Development
City and county leaders joined with members of Richmond’s growing urban farming community to discuss ways to keep West County communities at the forefront of the movement toward locally-grown foods.
There’s good news and bad news for the city’s budget for 2011-2012. In the positive column, the city’s credit ratings remains strong, there’s money in the bank—$10 million in general fund reserves, essentially a rainy day fund—and funding for the city’s services will for the most part remain intact. The bad news is that every part of city government will experience cuts of some kind, while programs that rely on state funding are under threat of a drastically constricted state budget, and part of the city’s budget relies on ballot measures, which are risky.
In North Richmond, a community farming project may be the answer to providing healthy choices to residents who have long lived in a “food desert.”
Ready to move forward after the first quashed attempt, Chevron’s Richmond refinery began the process to restart its embattled Renewal Project on Monday by filing a new conditional use permit application. This will be the second attempt to complete the project, which was halted by a county appellate court in 2009 after it was narrowly approved by the city council. The project is meant to upgrade equipment at the refinery and replace aging components.
A bevy of state, county and local officials donned hard hats and grabbed shiny new shovels to break ground for the West Contra Costa County Health Center in San Pablo. The shovels were ceremonial, but real work will begin soon on the new clinic that will serve real needs in the community.
In a complex and dynamic world where scientific certainty is hard to come by and new technologies, chemicals and industrial processes are being introduced into the world, Richmond’s City Council decided that it is best to take a cautious approach to making policies and city planning. At least, that’s the aim of a resolution passed at last night’s city council meeting.
A house with a white picket fence has long been a quintessential part of the American Dream. While a majority of Bay Area residents live that as home owners, in recent years renting seems to be trending upward in popularity in almost every Bay Area county. Now with the collapse of the real estate market, will home ownership become a fading dream?
The Richmond Art Center, the Plunge and Betty Reid Soskin, the oldest active National Park Ranger, were among this year’s Historic Preservation Awards recipients.
Richmond moved forward yesterday in the competition to be the site for a second campus of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The city’s Richmond Field Station, already owned by UC Berkeley, is one of six finalists. Other finalists are in Berkeley, Alameda, Albany, and Oakland. LBNL has outgrown its current location in the hills above UC Berkeley, and Richmond has long looked to the site as part of a plan to bolster the city’s growing green- and clean-technology sector….