Albany Today

Three events are scheduled to celebrate Albany’s Centennial on Albany Hill on Saturday, Nov. 22.  Bird Watching, 8 am-10 am; Native Plant Walk, 10:30 am-12:30 pm; and Monarch Butterfly Thanksgiving Count, 2 pm-3 pm.  The activities will be led by biology experts. Meet at Taft St. Turnaround for each event. For further information contact Carole Fitzgerald at (510) 528-3236.

The City of Albany is losing significant amounts of revenue under the current worldwide economic recession. City officials decided to cut budget to deal with the problem Monday.

Housing sales in the city are declining rapidly. 25 housing properties were sold in July, 12 were sold in August, and only 6 were sold in September. The City used to gain an average of $100,000 each month in property transfer tax in previous years. But it got less than $40,000 in September.

The City’s total property transfer tax went down by more than 60 percent during the first quarter of the 2008-2009 fiscal year (from July to September), compared with the same period of the previous fiscal year. Read the rest of this entry »

Fire hit the Albany Hill  Friday afternoon. It  burned 20 Eucalyptus trees on the west side of the hill but damaged no houses.

The fire was reported by a resident at around 5 pm Friday, and was put out by firefighters half an hour later. Read the rest of this entry »

The Albany Library is holding a large book sale this weekend. About 4,000 books, including some rare collections, are on sale.  You could go and pick up a few good books at very low prices tomorrow (Sunday, Nov. 16, 11 am- 3 pm) if you’ve missed it today. The event is sponsored by the Friends of Albany Library, and most of the books were donated.

The City of Albany proclaimed a Church on the Corner Day earlier this month to celebrate the  100th anniversary of the local baptist church. But many local residents might have never been to the church, or to any of the other few churches in town, as Christian worship has largely faded out of people’s daily life at Albany. 

The Church on the Corner, formerly known as First Baptist Church of Albany, used to play a prominent role in the town for decades. Now the 100-year-old is undergoing radical changes in order to regain its relevance to the community. Read the rest of this entry »

About two dozen Albany residents participated in a ceremony to dedicate two memorial plaques at the Veteran’s Torch on Solano Avenue Tuesday.  One plaque is inscribed with the names of 16 Albany young men who died in service during World War II,  and the other honors the firefighters who donated the cherry trees at the site.  The Albany Community Foundation and the Albany Firefighters Association donated the money to purchase the new plaques to replace ones that were illegible. Photos by Linda (Linjun) Fan.

Dear Readers,

As some of you might know, Albany Today was started by me as a class project a year ago to explore the new possibilities of journalism in the digital era.

It has become a reliable and respected news source for hundreds of people in the community in the past year, through its timely, lively, and fair coverage of major issues in town.

Now more than 2,000 Albany residents visit the website weekly, and more than 500 visit it daily. Read the rest of this entry »

The candidates who won the City Council and the School Board elections Tuesday, wrote messages of gratitude and hope to voters:

Farid Javandel: “I feel honored to have been selected by the voters of Albany to continue representing them on the City Council. I will do the best I can to represent the interests of all residents by listening respectfully to the concerns they express and working creatively to develop consensus solutions. This is what I have tried to do over the past four years, what I emphasized in my reelection campaign, and what I hope to do even better over the next four years. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Pilch, one of the candidates who did not get elected into the City Council, wrote the message below to the community:

“I’m proud of the voters of Albany for producing somewhat unconventional results in our local election. And I’m happy to have gotten the support that you’ve given me. And I’m happy that *all* of the candidates received support from the voters. This was a close race and Albany was lucky to have had a great selection of candidates to choose from. Read the rest of this entry »

About 100 people helped out at polling stations at Albany on the election day. They started at 6:30 a.m. and worked till late into the night. I talked to some of them at a polling station at the University Village on the election night, asking them why they did the work.

22-year-old Alana Ingram said she was proud that she worked at the polls at a historical election. “I want to be able to tell my kids that your mother was there at that historical moment, ” she said. Read the rest of this entry »

Ellen Toomey, one of the candidates who did not prevail in the City Council election, wrote an inspiring artcle on her thoughts at the election result and ideas for solidarity in the community:   

“I am celebrating the awesome victory of Barack Obama. On the local front, the Albany City Council was INCREDIBLY close, between all six candidates. I, alas, did not prevail.

Conventional wisdom held the day — two seats were won by the two incumbents, with the third seat (and highest vote count) going to a well-known, long-time candidate re-entering city council. The closeness of the race plus other factors were in no way conventional, though! Read the rest of this entry »

Peggy Thomsen led the City Council race with 2,968 votes, Farid Javandel ranked second with 2557 votes, and Robert Lieber followed with 2446 votes, according to the Registrar of Voters of Alameda County. The other three candidates all got more than 2,000 votes, but failed to be elected. Read the rest of this entry »

Voters waited in line at a polling station at University Village, Albany in the early morning of Tuesday. Photo by Linda (Linjun) Fan

Patricia Low and Ron Ronsenbaum were elected to the school board of Albany Unified School District Tuesday. Low led the race with 3,919 votes, and Rosenbaum received 3,424. The other candidate, John Kindle, got 1,082 votes, according to the Registrar of Voters of Alameda County.

School Resource Officer David Belman returns to Albany High School Tuesday, after being  absent from the school for the past month, during which a whirlwind of student protest surged on the campus calling for his resignation.

The complaint was sparked by the arrest of a senior at the school, Omari Parker, on a street near the campus during lunchtime at the beginning of October. Read the rest of this entry »

Albany resident Mac McCurdy commented on the city’s budget transparency and financial viability in the article below:

Those who follow Albany issues are well aware of the $600,000 waterfront “visioning” exercise which is currently underway. But there is another visioning process that is far more critical to the future of Albany.  Take a little quiz:

What does the city currently spend in a year to “run” Albany? Where does our money come from? How is this money spent? Read the rest of this entry »

Few customers showed up at Ray’s Pumpkin Patch on Solano Avenue Tuesday, whose business is suffering a sharp decline. Photo by Linda (Linjun) Fan.

You might have noticed that not as many pumpkins are smiling at porches in Albany right now, although the Halloween is only three days away. At least several hundred Albany families have cut back on buying pumpkins this year, in the gloom and uncertainty of economic recession. Read the rest of this entry »

Students of Albany High School filled out their ballots at a mock presidential election Wednesday. Photo by Micah Yee. Article by Linda (Linjun) Fan.

If students of Albany High School had the say in the upcoming presidential election, Barack Obama would win by a 80 per cent margin over John McCain.

572 students at the high school participated in a mock election organized by the school and the League of Women Voters Wednesday. 86 per cent of them voted for Obama and less than 5 per cent voted for McCain. Read the rest of this entry »

About two dozen Albany parents and children carved pumpkins at the Albany Pumpkin Festival on Solano Avenue Saturday. Councilmember Jewel Okawachi and Marge Atkinson, City Administrator Beth Pollard served as judges of the pumpkin-carving contest. Photos by Linda (Linjun) Fan.

Dear Readers,

You might know that I have been following Ms. Kay Sorg’s case and written about it for about a year now. I disclosed some new information in the most recent story Hearing of Sorg’s sexual offense case centers on letters, including the names of two witnesses, who used to be students at Albany schools.

But I didn’t include the name of the accuser and the first name of her father. The attorneys of the case concealed the names in their court papers. However, I’ve got them through research of public records. Read the rest of this entry »

By Linda (Linjun) Fan

A preliminary hearing of Kay Sorg’s case, which had originally been scheduled for last week, was postponed to Nov. 20.

The upcoming hearing will center on several letters Sorg wrote to the accuser, who was a former student in her science class at Albany Middle School, in the early 1990s.

Three people have said they had seen the letters in interview with Albany Police. Two are the accuser’s friends back in school years. The other is her father, Mr. Doe. Read the rest of this entry »