Rebecca Bowe

Sailing into the plastic vortex

Green City: Closing in on the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre

08.12.09 - 2:01 am | Rebecca Bowe |

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GREEN CITY If a plastic soft drink bottle got tossed into the San Francisco Bay and swept out under the Golden Gate, it might end up in the massive junkyard-at-sea that swirls through a current known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.Read more »

Sup. Mirkarimi pushes for transparency in mayor’s security detail costs

08.11.09 - 1:54 pm | Rebecca Bowe |

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By Rebecca Bowe

Image courtesy James Ratcliffe

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi has introduced legislation that would require elected officials to reimburse the city for security-detail costs while traveling the campaign trail, the Chronicle has reported. Read more »

TONIGHT: town hall to discuss a California constitutional convention

08.11.09 - 8:50 am | Rebecca Bowe |

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By Rebecca Bowe

A lot has happened since we first reported on a campaign spearheaded by the Bay Area Council to hold a California constitutional convention.

We watched the state-budget drama unfold, a tearjerker with a surprise ending delivered by knife-wielding Gove Read more »

PG&E employees to receive $17.25 million in overtime case

08.03.09 - 1:57 pm | Rebecca Bowe |

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By Rebecca Bowe

It’s payday for about 700 Pacific Gas & Electric employees – and for some, the check will cover long hours they put in more than a decade ago.

As part of a settlement in a class-action lawsuit, PG&E must fork over $17.25 million in unpaid overtime going back, in some cases, to 1996. The settlement, approved by a San Francisco Superior Court judge on July 30, is the final conclusion of Conley, et al. v. Read more »

Did Newsom forget to mention COPS cash during budget talks?

07.31.09 - 12:04 pm | Rebecca Bowe |

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By Rebecca Bowe

The San Francisco Police Department received $16.5 million in federal funding through the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) hiring grant program, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced July 28.

That’s a lot compared with the sums allocated to other cities throughout the country, but it’s just a fraction of the $89 million that Mayor Newsom and then-Police Chief Heather Fong requested for the SFPD in mid-April. Read more »

City Hall's collaborators

Budget deal leaves progressives uneasy as more bad news looms

07.29.09 - 12:48 am | Rebecca Bowe |

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

As the Board of Supervisors prepared to give final approval to the city budget July 21, Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the board's Budget and Finance Committee, told his colleagues the budget deal that he and President David Chiu negotiated with Mayor Gavin Newsom is "ushering in a new spirit of cooperation and collaboration at City Hall."

But at the end of the day, frantic last-minute revisions and indignant criticism from Avalos's progressive colleagues felt more like a family feud than the culmination of a team effort. Read more »

PG&E watch: The rate hike, the LNG pipeline and the $82 million corporate giveaway

07.24.09 - 1:11 pm | Rebecca Bowe |

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By Rebecca Bowe

Image courtesy of TURN

Pacfic Gas & Electric Co. Read more »

A messy wrap for city budget

07.22.09 - 1:35 pm | Rebecca Bowe |

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By Rebecca Bowe

Emotions run high and things get messy when there’s so much less cash to go around. Just as San Francisco’s 2009-2010 fiscal year budget was finally approved at yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, the news from Sacramento was that the long-awaited state budget deal bridges California’s gaping budget deficit in part by raiding local-government coffers.

San Francisco’s own hacked-up budget went through a round of last-minute changes at yesterday’s meeting before approval, marking last-ditch efforts by Sups. Read more »

Bitter medicine

Health care reform groups fear the cure may be worse than the disease

07.22.09 - 1:27 am | Steven T. Jones and Rebecca Bowe |

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news@sfbg.com

The Democratic Party has been promising a major overhaul of the health care system for a generation or more. Now, with President Barack Obama and his party's congressional leaders in a strong position to finally reach that elusive goal by next month, this should be a momentous time for the reform movement.

So why are so many health reform advocacy groups unhappy?Read more »