Economy
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.
On June 7, Richmond residents will go to the polls to vote on Measures C and D, both tax-related measures that are meant to make up for shortfalls in the budget stemming from Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed budget cuts. But opponents say the measures are a bad idea, and could potentially expose the city to costly lawsuits.
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?
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….
Pastor Sydney Keys has been granted more time to continue paying the mortgage on the building that housed Bible Way Community Church until late last March, when the building was foreclosed upon. Meanwhile, the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s office has opened an investigation to address Pastor Sydney Keys’s allegations of mortgage fraud.
Mike H. had been waiting for half an hour to hear his name called by an intake counselor at the Rubicon Legal and Economic Service Center in Richmond. But he was in no rush. He had been waiting for over 30 years for this; Saturday was the closest he’d ever been to getting his criminal record dismissed.