Development
The City Council decided last week to spend most of a $2 million tax settlement with Chevron on a conditional contract with transMETRO, a transportation consulting service that will help the city implement a greenhouse-gas reduction program. Although the majority of the council appeared to enthusiastically embrace the contract, an amendment added at the meeting requires transMETRO to conduct an initial study on how to serve low-income communities, and to present its findings to the council in 120 days, before…
Fred Casanares got to Point Pinole Park a little before 8 a.m. on Saturday. He fired up the grill at 10 a.m. with almond wood, because it burns cleaner than charcoal. For the next five hours, Casanares cooked hundreds of pounds of burgers, hot dogs, quesadillas, and skirt steak, while smoke wafted around the festival and the persistent long lines in front of the grill. “I can’t even calculate how many people I’ve fed,” he said, wiping the trails of…
Brewster Kahle, a major Internet entrepreneur, met with city officials, including Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, last month and discussed a possible free-access wireless Internet program for the city’s downtown and surrounding neighborhoods.
The City Council acknowledged Mike Coyle, the former general manager of Chevron’s Richmond refinery who recently was promoted to the company’s San Ramon headquarters, with a proclamation Tuesday night. While many speakers from the community and council members spoke highly of Coyle’s character, some were extremely critical of Chevron as a company and its role in Richmond. “He is a human being that puts a face to the corporation that is Chevron,” Councilmember Jovanka Beckles said after congratulating Coyle on…
Since July, the city has been trying to use more than $400,000 in federal stimulus funds to provide discounted and free solar panels for Richmond homeowners. The initial goal of the R3 program was to install the panels on a hundred homes, but so far only eight people have signed up. The city is beefing up its outreach program, though, and officials say they believe at least 40 low-income homeowners will choose to have free panels installed by November 2012….
Last Saturday, Richmond residents and community leaders gathered in North Richmond to call for stronger community relations and an end to gun-violence. The community fair was sponsored by Ground Zero, Operation Richmond, and the McGlothen Temple Evangelist Department. Complete with grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, snow cones, an air castle, housing and employment specialists, and music from the band Redemption, the event drew residents out their homes all afternoon long. Here’s a snippet of the day’s action.
North Richmond’s share of landfill mitigation funding for 2012-2013 is likely to be doled out in proportions roughly similar to previous years, the mitigation committee suggested in a meeting last Friday. County leaders offered an early glimpse at an expenditure plan that would provide the incorporated and unincorporated areas of the community with an estimated $1.13 million over two years. The North Richmond Waste and Recovery Mitigation Fee Joint Expenditure Planning Committee administers these funds, and the Friday meeting was…
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab representatives offered a limited update on their hunt for a second campus site to members of the lab’s Community Advisory Group Thursday. But while lab officials maintained their poker face, members of the CAG and public audience – few of them Richmond residents – were eager to recommend Richmond’s site. Richmond City Councilmember Jeff Ritterman appeared to be the only council member present from the cities vying for the lab, and the only speaker in the…
The City Council will spend $20,000 to lobby for a federal transportation grant to help light-rail company CyberTran develop 13 ultralight rail stations throughout the city — a transit system, in the words of city leaders and CyberTran’s CEO, that would be clean, efficient, and create 20,000 jobs in the next decade. Fittingly, “dream” was an oft-used word in the hour-long discussion before the council voted 4-1 to approve the funding Tuesday night. “I believe this is a dream for…