San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Deadly fires top Bay Area news stories in busy year
(10) Taxing fight over Prop. C
The torrid flames that devastated Paradise, tornadoed through Redding, charred Lake and Mendocino counties and closed Yosemite National Park didn’t physically touch the ninecounty Bay Area, but the wildfires dominated local headlines and conversations and offered a stark warning about the future of a warming California.
This year’s disasters — topping even the horrific damage seen in 2017 — choked Northern California with smoke and pulled at heartstrings, motivating countless people to open their homes and wallets to help the victims. The impact was so deep — the loss of life and property so devastating — that
The Chronicle’s reporters and editors almost unanimously selected the deadly infernos as the top Bay Area story of 2018.
Other notable tales from this tumultuous year drew national, and even international, attention.
A Palo Alto law professor accused a Supreme Court nominee of sexual assault. A scandal erupted over toxic soil at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. Two cracked steel beams forced the emergency shutdown of the city’s brand-new $2.2 billion transit hub, and the passage of a homeless services tax on big companies in the city sparked a greater discussion about what responsibility the region’s wealthiest corporations have to the most vulnerable residents around them.
In reverse order, here are the top 10 Bay Area stories from 2018:
Tech companies have been blamed for gentrifying San Francisco, and some CEOs have been criticized for having a blase attitude toward people living on the streets. But money and political support from Salesforce founder and billionaire CEO Marc Benioff pushed Proposi-
tion C, a tax on tech and other large businesses to fund homeless programs, to victory in November.
Voters passed Prop. C, which is expected to raise about $300 million a year for homeless services with a new corporate tax. Benioff contributed about $8 million to the campaign to pass the measure, saying the city needs more money to deal with homelessness and corporations should pitch in to help. Mayor London Breed opposed Prop. C along with the city’s business community, arguing the tax would drive away commerce. Residents were unmoved and Prop. C passed with 60 percent of the vote. However, legal challenges have stalled implementation by claiming the measure required a two-thirds majority like other new taxes in California. Prop. C’s implementation could be held up for years.
(9) Horror at BART platform
The fatal stabbing of 18-year-old Nia Wilson at BART’s MacArthur Station in Oakland on July 22 raised questions about safety on the Bay Area’s backbone transit system and pressured officials to step up security.
Wilson and her sister were brutally attacked at they stepped off a train on a Sunday evening. Their alleged attacker, John Lee Cowell, a recently paroled robber with a history of violence and psychiatric hospitalizations, was arrested the next day on a BART train after a passenger’s tip to police.
The killing and news that two other homicides had taken place on BART within five days generated fear among riders and led to calls for a stronger police presence and more transparency from BART about serious crime.
In response, the transit agency temporarily increased the number of police in stations and on trains and announced plans to boost security training for employees, test alarms and sensors and upgrade cameras and emergency call boxes on platforms.
Cowell, who could face the death penalty, may not be mentally fit to stand trial, his attorneys said in court this month. Wilson’s family and friends have said they believe the killing was a hate crime because Cowell is white and Wilson was black, though investigators said they have found no evidence of
that.
(8) ICE sweep meets resistance
As the year began, the Trump administration stepped up its crackdown on undocumented immigrants, putting the Bay Area on high alert. Rumors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids had been persistent on social media, but had turned out to be mostly false.
In January, The Chronicle reported that ICE was planning a huge Northern California sweep to send a message that immigration policy would be enforced in the sanctuary state. Then in February, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf issued her own warning, saying she had learned from “credible sources” that a big ICE action was imminent in Northern California.
After the sweep netted 232 arrests, President Trump lashed out on Twitter and in speeches, accusing Schaaf of “putting the entire nation at risk” and being “the best friend of criminals.” Schaaf responded: “I do not regret sharing this information. It is Oakland’s legal right to be a sanctuary city, and we have not broken any laws. We believe our community is safer when families stay together.”
The Department of Justice began an investigation into Schaaf in May, and a “Mayor Libby Schaaf Act,” which was introduced in Congress, proposed imprisoning local officials who warn of ICE raids. In November, Oakland voters re-elected Schaaf to a second term by a wide margin.
(7) DNA gambit cracks coldest case
Starting in 1975, a man known as the Golden State Killer and East Area Rapist killed 13 people and committed more than 50 rapes over 11 years in California, authorities believe. The case remained unsolved until investigators uploaded DNA attributed to the serial attacker to an open-source genealogy website that was able to identify relatives.
The strategy steered authorities to several potential suspects including Joseph James DeAngelo, an ex-cop living in Citrus Heights (Sacramento County). He was arrested after investigators collected DNA from an item he had discarded and compared it to the profile from one of the crime scenes. DeAngelo, 73, faces 26 charges in six counties.
(6) Newsom rides blue wave
California was already a blue state and the face of the resistance to the Trump administration. But the Democratic stranglehold on the state grew even firmer in November with the election of Gavin Newsom to succeed Jerry Brown as governor, as well as Democrats capturing all seven of the Republican-held congressional seats they targeted.
California’s blue wave crashed on the state’s Republican Party, rendering it nearly irrelevant in the politics of the nation’s most populous state. Not only will California send seven more Democrats to Congress, but Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, is also expected to be elected speaker of the House.
(5) San Francisco’s dangerous ground
The scandal surrounding the cleanup of toxic soil at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard — a 500-acre Superfund waste site that San Francisco has been trying to transform into housing for almost 30 years — grew deeper and messier this year with the startling admission by federal agencies that years’ worth of radiation tests can’t be trusted and need to be redone.
Federal and local investigations were launched. Whistle-blower lawsuits alleging pervasive misconduct and fraud in the cleanup were unsealed. Two former cleanup workers were sentenced to prison after admitting to falsifying radiation tests. Health hazards were revealed at an unusual city office building in the shipyard surrounded by toxic soil. And a highly radioactive object was discovered near homes and families in an area of the shipyard where authorities had long insisted that no such objects could exist.
These revelations were detailed throughout the year by The Chronicle as part of its Dangerous Ground investigation into the redevelopment of the shipyard.
(4) Breed makes history as mayor
London Breed, a San Francisco native raised in a public housing project in the Western Addition, became the first African American woman to be elected city mayor in June. She defeated a pair of progressives, former state Sen. Mark Leno and Supervisor Jane Kim, in a close special election, but her position is far from secure.
Breed won an abbreviated term to replace the late Mayor Ed Lee, who died in December 2017, and she’ll have to run for re-election in November 2019.
In her five months as mayor, Breed has pushed to streamline the permitting process for small businesses, eliminate homeless encampments and increase housing development. She’s proposed spending a $181 million city windfall on homelessness and housing initiatives while Prop. C works its way through court. And she’s expressed dissatisfaction with Ed Reiskin, the Municipal Transportation Agency’s chief, over the pace of transit improvements.
More controversial was her decision to ask Gov. Jerry Brown to commute her brother’s 44year state prison sentence in the death of a woman on the Golden Gate Bridge. Brown declined.
(3) A charge, a denial, a divide
The debate over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court became one of the year’s biggest and most bitterly fought dramas when a Palo Alto professor accused the judge of sexually assaulting her at a party when they were teenagers.