A.M. Splash: Lee Proposal Backs Middle-Class Housing in SF; Berkeley Police Chief Used Officers to Track Down Son's Stolen iPhone

Mayor Ed Lee on Tuesday will announce plans to create the city's first dedicated funding stream for moderate-income and affordable housing, generating $20 million to $50 million a year for 30 years.

It may have started as an attempt to help the common worker, those making minimum wage in high-priced Silicon Valley. But if San Jose agrees to raise the hourly minimum wage in the city, the majority of businesses who employ minimum-wage workers say they'll have to cut employee hours or lay off workers and raise prices. The polarizing debate is expected to come to a head at Tuesday's City Council meeting, where labor unions want council members to approve raising the minimum wage from $8 to $10, but the mayor wants residents to decide on Election Day in November.

Oakland officials have nixed a proposed medical marijuana dispensary because of the operators' ties to a "potrepreneur" facing 13 felony charges for defrauding the city. Deputy City Administrator Arturo Sanchez rescinded a conditional dispensary permit issued to G8 Medical Alliance, whose consultant and perspective landlord was Dhar Mann -- the 27-year-old businessman accused by Alameda County prosecutors of pocketing more than $40,000 in city grants intended for improvements at several of Mann's properties.

When Berkeley police Chief Michael Meehan's son's cell phone was stolen in January, 10 police officers were sent to track it down, with some working overtime at taxpayer expense, police said Monday. A police report about the theft of the teen's iPhone from a school locker was never written and the Oakland Police Department was never notified that officers on the department's drug task force were in North Oakland knocking on doors looking for the phone. Three detectives and a sergeant each logged two hours of overtime.

Capt. John Cota, who was blamed for causing the worst oil spill in San Francisco Bay in two decades when he crashed the cargo ship Cosco Busan into the Bay Bridge in 2007, is quietly trying to regain his mariner's license. Cota, 64, of Petaluma, pleaded guilty to water-pollution violations and served 10 months in prison after investigators concluded he was traveling too fast in heavy fog, was impaired by prescription drugs and ignored safety precautions while working as the ship's pilot on Nov. 7, 2007.

It was a bizarre component of Gov. Jerry Brown's latest budget - despite fewer revenues than expected in January, the governor said the state actually owes more to schools under its complicated funding formula. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office says it may be wrong, not bizarre.

Alameda County prosecutors dropped robbery and hate-crime charges Monday that they had filed against three Occupy Oakland demonstrators who got into an ugly altercation with a woman at a rally.