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Richmond’s new mayor Tom Butt made his first State of the City address on Tuesday night, announcing that “Richmond is open for business” and saying that his office is checking on the Hacienda public housing complex resident relocation every day. Butt started his address by thanking former Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, City Manager Bill Lindsay and all city employees for the “8 great years” when McLaughlin served as the mayor. “Richmond has clearly changed for the better and we want to…
On Wednesday night, West Contra Costa Unified School District’s (WCCUSD) first board of education meeting of the year was packed with chatty bouncy children, a sea of blue shirt-wearing Caliber Beta Academy teachers, and people holding orange public comment sheets. Newly-elected school board president Todd Groves began the meeting promptly at 6:30 pm as eager parents and teachers waited to discuss pressing topics on the agenda, such as the charter petition renewal of Richmond College Preparatory Schools (RCPS), and the…
Long after the billboards come down, the campaign mailers rest in landfills and the New Year’s toasts come and go, 2014 may be remembered as Richmond’s big election year. We are honored to have been in Richmond’s streets and chambers, its homes and schools and everywhere else, helping write the first drafts of history in an important time and place. Chevron Corp. poured an unprecedented $3.1 million into the municipal races only to lose the open mayoral and city council seats to a progressive coalition on every…
Magaly Rodriguez, who came to the U.S. from Mexico when she was an infant, is not a U.S. citizen. To get Rodriguez to Brown University, ILC and university officials had to navigate a web of regulations that inhibit undocumented students. But they were also helped by a key new federal program—DACA.
It was on a regular night more than three decades ago when Shonda Dilliehunt woke to several masked gunmen raiding her home. Life wasn’t perfect at their small apartment in the Kennedy Park housing complex, but she never imagined something like this. All she heard was a distinctive boom, and men she didn’t know forced her and her family to the floor. “That was the first SWAT raid,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going on.” Memories of those…
Public defenders staged courthouse demonstrations across the Bay Area on Thursday to urge reform in the criminal justice system’s treatment of people of color.
Eleven years ago, Bridget Gaines was driving through North Richmond with her son, and as the police pulled her over, her life was at one of many turning points. She had not slept for days due to smoking crack cocaine. She had been selling heroin that night on 2nd street and had both crack and heroin on her person. “I was scared to death, and high as a kite,” she says. “I though this was it, I was going to…
The last thing you’d expect to sit opposite Jerry’s Cocktail Lounge in Richmond is a family-oriented, Muslim place of worship, let alone a full-fledged Islamic school. Yet every Sunday, over 150 parents, students, elders, and teachers pile out of their cars or from the closest bus stop to walk over to Richmond’s Masjid Al-Rahman. Many families come from as far as Albany and Emeryville. Mosques in West Contra Costa County are sparse – the only other Muslim place of worship in…
Now in Richmond, wild turkeys chase joggers in Wildcat Canyon Regional Park, pad around parking lots at Hilltop, leave droppings on residents’ driveways in Point Richmond, and have been sighted on the roof of a residential building in Brickyard Landing.