You don’t cancel Christmas, and you don’t cancel Carnaval. But The City plans to find out why the Mission district’s biggest and most important cultural event found itself in such dire fiscal straits that the May festival was nearly canceled.
Celebrated the Sunday before Memorial Day, the event features dancers, musicians and cultural elements from all Latin American traditions — making it a uniquely unifying parade and street fair that’s the biggest of its kind on the West Coast.
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California’s medical marijuana industry would be overseen by a Sacramento-level bureaucracy under a reform bill introduced Tuesday by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco.
Similar to how Alcoholic Beverage Control regulates California bars and liquor stores, the Division of Medical Cannabis Regulation would establish statewide standards and applicable fees for how medical cannabis is grown, transported, sold and taxed. The division would be under ABC’s control.
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The owner of two large, derelict homes near Sutro Heights Park in the Outer Richmond district was officially instructed Monday to clean up his act, although he appears to have both the financial means and an understanding of the system to keep his properties as is indefinitely.
The homes at 641 and 645 48th Ave. — both of which belong to Wing King, a doctor who practices at UC San Francisco — were issued notices of violation under The City’s vacant-building ordinance, according to the Department of Building Inspection.
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Frank Choy’s patience ended when his curtains glowed orange.
A predawn phone call Jan. 19 jolted awake the St. Francis Memorial Hospital surgeon and his wife at their home near Sutro Heights Park. “Frank, there’s a fire,” said the voice on the other end.
Click on the photo to see the slideshow.
The 31 San Francisco firefighters who arrived to fight the three-story conflagration next door had to figure out how to reach it first. The blaze was on a rear lot that sits on a steep incline accessible only via a footpath on National Park Service land.
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The cost of adding the name of slain gay-rights icon and former Supervisor Harvey Milk to the title of San Francisco International Airport could be as low as $355,000, according to a new report.
That’s significantly lower than initial estimates of $4.1 million or more offered by airport officials, a figure gleaned from costs associated with adding Thurgood Marshall’s name to Baltimore’s airport, according to the report from the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office.
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Cut the monitor and run — escaping from justice is as easy as that. Or so some paroled sex offenders think.
Since state prison realignment began in October 2011, there has been a 15 percent increase in such parolees violating the terms of their release.
In San Francisco, that number rose from 72 to 84 cases. Of those, 11 sex offenders were still at large as of last week, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. They were John Duggan, Derick Stewart, Gilbert Valentino, Charles Kendrix, Oscar Genel, Stephen Gene Pollard, Edmond Worthington, Curtis Johnson, Michael Jones, Tanya Davis and Elon Collis.
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The City’s effort to reduce the pay for certain future public employees is in line with market rates for those jobs, but the proposal would disproportionately affect the earning power of women and minorities, union officials told city leaders Wednesday.
In December, The City moved to reduce the pay for about 45 classes of workers — including custodians, nurses and pharmacists — who earn more in San Francisco than in other cities.
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New hospitals will grace both Cathedral Hill and the Mission district after a lengthy and contentious development squabble between city leaders and California Pacific Medical Center officials ended in a tentative compromise announced Tuesday.
CPMC had once sought to tear down the vacant Cathedral Hill Hotel and replace it with a 555-bed hospital nearly twice the size of San Francisco General Hospital. St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission district, which primarily serves low-income people, would have been reduced in size and could have been shut down.
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Possession of certain extra-lethal bullets would be banned in San Francisco under a proposal expected to pass the Board of Supervisors today, even as a legal challenge to a prior ammo-sales ban proceeds.
Hollow-point bullets that expand into jagged metallic petals on impact, as well as bullets intended solely for “law enforcement or military agencies,” would be banned locally under legislation introduced by Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Malia Cohen in the wake of the December massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newton, Conn.
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The City is poised to shell out $1.7 million to homeowners and businesses whose properties were damaged when storm drains flooded in 2003 and 2004, the final step in a nearly decade-long legal battle.
In December 2003 and again in January 2004, homes and businesses in the South of Market, Inner Mission, Excelsior, Mission Terrace and Outer Mission neighborhoods flooded with storm runoff mixed with sewage during a “moderate” winter storm, according to a 2005 lawsuit filed by 46 plaintiffs.
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The editors in New York know her. The designers in Paris fear her. The Obamas wear her clothes.
Julienne Weston has conquered the fashion world. But rather than cash in on her cachet and take up residence on Madison Avenue, she has done it all from San Francisco. It was here where she grew Weston Wear from a fashion startup to a global brand, carried by fine boutiques worldwide while still being manufactured in the same town where it is designed.
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Significant. Historic. A promise fulfilled.
Not even Meg Whitman can resist.
President Barack Obama’s administration filed a legal brief Thursday with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of overturning Proposition 8, California’s 2008 voter-enacted ban on same-sex marriage.
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A lengthy neighborhood battle on Nob Hill is ending to the sound of more music.
Concert promoter Live Nation’s quest to rehab the aging Masonic Center auditorium and turn it into a live music destination is at last moving forward after neighborhood groups — who had spent the past five years opposing the project, first at City Hall and then via lawsuits — agreed this week to drop their opposition in return for a list of concessions.
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Katy Tang was driving Monday evening when she received a long-awaited telephone call. “Pull over,” the voice on the phone said.
It was sage advice from Mayor Ed Lee, who made his own sage move Tuesday when he selected Tang to succeed Carmen Chu as the Sunset district’s representative on the Board of Supervisors.
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Thanks to managed care, patients at San Francisco General Hospital are charged less for medical attention. But that savings — along with skyrocketing unpaid bills and ballooning employee costs — has put the hospital in the red.
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