It's Tuesday and the City Council will be discussing Instant Run Off Voting tonight--and voting on it.

Wait, you ask--didn't the California Secretary of State and the Oakland City Attorney both say Oakland had to use IRV in the upcoming election? Do they really need to vote?

Apparently, they do, because finance is still an issue. Both the East Bay Young Democrats and EBASE are urging citizens to call their council person today to urge thim or her to approve both the implementation and funding to support IRV for the 2010 elections.

Still on IRV and elections, OL's deconstructed the report John Russo wrote about costs and wonders whether we should have a primary or save the $800K? Also, is there any chance we could get stuck with the tab for the whole IRV implementation cost? Our own share will be about $946K, almost a milion dollars. Hopefully, we'll find out more at the CC meeting tonight, and we welcome your views on this.

Tonight's City Council meeting is also going to discuss the $2MM the Fox Theatre wants to borrow to complete renovations. The translation on this, according to Inside Bay Area, is that the Fox needs the money to pay contractors who are still waiting for funds. (Susan sez: Apparently, in a city where documents are only available in PDFs via a web treasure hunt through a multi-site maze, finishing renovations is bureaucratize for "workers have not been paid." Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente,, who heads the council's community and economic development committee thinks the thing to do is pay the money and then do an audit.  (Susan sez: Sounds like the city is being squeezed.)

The Chronicle has a sweet story about the soon to be opened Green Youth Arts and Media Center, which used $400,000 in Black-Eyed Peas Foundation money to start up a center with impressive production facilities that opens January 14th.

Late last night, folks were twittering about the Davey D video of the Jan 1 Fruitvale BART assembly in memory of Oscar Grant. OL was highly impressed by the speech CC Desley Brooks gave at the event. Brooks stressed the need for a police oversight committee and called out Mehserle and others involved in OG case as "rogue officers," even as BART directors sat there nodding on the platform. Now, we'd love to see the lady start to Twitter (her account is inactive).

When is Oakland going to get into the records management thing about the impossibility of getting any city-issued documents online without a treasure hunt? In New Jersey, there was a court case tied to processing paperwork and needing to get it out of PDFs--made me think of Oakland.

OL has a calendar stuffed full of events this month--but we need you to add more!
However, we're going to skip adding the May 2010 date Harold Camping, an 88-year old  local  Bibical scholar, pinpoints as the end of the world, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

What's up in your neck of the woods? What stories would you like to cover, or see written about? Notes to editor@oaklandlocal.com, please.

The photo today is by Daniel Gies, of a New Year's memorial at St. Columba Church. Daniel writes: "St. Columba Church places a memorial cross for each homicide victim in Oakland that year. This photo was taken the morning of New Years' Eve. All 98 crosses were cleared that evening. Here is the same scene 6 months earlier."

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