By Kevin Hall
SACRAMENTO – The California dairy industry has Sen. Ben Hueso (D-San Diego) by both teats and is pulling hard, and Hueso is clearly enjoying it.
By Kevin Hall
Three candidates are vying to become the next representative for District 7 on the Fresno City Council. The one woman, Veva Islas, and two men, Brian Whelan and Nelson Esparza, will have raised and spent more than $400,000 on the June primary election alone, an unusually high amount in local races. Clearly, there’s a lot riding on this, but for whom? Continue reading Male Privilege, Misogyny & White Fear on the Campaign Trail
May 27, 2018
STEP AWAY FROM THE INCINERATOR
Disasters—whether natural or human-caused—tend to spur action.
They also draw out the opportunists.
We saw this during the ten-year drought when mountains of stressed trees were overtaken by opportunistic bark beetles. Today, the U.S. Forest Service estimates there are up to 129 million dead trees in California’s forests.
By Kevin Hall
Lame duck Fresno City Councilman Clint Olivier, now in his final year in office and approaching the end of his political career, is disingenuous when he acts as if public health concerns about diesel exhaust are a desperate, last minute attempt to stop a project’s approval, as in the recent Gap Inc vote.
By Kevin Hall
Our kids are the canaries in Fresno’s coal-mine-like atmosphere of microscopic pieces of soot and gases.
The more deleterious impacts to their sensitive, developing systems play out over their shortened lifetimes. One in four suffer acute impacts from asthma, about which Mayor Lee Brand once asked if air pollution is so bad why don’t we all have asthma? He was voting in support of wrapping a commercial almond orchard around California Veterans Home at the time.
Continue reading 20 Years of Documented Diesel Damage to Fresno Children Ignored by City
By Kevin Hall
“The lower we go, the stronger our negotiating position becomes.” Fresno Mayor Lee Brand, April 4, 2018
With the latest in a string of negative declarations of environmental impacts for warehouse distribution centers, Fresno government’s institutionalized racist policies and practices have impacted people’s health once more. With its early April approval of the Gap Inc.’s expansion, it also approved potentially thousands of additional daily diesel truck trips by schools and neighborhoods.
Continue reading City Council allows Gap Inc. to dump diesel on Fresno students
By Kevin Hall
I was first introduced to Nelson Esparza while he was briefly employed at a local nonprofit, so I agreed to get together and talk politics when he called a few months later. Over a quart-sized ice tea at Irene’s in the Tower, I listened closely as he told me he was running for city council and asked me to join his kitchen cabinet, that close circle of advisers candidates rely on to keep them honest and who have some experience with politics. And I do. Which is why I said no. Continue reading Why I said ‘no’ to Nelson Esparza
By Kevin Hall
A pustule occasionally erupts on Fresno’s complacent face of institutionalized racism. At the Jan. 25 city council meeting it was council member Steve Brandau’s turn. Again. He apparently thought he was cast to play the role of council member Oliver Baines’s anger translator, a la Keegan-Michael Key’s Luther, but Brandau wasn’t joking when he used the pejorative “poverty pimps.”
By Kevin Hall
FRESNO – A recent unanimous vote by the Fresno City Council threatens to knock the city’s developer-controlled politics right off their very old foundations. The legislative temblor struck in late January when the opposing plates of profit and public health converged, cracking open a deep fissure in the city’s current land use decision-making practices. At its core are environmentally racist practices at odds with state law and the city’s own policies.
Continue reading Tectonic Forces Converge: Walls of Institutional Racism Sway at City Hall
Valley Climate 