Daily Report: General Assignment

Kendall Taggart/California Watch The Church of St. Leo the Great in Oakland recently installed a cell antenna in its bell tower.

Inside the bell tower of the Church of St. Leo the Great, constructed in 1926 on a corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, isn't the obvious spot for a cell antenna, but that's where AT&T installed one.

Across the state, wireless companies are installing an increasing number of cell sites inside church steeples and bell towers. With the growing use of tablets, smartphones and other wireless devices, the wireless industry has approached churches because of their height and residential locations, where putting new towers would be difficult.

The practice has created additional work for property tax assessors, who are responsible for determining how much of the church's property is no longer tax-exempt. Churches and other nonprofits often are exempt from property taxes, but only if the property is used for religious or charitable purposes. If property is used for commercial purposes, such as leasing space for a cell tower, tax assessors must charge the organizations...

Mai Le/Flickr Commuters use public transit in San Francisco more than anywhere else in the state. 

Californians rank 10th in the country for having the longest commute times, taking an average of 26.9 minutes to travel to work, recently released census data show.

Workers in the state spent 10.4 minutes more getting to work than did workers in North Dakota, which reported the quickest commutes in the 2009-11 American Community Survey. Commuters in Maryland had the longest commute times to work at 31.8 minutes.

On average, Americans spent 23.7 minutes getting to work. More than three-quarters of them drove alone to their jobs, nearly 1 in 10 carpooled and 5 percent took public transportation. Californians were less likely to drive alone – about 73 percent did – and were more likely to carpool (11.4 percent) or ride public transit (5.2 percent).

Californians' commuting habits have not changed much in recent years. They drive, carpool and ride public transit at about the same rates they reported in the 2006-8 American Community Survey, and their journeys to work are about the same duration...

Big changes are coming to San Francisco’s most heavily traveled and historic bus line – but few people know about them, according to a new survey of transit passengers.

Plans to install two separated bus-only lanes on Geary Boulevard to speed up the 38-Geary line have been in the works for years and are now advancing slowly toward reality. But of 600 riders surveyed this summer, 57 percent had not heard about the project, according to the results released earlier this month by the San Francisco Transit Riders Union, a group that advocates for Muni riders.

San Francisco County Transportation Authority planners say that the bus rapid transit project would transform the line that carries 50,000 riders a day, the most in the system, into something more like a train. With a dedicated bus lane in each direction, low-floor buses would arrive at more regular intervals to carry passengers between the quiet west side of the city and downtown. It’s scheduled to open in 2019...

AlexKalina/istockphoto.com

State regulators need to have more oversight of new types of companies that claim to have a social or environmental mission, legal experts say. 

About 75 companies have registered as "benefit" or "flexible purpose" corporations since Gov. Jerry Brown signed two bills into law a year ago that created the new entities.

The law is intended to shield businesses from lawsuits as they pursue social objectives, such as preserving the environment, in addition to making a profit. Traditional for-profit companies, proponents argue, could face shareholder lawsuits if they prioritize social goals at the expense of profits.

The companies that have taken advantage of the new law range from large businesses like Patagonia, which has a long-standing history of supporting environmental causes, to startups like Powerhive in Oakland, which is working to provide clean energy to households without electricity.

But private attorneys at a National Association of State Charity Officials conference recently told an audience of state nonprofit regulators that they had concerns...

Marc Pagani Photography/Shutterstock Lance Armstrong in 2004 

Cycling superstar Lance Armstrong earned his unprecedented seven victories in the Tour de France with the aid of a “sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program” on his racing team, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency said today.

Eleven former cyclists from the U.S. Postal Service team have told investigators that for years, Armstrong used an array of performance-enhancing drugs, the agency’s chief executive, Travis Tygart, said in a statement.

Riders on Armstrong’s team were pressured to take banned drugs and participate in a cover-up of doping on the team, Tygart said.

“The evidence of the US Postal Service Pro Cycling Team-run scheme is overwhelming and is in excess of 1,000 pages, and includes sworn testimony from 26 people, including 15 riders with knowledge of the US Postal Service Team,” the release says. It adds that a full evidence dossier will be made public later today...

Brad Camembert/Shutterstock Lance Armstrong in 2011 

Cyclist Lance Armstrong’s recent fall from grace has been portrayed in books and news accounts as a thriller featuring teammate betrayals, motorcycle drug couriers and secret blood transfusions.

But as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency prepares to release an evidence dossier detailing its reasons for stripping the cycling star of seven Tour de France titles, the most compelling evidence might be found in dry data drawn from tests of Armstrong’s blood chemistry, a world-renowned doping expert says.

Michael Ashenden, an Australian scientist who helped create a test for the blood-doping substance EPO, told California Watch that an analysis of blood samples drawn in 2009, contained in an earlier court filing, suggests that Armstrong was recklessly using banned doping methods in an effort to win the Tour de France one more time. He finished third that year.

The tipoff, Ashenden said in an interview and follow-up email, is found in three weeks’ worth of telltale readings in Armstrong’s so-called “biological passport,” a log of blood...

Katharine Mieszkowski/The Bay Citizen Welcome sign at Boeddeker Park 

It was recess in the Tenderloin, and students from San Francisco City Academy swarmed the playground at Father Alfred E. Boeddeker Park. 

They slid down the rusting slide and hung from monkey bars held aloft by old beams that shed slivers of wood and green paint chips. After recess, bits of paint sometimes dot their clothes, said Vanessa Brakey, administrator for the private Christian school.

“A lot of kids get a lot of splinters from the wood around here,” said Brakey, who was supervising recess last week.

The playground at Boeddeker Park was ranked the worst in San Francisco this month in a survey by the San Francisco Parks Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group, and the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. 

The neglected acre of green space at the corner of Jones and Eddy streets was one of 16 that scored a “D” or “F” on this year’s Playground Report Card. Others on the list include Stern Grove, Lafayette Park and Golden Gate Heights.

For the children from San Francisco City Academy, the only thing worse than playing on the...

Beck Diefenbach/Reuters Oakland A's pitcher Bartolo Colon 

Bartolo Colon, the Oakland Athletics pitcher suspended today for testing positive for testosterone, had his best year in baseball after training with a reputed steroid supplier, according to Major League Baseball's Mitchell Report on the game’s steroids era.

In 2005, when he won the Cy Young Award while pitching for the Los Angeles Angels, Colon worked out with personal trainer Angel “Nao” Presinal, according to the report. At the time, Presinal had been “declared a pariah” and banned from baseball clubhouses because of his ties to banned drugs, according to the report.

The 2007 report, written by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, did not tie Colon to the use of steroids.

But it mentioned Colon in a narrative concerning suspected steroid distribution by Presinal, who was described as a “prominent personal trainer for a number of professional baseball players, operating out of facilities in the Dominican Republic.”...

They are essentially FasTrak freeloaders: drivers who stay in a dedicated FasTrak lane as long as possible to get ahead of traffic and then, at the last minute, switch to a lane that accepts cash.

Kevin Gong, a longtime FasTrak user, said he sees that kind of driving all the time on the Bay Bridge and the Benicia-Martinez Bridge – not just during rush hour.

"You think the cars in front of you are FasTrak users until about 500 feet before the toll booth, and they slow down and try to switch lanes. And you think, 'Why are you doing this to me? You're slowing everyone down and pissing everyone off,' " Gong said.

About half of all drivers on Bay Area bridges use FasTrak, according to John Goodwin, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees toll collection on the region’s seven state-owned bridges. Late lane switchers represent what he called "a tiny percentage of drivers." But Goodwin acknowledged they can have a big impact on the commute, especially on the Bay Bridge, where FasTrak lanes are at capacity during peak hours and on many weekends.

Yet policing those last-minute lane changers isn't a priority for the California Highway Patrol.

"As agitating and frustrating it may be, it's not necessarily going to kill somebody," said Diana McDermott, public information officer for the CHP.

Jed Lane might disagree. In June, he was driving on the Benicia bridge when a woman crossed over three FasTrak-only lanes to get to a lane that accepts cash...