By Adam Beam : sfgate – excerpt

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A long-sought and disputed project in drought-prone California aimed at capturing more water during heavy rain storms reached a key milestone on Friday when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration finished an environmental review for an underground tunnel.

The tunnel would be about 45 miles (72 kilometers) long and 36 feet (10.9 meters) wide, or large enough to carry more than 161 million gallons of water per hour. The tunnel would be another way to get water from Northern California, where most of the state’s water is, to Southern California, where most of the people live.

The Newsom administration says the tunnel is a necessary upgrade of the state’s aging infrastructure because it will protect the water supply from earthquakes and capture more water from rainstorms known as atmospheric rivers that scientists say have been increasing because of climate change.

But environmental groups, Native American tribes and other opponents say the project will take more water out of the river than is necessary and will harm endangered species of fish.

Friday, the California Department of Water Resources released its final environmental impact report for the project. The report is the last step of a complex and lengthy state regulatory process. But it doesn’t mean the project is close to being built. The project still must complete a federal environmental review and obtain various state and federal permits. That process is expected to last until 2026…(more)

by Ethan Baron : mercurynews – excerpt (includes audio)

google maps

The CEO of a contentious plan backed by Silicon Valley billionaires for a utopia in Solano County refused to back down from a $510 million lawsuit against property owners, as he faced a mistrustful crowd of local residents.

Former Wall Street investor Jan Sramek on Tuesday addressed about 150 ranchers and other locals at the American Legion hall in Rio Vista, a hamlet of 10,000 people on the Sacramento River near Antioch. His company, California Forever, billed the gathering as a town hall to inform the public and gather feedback about the plan to build a new city with tens of thousands of homes in the next 35 to 40 years.

In jeans, scuffed brown dress shoes and an open-necked gray button-up shirt, Sramek highlighted his “blue-collar” background in the Czech Republic — mechanic father, teacher mother — and noted that “a series of scholarships” led to his degrees from the United Kingdom’s prestigious University of Cambridge and London School of Economics. He said he left Goldman Sachs, “where shifting pieces of paper around” was “a really easy way to make money,” after 20 months to co-found an “education company to help people train and acquire new skills.”

California Forever, founded in 2017 and funded by billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz and fellow billionaires LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs, raised hackles in rural Solano County by keeping their plan secret while buying up tens of thousands of acres, much of the land agricultural, then suing dozens of landowners in May for $510 million in damages over claims that through “endless greed” they conspired to jack up the sale prices of their properties…(more)

How do we send the billionaire venture capitalists back to the paper shuffling jobs? Under which laws is the case being filed? Where is the protection for the US Airforce and the public parks? Must the state legislature specify a distance from sensitive areas to protect them from encroachment by millionaires? The Governor is already trying to raid the Bay’s natural water supply that will be needed to keep the salt water flushed out of the Bay. The real question is priorities. Why is the our government that claims to be deeply in debt continuing to spend money against us while begging for more? ourneighborhoodvoices.com should find a lot of fans in Solano County.

By Astrid Kane : sfstandard – excerpt

Kevin Ortiz, co-president of the San Francisco Latinx Democratic Club, spoke during a protest this week criticizing Valencia Street’s center-striped bicycle lanes.

Two of the most heavily used bike lanes in San Francisco intersect in the city’s Mission District, at Valencia and 17th streets, where there’s a taqueria, a police station, an upscale furniture store and a famous sex shop.

One set of lanes cuts east-west, from the giant rainbow flag in the nearby Castro across the Mission into Potrero Hill. As with most bike lanes, these flank the parking lane, are generally unprotected from cars and, for the most part, don’t offend anyone. The other, running north-south through the ever-trendy neighborhood, has lately become a cultural flashpoint, a fight on par with the conflict over tech shuttle buses.

Four months ago, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency relocated the north-south bike lanes along Valencia between 15th to 23rd streets from the sides of the street to the center, zipping them together for the span of eight blocks before unzipping them again. In the process, several dozen parking spaces were eliminated, too…

Grumbling about this eight-block stretch has been building since summer. But the anger erupted Tuesday when several dozen small business owners occupied the street, chanting and holding signs calling on the city to remove the lanes, as Streetsblog first reported.

The protest came just a few days after the bar and live-music venue Amado’s closed, with its owner claiming that sales dropped 80% after the bike lane was installed and created a hassle for musicians due to a lack of parking.

Opponents have seized on the bike lane as more evidence that the city runs roughshod over the small businesses that fill its coffers with tax revenue and give it character. But how does moving a bike lane by a few feet destroy a business?…

More than Just a Bike Lane…

“Everybody’s focused on the bike lane, but it’s really about a bureaucracy,” said Bill Dickenson, who sits on a steering committee of the San Francisco Small Business Coalition, which organized Tuesday’s protest on Valencia. “The SFMTA is a government agency that has gone rogue in many ways.”…

An April 2023 planning document appears to put the cost at $590,000, funded by several previous ballot measures, but SFMTA confirmed to The Standard that $1.5 million had been spent so far, with the total amount yet to be determined…(more)

by Noah Baustin : sfstandard – excerpt (includes map)

The Bay Area blossomed as the nation’s work-from-home capital after the Covid pandemic drove the area’s tech companies to embrace remote models. But where people are logging on remotely for work within the region varies dramatically from county to county and neighborhood to neighborhood, according to data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

In some Bay Area enclaves, the majority of workers clock in from home, but in others, virtually everyone still physically travels to work, according to the data.

As a whole, the Census Bureau estimates that about 735,000 of the 3.9 million Bay Area workers—19%—clocked in from home during the survey’s period. That’s far above the national work-from-home rate of 12% of American workers. The largest share of the Bay Area’s remote workers come from Santa Clara County, with 189,000 working from home, about 20% of the workforce. That may be contributing to the significant amount of empty office space in that county…(more)

Work from home numbers in the north bay could explain why the Gold Gate Bridge has seen a decline in traffic.

By Shira Stein, Joe Garofoli : sfchronicle – excerpt

WASHINGTON — Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will retire from Congress at the end of the year, just weeks after he was ousted from the position, he said Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal.

McCarthy gained the speakership after 15 votes in January, the most required for any speaker to be elected. He was then removed from his position Oct. 3 in a vote supported by all House Democrats and eight right-wing members of his own party, the first time a speaker had ever been removed in history…

His departure, along with that of Ohio Rep. Bill Johnson and the removal of George Santos, will leave House Republicans with only a one-seat majority. That will make it even more difficult to permanently fund the government in January with upcoming deadlines…(more)

Special Reports : opportunitynowsv – excerpt

California finance expert Tom Rubin analyzes MTC’s proposed $10–20 bn bond measure, which would chuck some greenbacks at jurisdictions in the name of developing/preserving affordable housing. Not only does the measure lack clear performance metrics (um, are we talking 100 or 10,000 units produced?), but it neglects key market problems—suggesting instead we hand gov’t (more) cash to figure everything out. An Opp Now exclusive.

Opportunity Now: Is it just us, or does the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s latest proposal to invest—cough—$10–20 billion in “affordable housing” in California feel a bit déjà vu? This isn’t the first time they’ve attempted something like this, right?

Tom Rubin: MTC has been working on this big housing bond concept for years now.

Pre-Covid, their plan via CASA was to provide $2.4 billion annually in housing from about 12 different sources. However, there wasn’t much information made available about how many houses CASA would reap, and when. What made the situation even more difficult was, since it was officially a private sector thing (involving community groups and nonprofits, although public interests were represented at the table), there were not open meetings and records weren’t publicly available. Nevertheless, CASA died for a couple of reasons, COVID being one of them…(more)

by Garey De Martini : marinatimes – excerpt

Winter has finally arrived, and it’s almost time to put 2023 to bed. Couldn’t happen soon enough in the minds of many San Francisco real estate agents.

“Stop me if you’ve heard this before: prices are down because interest rates are up, prices are up because listing inventory is down,” said Matt Fuller, cofounder at Jackson Fuller Real Estate, when describing current market conditions.

“At an annual real estate luncheon in December of 2022, First Republic Bank predicted a bumpy 2023, and a drastically improved 2024,” he continued. “Well, they sure were right about 2023.”

And what’s ahead in 2024?…

According to a housing and economic forecast released in late September by the California Association of Realtors, slower economic growth and cooling inflation will bring down mortgage interest rates in 2024 and create a more favorable market environment to spur California home sales next year.

But, really, who knows? It’s always a little frightening to think that a slowing economy is a good thing, something that should be welcomed…

As has been well documented, San Francisco is suffering from a lack of listings. Fuller pointed out there might be light at the end of that tunnel, but it might include some unforeseen consequences.

San Francisco is supposed to build 80,000 market-rate homes in the next eight years to comply with its state-mandated housing goals. If that’s even possible, in a city that averages 4,000 to 5,000 sales a year, what would adding 10,000 new homes a year on top of that do to values in the city’s real estate market? Only time will tell.

Where will all these new homes be built? According to Fuller, most of the development sites are south or east of I-280. And of course on Treasure/Yerba Buena Island, where 8,000 new homes are planned — and where he estimates less than 500 new homes have been finished as of 2023…(more)

By Christopher : Calmatters – excerpt (includes audio track)

Who’s up and who’s down? When the news broke late Tuesday that new Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas picked new committee chairpersons and canned others, the Sacramento political sphere was immediately abuzz with talk of winners and losers.

The winners include Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, the Davis Democrat who was named Assembly majority leader, and Encino Democrat Jesse Gabriel, who is taking over the budget committee, though at a time of budget deficits. He’s replacing Assemblymember Phil Ting of San Francisco, who said that the eight state budgets he helped put together have boosted California’s efforts on child care, climate change and access to higher education and healthcare…

Yes In My Backyard activists — who promote legislation meant to make it easier to build housing of all kinds, even if that comes at the expense of local control over development decisions — have been on a winning streak this year.

The chorus of lawmakers willing to argue that the state doesn’t face a housing shortage, or that the state need not get involved has dwindled in recent years. By the end of the most recent legislative session, with Rivas at the helm of the Assembly, the Legislature passed an array of bills that fast-track “any flavor of affordable housing you could possibly want to build.”…(more)

Not the best news going into 2024. MUST support some new people in
Sacramento. You have until Dec. 8 to talk someone into running. PLEASE Do.

By Chronicle readers : sfchronicle – excerpt

Regarding “PG&E bills to soar nearly $400 a year in 2024 for millions of California households” (California, SFChronicle.com, Nov. 17): Again the California Public Utilities Commission sides with the investor-owned utilities not the citizens of the state or of the blue planet.

We can’t afford it anymore. People are struggling to pay their utility bills, and PG&E got another big rate increase estimated to average about $400 per year and a reduction in payments to owners of rooftop solar for the second time this year, supposedly to reverse the “unfair subsidies.”

Rather than incentivize property owners to take load off the grid we have, once again, incentivized PG&E to build more power plants.

Why does our governor and presidential hopeful continue to side with the corporations instead of the citizens?

Aren’t we really supposed to be trying to reduce the use of fossil fuels, the state’s stated goal, and decrease the impact that humans have on our beautiful blue planet?…(more)

This is one of many letters that deride the Governor-appointed CPUC for raising energy costs while punishing people for installing rooftop solar systems to relieve the pressure on the grid. Not only is PG&E forcing private citizens to pay more, they are gauging the SFMTA that must rely on them to expand their electric fleet. Now the state has put our public transportation system that they normally support in a bind. They are passing unfunded mandates on public transit systems. Read the details here: Muni’s Dream of An Electric Fleet of SF Buses Suddenly Looks Much More Like the Present

Time for new people to represent us in Sacramento. Ask your most responsible honest local politicians to run for office. Ignore the negative campaigns against them.