Guide for last-minute holiday shopping in Oakland

A surprising number of people have been reaching my blog in the past few days by searching for “oakland holiday gift guide” or something similar to that. The problem is that all the events in my Oakland holiday shopping guide have now ended, and it’s clear many people are still looking to shop locally.
At this [...]

Weekly events listing on hiatus

As you can probably imagine, the weekly events listing takes a fair amount of time to put together, and since there’s not much going on in the next couple of weeks due to the holidays,  I thought this was as good of time as ever to take a two-week break. I will resume the events [...]

Yesterday’s budget meeting via Twitter

I had hoped to write a real blog post yesterday or today, but yesterday flew by and today I woke up with a nasty cold and I can’t really focus. So you won’t get a super-excited post from me about City Attorney John Russo’s opinion, issued yesterday, that clearly states that the Council must implement [...]

Budget meeting this Thursday, no thanks to Jean Quan

Somehow I totally missed this when putting together the weekly events listing, even though I was looking for it, but there’s a special budget meeting tomorrow, Thursday, December 17th at 10am. I might have missed it because I naively thought it would be held in the evening, when working people could attend, especially after many [...]

Broadway shuttle offers environmental, economic & community benefits at no cost to the General Fund

Tomorrow’s committee meetings are going to be packed with some exciting, forward thinking transportation projects, including an update on BRT and another discussion of the citywide parking study at the Public Works Committee. But the transit item I’m most excited to will be heard before the Community & Economic Development Committee (CED) – a free [...]

December 14-20 Oakland Political & Community Events

Wednesday, December 16h – AC Transit Meeting on Service Adjustment Plan
At AC Transit’s regular Board meeting, the Board will be voting on final approval of the service adjustment plan. They also will be voting on changing transfer policy so that transfers would be valid for 2 hours, instead of the current 1.5 hours. This was [...]

Oakland Holiday Shopping Guide

UPDATE: If you’ve procrastinated a bit on holiday shopping, not to worry – I’ve put together a last-minute holiday shopping guide for Oakland.
This holiday season, there are a myriad of holiday local shopping opportunities – so many so that it might be hard to keep track of them! So I thought I’d write a brief [...]

Believe it or not, the final Oakland Airport Connector project is even worse than expected

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, the BART Board voted earlier today 7-1 to approve the project.
Tomorrow, the BART Board of Directors will vote on approving the contract to begin construction of the Oakland Airport Connector. And believe it or not, the project has gotten even worse.
Remember at that late night City Council meeting in October when BART and [...]

Tonight’s Council Meeting: Mills Act, Solar Financing, Stimulus Update, and Legislative Agendas

Tonight’s Council meeting will cover a large array of issues, some of which I’ve described below.
Item 14.1: Eleven Mills Act Contract
Ignacio De La Fuente has forged an uncommon alliance with historic preservationists to propose the approval of eleven properties under the Mills Act two-year pilot program and the expansion of the Mills Act. Via the [...]

John Klein: The Public Ethics Commission Plods On

This guest post was written by John Klein, a resident of Oakland for over 23 years. His sense of ethics was formed as full-time volunteer for 12 years during the 70’s and 80’s with Nyingma Centers, a Tibetan Buddhist community in Berkeley and Sonoma County, and more recently as a legal assistant in large Bay [...]