The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency agreed to assess people’s parking needs block by block in the Mission and other southeastern neighborhoods before installing any new parking meters. That marked a change in the agency’s attitude since a Jan. 13 meeting in which a hearing officer approved the installation of about 5,000 parking meters in several eastern neighborhoods, despite the objections of hundreds of people who spoke unanimously in opposition to the proposal.

A proposal to regulate two popular Castro District hangouts by restricting chairs and shopping carts is a step closer to becoming city law. The Board of Supervisors will decide Tuesday on an ordinance, which passed the Land Use Committee this week, that would ban nighttime sitting, sleeping, vending, smoking and even pushing a shopping cart in Harvey Milk and Jane Warner Plazas.

San Francisco supervisors are considering legislation that will require local control and civilian oversight of terrorism investigations the San Francisco Police Department undertakes with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Calling it "The Portland Solution" because it mirrors a similar ordinance enacted in Oregon, Supervisor Jane Kim said that  her legislation does nothing more than restore transparency to intelligence gathering by police officers working with FBI agents.

A medley of people wait for the San Francisco Public Library to open in the morning. Students on a deadline. People who really need a library book. Retired folks. And people checking email. As the doors open, patrons stream into the atrium at the main branch near the Civic Center in downtown San Francisco. Some head to their favorite reading nook; others to computers to start surfing the Web.

Responding to criticism from the Legislative Analyst’s Office and others, California State University officials have revised a proposed list of peer universities they plan to use to help set pay for campus executives. The new list, provided to California Watch, no longer considers Temple University in Pennsylvania a peer of San Diego State University because Temple has a medical school – a feature that tends to drive up the cost and complexity of university operations. Temple paid its president $536,000 in base pay in 2009-10.

A campaign to get a new measure on the November ballot that would increase penalties against human traffickers in California launched Wednesday in San Francisco. The campaign, announced on National Human Trafficking Awareness Day, requires 800,000 signatures to make it into the state ballot. The California Against Sexual Exploitation (CASE) Act would increase prison terms and fines for human traffickers (up to $1.5 million, which would go to fund victim services), remove barriers to prosecute child sex traffickers, require convicted sex traffickers to register as sex offenders and disclose their Internet accounts, mandate training for law enforcement officers, and prohibit the use of the sexual history of trafficked victims in court.

In the Public Press, elites don’t dictate coverage

If you missed it, the Winter 2011 edition of the Public Press (Issue 5) went on sale in November, and it came on the heels of a national conversation about how to fund and fortify community journalism. This is the editorial on page 2.

Issue 5 of the San Francisco Public Press, an ad-free nonprofit local newspaper, takes cues from noncommercial magazines, some of which have become influential of late. One model was Adbusters, the “culturejammer” magazine that inspired the global Occupy movement. Our approach at the Public Press has always been to look for stories that see the city and the Bay Area from the viewpoint of average people instead of just the elites, whose concerns are well represented. While we don’t practice advocacy journalism, we do strive to cover, in depth, stories and communities that commercially funded media don’t often pay attention to.

With the holiday festivities swiftly approaching in a year marked by global protests over economic inequality, people in the Bay Area are turning to alternate, community-based means of exchanging goods and skills. Collectives like the Timebank help people circumvent buying gifts with money during the holidays. “The systemic way in which the economy works undermines every good that we try to do,” said Mira Luna, co-founder of the local nonprofit Bay Area Community Exchange, an organization that has been facilitating trades of talents and commodities using time rather than money as the currency. “There’s a lot of underutilized resources and a lot of needs out of there.”

BUSINESS: Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse among biggest backers of profitable low-finance firms

Even as the Occupy San Francisco encampment at the base of Market Street expressed outrage at big banks and high finance, it remained business as usual at some of the city’s less glamorous financial establishments. San Franciso-based Wells Fargo, as well as other banks, are investing big money in firms that lend money at rates they are prohibited from offering. High-interest, unsecured “payday” loans are readily available at 32 establishments along Market Street and in low-income communities around the city. The banks’ names and brands are nowhere to be seen, but they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in businesses that charge an annual percentage rate of 400 percent or more, a practice once considered by the state of California to be “usury.”