General
More than 750 families in the city’s low-income Iron Triangle neighborhood now have computers in their homes thanks to a two-year effort by a coalition of nonprofit agencies working to make broadband Internet access widely available there.
Generally, when you sit a 19-year-old at a table with a reporter, it’s a classic recipe for one-word answers and evasive glances at the ground. Yet, Francisco Rodriguez stands to shake my hand. He looks me directly in the eye, and speaks clearly, in full sentences. “That’s everything they teach you in the post,” Rodriguez says. The Explorers, a police-directed extracurricular program that grooms youth not only for law enforcement but also for life, hasn’t just given Rodriguez social tools…
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…
Richmond residents, business owners and conservationists showed up in droves at the City Council chambers Thursday night to give the Planning Commission an earful regarding the fourth draft of the city’s major planning document and its accompanying final environmental analysis. In all, 59 speaker cards were submitted, and most residents expressed concerns about air quality, job growth, transportation, development and especially land use. “You can imagine that in such a city there is going to be quite a bit of…
Sit for a minute and watch cars drive the stretch of road on Barrett Avenue from Harbor Way to Seventh Street, and you can see bad pavement in action. A red Range Rover trips over an uneven patch with a jolt. The Camry behind it slows down and creaks as tires meet pothole. A white Chevy tries to accelerate, but the cracks on the road resist. According to a quality standard set by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the pavement of…
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….
The California prison population has increased more than 500 percent in the past three decades. Since 1980, spending on prisons has risen from 3 percent of the state’s budget to more than 11 percent. As legislators scramble to mend the increasingly costly and problematic prison system, the federal government has demanded change. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court, citing inhumane conditions, ordered for the release of thousands of state inmates. Here is a brief look at some of the factors…
Continued overcrowding in California’s state prisons brought about a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that the state’s efforts to cram in more prisoners constituted cruel and unusual punishment, a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The state responded with legislation that shifts responsibility for state parolees to counties and redefines what constitutes a prison-worthy offense. That realignment started Saturday. It continues for the next two years as the state tries to reduce its prison population by about 110,000 prisoners to 137.5 percent…
Summer Brenner sits quietly at a coffee shop table amid the rumbling of the city outside and smiles as she gently thumbs through a copy of her 2009 children’s book Richmond Tales: Lost Secrets of the Iron Triangle, a story featuring an array of young characters who journey through time to discover the lost history of the industrial city. “I believe it gives insight into children’s lives growing up there, especially those that feel disconnected from their homeland,” Brenner said….