San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/2013/05/page/2/)
Gov. Jerry Brown’s effort to divert $500 million earmarked for environmental initiatives into the general fund would hurt California communities with high pollution levels and slow down efforts to spur efficiency, mass transit and alternative energy, critics told legislators this week. » Read more
By Dhyana Levey, Bay Nature
You might remember the guy. A year ago at this time, Alden Olmsted was on a mission. Seventy California state parks were slated for closure, and like many parks advocates, he sprang to action — but he took it grassroots, one dollar at a time. At his peak, the filmmaker’s “bucket list” amounted to 63 plastic donation buckets placed in cafes near state parks throughout Central and Northern California. Just give a dollar, the signs on his buckets asked, to save the parks from a devastating $22 million in state budget cuts.
By Tay Wiles, Mission Local
As national lawmakers debate an immigration bill pending in the Senate, the Archdiocese of San Francisco has launched a campaign to engage families around the Bay Area to demand meaningful reform. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone stood with Father Arturo Albano, Father Paul Gawlowski and other Roman Catholic leaders on the steps of the city’s historic Mission Dolores Monday to call for urgent comprehensive immigration reform to help thousands of undocumented families from Marin County to San Mateo County. “We have a historic opportunity to fix the immigration system,” Cordileone said. “Our country has a right and a responsibility to protect its borders, and effective immigration laws are part of that enforcement.”
Read the complete story at Mission Local.
San Francisco’s record of raising the minimum wage 10 years ago without crashing the local economy proves that California can do the same, said a leading labor policy reformer in the Legislature.
Watsonville Assemblyman Luis Alejo’s plan to raise the state minimum to $9.25 an hour by 2016 draws heavily on the experience of San Francisco, which in 2003 created a local minimum wage pegged to inflation. » Read more
By Scott Detrow, KQED News Fix
California has some of the toughest gun laws in the United States. They don’t appear to be stopping people from purchasing firearms.
Despite 10-day waiting periods, expansive background checks, a limit on one handgun purchase every 30 days and a broad “assault weapons” ban, California experienced a 180 percent increase in attempted gun purchases over the last decade. California is one of a handful of states that require background checks for every single gun purchase. Whether a person is trying to buy a gun from a licensed firearms dealer or through a private transaction, the potential purchases is required to submit information to the state. So, the number of background checks being processed provides a rough — but not exact — window into the number of guns being purchased here.
By Alison Hawkes, Bay Nature
On a mild, sunny afternoon in downtown San Francisco, office workers sit around a plaza eating lunch, for the most part oblivious to the fluttering around them. Western tiger swallowtail butterflies are attracted to the plaza off Market Street, too, for its flowering cherry trees and London planes, a water fountain and dappled sunshine. “Right there — look!” said butterfly expert Liam O’Brien, bounding onto the scene as cheery as the yellow, black-striped lepidoptera around him. “It’s the largest butterfly in the county. It looks like it’s going for some nectar source.
By David Weir, KQED News Fix
Two local software developers, Dan Grover and Mike Belfrage, have designed an interactive map that allows users to view how neighborhood incomes rise and fall along the Bay Area’s public transportation routes. The data are available for all BART, Muni and Caltrain routes. The relative income disparities of residents along the routes can be dramatic, rising from the $20,000 range around BART stops in the Tenderloin or the Oakland Coliseum, to about $200,000 around the Caltrain stop in Atherton, or $160,000 near a Muni stop in Pacific Heights. Read the complete story at KQED News Fix.
By Rachael Myrow, KQED News Fix
When wildfires blow up, and especially when more than one is raging at the same time, the calls go out to everybody with firefighting resources. It happens every year, more or less often depending on the weather. This year, though, our collective ability to fend off fiery Armageddon is hampered by a hoary beast that roams Excel spreadsheets up and down the state: Budget Cuts. “A lot of the local agencies across the state have been struggling to just provide the basic level of fire protection for their own communities,” said Alameda County Fire Chief Demetrious Shaffer. He’s also the president of the California Fire Chiefs Association.
By Emily Green, KQED News Fix
On Thursday, San Francisco once again takes up the controversial issue of parking meter expansion at a committee hearing. One issue will be Sunday meter enforcement, which took effect in late February. The change has angered many churchgoers, who say it is undermining community bonding and forcing people to pay money to worship. Floyd Jones is one of those people. He has been coming to the Jones Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco’s Japantown neighborhood every Sunday for the past 60 years.
By Aarti Shahani, KQED News Fix
The San Francisco district attorney’s office is just around the corner from some of the world’s most cutting-edge data collectors and data miners. Yet, according to D.A. George Gascon, his office is stuck in the 1970s. To leap forward a few decades, Gascon has hired his first chief information officer. Now he’s got to warm his prosecutors to the idea that cold hard data can help deliver justice. Gascon wants to give his office a makeover (and not just with furniture), using Big Data.