It’s been nearly 100 years since Congress authorized the City of San Francisco to build the O’Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite National Park. This is the dam that turned Hetch Hetchy Valley into Hetch Hetchy reservoir, providing water and electricity to San Francisco and surrounding cities. John Muir and a emerging Sierra Club fought against this project proposal for nearly 12 years before Congress passed the Raker Act in 1913, giving San Francisco the authority to build the dam, power generators, and delivery system to the Bay Area.
For budgetary reasons, 70 of California's 279 state parks were set to close to the public on July 1st. But thanks to partnerships with private businesses and advocacy groups, 68 of those parks remain open for the time being. Even with this money and the recently discovered surplus in the Parks Department, Californians need to decide if funding our state park system is in our best interest, especially in an economically challenging climate. We talk about California’s State Park system, its history, its value, and what closing a state park might look like.
As more than 23,000 delegates from over 195 countries convene this week in Washington, D.C., for the XIX International AIDS Conference, LGBTQ rights advocates and others in California are trying to raise awareness about FDA policies and guidelines that they say place undue and unnecessary restrictions on LGBTQ individuals looking to conceive--policies they say were informed by concerns around the transmission HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
For the last twenty years, San Francisco city leaders have promised to address the long-standing challenges facing the Mid Market Street neighborhood, but nothing has really changed.Now, San Francisco is taking a fresh approach to revitalizing Mid Market Street that includes attracting tech businesses and actively reaching out to arts organizations, community groups and residents to create a new vision for this diverse neighborhood.
City Visions talks with Rec and Parks' General Manager about the department's budget initiatives for next year, the $195 million parks improvement bond proposed for this fall's ballot, and what all of this could mean for your favorite neighborhood park.
