Author Archives: Public Press staff

By Jon Brooks, KQED News Fix The California Department of Motor Vehicles sent out a retraction Friday night of a memo it had issued earlier this month that vehicles even occasionally used for commercial purposes — like those driven for ride services such as Lyft and UberX — would need to be registered as commercial […]

By Lindsey Hoshaw, KQED News Fix/KQED Science Last year, a record number of sea lions washed up on Central and Northern California beaches, according to the Marine Mammal Center, the organization that treats wounded wild marine animals. Usually, the center near Sausalito treats fewer than 20 sea lion pups a year, but in 2014 that […]

By Scott Smith, Associated Press/The California Report California farmers now must abide by the nation’s strictest rules for a widely used pesticide in a change designed to protect farmworkers and people who live and work near agricultural fields but is likely to raise prices on produce. The restrictions announced Wednesday target chloropicrin, a pesticide injected into […]

By Dan Brekke, KQED News Fix The agency in charge of certifying the state’s junior and community colleges has given City College of San Francisco two more years to comply with eligibility standards. For now, that decision — made last week and announced Wednesday — effectively ends a shutdown threat that has hung over the school […]

By Dan Brekke, KQED News Fix If you showed up in the Bay Area in the last three years or so, you know that you have moved into a world where rents and home prices appear to know no limits. The current “up” market has seen the median price of single-family homes sold in San […]

By Ted Goldberg, KQED News Fix Three San Francisco government departments and the local office for a state agency are scrambling to hire staff to keep up with the city’s steady increase in construction projects. In recent years, several thousand buildings have been put up or substantially renovated throughout the city, leading San Francisco’s Planning […]

By April Dembosky/The California Report/State of Health Most days in early January, tax preparation offices are dead. Most people will not get their W-2 or other tax documents until later this month. But at an H&R Block office I visited in San Francisco, office manager Sue Ellen Smith is expecting things to pick up fast. […]

By Laura Wenus, Mission Local You may have noticed these shiny, brightly colored new giants hanging around in pairs at the 16th Street BART plaza: The transit agency has recently installed seven two-part units of solar-powered trash and recycling bins near the station entrances and benches. Capp Street Crap first reported on the bins, some […]

By Laura McCamy, KQED News Fix/Oakland Local As AC Transit begins construction on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on International Boulevard in Oakland, we wanted to take a moment to consider the impact of the new transit design on one population that relies heavily on the bus system: seniors, particularly low-income seniors, many of whom travel […]

By KQED News Staff/The California Report New year, new rules. More than 900 new laws are hitting the books in 2015. Here is our annual list of the most important and/or interesting, as picked by KQED news, science, health, and politics and government editors. For a more detailed look at health laws, check out KQED’s […]