Daily Report: General Assignment

The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Bay Citizen agreed today to formally explore a merger, a move that would combine the oldest nonprofit investigative news group in the nation with a startup newsroom focused on the San Francisco Bay Area.

The boards of both organizations signed a memorandum of understanding to begin working out details of merging their two staffs. The deal still has hurdles to clear before a merger can be completed.

Phil Bronstein

Former San Francisco Chronicle Executive Editor Phil Bronstein and CIR’s current executive director, Robert J. Rosenthal, will lead the combined organization.

Bronstein will assume the role of executive chairman of the newly constituted 19-member board of directors. In his new role, a paid position, Bronstein's focus will be on overall strategy and audience engagement. He will emphasize fundraising and developing new ways to sustain the nonprofit. 

Bronstein, 61, has served as chairman of the CIR board since January 2011. He played a key role in brokering a potential merger after he was approached to be the next chief executive officer of The Bay Citizen. 

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Todd Stands

More than 40 years before Occupy protesters camped in New York's Zuccotti Park, Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza and elsewhere, Chicano activists in San Diego wielding paint and primer transformed a bleak urban netherworld into an epic work of art.

On April 22, 1970, this turbulent piece of ground in the shadows of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge became a conduit for a displaced community’s rage. That day was the beginning of a 12-day occupation by residents of Barrio Logan, the historic heart of the city’s Mexican American community, which resulted in Chicano Park: a seamy underbelly of massive gray concrete freeway ramps and pylons re-imagined by muralists as dazzling public art.

“Our idea was always to paint this place,” Mario Torero, one of the park’s original muralists, recalled on a recent Saturday. “We told the story of the colors and dreams of our ancestors, painting new faces of our sad and glorious history on the pillars and screaming in full rage.”

But over the decades, the 72 or so murals, created in the heat of political struggle and maintained by volunteers, had begun to show their age. Considered a major example of the Chicano mural movement – which flourished in California between 1969 and 1975 – the park’s concrete canvases were deteriorating, the pillars subject to 40 years of vibrations from five lanes of traffic carrying some 85,000 cars a day across the...

Lokibaho/istockphoto.com

Cities throughout California are grappling with foreclosed homes and struggling or recalcitrant homeowners whose properties have become eyesores. Now, an increasing number of local authorities are initiating health and safety receiverships, a legal process in which control of the property is temporarily taken from the owner and placed with a court-appointed officer.

“It’s really an emerging field and an emerging resource that cities are turning towards,” said Dean Pucci, director of the receiverships division for the law offices of Jones & Mayer.

Remedies that local agencies typically used during the past decade may no longer be possible, as city code enforcement budgets have been slashed and an increasing number of homes are cited for serious code violations.

Mark Adams, president of the California Receivership Group, said his business has increased 30 to 40 percent in the last year alone.

Receiverships can offer cities a less expensive way to address properties that present health and safety risks.

“Fines and penalties are one thing, but they don’t get the property fixed,” Adams said. “The distinguishing factor of health and safety receiverships, in relation to more traditional tools of code enforcement, is that the project actually gets completely rehabilitated.”...

Taber Andrew Bain/Flickr

While many Californians are considering transferring their money from banks to credit unions by tomorrow as part of "Bank Transfer Day," consumer advocates are urging customers to look closely at the business practices of some credit unions.

Advocates are concerned about those involved in payday lending, small short-term loans with high interest rates.

Bank Transfer Day’s mission, according to its Facebook page, is to shift funds from for-profit banking institutions to not-for-profit credit unions.

“We will send a clear message that conscious consumers won't support companies with unethical business practices," organizers state on the page. "It's time to invest in local community growth!”  More than 70,000 people already have said they're participating.

But the National Consumer Law Center says not all credit unions operate in the same manner. They single out 24 credit unions, out of roughly 7,000 nationwide, that provide loans that can lead borrowers into a destructive cycle of debt.

In California, Kinecta Federal Credit Union acquired Nix Check Cashing, one of the largest payday lenders in the Los Angeles area, four years ago. To get around the interest rate cap imposed by federal regulators, consumer...

Courtesy of the California Seismic Safety CommissionThe new Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar was severely damaged in the 1971 San Fernando earthquake.

As many as 17,000 older concrete buildings in California could be vulnerable during a major earthquake, according to a new inventory by a coalition of volunteer structural engineers, universities and government agencies.

A number of schools, state and local government buildings, and other vital infrastructure – such as police stations and hospitals – made the list. 

During the San Fernando, Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes, several concrete buildings constructed before the implementation of modern codes collapsed or were catastrophically damaged.

“One of the problems with the concrete buildings is that they tend to be large," said Craig Comartin, director of the Concrete Coalition project, a group of volunteer structural engineers that wrote the report [PDF]. "When you have a major apartment building, there could be hundreds of people in the building. When one does come down, the potential for deaths or injuries is high.”...

Missy Schmidt/Flickr

A California company selling government job listings that were available for free on the Internet was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission, the agency announced yesterday.

Since at least 2007, Santa Barbara-based Frontier Publishing, doing business as American Data Group, placed ads in newspapers and on websites like CareerBuilder.com offering government jobs earning $12 to $48 per hour. When consumers called the toll-free number at the bottom of the ad, telemarketers charged $69 for access to information, applications and job listings, according to the complaint filed this month.

In their pitch, telemarketers claimed that the list of jobs wasn't available to the general public and that they also would provide sample questions and answers to exams used by the federal government in the hiring process.

After paying the fee, a packet was mailed out containing a one-page cover letter, a spreadsheet listing general information about jobs in the area and a 119-page booklet titled, "Federal Employment Resource Workbook." If a consumer called back for more help with the job search, the customer service department searched usajobs.gov and sent the search results back via e-mail, mail or fax, the commission...

emilydickinsonridesabmx/ Flickr

On Oct. 20, 1991, a firestorm in the Oakland hills killed 25 people and burned 3,500 homes, including some of the most expensive and beautiful structures in the Bay Area. As the 20-year anniversary of one of the state's worst disasters approaches, California Watch reporter Lance Williams, then with the San Francisco Examiner, describes what it was like inside the fire lines:

By midmorning Sunday, the fire obviously was out of control, and the city desk was sending every reporter it could find to Oakland.

I went to the pricey hillside neighborhoods between the Claremont Country Club and Lake Temescal, where dozens of homes were ablaze.

The firestorm had swept west from the lake into Upper Broadway Terrace, but there were only a couple of fire trucks and perhaps a dozen Oakland firefighters on the scene.

And so much of the firefighting was done by volunteers – residents who had ignored the police evacuation order in hopes of saving their homes, teenage boys who had abandoned pickup basketball games at the Chabot Elementary School when the fire broke out.

The scene was unbelievably chaotic. I remember the choking clouds of smoke, dark as twilight; the bursts of flame, red-orange and intense, as the eucalyptus trees caught fire; the sudden crashing sounds as houses exploded and the plate glass broke; and the ugly hissing sound of gas mains burning inside houses that were already on fire.

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U.S. airlines collected $15 million more in baggage fees in the first quarter of 2011 compared with the first quarter of last year, according to airline financial information released yesterday by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Baggage fees have gone from adding $119 million to the bottom line of U.S. airlines in 1990 to $3.4 billion in 2010, according to the bureau's data.

As fees make up more of the total cost of flying, the Department of Transportation has proposed collecting more data on the various fees. Right now, only baggage and reservation change fees can be tracked independently. If approved, the data would track "16 additional categories of fee revenue in addition to the baggage and reservation change fees to provide additional airline pricing information to consumers and airline analysts," according to the bureau...

Kevin Stanchfield/Flickr

Of the 15 million Californians who commute to work, 2.7 million spend at least 45 minutes getting to their jobs, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

The latest estimates come from the 2005-09 American Community Survey, which has half of commuters clustered in the 5- to-24-minute range.

On the high end, more than 470,000 commuters spend 90 minutes or more getting to work, with the biggest concentrations being in Los Angeles and Riverside counties.

The commute time "includes time spent waiting for public transportation, picking up passengers in carpools, and time spent in other activities related to getting to work," according to the Census Bureau.

A recent Wall Street Journal article found that extreme commutes are on the rise in parts of Southern California:

"It used to be when you looked at Census data and saw that someone lived in Los Angeles and worked in San Francisco, you assumed it was a mistake," Alan Pisarski, author of (the study) Commuting in America, told the Wall Street Journal. "These days, you cannot be sure...