Tagged: East Bay Express

As is the case in many other cities in the Bay Area and across the country, Berkeley's stormwater infrastructure is in sad shape. But help could be on the way. On Election Day, Berkeley voters overwhelmingly supported Measure M, a $30 million bond aimed at street and watershed improvements. The city also recently completed environmental review of its 2011 Watershed Management Plan, a one-hundred-page document outlining the problems facing the city's infrastructure and offering a mix of solutions.

The most controversial local ballot measure facing San Franciscans this November — whether to develop a plan to reform the Hetch Hetchy water system and restore Hetch Hetchy Valley — reflects a question that cities everywhere are grappling with. As geologist Andrew Alden asked in a recent essay about the measure, "Do we want to arrange our society as if nature really matters?"

Throughout the 1990s, tough-on-crime laws were extremely popular in California. Numerous pieces of legislation lengthened prison terms for many crimes, and the War on Drugs locked up an unprecedented number of small-time criminals. However, it was California's Three Strikes law — approved by an overwhelming majority of voters in 1994 — that exemplified the tough-on-crime mindset of the decade.