Here's what's happening in the Bay Area, as curated by KALW news:
Plan to increase S.F. police staffing advances through committee // SF Gate
"A plan to increase San Francisco’s Police force is one step closer to being realized after passing a Board of Supervisors committee on Monday.
"Supervisors Scott Wiener and Malia Cohen brought the resolution calling for 500 more officers before the land use and economic development committee, a committee Wiener sits on and Cohen chairs. The resolution, which if passed before the full Board of Supervisors will cost the city millions of dollars over the course of several years, passed in committee in a 2-to-1 vote with Supervisor Jane Kim voting against it.
“Officers don’t prevent crime - keeping kids in school does prevent crime. The less youth that drop out of our public school system prevents crime. When we have families that are housed or adults that are housed instead of living on our street, we absolutely know that prevents crime.”
-----
Longtime salmon institute told to leave SFSU property in Marin // SF Examiner
"The Tiburon Salmon Institute has operated at what’s now SFSU’s off-campus research and teaching facility, the Romberg Tiburon Center, since the San Francisco Tyee Foundation established the institute in 1973. It raises 10,000 fall-run Chinook salmon each year, nearly a quarter of which receive a ceremonious sendoff into the San Francisco Bay as part of the institute’s educational component.
"But following years of safety and financial concerns, SFSU in January issued a cease-and-desist order to the salmon institute effective July 1, said Robert Nava, vice president for university advancement."
-----
LeRoy King dies // SF Examiner
“Flags at San Francisco City Hall were raised at half-staff from sunrise to sunset yesterday in memory of civil rights and labor leader LeRoy King, a long-serving member of The City’s Redevelopment Commission.
"King passed away last Friday of natural causes at the St. Francis Square Cooperative in The City’s Western Addition neighborhood. He was 91 years-old.
“He advocated for struggling people so that they would have had a good wage and fair working conditions and were treated with dignity and respect and without racism,” his daughter Rebecca King Morrow, 62, said."
-----
Revised 5th and Mission plan adds affordable housing, open space // SF Gate
“Developers seeking to build the project on four acres next to the Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission streets are beefing up their affordable housing and open space commitments in an effort to win approval in a political environment that is becoming increasingly demanding around issues of affordable housing.
"Under the new plan, developer Forest City in partnership with the Hearst Corp., which owns The Chronicle, have agreed to make 33 percent of the project affordable.
Mayor Ed Lee said the project, known as 5M, is the first private development to meet the goals of 2014’s Proposition K, which called for 33 percent of housing produced in the city to be affordable to low- and moderate-income families.
“We made it clear to Forest City from the start that we wanted them to maximize the affordable-housing component of the 5M project,” Lee said.”
-----
SF Police shoot family dog // ABC7 News
“San Francisco police officer fatally shot a dog in San Francisco's Bayview neighborhood Sunday evening.
"Two officers responded to the house after getting a 911 call. It turned out there was no emergency. A child who was playing with the phone inadvertently called emergency dispatch, but the officers didn't know that at the time and entered the property where they encountered a pit bull. "Six shots, for a dog? I mean, what can you say?" Jeffrey Stancil said."
Police say the officer shot the dog only after it bit him several times, but the family says the shooting was unnecessary.”
-----
Bay Area looks to Australia for drought advice // KRON
“Australia, the land poet Dorothea Mackellar dubbed “a sunburnt country,” suffered a torturous drought from the late 1990s through 2012. Now Californians are facing their own “Big Dry,” and looking Down Under to see how they coped. Australia also faced tough water restrictions — along with dying cattle, barren fields and monstrous wildfires that killed 173 people. But when the rains finally returned, Australians had fundamentally changed how they handle this precious resource.
"The lesson: long droughts are here to stay, so societies had better plan ahead, says drought-policy expert Linda Botterill of the University of Canberra.”
