Economy
Dozens of Kaiser employees from the National Union of Healthcare Workers and the California Nurses Association hit the streets Thursday in front of Richmond’s Kaiser location to picket proposed cuts to NUHW employees’ healthcare and retirement benefits.
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…
In a 5,000-gallon fish tank in a 1980s greenhouse off a side street near Fred Jackson Boulevard, about a thousand koi fish, the fish so often found in Japanese garden ponds, are busy growing lettuce. The “tank” is actually an uncovered, blue-tiled, above-ground swimming pool that local organic farmer Pilar Reber purchased at Target about nine months ago. To see the fish clearly, though, you have to walk on tip-toe to the pool’s edge because the koi are, well, coy….
Congressman George Miller flies in and out of the Bay Area on a near weekly basis. When he looks down as he flies over Richmond he sees one of the “last big promising corners in the Bay Area.” “What you see is this huge asset with a lot of developable properties,” he said to a round-table of reporters in Monday afternoon. Richmond, Miller said, has most everything it needs to facilitate major growth: easy transit, innovative businesses, forward-thinking public officials….
At 19 years old, Lela Turner found herself homeless, jobless and struggling. Two years earlier, the San Leandro High School graduate had tried working part-time at McDonald’s and attending Chabot Community College in Hayward. But an unstable family life and unforeseen expenses soon put Turner out on the street with no place to go — until her caseworker told her about RichmondBUILD. The RichmondBUILD Pre-apprenticeship Construction Skills and Green Jobs Training Academy allows Richmond residents to obtain skills like solar…
Forty Richmond Kaiser employees plan to join more than 20,000 Kaiser workers statewide in picketing Thursday to protest administrators’ proposed plan to reduce healthcare and retirement benefits for union workers. About 4,000 Kaiser caregivers represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers — including 1,500 psychologists, social workers and optical workers in Northern California — face benefit cuts under the proposed contract, said Leighton Woodhouse, NUHW’s director of communications. The crowds are expected to be largest at Kaiser headquarters in…
Chevron’s Richmond operation will soon have a change in its top management as General Manager Mike Coyle will leave office in the last week of this month to take a job at corporate headquarters in San Ramon. Coyle, who has “proudly” been the refinery GM for three years, said he will leave with a single regret: that he couldn’t complete the Renewal Project, which was halted during his time as the refinery chief. The task of passing the project will…
It will take an extra $19 a year tacked onto Richmond property owners’ tax bills to help keep the city in compliance with federal and state clean water regulations.
So say Contra County officials, whose new fee plan the Richmond City Council endorsed this week. Officials say the county needs to nearly double the amount of money it’s collecting, totaling an extra $12-$15 million annually, to stay in compliance with federal and state stormwater runoff regulations.
After a series of foul odors released from its sewage treatment plant over the last year, the multinational company Veolia may only have 90 days left in Richmond. Although the City Council had considered terminating the contract immediately at the council meeting Tuesday, council members opted to consider the arguments and the possibility of alternatives, and set a decision on the contract for Dec. 6. Mark Russell, a lawyer who is providing the city with outside legal counsel, said Tuesday…