.Friday’s Briefing: Berkeley Reverses Course on Police Misconduct Records; Two Oakland Councilmembers Join City Union Protest

Stories you shouldn’t miss for Feb. 1, 2019:

1. The Berkeley City Council ordered city staff to reverse course and to publicly release police misconduct records that are older than Jan. 1, reports Emilie Raguso of Berkeleyside. The council’s vote came after the ACLU and Berkeleyside sued the city for allegedly violating a new state law that unsealed police misconduct records for the first time in four decades. Berkeley city staffers had agreed with police unions that have been attempting to gut the new law, claiming that it should only apply to new misconduct records.

2. Two new Oakland councilmembers, Nikki Fortunato Bas and Sheng Thao, joined in a city employee union protest at City Hall, demanding higher wages for government workers and for the city to fill vacant positions, reports Kimberly Veklerov of the San Francisco Chronicle. Bas and Thao’s attendance at the protest gave a clear indication that they intend to be more labor-friendly than their council predecessors.

3. The National Weather Service has issued a flash flood warning for all of the Bay Area tonight, as a cold, powerful storm moves toward the Northern California coast, reports Amy Graff of SFGate.com. The storm is expected to bring strong winds of up to 60 mph in the hills and up to 4 inches of rain in some places.

4. Oakland’s old Kaiser Convention Center, which has been closed for 13 years, may finally reopen in 2020 under a new plan proposed by Orton Development, reports Ali Tadayon of the East Bay Times$. Orton’s plan, which includes restoring the arena foyer and turning it “into offices for local arts and nonprofit organizations,” is scheduled to go before the Oakland Planning Commission in early March.

5. California’s fire season is now extending into December because of a climate change, reports Kurtis Alexander of the San Francisco Chronicle$, citing a new study by researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

6. And the new $2.2 billion Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, which was only open for six weeks, will remain closed until at least June as engineers devise a plan to shore up two cracked steel support beams, reports Michael Cabanatuan of the San Francisco Chronicle$.

$ = news stories that may require payment to read.

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