by Elise Craig

As lawmakers wrestle with the latest iteration of the bailout plan, local residents are struggling to put food on the table, and area aid organizations are scrambling to keep up with increased need and slimmer budgets.
With Thanksgiving approaching, the Alameda County Food Bank, the Berkeley Food and Housing Project and Berkeley’s 24th annual Thanksgiving Turkey Distribution are all finding significant increases in requests for help.
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by Nick Burns/BERKELEY

Inside the Bancroft Hotel’s craftsman-style ballroom, a rare meeting of Berkeley’s green minds occurred on Thursday for the 2008 Sustainability Summit and Green Gathering. Over locally grown and produced wine, beer, an assortment of tapas—and, of course, a small carbon footprint—a who’s who of environmental leaders mixed, mingled, promoted environmentally conscious projects and recognized local organizations for achievements.

Hosted by the Ecology Center and the City of Berkeley’s Office of Economic Development, the 2008 Sustainability Summit and Green Gathering sought to provide an open forum to exchange ideas and name four of the year’s most Earth-friendly projects “Champions of Sustainability.”

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By Japhet Weeks/BERKELEY

When 80-year-old Ethel Collins was just out of high school, she had a hard time getting a job in a white company because of the color of her skin. With the help of the NAACP, she was eventually hired.

More than 60 years later, on Election Day, Nov. 4, 2008, Collins watched in her Berkeley home as polls closed across the country. Just after 8 o’clock, CBS projected that Senator Barack Obama would be the next president of the United States and an emotional Collins screamed, “He got it! He got it! Thank you Jesus! He got it!”

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by Nick Burns, Dara Kerr & Shilanda Woolridge/BERKELEY & OAKLAND

Berkeley and Oakland know how to party! When the media named Barack Obama the winner of the Presidential election on Tuesday night, the streets in both cities erupted in spontaneous celebration. East Bay West Online caught the festivities on film. Watch our interactive presentation after the jump!

For more celebration coverage, click here.
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by Elise Craig/BERKELEY

The Berkeley mayoral race was such a blowout that Tom Bates gave his acceptance speech with less than 45 percent of precincts reporting his victory over Shirley Dean.
“It’s still early, but you know what, I think the tide is turning in our favor,” he said.
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By Clayton Trosclair/BERKELEY

California voters got the word mere seconds after the polls closed: Barack Obama was elected by sweeping margins as the nation’s 44th president, and the first African American chosen for the office.

The victory was joyous on two fronts for many West Berkeley and West Oakland voters. It marked the end of the George W. Bush presidency, an unpopular Republican administration marked by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the realization of a civil rights dream: that Americans would one day look beyond race in electing the nation’s chief executive.

Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, claimed a wide victory over John McCain, a former prisoner of war and long-time Republican senator from Arizona. In the final days of the race, Obama campaigned hard in traditional GOP territory such as Nevada and Virginia, and the handful of tossup states that had remained too competitive for pollsters to predict: Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Indiana and North Carolina. His efforts paid off, with wins in each state.

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by Japhet Weeks/BERKELEY

A post from SFist.com today quotes a reader saying that a polling place in San Francisco’s Mission District ran out of paper ballots by 9 a.m. this morning. Our sister site Mission Local confirms that more ballots were delivered by 9:30 a.m.

There seems to be no such problem on this side of the bay in Berkeley. At around 10 a.m. this morning, polling sites at two retirement homes, a library and a synagogue all had plenty of extra ballots.

A poll worker at Congregation Beth El in central Berkeley told this reporter that the Alameda County Registrar of Voters office had supplied them with twice as many paper ballots as there were voters regisered to vote there.

Esther Robinson, a supervisor at the Registrar’s office, said this morning that her office had ordered an “ample amount” of ballots.

“We have a percentage (of ballots) over and above those people registered at any particular polling place,” she said.

Wait times for voting, which were predicted to be longer than usual this year, seemed normal this morning.

One poll worker at the Berkshire Retirement Home in Berkeley described the situation today as “busy and slow.”

By Elise Craig/BERKELEY At the Ashby BART station, campaign workers are having a tough time finding people who haven’t already voted.
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by Nick Burns/WEST BERKELEY

Local democratic campaign volunteers worked furiously into the night preparing for tomorrow’s historic election. Armed with cell phones, area residents manned tables at Berkeley’s United Democratic Campaign office to encourage voters to cast their ballots. Children of volunteers also participated in phone banking efforts, leaving messages pleading for residents to reelect Mayor Tom Bates and vote against Proposition 8, which seeks to ban gay marriage by amending the state constitution.

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Videos by Elise Craig & Nick Burns/WEST BERKELEY

On October 27, Berkeley’s four mayoral candidates faced off in a debate at the West Berkeley Senior Center. In the videos below, East Bay West Online highlights three major issues facing the community. Missed the debate? Get the full story here.

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