The state may have failed to recover up to $20.8 million lost to waste, fraud and other problems, according to data provided by the California state auditor. The money represents a tiny fraction of California’s $91.3 billion budget. But given the state’s financial straits, government watchdogs say officials should do more to collect the funds. […]
Yearly Archives: 2012
Posted inBay Area, Bay Area Smart Growth, City Hall, Land use, Media
Marin cities rebel against regional planning
Corte Madera, population 9,300, kicked off a fierce debate in Marin over housing mandates earlier this year when the town council voted to become the first member to secede from the Association of Bay Area Governments. At the time, the nine-county planning agency (until then, made up of representatives of every Bay Area city) was launching a big regional housing-growth initiative called Plan Bay Area. Now, several local groups across the Bay Area are questioning the value of the regional plan, saying it will sacrifice local control.
Posted inBay Area Smart Growth, News
Map: The bay’s 50-year boom — population growth, 1960-2010
Among 101 cities, those in periphery grew fastest
Like trees, cities can be thought of as adding growth rings every year. For most cities on this map, the outer ring represents the current population, from 2010 census data. The smallest, inner growth ring was the population in 1960. The largest cities of 1960 — San Francisco and Oakland – have larger inner rings. San Jose is a notable outlier, having swelled to consume the Valley of Heart’s Delight. The spacing of the decennial rings allows the reader to understand whether cities’ population growth is sudden, like Concord between 1960 and 1970, or gradual, like Pleasanton, denoted by the regular interval between the growth rings. Slow-growing Moraga doesn’t show a 1960 ring at all, because it is covered up by the 2010 growth ring.
Posted inCity Hall, Transportation
Muni to try quicker boarding scheme in latest effort to meet elusive performance goals
Clipper Card readers placed in the back of Muni buses long ago will finally get more use starting July 1.Transit officials are gearing up for all-door boarding throughout this system, which will reduce travel times, speed up loading on Muni buses and generate more fare revenue, said Muni spokesman Paul Rose. Muni will become the first bus and light-rail system in the country to have all-door boarding for its entire system.
Posted inBay Area, Bay Area Smart Growth, Land use, Parks & Open Space, Transportation
With redevelopment’s end, Bay Area cities scramble to keep grand plans alive
Oakland’s Auto Row renaissance may have to work on a smaller scale
Since 2000, city officials have had big plans for Auto Row. They called it the Broadway-Valdez project, a 96-acre development that included a strip of housing and restaurants next to the 19th Street BART station, the Valdez Triangle.Planners said the effort, if fully funded, would be Oakland’s best bet to revive its sagging retail sector. But the project’s prospects have dimmed since California killed redevelopment funds as a way of backfilling the state budget deficit.
Posted inNews
Drop in immigration clouds future of S.F. school for Spanish speakers
By Grace Rubenstein, California Watch English and Spanish alternate seamlessly in the classrooms at the Mission Education Center in San Francisco. Decorative signs identify objects that in other schools would seem too basic to name: “clock” and “door.” This public elementary school has for 40 years served children who have just arrived from Latin America […]
Posted inNews
Accrediting agency questions S.F. culinary school’s job placement rates
By Erica Perez, Bay Citizen One of the agencies that accredits San Francisco’s California Culinary Academy is questioning the veracity of the college’s reported job placement rates – ordering the school’s parent company to provide audited placement data by September in order to maintain its accreditation status. The Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges […]
Posted inBay Area Smart Growth, Housing, Land use
Ever-changing population predictions frustrate Bay Area smart-growth planning
State and regional planning agencies have produced differing predictions of how many people will migrate to the Bay Area in coming decades. The disagreement is frustrating efforts to forge a consensus on how many hundreds of thousands of new homes to build across the region, and where. In May, the California Department of Finance took a fresh look at economic forecasts and officially backed away from its prediction that 9.5 million people would live in the Bay Area in 2040. The state now says it is likely to be closer to 8.4 million. But the Association of Bay Area Governments pegged the population for the same 2040 target date at a robust 9.3 million. The agency is charged with developing Plan Bay Area, an ambitious agenda to reshape the sprawling region by building 660,000 new homes in the urban image of walkable, transit-friendly San Francisco.
Posted inBay Area, Bay Area Smart Growth, Census, Education, Housing, Land use, News, Transportation
Map: Where we live now — 2010 household density and priority development areas
Part of the challenge facing regional planners, who wrote the 30-year Plan Bay Area, is that it is hard to predict future population growth. The current list of more than 200 potential priority development areas in the plan tracks established high-density zones closely, indicating that the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and other regional agencies want to fill in developments in areas that are already highly urbanized or near mass transit lines, instead of in undeveloped or underdeveloped suburban settings. This map helps readers of the Public Press’s summer edition special project, Growing Smarter: Planning for a Bay Area of 9 Million, understand these trends.
Posted inBay Area, Bay Area Smart Growth, Land use, Social Justice
Tea partiers and Occupiers make strange bedfellows opposing sprawl control
So far, Plan Bay Area — an ambitious regional blueprint for dense urban communities convenient for walking and public transit — seems to have more strident critics than defenders. Some libertarians, liberal Democrats, environmentalists, professional urban planners and anti-capitalist Occupiers have all found issue with parts of the plan, and the way its authors have sought public opinion.