Comments for Albany Bulb

Comment on Albany Bulb Removal of Safety Hazards by Mackenzie Sowers

Mackenzie Sowers — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:21:24 +0000

I am hoping to convince the Waterfront commitee that safety is not necessary, but I suspect I wont succeed. I made the point that people take life at their own risk and suing over an ill maintained sidewalk is quite different than suing over a skate park one built himself, or some risky looking rebar that he realized was probably a bad idea to climb.

I got a whole batch of funny looks for being anti safety. It isn’t something they are used to hearing.

Comment on Where is that Owl? by Mackenzie Sowers

Mackenzie Sowers — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:13:30 +0000

The Park is actually not legally supposed to create playing feilds, and at the waterfront commitee meeting on monday, it seemed like they were not going to, since it wasn’t really allowed anyways.

Comment on Albany Bulb Removal of Safety Hazards by Jill

Jill — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:51:00 +0000

Well, it has started - the destruction of what the city calls ’safety hazards’ and what the rest of us call imagination, creativity, freedom of expression and more.
The beautiful bridge which a group of people were building at the far end of the Bulb was taken down and every scrap of wood removed…to be taken to a… landfill perhaps?
And then there is the horrible destruction of the skatepark, which had been providing hundreds of kids, teens and not so young kids with a place to go where they learned what it means to look after a place they had ‘invested’ time and energy in. And have a wild time.

I dunno about you, but I keep hearing that we do not provide enough activities for youngsters - so they did it themselves, they built it and they looked after it, and no-one who fell and scratched themselves went home to mommy and cried.

Social control takes many forms - it’s hard to hear people of my age who used to protest outside city hall in the 60’s and 70’s and now run those same cities, be so willing to crush individual forms of personal expression in our own backyard. Leave the friggin’ landfill alone!

Comment on Where is that Owl? by admin

admin — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:03:02 +0000

Thanks for your comment Phil.

There is an interesting discussion/reply on Phil’s blog “Ridiculous whining about Burrowing Owl habitat creation” from Clay Larson, a member of Albany’s Waterfront Committee.

Comment on Where is that Owl? by Phil Price

Phil Price — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:24:52 +0000

My blog, the Bay Area Bird Blog, has some posts on this subject. A City of Berkeley report on the owls at the Gilman Street site is on the City’s website; some other relevant reports are on there too, you can look around. Burrowing owls (plural) were seen at the site by birders in 2003 and 2004 (and maybe earlier, for all I know); this year there were four burrowing owls at Cesar Chavez Park in Berkeley, across the cove from the playing fields site (my blog has some information about the problems they’ve had there).

In short, there are multiple burrowing owls in the area, but no guarantee that the habitat creation plan will succeed.