Economy
Eleanor Thompson is known in the Iron Triangle neighborhood as an advocate for youth and their safety. What’s less known is that she is motivated to work for the young people of Richmond by her own childhood experience. Thompson was born in Arkansas but moved to Arizona when she was six. By the time she was 14, she had lost both her parents and entered a foster home with her two younger sisters, then 13 and 12. Despite being the…
The stoppage of operations at Chevron’s damaged Crude Distillation Unit, which supplied units at the Richmond refinery responsible for 38 percent of the Bay Area’s total refining capacity, has been partially blamed for soaring gas prices across the state.
The Community Coalition Against Beverage Taxes spent $1.8 million dollars on efforts to defeat Measure N between July 1-September 30, more than four times what it spent on the campaign in the six months between January and July. Campaign contribution statements filed with the city clerk Friday show that the CCABT, a local group funded mainly by the American Beverage Association, received $1.39 million in total contributions between July and September and spent $1.84 million on its efforts to defeat…
Terry Harris spent the last four years bouncing between temp agencies and commuting to the South Bay to find work, never able to find a full-time job. Then Nutiva, an organic “superfood” company, arrived in Richmond and started hiring Richmond residents – including Harris, a forklift operator. Now, he said, he can ride his bike to work. Thursday afternoon Harris walked through the cavernous 105,000-square-foot warehouse, mixing with business owners, residents, politicians — and his new coworkers – at a…
Representatives from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab unveiled long term plans for the Richmond Bay Campus, including ideas on how to involve surrounding neighborhoods, at a workshop at the Richmond Memorial Auditorium Thursday night. The lab’s Long Range Development Plan will consolidate existing bioscience facilities associated with LBNL from around the East Bay. The research goals at the Richmond campus will include bioscience solutions for carbon-neutral fuels, reduced human environmental footprint, and improved human health. The presentation Thursday highlighted the…
Streaming water, Jack Johnson hauled himself up on the dock and spat out his regulator. He pulled off his mask and sat panting, fins in the water, his face pooched out under his camo neoprene hood. “Can’t do that on the vegetarian diet,” he said, wiping at the water dripping from his forehead. He’d just scrubbed the bottoms of a 38-foot sailboat and a 35-foot powerboat, feeling his way around in the frigid green baywater, breathing through a hose attached…
The City Council unanimously adopted two resolutions Tuesday: an industrial safety resolution calling on Chevron to adopt the highest possible safety standards during renovations to the crude distillation unit damaged in the Aug. 6 refinery fire, and a long term investment resolution encouraging the energy giant to invest in a technology campus at Marina Bay. The industrial safety resolution, authored by Mayor Gayle Mclaughlin and Councilmember Jovanka Beckles, received public backing from the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, an environmental conservation…
The campaign signs read, “More sports + less sodas = healthy kids.” A tax on sugar sweetened beverages is designed to raise money to provide opportunities for our young people to participate in healthy organized sports. It promises to yield benefits that are priceless to our community, including an increase in both the mental and physical health of our youth. A beneficial byproduct of this improved mental and physical well-being is a decrease in crime, as children are busy and…
The last few years saw many boots unlaced as development stalled and jobs disappeared, with construction workers—carpenters and roofers, pipefitters and welders, cement masons and bricklayers—unemployed at more than double the rate of the general population. But things finally seem to be improving, says one local boot seller—and he would know.