Good Morning, San Francisco

The weather desk is dark this morning — no data, so step outside and trust your own eyes. While you're at it, here's the line that should ruin your coffee: Oakland wrote $376,000 in checks to a "rescue" that was quietly putting Bay Area dogs in the ground.

Oakland Paid $376,000 to a Rescue That Was Killing Its Dogs

Here's the kind of story that makes you want to read every municipal contract line by line. Over four years, Oakland Animal Services and its volunteer fundraising arm funneled $376,000 to Miranda's Rescue, a Humboldt County nonprofit whose owner investigators now believe was shooting dogs and filing them away as "adopted." Since 2020, Oakland sent 827 dogs north to Fortuna — 13.5 percent of every animal it handed to a rescue partner. At least five of them left Oakland alive and didn't make it.

The Humboldt County Sheriff's Office has a criminal investigation open. Contracts across the Eel River Valley are suspended. And Oakland's shelter system is now doing the math on how a "lifesaving pipeline" became a one-way trip for hundreds of animals.

Let's be clear about what this is. It's not just a horror story about one bad actor in Fortuna — it's a failure of oversight that taxpayers and donors paid for handsomely. Three hundred seventy-six thousand dollars is real money, and somewhere in the chain that moved it, nobody asked the obvious questions: Where are these dogs ending up? Why is one out-of-county rescue absorbing this much volume? What does "adopted" actually mean on the paperwork? A pipeline that big should have triggered a single audit. It didn't.

The instinct in moments like this is to demand a new task force, a new oversight office, a new line item. Resist it. The tools to catch this already existed — basic contract verification, a follow-up phone call, a spot check. What was missing wasn't budget; it was the will to use the authority Oakland already had. Accountability isn't a program you fund. It's a job you do. We'll be watching to see whether anyone in the shelter system loses theirs over this — and whether that $376,000 ever gets clawed back.

The Rundown

City Hall & Politics

Berkeley's Zone 0 rules met their first red-flag test — half-ready. Berkeley's aggressive EMBER ordinance bans combustible material within five feet of hill homes, and the season it was written for arrived this week with gusty winds and single-digit humidity. The problem: the fire department had inspected roughly 600 of about 1,400 homes legally required to comply. Passing a landmark law in June 2025 means nothing if you can't staff the follow-through by the first hot week of 2026 — the ordinance is only as good as the inspections behind it, and right now that's a coin flip.

CaliBunga Waterpark is dark for summer 2026. The Lake Cunningham waterpark — Raging Waters for 38 years — won't open, and San José has tapped Lakeside Partners to "reimagine" the 23-acre site with no date, no dollar figure, and no name surviving the rebrand. After years of operator churn, "reimagine" is the word cities reach for when they don't have a plan. Show us the capital commitment before the press release.

Waymo quietly thinned out a SoMa garage the moment a reporter showed up. Two outlets confirmed Waymo has been staging dozens of robotaxis in the shared garage at SoMa Grand since May 2025 — and reduced the count once the SF Standard started asking questions. The company won't say how many vehicles or under what terms. Residents sharing a building with a fleet depot deserve a straight answer, and the reflex to shrink the footprint when sunlight hits tells you the company knows it.

Public Safety

The heat broke; the fire didn't. Petaluma hit 101°F Thursday as the Putah Fire in Yolo County reached 860 acres with 30 percent of its perimeter uncontained on day four. Cal Fire's point all week: cooling temperatures don't rehydrate weeks-dry grass. The mid-70s weekend is a relief for you, not for the fuel load — crews stay on elevated alert.

A mystery flag went up at the old Mission Police Station. Someone hung a new flag last week on the 1902 former station at 3057 17th Street, privately held in near-total silence for 24 years. Nobody publicly knows what it means. Sometimes a story is just a building keeping its secrets — and a neighborhood that can't stop asking.

Tech & Startups

Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5, and the invoice is the headline. The San Francisco company's first "Mythos-class" model landed June 9 at $10/$50 per million tokens, with a million-token context window. Benchmarks are strong; so is the sticker shock — at least one developer cleared $110 before lunch. Powerful is easy to sell. Affordable is the part the market actually decides, and the early reviews are split right down that seam.

Culture, Food & Sports

World Cup fever is doing exactly what San Jose bet it would. Santana Row's FIFA pop-up drew crowds strong enough to extend through July, and Eastridge's opening-day party packed in fans — early proof the city's neighborhood watch-party play moves real money to local businesses. Across the bay, Mexico's 2-0 opener turned the Mission's Napper Tandy into a midday roar, with Mayor Lurie strolling in before halftime. When a city bets on small businesses instead of a stadium subsidy, we're happy to cheer.

Matt Chapman is hitting .469 in June — and our sports desk says read the fine print. The numbers are a cartoon: five homers, 18 RBI, a 1.000 slugging mark. But the exit velocity is down 5.5 ticks and the hard-hit rate has cratered. Enjoy the show; don't bank on it lasting.

A Richmond donut shop just won a national journalism award. Richmondside took first in the 2026 Society of Features Journalism awards for an intern's piece on the pre-dawn regulars at Andy's Donut Stop — paramedics, Chevron workers, and folks who "conduct commerce by pointing and grunting." Local news, done right, about local life. We approve.

One More Thing

Tom Hanks walked into Berkeley Typewriter last week, tried nearly every machine in the joint, bought a 1930s Royal standard — then left one from his own collection in the window with a handwritten note. The man came to buy a typewriter and ended up making a donation. That's the most San Francisco Bay thing we've heard all week.