Letters: What would Oakland do with more property tax money? Waste it like always
Regarding 'Property tax hike proposed by Oakland's interim mayor to patch budget gap' (East Bay, SFChronicle.com, May 6): Oakland Interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins wants us to pay more property taxes. No way!
Our household income last year was $85,000. Property taxes, at $674 per month, are our largest bill.
For decades, we have watched the city fritter money away on consultants and things like the abominable Downtown Oakland Specific Plan.
Streets have bicycle lanes where no one rides bikes, while up on Skyline Boulevard, the cavernous potholes maim cyclists, who can now sue the city.
And how about the 'traffic calming' reconfiguration of Telegraph Avenue in the Temescal District? Were the transportation planners who designed that mess microdosing on something?
How much tax money went to the hated Bus Rapid Transit infrastructure on International Boulevard? A recent UC Berkeley study found that this bad planning has resulted in 35 fatal accidents and economic losses to small businesses.
We are fortunate to own our house. Many of Oakland's residents are renters who figured that they could stick it to homeowners by voting to increase property taxes. But, of course, landlords pass this on by increasing rents, which decreases affordability in Oakland.
We have great confidence in Mayor-elect Barbara Lee. But she should not count on the largesse of her house-poor Oakland citizenry.
Amelia Marshall, Oakland
Mother's Day reminder
Mother's Day evokes joy for many; it carries a deep and painful significance for me.
I lost my son Eric to an overdose on Nov. 23, 2022, just three weeks shy of his 32nd birthday.
His loss is part of a tragic statistic: about a million lives have been lost over the past decade to overdoses, all preventable deaths.
For far too long, society has responded to substance use disorders with stigma and punishment rather than compassion and understanding.
Harsh drug laws are ineffective, costly and steeped in systemic racism. Criminalization fills our prisons without addressing the root issues faced by those struggling with substance use disorders.
We must advocate for expanded access to evidence-based health strategies that have proven effective in saving lives. This includes making medications for opioid use disorder more widely available, increasing harm reduction services and ensuring that the overdose-reversing drug naloxone is distributed across all communities.
Cara Wykowski, Oakland
While not wishing to wax too rhapsodic about the San Francisco Giants, in these screwy times, baseball is a grand way to forget about it all for a few hours.
To see a grand slam, a guy steal third or the joy on the face of a child who gets a foul ball, all make the experience a balm in times of trouble.
Steven Tracy, Davis
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San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
How the Trump-Musk divorce could crush California's green-car dreams
After 24 hours of spiteful, online mudslinging with Elon Musk, President Donald Trump fired a new salvo Friday morning: According to reports from the New York Times, Trump vowed to sell the sleek red Tesla he'd bought in March and flaunted on the White House South Lawn, in one of his few concessions to green energy. Musk's electric vehicle company had evidently driven a wedge between the two billionaires, revealed when Trump introduced a 'big, beautiful bill' that would remove the $7,500 tax credit for buyers of Teslas and other zero-emission cars. Although Musk had counterintuitively supported ending the tax credit in December, he appeared to course-correct this week, lambasting Trump's tax bill on social media. 'Elon's upset because we took the EV mandate, which was a lot of money for electric vehicles,' Trump said Thursday, during an Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that got subsumed by the Trump-Musk feud. 'And you know, they're having a hard time, the electric vehicles,' Trump continued. 'And they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy.' The ugly divorce battle that ensued pitted the world's richest man, who as Tesla's chief executive has built an empire from clean cars and trucks, against a president whose base largely denies climate change. As Tesla's shares whip-sawed in the stock market, questions swirled not only for Musk's brand, but for the electric vehicle market more broadly. The sparring caused a particularly rough jolt for California, where Tesla had long been key to an ambitious environmental platform. Given California's mandate to convert 35% of new car sales to EVs by next year, leaders have tried to promote these automobiles, offering rebates and free access to carpool lanes while cities steadily expand their charging infrastructure. But the Trump-Musk bromance threw the plodding electric vehicle movement into chaos. People who had once embraced Tesla rushed to boycott the company with such fervor that Tesla sales dropped 21 % in the first quarter of this year. 'It's hard to think of any company whose public image is more closely tied to its chief executive than Tesla,' said Lucas Davis, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business who specializes in energy economics. He noted that, in the U.S., vehicle purchases have become tightly intertwined with political ideology. Democrats who in the past reliably bought Teslas to signify their environmental values are now shunning the cars, and they haven't embraced other brands fast enough to compensate. Overall, EV sales in California dipped 3% year-over-year in the first quarter. With the GOP-controlled federal government now pushing to revoke the EV tax credit, sales are likely to plunge further. If Musk had thought he might have won back the liberal environmentalist crowd by attacking Trump this week, he made a grave miscalculation, said Bill Pearce, a marketing expert at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. 'This was a classic marketing miscue,' Pearce said, explaining that Musk alienated his original audience by going all in for the president. Although Tesla gained a smaller conservative fan base, Musk has now repelled those people as well with his sniping on social media. He derided Trump's 'big beautiful' tax bill for being 'massive, outrageous' and 'pork-filled,' and alleged a connection between Trump and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. 'I think he was trying, at least partly, in his criticism of Trump, to get his traditional buying base to say, 'OK, Elon's back on our side,'' Pearce said. 'But that's not the way consumers think.' Even before Trump and Musk's relationship began unraveling, Professor James Sallee of UC Berkeley's agriculture and resource economics department predicted a full-frontal assault by the Trump Administration on electric cars. In a UC Berkeley Energy Institute blog post provocatively titled 'Three Ways to Kill an Electric Vehicle,' Sallee laid out 'three big pieces of the Trump agenda that could threaten the future of electric vehicles': rollbacks of California's zero-emission mandate and federal clean car standards; unwinding of subsidies for EV buyers and manufacturers of batteries or other parts, and tariffs associated with the U.S.-China trade war. Whether Californians' belief in a clean energy future is strong enough to overcome these hurdles remains to be seen. But that financial argument won't hold for the rest of the country, Pearce said. 'And it will definitely slow adoption.'
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Overcrowded, Understaffed and Unsafe: One Woman's Night in Atlanta's City Jail
Dominique Grant said she was in the middle of a mental health crisis when she was pulled over driving on Moreland Avenue by a Georgia State Trooper the Friday before Mother's Day. Arrested under suspicion of DUI, the 32-year-old mother was booked into the Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC) around 11 p.m. that night. Grant admits to speeding but denies being intoxicated. She believes the officer was upset that she requested a field sobriety test and chose to arrest her instead. After she was handcuffed and placed in the back of the police car, she said the officer then offered her a Breathalyzer, which she refused. Grant is a full-time advocate and community organizer working with currently and formerly incarcerated women. So it felt like an unfortunate twist of fate when she found herself behind bars in one of the jails she regularly visits. 'I asked to be taken to the diversion center instead of ACDC, and I was denied that option,' she told Capital B Atlanta. When Grant arrived at the jail, she said, she was able to get in contact with her husband before she was put in a cell with two other women. One she said was visibly drunk and cursing at corrections officers, and another who she thought was experiencing withdrawal symptoms had a large open wound on her leg. Throughout the night, Grant said, she asked to be given water and was ignored, until an officer offered her water out of his own cup. When she asked for a new cup, he declined and continued to disregard her pleas. 'I got there at 11 o'clock at night, it's now 6 o'clock in the morning and I haven't gotten water or a phone call since … so I'm just crying,' she said. Grant said the treatment she and the other people detained in the jail that night was unprofessional, and she made it known. 'I said, 'We really push [the incarcerated women we work with] to respect y'all, because y'all are doing y''alls jobs, but to see how y'all treat people is really crazy,'' she recounted. Once the corrections officers found out she was with Women on the Rise, a local organization working to combat mass incarceration and empower formerly incarcerated women, she said her treatment changed. She was allowed to leave her cell and make a phone call at 6:15 a.m. 'I call my husband, and he's like, 'Yeah, I've been sitting in the lobby since 2:30. Your bond has been posted since 2 o'clock,'' she said. Grant was relieved to be released at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday morning so she could spend Mother's Day with her 4-year-old son. Still, the overall experience left a bitter taste in her mouth but even more committed to her work. Since her release, Grant has hired an attorney, begun seeing a therapist, visited a psychiatrist and restarted mental health medication. She also plans to take a driving class before her August court date. As the campaign and operations manager for Women on the Rise, Grant has been front and center with Communities Over Cages, a coalition of local organizations working to close the Atlanta City Detention Center. Built in 1995 ahead of the Olympic Games, ACDC is owned and operated by the city of Atlanta. But it is not the responsibility of the city to maintain a jail. According to Georgia law, that responsibility falls to the county's elected sheriff, Patrick Labat. Facing an overcrowding crisis and deteriorating conditions at their main jail led Fulton County leaders to turn to Atlanta for help. But even with access to a newer, not overcrowded jail, many of the same issues persist. Last fall, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 97-page report on the jail that described how policy, training, and systems of accountability do little to prevent excessive uses of force by corrections officers against incarcerated people. Read More: Renovating Fulton County Jail Isn't Enough, Sheriff Says 'The DOJ report talks about the fact that the issue with Fulton County or with Rice Street isn't necessarily the condition of the building itself. It's the culture amongst [corrections officers] and that shit is carrying straight over to ACDC,' Grant said. The four-year lease agreement between the city of Atlanta and Fulton County, that allowed for Grant to be detained at ACDC rather than in a Fulton County-owned jail, will end in December 2026, and the contract explicitly states renewal is not an option. With the lease's expiration date on the horizon, advocates like Grant are hopeful they can successfully get the city to close the jail once and for all. Fulton County officials, however — such as Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts — have been vocal about wanting to purchase ACDC from the city. While Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens has said he has no plans to sell or relinquish the jail to the county, Pitts told Capital B Atlanta that based on his own conversations with the mayor's office, he still believes it is a possibility. This isn't the first time Atlanta has gotten this close to closing its downtown jail. In September 2018, former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms ended the city's eight-year agreement to house Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detainees in ACDC. 'As we work to achieve our vision of an Atlanta that is welcoming and inclusive, with equal opportunity for all, it is untenable for our City to be complicit in the inhumane immigration policies that have led to the separation of hundreds of families at the United States southern border,' Bottoms said in 2018. For a while, it looked like the jail was close to being shuttered. Once it was no longer holding ICE detainees, the jail housed fewer than 50 people on average while operation costs continued to rise for the building that was designed to hold 1,300 people. In May 2019, then-City Council member Dickens successfully authored and introduced a bill to create the Reimagining ACDC Task Force made up of residents, organizers, and local government representatives. The next week, Mayor Bottoms signed legislation authorizing the closure of ACDC with the goal of transforming it into a centralized hub for social services like behavioral health programs and job training and placement. Despite the task force developing four proposals for how to repurpose the facility in 2020, ACDC now houses over 400 people. In December 2022 — at the end of one of the most deadly years at Fulton County's main jail on Rice Street, where 15 people died — the city of Atlanta entered into a four-year lease agreement with the county for up to 700 beds in the city's detention center. Two of the 19 people who have died in Fulton County custody since then were incarcerated at ACDC. At the start of the lease, Fulton County was housing around 3,400 people in its main jail, which was built to hold 2,500. Half of those in custody were unindicted. According to the county's public safety dashboard, the number of incarcerated people sleeping on portable or temporary bunks continued to rise in the months after the lease agreement began and did not reach zero until a year later. 'The leadership of the grassroots movement, especially Women on the Rise, gave the city a blueprint for how they could repurpose that space, and the city broke its promise,' said Tiffany Roberts, who served on the Reimagining ACDC Task Force, in an interview with Capital B Atlanta. Read More: Why Does Atlanta Want to Lease Its Jail to Fulton County? Roberts is also director of public policy at the Southern Center for Human Rights, who, along with Women on the Rise, was a vocal opponent of the lease with Fulton County and warned that it would not alleviate the overcrowding issue that the lease purported to address. As a former criminal defense attorney with the Fulton County Public Defender's Office and then in her own private practice, Roberts saw how the jail was used to warehouse people who often didn't have the resources to pay for their own release. '[I was] representing people who were homeless or who were profiled by police and were stuck at the detention center for city ordinance violations that were essentially either crimes of race or crimes of poverty,' she said. Roberts has been telling officials and residents for years that overcrowding will not be solved until local elected officials address the root causes of the issue instead of throwing more money at police, prisons and prosecutors to lock up more people. It was recently reported that the multi-million dollar Fulton County Center for Diversion and Services is barely utilized by the 15 police departments in the county, including APD, that are authorized to use the facility 'There should be incentives, for example, for police officers to use [diversion services] rather than arrest. Mayor Dickens has within his power to tell the police to deprioritize crimes of homelessness,' she said. A representative from Grady Health System, which operates the diversion center, told the Fulton County commissioners last week that the staff sees an average of only three people each day. Next year, Fulton County will have to find a way to house the 400, mostly women, that are currently being detained in ACDC. No announcements have been made yet, but prior to the lease, they were being detained at the south annex jail in Union City that the county has been renovating over the last year. Legislation introduced in March by council member Antonio Lewis to begin planning a staged withdrawal of detainees has stalled in the Public Safety and Legal Administration Committee. Roberts said now is the time for Atlantans to press local elected officials to prioritize uplifting Black communities, not criminalizing the people who live in them. 'We have to stop defaulting to this nonsensical belief that authoritarianism and over-policing is okay as long as Black people do it. We complain about other folks doing it at the national level, so we've got to be paying attention to what our local officials are doing,' she said. The post Overcrowded, Understaffed and Unsafe: One Woman's Night in Atlanta's City Jail appeared first on Capital B News - Atlanta.
Newsweek
8 hours ago
- Newsweek
Republicans Propose 'Natural Family Month' To Boost Birth Rate
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Ohio Republican lawmakers introduced a bill aiming to designate the weeks between Mother's Day and Father's Day as "Natural Family Month" to try to tackle America's falling birth rate. Why It Matters America's fertility rate is now projected to average 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office's latest forecast released this year. The number is well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman required to maintain a stable population without immigration. The Ohio bill is one of several recent proposals nationwide that seek to boost birth rates by affirming the role of marriage and two-parent households. Riley Walters, 7 months old from Traverse City, Michigan, watches her first National Cherry Festival Junior Royale Parade through downtown Traverse City on July 8, 2004. Riley Walters, 7 months old from Traverse City, Michigan, watches her first National Cherry Festival Junior Royale Parade through downtown Traverse City on July 8, 2004. AP What To Know The proposed legislation would create a "Natural Family Month" observance in Ohio each year between the second Sunday in May and the third Sunday in June. State representatives Beth Lear, of the 61st District, and Josh Williams, of the 44th, introduced House Bill 262. It has 26 co-sponsors, including the Ron Ferguson, of the 96th District, who told WTOV News 9 that he does not expect the bill to be passed before the summer break, although he does expect it go through before the end of the General Assembly. The bill is currently in the House committee and had its first hearing on Tuesday afternoon. Newsweek has contacted Lear, Williams and Ferguson via email for comment. Critics of the bill include Equality Ohio, which argues that it excludes families made up of same-sex couples. "I think that's people really trying to stretch what we're focused on here," Ferguson said. "What we're really focused on is, again, recognizing that a mother and a father are very important for the development of a child." President Donald Trump's administration has spoken out about the issue of declining birth rates multiple times, with Vice President JD Vance saying on January 24 that he wanted "more babies" to be born in the U.S. Trump has signed an executive order expanding access to in vitro fertilization for Americans, and Transport Secretary Sean Duffy directed the Department of Transportation to give funding precedence to "communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average." The White House is also reportedly exploring giving women a "baby bonus" of $5,000 to encourage Americans to have more children. What People Are Saying Ohio state Representative Ron Ferguson: "What we really need to see is an increase in population and creation of family, and so it was exciting to really support something that recognizes mothers and fathers." Ohio state Representative Beth Lear, in a previous press release: "At a time when marriage is trending downward and young couples are often choosing to remain childless, it's important for the State of Ohio to make a statement that marriage and families are the cornerstone of civil society, and absolutely imperative if we want to maintain a healthy and stable Republic." President Donald Trump, during a speech in December: "We want more babies, to put it nicely." Vice President JD Vance, who is from Ohio, in January: "We failed a generation not only by permitting a culture of abortion on demand but also by neglecting to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to lead a happy and meaningful life. "Our society has failed to recognize the obligation that one generation has to another as a core part of living in a society. So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America." What Happens Next The bill needs to go through multiple steps before being voted on by the Ohio House, then Senate.
