Keeping the A’s, going for the World Cup…

I’ve signed two pro-sports petitions recently to give Oakland a sporting chance at remaining/becoming a sports destination. I love futbol and went to lots of games in Asia…and I used to play coed pickup games in Berkeley a lot when I could bike there from North Oakland. Alas, I live in Uptown now and that is no longer possible.

Realistic City of Oakland Budget: 10% Cut

City must trim its budget… to FY2000 levels…soon.

[The short version: FY08-09 budget $1.066 Billion. 10% cut needed -- a $106.6 Million cut for FY09-10.]

A favorite blogger of mine, Karl Denninger, incinerates the moldy loaves of lies distributed by the “Federal” Reserve, Congress, White House and corporate media, daily.

Indeed… Who respects authority figures these days? Americans are lied to by everyone–from politicians to CEOs to AC Transit directors to City of Oakland administrators to realtors…. it’s a loooong-ass list! That many Americans don’t vote actually shows how smart we are.

Captain Obvious: Lake Merritt is our GGP!

By Captain Obvious (KenO)

Thanks to John Klein for posting photos of our local repaving team at work:

Repaving LM pavement

Keeping Lake Merritt firmly ensconced in a brand new asphalt setting (or “collet” if you are British) will keep our aqueous Jewel looking shiny and welcoming for quite some time. The city’s Public Works department has also repaved the walking paths around the south side of the lake. Completing the makeover, with the new Lake Chalet finally open, the Lake now has its own upscale eatery.

Do not interpret any of this as diminishing the important part (and utility) of the Lake Merritt Bakery though.  The Merritt R&B is still open until 12am or 2am (thanks Oakland city council for the 2am must-close rule!) unlike the 3-4am sitdown times I enjoyed back in my 20s after a night of hard SF house clubbing.

Are cities really sustainable?

One of my colleagues recently presented on sustainability and urban planning in Vancouver. This led me to think of what I’ve been reading lately. Not libatious poetry about cities or google eyed narratives in Next American City magazine, but some naysaying.

I’ve read a bit of city naysaying recently. One critique of cities is that they absorb quite a bit of bio capacity from other areas, requiring transport. Meaning, we cannot have Hong Kongs every 100 miles. Not at HK’s current scale.

For Rome in 2,000 years ago this would have meant moving food and lumber from outlying areas, France and even Africa back to Rome. Intercity trade without capital flight can be good, but ecologically speaking if there is one metropolis pulling in resources from everywhere, that probably cannot last long before exhaustion from human population growth and increasing resource use per capita.

This reminds me of something one of my friends said once, that urban is the conceit of stretching (bending) natural limits. I agree that urban constitutes the “extend and pretend” that we are separate from nature. Apart from wilderness.

Is Oakland greener than Berkeley?

Is Oaktown more of a sustainability oasis than Berkeley? Offhand, I’d say no.

It’s hard to beat 10-20,000 college students walking to class or to food, unlike us Oaklanders in our Subarus, Priuses, bicycles and Buicks driving to the Temescal, Saturday Lakeshore and other farmers’ markets.  Plus Berkeley has Biofuel Oasis and those elementary school gardens who provide vegetable matter for diners at Flora.

But maybe that’s not quite fair.  Oakland has more BART stations (though due to larger size) and perhaps more bicyclists than does Berkeley.  Oakland’s population is also 3-4 times bigger than Berkeley’s. I don’t have any figures on the latter, though.  Maybe EBBC’s number crunchers know.

SustainLane.com, a bay area green living guide, is conducting an 8-week sustainability challenge ahead of the December Copenhagen climate treaty negotiations. Cities of Berkeley, SF, Oakland, San Jose all have “top 10 lists” posted of things they’d like residents to achieve.

Interestingly, Mayor of Berkeley Tom Bates is participating directly, and being a good role model by example.  Here he is using shower water to water his garden.  A lot of Berkeley and Oakland residents use graywater systems to recycle mostly clean bathwater.  Time to show your green pride!

Many Berkeley and Oakland folks are already quite green compared to the stereotype of Los Angeles or middle america. Time to prove it!

Let the games begin!

Scene: Tem

Temescal’s BurmaSuperstar was hopping tonight. It’s a super-crammed eatery and tho the food was fairly good, it wasn’t as good as in Alameda where you don’t feel hurried by the crammed-in tables, single file walkways and loud noise. It was really noisy in there due to being packed and medium small.

Service was great though, no wait, every other waiter bussed us, brought us menus, took away card. Host opened door for us. There were groups of folks waiting, but these were 6-8 in size.

Here’s hoping that BurmaSS takes part in next Tuesday’s “Taste” 90% gourmand, 10% localvore eatery sampling event.

Will Telegraph be closed to traffic? That would be a great idea.

Parking Irony

In today’s SF Examiner, the headline piece is:

“Meters until midnight”

“Controversial plan would extend parking pay hours to late n ight and SUndays to generate $9 million”

Will Oakland’s political-business elites grow a pair and bring back either (A) higher parking rates or (B) longer meter hours, a few months from now?

Perhaps March or April before Earth Day would be a good time for it.