Welcome to Monitor Notes, a weekly roundup of news items, event announcements, and updates on past Bay Area Monitor articles.
Vote On
The Presidential Primary Election is less than a week away! Need help studying or sorting through the ballot? Check out Voter’s Edge California, a joint, non-partisan project of MapLight and the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund. Input your address and the site will whip up a personalized ballot with candidates as well as the state and local ballot measures you’ll be weighing. It also lists related endorsements, funding sources, editorials, news articles, biographies, and other material to help make balanced and informed decisions. All that, and your polling place too. Get primed.
Drop into the Water Survey
Santa Clara County’s Valley Water is asking residents to take a two-minute survey to help filter decisions about whether to renew the Safe, Clean Water Program. It was approved in 2012 by 74 percent of voters as a special parcel tax with a 2028 sunset date. The survey comes as Santa Clara County, and many other jurisdictions across the Bay Area and the state, deal with issues related to climate change, natural disasters, population growth, and water supplies. In early January, California state agencies released a draft Water Resilience Portfolio outlining ways to help the state better prepare for and withstand future challenges.
Get Energized with Air Data
March kicks off with some spring cleaning. The Bay Area Regional Energy Network (BayREN) is hosting a free March 3 forum from 8:30 a.m. to noon at San Francisco’s Bay Area Metro Center where it’ll run through 2019 energy code changes aimed at reducing building emissions. That includes solar photovoltaic systems and all-electric building and Energy Design Rating (EDR) compliance for new homes. Register here to attend in-person, or freshen up your knowledge via the webinar instead.
The following day, March 4, Aclima will present air pollution data collected in West Contra Costa County last year. The company generated more than 110 million data points, measuring pollutants at a block-by-block resolution. Click here to see where Aclima recorded higher-than-average levels and what you can do to reduce pollution. Then RSVP here for either the 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. workshop. More Aclima reports are coming. It’s mapping hyperlocal air pollution in all nine Bay Area counties.
Seeking Alignment
MTC and ABAG this month named the integrated transit-fare system proposal as the winner of their Transformative Projects competition launched in 2018. The fare integration idea was jointly proposed by Seamless Bay Area, SPUR, college student Eddy Ionescu, and local transportation planner Jason Lee. By integrating fares (a policy approach the Monitor explored in a 2019 article) riders would be able to travel seamlessly between transit systems. That’s expected to make it easier to use transit around the Bay Area, boost ridership, and ease traffic congestion. The competition winner announcement comes as MTC and BART begin a fare-integration study and new legislation (AB 2057) aims to align all the region’s 27 transit agencies.
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