By Jerry Cadagan

OPINION Lake Merced is a San Francisco jewel that for years has suffered from the benign neglect of the city. Here are some facts:

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is the owner of the lake and surrounding land. In 1950, the SFPUC made a major mistake in delegating to the Recreation and Park Department vague authority for recreation at the lake. Under the City Charter, Lake Merced is not a park that would ordinarily be handled by RPD.Read more »

Editors note: We received two interesting commentaries on our Hetch Hetchy cover story ("Damn the Dam," 8/10/2011). They appear below, offering very different perspectives on the issue.

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By Larry Bush

OPINION Proposition F, a measure on the November ballot, is supposed to clean up some provisions of the law that requires political consultants to register and make disclosures about their clients and their work. It was approved by all 11 supervisors.

But Prop. F has some serious problems. For starters, it grants authority to the Ethics Commission to make any other changes it wants in the law.

As the Voter Handbook says:Read more »

OPINION Editor's Note: Between the well-funded, politically connected campaign pushing Ed Lee to run for mayor and the high-profile critics who say he should keep his word and step down, it's hard to tell how the average city resident feels. So to reflect that perspective, we're reprinting a letter that was sent to Lee on July 29.

Dear Mayor Lee,Read more »

By David Looman

OPINION The senior staffers at the Recreation and Park Department routinely cry that the department is poor and going broke. Is it possible they are lying?

Conspicuously lacking in discussions of Rec-Park funding is any kind of hard data about how well or poorly San Francisco Rec-Park is really funded. Whether it's the mainstream media, the alternative press, or our elected representatives on the Board of Supervisors, nobody seems to know how our park system compares with other park systems in California or the U.S.Read more »

OPINION We sat together: elders, youth, workers, students, and folks. We were on our way to a low-paid job, an overpriced university, a pre-gentrified home and a public school. There was laughter and shouts, murmurs and silence. Then suddenly, there were nine heavily armed police officers and fare inspectors walking through the crowded 14 Mission Muni line. One stopped in front of me and my son.Read more »

The U.S. Supreme Court, which has already ruled that corporations can spend all the money they want on political campaigns, dealt another huge blow to democracy in June when it struck down a campaign finance law in Arizona that was designed to level the playing field for candidates running against better-financed opponents.Read more »

The moment has arrived to eliminate the death penalty in California and, for the first time in decades, it is a goal we can accomplish.

My legislation, Senate Bill 490, would close death row and replace the death penalty with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Last week it passed its first legislative test by a vote of 5-2 in the Assembly Public Safety Committee.Read more »

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Marin, Sonoma counties) is a rarity on Capitol Hill. She's a lawmaker with guts who speaks from the heart.

Whether focusing on children and seniors at home or the victims of war far away, Woolsey insists on advocating for humane priorities. Several hundred times, she has gone to the House floor to speak out against war. She stands for peace, social justice, human rights, a green future, and so much more.

Last week, after more than 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Woolsey announced that she will not run for reelection next year.Read more »

Four weeks ago, surgeon Dimitry Nikitin walked out of Florida's Orlando Regional Medical Center to his car and was shot dead by a disgruntled patient who then turned his gun on himself and committed suicide. Last September, a doctor at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins was shot and killed by a patient distraught over his mother's terminal diagnosis.Read more »