High Priority

On the agenda for tomorrow night’s City Council meeting there will be a report on the City Council’s priorities for next fiscal year.  According to the staff report, the purpose of this is to:

…provide an opportunity for the City Council to give direction on the City s priorities for departmental work plans…and to strengthen the City Council’ s understanding of staff’ s current work plans and the resources available to carry them out…

Which is just gobbledygook for basically keeping the Council more in the loop on what the heck staff is working on, but I suppose one wouldn’t put “keeping Council in the loop” in a publically available staff report.  

Waterfront Property for Sale

According to an article in yesterday’s Sun (today’s for me, I don’t get a physical copy and so have to wait until Fridays to read it online — yes the Sun does deliver to Bayport, but a due to a series of complicated reasons, not to my house, but I digress) huge sections of Bay Farm Island will be underwater in 100 years, well at little less than 100 years, more like 92 years since they are predicting this will happen on 2100.   Of course, few, if any of us, will be alive by then, but it doesn’t mean we should care any less.   Highlights:

…[G]lobal warming will sink large swaths of Alameda and the Bay Area, according to long-range research on local climate change impacts unveiled by a state official Tuesday.

Both Oakland and San Francisco airports will be underwater in 100 years’ time — even under best-case scenarios developed by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission…

While scientists weigh the efficacy of constructing storm gates at the Golden Gate, Travis said wetlands restoration and higher density housing are the strongest arrows policy makers have in their quivers. “Tidal wetlands absorb flood waters like a sponge and they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” he said, noting his agency’s efforts to return several sprawling South Bay salt ponds into wetlands habitat. “This, more than anything — more than changing light bulbs, more than buying Priuses — is the single biggest thing we can do to stop global warming,” Travis said.

Closing and consolidating

From Tuesday’s Alameda Journal, regardless of what happens with the Parcel Tax or with the state budgets, it’s clear that the work already started by the district regarding elementary capacity will need to continue and will in the form of a K-12 ”restructuring task force.”   Which means that the district will probably take a good serious hard look at closing smaller schools such as Paden, Franklin, and Wood. 

Some of the major hurdles will be determining if these closures will be cost effective in the long run.   After all, if you are only going to save $300,000 to close a school like Paden and shift the students to Washington and/or Ruby Bridges, will the need to add capacity at the two schools eliminate the savings gained from the closure?  

It’s amazing that when we talk about closing our smallest schools in order to save money, the conversation never turns to the issue of charter schools like ACLC which serve less students than our smallest elementary schools.  Are Franklin’s API scores any less impressive than ACLC’s as that seems to be our only means of judging how “good” a school is?

Cue the chorus!

Who will be the first person/organization to start the chorus of “I told you so!” regarding the latest news about Alameda Power and Telecom?   It wasn’t Alameda Daily News in it’s scoopilicious fashion, in fact we all had to get the news from Chip Johnson of the SF Chronicle who took a bit of a break from writing almost endlessly about Oakland to turn his eye to our neck of the East Bay woods, highlights:

…On Monday, the utility’s general manager, Girish Balachandran, confirmed that a consultant has been hired to identify and contact parties interested in buying the telecom service and its 15,000 subscribers - who make up about half the cable business in the city of 74,000 residents…

You don’t know Jack

When crticisms of Alameda Community Learning Center (ACLC) comes up, inevitably someone will point to State Superintendent Jack O’Connell visit to ACLC and say, “See, he thinks it’s terrific, so you all should too.”  One of the sites I like to read is SFSchools which, while it focuses on San Francisco school issues, sometimes branches out a bit, one of the authors there pointed me toward a blog — The Perimeter Primate — written by a former staff person with the Oakland Unified School District and parent of children who attended Oakland schools.   She had reposted an excellent “My Word” that she had written for the Oakland Tribune and I recall enjoying it when I had read it on SFSchools but couldn’t find it.  (Bear with me folks, there is a reason behind this huge set-up)   What made the Perimeter Primate interesting is that the author had recently been let go from her position at the OUSD and she attributes it (in Caroline’s words on SFSchools):

…She’s quite certain she was fired in retaliation for her writings speaking out about the current state of Oakland Unified, which has basically been turned over to billionaires whose hobby is school reform, to experiment with those oddly named “boutique schools” and whatever other whims strike their fancy. Sharon writes that when outsiders swoop in to renovate a school district, they throw out babies like community and history with the bathwater.

And in fact on the Perimeter Primate on the left hand column of the blog she relates one of her conversations with a district official leading up to her termination.  So my interest was piqued and not knowing a whole lot about the state of OUSD I kept reading the Perimeter Primate to figure out what the heck was going on.  Turns out, her criticisms mirror those that were catalogued in the East Bay Express about billionaire Eli Broad’s (as in Kaufman and) machinations in the business of OUSD.   One of the things that was really interesting was how the story kept coming back to Jack O’Connell and his ties to the charter school advocacy community.   One of the things EBX loves to do is tie an issue to campaign funding and this time, they hit the pay dirt.  Many thanks to Robert Gammon and the EBX for compiling Jack O’Connell’s 2002 campaign finance report into an easy to use Excel spreadsheet.

Consolation Prize

File this under “something is better than nothing” appointments have finally been made to the Bay Area Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) board, not to be confused with this Weta.  And according to Inside Bay Area, Vallejo and Alameda both have seats at the table:

…Schwarzenegger appointed Vallejo’s Anthony Intintoli Jr. to be vice-chairman of the board and Perata named Alameda’s Beverly Johnson as a board member. Both were mayors until last year’s municipal elections…

Erik Nelson clearly doesn’t write the Alameda beat does he?   Must have been a shock to Beverly Johnson to know that she was a mayor only until last year’s elections.  

On the Borders

Ruh roh…possibly bad news for the Towne Centre who is banking on Borders to be it’s newest anchor store?   From the SF Chronicle:

Borders, the nation’s second-largest bookseller, said Thursday it may put itself up for sale and that it has lined up $42.5 million in financing to help the chain continue operations.

Shares tumbled more than 29 percent, or $2.07, to $5.03 in volatile trading at midday.

Borders has lost market share both to online retailers and to discounters like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and its possible sale was given mixed prospects by industry analysts.

From tree to shining tree

I don’t normally get too excited about trees.   They’re nice and all, but my love of trees generally falls into the category of “is it pretty?”   If the answer is yes, then I’m all over it.    Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the article in the Alameda Sun about the tree surveyor hired by the City of Alameda to take inventory of our exisiting stock of streets trees.   According to the article this is one of the first steps toward a Citywide Master Tree Plan.   But of course when you live in a City whose name means “tree-lined avenue” a master tree plan is a definite must.  

Personally the thing I really enjoyed about the article was the “best of/worst of” from Alamedans at the end of the article.   I liked Barbara Brown’s dislike of Acacias and wanting to do a little “creative” removal of them for the good of asthma stufferers everywhere.

Meet me at the Antique Faire

What is it about Alameda that makes folks insist on tacking an extra “e” on to words unnecessarily?  Must be that old tyme feel that pervades Alameda.  I have to say I have never been to the Alameda Point Antiques Faire, maybe because I’m not the sort of shopper that gets lured to that type of shopping experience, plus I’m not a huge fan of antiques either.  However I have to say that the recent article in the Chronicle about the antiques fair was very compelling.   Even the items described in the narrative sounded interesting, but then I saw the photos and my interest in them plummeted.  Like I said, I’m not a fan of antiques, but I can see why other people like them.

I imagine what is appealing about the Antiques Faire is the teeming masses of people that are all in the same boat as you are, looking for that one-of-a-kind bargain.  Personally, I liked to story of the Alamedans who bike to the Faire and sometimes even carry small items home on their bikes:

…[Marcy] Voyevod, a designer who lives in Alameda, and her husband, Tim Englert, have been getting on their bikes and riding to the show since it started in 1998.

Englert collects things like postcards and pop bottles, but once he found himself cycling home with a small table on his shoulders. “Usually,” Voyevod said, “if we find something big, we just ride home and drive back for it.”

Reclaiming public education

I won’t be the first person nor the last to talk about the launch of the Alameda Education Foundation’s awareness campaign about the value of public education in our community.   You may have seen the signs for the campaign cropping up around town like spring daffodils.   A publication who shall not be named mistook this launch as yet another protest, but it’s so much more than that.   Too long public education has been a dirty term in our common vernacular and it’s about time that those of us that see and understand the value of public education reclaim the term “public education” and give it a positive, rather than negative, connotation.

Last September, Peter Schrag wrote an article for Harper’s Magazine about how we as a society have pointed a collective finger of blame at our schools for the past 50 years.   The only problem was, I couldn’t access the Harper’s site (I’m cheap, I didn’t want to pay for it), but thanks to SFSchools, I was able to access the shortened version from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.  Hey, you get your articles wherever you can, even an Indiana newspaper.  Before I move on to highlighting passages from the article –chock full of great stuff, the scariest part is the listing of the various “reforms” that have taken place in the past 50 years, often conflicting, but all have been applied at one point or the other to our public schools — I want to give you more information about the event today in case you will be around to catch it.