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What does street cleaning make you think of? Noise? Dirt? Big trucks? All of the above? Want to hear that at night while you sleep? Well, it's for those reasons that the Downtown Lake Merritt Neighborhood Group launched a petition drive to have the City of Oakland go from nighttime to daytime street cleaning and got 181 people to sign it. The trouble is that the City of Oakland's stil not implemented the change. Here's the Downtown Lake Merritt Neighborhood Group's notice on the matter: Good Afternoon, 18 months ago, the Downtown Lake Merritt Neighborhood Group presented a petition with 181 signatures to the Oakland Public Works Agency and our City Councilmember, Nancy Nadel, requesting that street sweeping hours in our neighborhood be changed from 12AM-3AM to daytime hours. The petition read: "The current street sweeping hours are inconvenient because they occur when the highest percentage of us are home -- the middle of the night. The street sweeping sched

Calfornia Hotel Resident Eviction Calls For Oakland City Attorney Action ASAP The California Hotel is the center of a battle between poor tenants and Oakland Community Housing, Inc. The California Hotel is a historic landmark building in Oakland currently owned by Cahon Associates, Inc., an affiliate of Oakland Community Housing, Inc. The building, located at 3501 San Pablo Ave. near the Oakland border with Emeryville, currhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifently has: • 75 single occupancy rooms, • 58 efficiency apartments, • 16 studio units, • a supportive services area, a large lobby and mezzanine, and • several ground floor commercial spaces. UPDATE: Congresswoman Barbara Lee's Office pointed to for inaction on this matter. Here's the problem. Last year, Oakland Community Housing put out this Request For Proposals to find a developer to, as the RFP put it: take over ownership and to convert the existing property into a model permanent supportive housing complex as

In yet another example of piling on, we have the California Report comparing Oakland's governance to a Keystone Cops movie. I'm not sure I'd go that far at all. But 30-year Sacramento veteran and former speaker Willie Brown staffer Bill Cavala -- who has a haircut right from a Keystone Cops movie -- thinks so. In the California Report, Cavala writes: “Cronyism” is one the charges made about virtually all elected officials. Unlike most work, political activity engenders opponents, those that would like you or your allies out of political office and replaced by themselves or their allies. To protect yourself from those opponents, politicians seek what others find in privacy in the company of people they trust. “Loyalty”, a political virtue, really means trustworthy under pressure. So when picking subordinates or employees, those of us in the political world add “loyalty” to the list of attributes we look for – along with skills, intelligence, judgment that everyone looks

California High Speed Rail Authority Bypasses Oakland After My Work to Avoid This California High Speed Rail , an issue I birddogged for Elihu Harris when he was Mayor of Oakland, is still alive and kicking. One of my major objectives was making sure Oakland was not bypassed in the formation of the route; something I also warned Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown about when he took office in late 1998. At the time I encouraged Mayor Harris to hand off the issue to Jerry Brown, which led to the pair arriving at a "Mayor's meeting" to advocate for Oakland's inclusion in the route system. In 1997, I successfully pushed for this article to be developed and ran in the SF Chronicle, to get the "Oakland View" in the public eye. At the time, Mayor Harris didn't believe the system would ever be funded, and so viewed it as a lost cause. But I argued that we could not afford to take a chance on that outcome and that at least Oakland should be considered. Mayor Harr

According to ResistRacism and SF Gate , the City of Oakland will pay $2 million to settle a case where Oakland Police Officer Richard Valerga sexually harrassed 16 Asian American women under the color of his role as police officer. Hopefully, the officer spends six-months in jail at least. But here's his lawyer's argument against that: When Valerga entered his no contest plea, his criminal defense attorney, Paul Brennan, said he could ask that Valerga not receive any jail time because he has no criminal history and had distinguished records as a police officer for six years and as a member of the U.S. Navy. The problem with this argument is the officer's admission of "no contest" is that it throws open to question just what he was doing during his six years of police work, and how many other women were harrassed -- I don't mean comments, but GROPING -- over that time? Come to think of it. What was he doing in the U.S. Navy?

I'm sure where this is headed -- court -- but for now, the mortar shells keep firing. Assistant City Administrator Cheryl Thompson -- Deborah Edgerly's Number Two -- was fired today in what seems to be Mayor Ron Dellums' Summer Massacre. The other problem is that Cheryl Thompson was supposedly promissed a severance package by Edgerly. Oakland City Attorney John Russo and Dellums Chief of Staff David Chai assert that Cheryl Thompson was not to receive a five-month's pay severance package that Cheryl Thompson says was promised to her by Edgerly. Russo told the Oakland Tribune that "Our position is, 'Where's this employment agreement in 2004 that you're mentioning?'" Russo said. "Does it exist? Without a written agreement, it's not even possible for us to even consider it." But here's the potential problem: if Edgerly and Thompson assert that there was a verbal agreement, then Russo or anyone else can't say it's n

A blooger who calls himself "Marine Layer" -- not his name -- says that Oaklanders don't go to Oakland A's games, but there's a reason for that. Marine Layer writes : Pro-Oakland types often say that ownership has in effect spit on them and driven them away. Some non-Oaklanders have concluded that the fandom really hasn't been there in the first place. Honestly, I think it has more to do with numbers: Oakland's population is only 1/6th of the East Bay, even less of the Bay Area's 7 million. One thing I've pondered is how many former Oakland residents attend ballgames. As the Oakland Hills has taken in transplants from San Francisco and the rest of the country, certainly many longtime Oakland residents were displaced. Some have left the flats for opportunities elsewhere, especially with the erosion of the manufacturing sector. It's likely a combination of the above factors, which is rather inconvenient for partisans looking for an easy scapegoa