Stimulus Watch
California’s budget woes are forcing public K-12 schools to absorb deep budget cuts. Over the past two fiscal years, the state has cut billions of dollars from public schools, and Governor Schwarzenegger’s current budget proposal would cut another $2.4 billion.
The schools have had some relief –-...
As stimulus money from Washington flows into the state, it’s lifting a few big public works that had run aground when California ran out of money.
One of those projects is an expansion of the East Bay's Caldecott Tunnel. It was first constructed during the Great Depression with money from FDR'S New...
You may have heard the news early last month about money troubles at the Economic Opportunity Council (EOC) of San Francisco. It’s an agency that runs a dozen subsidized childcare centers in the city. It also runs the Potrero Hill Family Resource Center and helps low-income residents make...
Months of frenzied application filing are starting to pay off, and federal stimulus dollars are trickling in to the City of Oakland. City officials are generally ecstatic, except for one troubling question: is there enough staff to manage it all?
Most of the federal stimulus grants allow...
Today Crosscurrents is airing a story I reported about a stimulus lending program to help small business, but one thing is noticeably absent in the story—a business owner. Well, there are two main reasons for this. First, like the story notes, very few business...
I thought I’d finished my story on the Triangle Court re-roofing project in Richmond. Quick summary: 1) Activists say the stimulus-funded project failed to comply with federal hiring guidelines; 2) the contractor says he was in compliance; 3) the Richmond Housing Authority refuses to comment...
Yesterday I had the rare opportunity of crawling beneath a public housing project in East Oakland. After months of environmental reviews, bidding, and bureacratic due diligence, the Oakland Housing Authority is beginning to spend its stimulus money on public housing improvement projects. A Housing...
Since my entry on October 1, I’ve managed to dig up a lot more information about the Triangle Court re-roofing project. Three degrees of separation: a classmate put me in touch with a fair housing advocate, who put me in touch with a local newspaper publisher, who put me in touch with two...
If you look at the stimulus loans given to small businesses in the Bay Area, it can seem a bit, well, random. A dentist in Fremont got a $433,000 loan. Chubby Burgers, also in Fremont, got a $22,500 loan. A swimming pool remodeling company got a $1 million loan.
But...
Stimulus money everywhere but so hard to keep track of it! I’ve spent many hours in the past two weeks browsing—eyes squinted, my headache increasing by the minute—through dozens of stimulus web pages cluttered with undersized text. If you’re suspicious why your local...
The pleasure kills
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