The Zine Comes To You!
In Which: I show off our lovely Zine to the online subscribers, Full articles are linked and explained for your viewing pleasure, and I dip out of town again. Oops.
I’m gonna level with you all, I was not able to get myself together to cover the news this time. Not only is tomorrow the 4th of July, I’m also out of town again. I barely got my feet under me before the Night Market—which was both intense and amazing—and now I’m leaving town again. It’ll be shorter, but it’s still disruptive. I’m going to try to have something for Tuesday, but for today, we’re going to try something a bit different.
A Taste Of Things
One of the things that made our time at the Night Market so special was having our first ever Hayward Herald Zine. We handed out around 150 of them to people who came by our booth—I even managed to shove one into the hands of Councilmember Francisco Zermeño—and my hope is that people read those stories and want to hear more.
The Zine had condensed versions of four of the most important—in my opinion—stories from the last few months. I was hoping to give folks a taste of local news in hopes that they pull up to a full online meal. I had planned to put QR codes to the full stories in the Zine, but not only would that have been kind of ugly, I also forgot until after it was published.
So to even things out, I want to offer a digital copy of our Zine so you can experience—in a way—all the hard work that we put into it.
Below are the full versions of the four articles from the Zine so that those who are coming here for the first time can easily get to the full stories. I’m also including some stories that weren’t included, but are important for keeping up on what’s happening around the City and School District right now.
This story covers one of the most important HUSD Board Meetings of this past school year. It gives some details of what the District decided to cut to save $50,000,000 and try to balance the budget. As recent stories are covering, though, even that amount wasn’t enough to balance things entirely.
And after a tense meeting, the Board announced that the Superintendent resigned! It was never made entirely clear why, but there was evidence that he had been given a DUI on the way home from a school event. It’s possible the resignation was unrelated, but it was a huge upset on top of the enormity of the cuts.
Homelessness is a fact of life in the Bay Area, and Hayward is no exception. But how we treat them makes a huge difference—we can pursue humane and dignified solutions or we can sweep them under the rug. It’s easy to forget that our unhoused neighbors often used to be housed like the rest of us—and that many are only one bad day away from joining them.
This story discusses homelessness solutions and focuses on Weekes Park. HARD is exploring entirely fencing in the park in an effort to curb homelessness. We chatted with former South Hayward Parish head Aaron Horner about what homelessness is actually like and what common-sense solutions we could pursue once we remember that unhoused people are human like the rest of us.
What matters to the City Council is not always clear to people who don’t watch as closely as we do at the Herald. But they’re people, like the rest of us, and they have pet projects and things they value more than others. This story was big—it covered a 6-hour meeting—so we broke it into two pieces. Only the first part made it into the Zine, but you can also check out Part Two below.
These kinds of stories not only help you understand the Council better, but also fill you in on all the different City departments and what they do. Knowing that can make it easier to get your problems taken care of without being shuttled around from person to person.
Hayward takes a lot of pride in its status as a Sanctuary City, but not everyone knows exactly what it means. HPD often says they won’t cooperate with ICE, but there are a lot of asterisks to that. For example, if an HPD officer decides to violate the Sanctuary policy, the policy itself prohibits any other officer from stopping them from sharing immigration information with ICE.
Knowing the limits of Hayward’s Sanctuary Status can help us defend our community from being picked up in unmarked vehicles and disappeared.
A Little Extra For You
I also wanted to share an extra story that might interest folks and didn’t make it into the Zine.
When you feel so confident in your ability to win that you don’t bother to submit a candidate statement, something is definitely going on. In this story, I dive into why Eric Swalwell barely needs to campaign to keep his seat as our House Representative—in case you didn’t know who your rep was, if you live in Hayward, it’s him.
What started with good intentions has made things so stagnant that the guy in the seat spends most of his time campaigning for other people.
If you have the time, I encourage you to take a look through our Archives. Old news can still be important. And if you want to support our work and help us grow, consider a donation. It’d mean a lot to us and supports local journalism you won’t find anywhere else.