) that has been asleep at the wheel finds it can't catch it's BART Train in the morning. Then there will be hell to pay.

Hayward, CA to get new power plant with greenhouse gas controls

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Right on the heels of the passage of the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act, which establishes a kind of "cap-and-trade" system for greenhouse gas emissions, we have a project I'm excited about as it will be the first power plant in America designed with a federal greenhouse gas limit. It's called the Russell City Energy Center and will be constructed in Hayward, California.

The facility is slated to employ 650 people and generate a one time tax revenue of $30 million and an annual revenue of $6 million for the City of Hayward, according to the website for the proposed facility.

What's exciting about the development that we're finally seeing a project that languished in development hell since 2001 finally see the light of day under the Obama Administration and the new act. The act calls for modernization of the electric grid; this is a brand new power plant. It calls for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; this plant has a limit on such output.

For those seeking construction jobs, you're wondering when it will start construction? Well, it's got to go through a public comment and hearing period first, then The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) will issue an air permit for construction and operation. Having gotten approval from the California Energy Commission, the project is one permit away from breaking ground.

That permit's a big hurdle. It seems there are groups and people who, well, just don't believe the facility will do what it's designed to do, and that's a shame. So much of California's economic problem rests with NIMBY's who fear any type of real progress. The plant's developers have agreed to every alteration requested to date. What we need to have is a pro-development culture; right now, what we have is an anti-development culture where people struggling to pay the rent don't want anyone else to have a chance at earning a decent living making things; in this case, power.

To the opponents, I say, give this one a chance. The San Francisco Bay Area, crumbling under the weight of the shrinking economy, needs this power plant. We've got to get over this habit of people constantly offering pseudo-intellectual arguments crafted to kill almost any project that might be proposed. This constant habit is costing us much needed jobs and sorely needed revenue.