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Even as President-elect Barack Obama was preparing a giant financial aid package meant to provide green jobs and steer the nation toward a sustainable economy, a sledgehammer blow paralyzed a healthy sector of the growing green economy in California.
It happened on December 18, 2008. The State of California was in an unprecedented financial crisis, no longer able to borrow, which it does routinely to smooth out cash flow. Faced with this emergency, the State director of finance, controller, and treasurer put an immediate stop to all spending of voter-approved bond funds—a total of over $3.8 billion committed to some 2,000 projects statewide. Many of the projects were funded by Coastal Conservancy grants to local governments and nonprofit organizations. (See update in the Spring/Summer issue.) More...
Many people travel to Sonoma County’s Valley of the Moon, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, to visit wineries or Jack London State Historic Park. Only a few make it to Hood Mountain Regional Park. At 2,730 feet, Hood Mountain is one of the highest peaks in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is also being connected by the Bay Area Ridge Trail, a 550-mile work in progress. One morning in mid-March, I set out to hike up the mountain. More...
More than 40 years ago, a citizens movement led the Legislature to establish the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) to keep the Bay shoreline from being turned into new waterfront real estate. Now, ironically, accelerating sea-level rise poses a new challenge: How to keep important places along the Bay shore from being inundated.
Coast & Ocean talked with Will Travis, executive director of BCDC, in his downtown San Francisco office, from which he overlooks the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge—and might someday look out over new buildings offshore, atop new levees installed to keep the sea out of the financial district. More...
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