By Jill Tucker
San Francisco Chronicle

With a stormy financial front headed toward San Francisco schools, Mayor Gavin Newsom offered to help the district Friday with $30.6 million from the city's rainy day fund. Facing a $40 million shortfall, district officials were preparing for massive layoffs and program cuts - including cutting more than 500 teachers and staff. "This is perilous," the mayor said of the potential impact. "This is ominous. This is simply not acceptable." Newsom's proposal must be approved by the Board of Supervisors. In 2003, city voters passed Proposition G, which required the city save excess revenue during good economic times.

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By Zach Church and Holly Kaufman

The tools to develop a sustainable energy system are available to us in San Francisco today, and the City is already implementing many of them. San Francisco has abundant ocean, wind and solar energy potential, compact development that presents opportunities for efficient transportation, and citizens possessing an entrepreneurial spirit, technological know-how, and a commitment to environmental progress. San Francisco can continue to promote sustainable energy solutions that will help achieve Mayor Newsom’s 20 percent greenhouse gas reduction target, save money, create jobs, strengthen the local economy and increase the quality of life in our City.  Each of the suggestions below should be part of the City’s comprehensive, integrated climate change and energy plan.  Read more »

By Megan Doyle Corcoran

California’s adult prison population bulges out of the state’s 33 adult institutions, which are at almost 200 percent capacity.  Approximately 175,000 individuals are housed in California prisons, and the rate of incarceration in the state, like that of the rest of the nation, is not dropping.  At this point, California stakeholders are all too aware of the urgency of instituting some kind of change to ensure that the cramped prison conditions are alleviated while public safety is respected.  In fact, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is presently engaged in extensive litigation in federal court, in which District Court Judge Thelton Henderson is threatening to place the California prison system into a federal receivership, as he did to the prison health care system in October 2005.  Read more »