Development
When the official returns came in on Wednesday morning, Richmond voters had decided that after the most expensive campaign in city history, what they wanted was familiar faces. Incumbents Nat Bates and Tom Butt were re-elected to the City Council, and Gary Bell, who will return to the dais after an eight-year hiatus, will take the seat vacated by retiring Councilmember Jeff Ritterman. The city’s proposed tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, Measure N, was defeated. Money was a major talking point…
Chevron will replace all piping in the damaged sections of the Richmond refinery with chrome alloy, the company said in a letter Wednesday to the city of Richmond and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The move comes six weeks after Chevron announced that it believed the Aug. 6 fire may have occurred because of thinning and corrosion in a piping component that may have had low silicon content. “Before the restart of the crude unit, Chevron will complete…
West County voters came out strong for education Tuesday — both on a local and state level. Measure E, Measure G and Prop 30 passed. Todd Groves and Randy Enos will join the West Contra Costa School Board.
Measure N was defeated in Tuesday’s election with an overwhelming two-thirds of voters saying no to the one-cent-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. Of the roughly 25,000 votes cast, more than 16,000 went against the measure. Championed by the Richmond Progressive Alliance, the proposed tax attracted national media attention, and drew the ire of local pro-business groups and the national soda industry, which spent more than $2.6 million to defeat the measure. A victory would have made Richmond the first city…
Richmond residents erupted into gleeful cheers as they watched CNN call three states in a row for President Barack Obama, before finally handing him the presidency. “Four more years! Four more years!” chanted people watching the results at Salute restaurant, throwing their fists into the air, hugging, and crying before toasting their champagne glasses. Anxiety turned into relief as Iowa a swing state, was called for the president. “I was biting my nails – I was too scared to watch…
Families from Richmond’s African American community testified Monday night to the fight against the health effects of poor diets at a town hall meeting to discuss the city’s proposed tax on sugar sweetened beverages. The town hall, held in the eastern corner of the Iron Triangle neighborhood at the Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church, attracted at least 80 residents and city officials who came to listen to keynote speaker Maya Rockeymoore, a leading public policy scholar based in Washington D.C. Rockeymoore…
Last year, Rob John, who spent more than 20 years teaching first grade in Kensington, decided to leave teaching and try his hand at starting a small business. He loved food and enjoyed the fare he found at gourmet food trucks, so he raised money to buy an old courier truck (think UPS), found an outfitter in Hayward, and voila: the WhipOut food truck was born. “Richard Branson chose to build spaceships,” John said. “I wanted a food truck.” On…
In the summer of 1975, Richmond Councilman Nat Bates received a call from Ben Brown, a Democratic campaign organizer in Atlanta. Brown needed Bates’ support rallying African American voters behind his candidate, Jimmy Carter, a little known peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia who had just finished his term as governor and was seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Bates was split. Back in California, incumbent governor Jerry Brown was also running for the Democratic presidential ticket, and Richmond councilmembers were…
Richmond native Anthony Green spent 13 years in the Air Force – first as an Aerospace Ground Equipment mechanic, then as a loadmaster for the C-5 airplane, which he told me was one of the best jobs he ever had. “I still got to fly around everywhere,” he said. “I just wasn’t flying the plane.” The Air Force took him from battlegrounds in Iraq and Afghanistan to training grounds at Travis Air Force Base, as well as to Washington, Texas,…