San Francisco city leaders have found an extra pot of $8 million they hope to use as a patch on the summer’s tattered budget, potentially rescuing more than 500 frontline workers already given pink slips or downgraded to lower-paying jobs.

The student paper headline read, "Debate Already Closed." But elsewhere on the San Francisco State University campus, the debate was just beginning, about a proposed $93 million recreation center whose bottom line seems to loom over the conversation about deep curriculum cutbacks this fall.

Students gathered Thursday in the Cesar Chavez student center for a teach-in organized by the Coalition Against the Rec Center, a group of students opposing the construction of a Recreation and Wellness Center. But the proposal has divided opinion on campus, with the president of the largest student group, which strongly backs the plan, declaring, "The project will never die."

Warfield Building owner David Addington said he spent several years, working to bring general advertising back on Market Street from Fifth to Seventh streets, in hopes of returning the central city stretch to its former glory days as a theater district.

Although his enthusiasm for the special district hasn’t dimmed, a sense of reality has crept in as opposition to the initiative, Proposition D, mounts.

For many, the police are here to serve and protect. The men and women in blue are those we call when we’re in trouble. And no part of Oakland is more in need of policing than the streets between the East 70s avenues and the East 100s avenues — stretching from the base of the hills to the bottom of the flatlands — or what residents call the “Deep East.” It is where over one-third of the city’s 124 homicides occurred last year. But many of the youths living on these dangerous streets don’t welcome the police as protectors — they consider them the enemy.

The city has sent layoff notices to 546 health and clerical workers, but that doesn't mean the public payroll will shrink by 546 jobs come mid-November. City officials are still deciding how many workers will be reclassified and then rehired at lower pay. The SEIU claims Mayor Gavin Newsom has reneged on a deal to save all the jobs.

Warren Hellman, a San Francisco financier, had planned to announce his intention to launch a well funded nonprofit Bay Area news organization — until someone else broke the news.

San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos is crafting a proposal that would place a fee on alcohol sold in the city, potentially raising $25 million to $35 million annually to help pay for alcohol-related public health and criminal justice costs.

Already reeling from a deep recession and massive cuts to staff and services in this year’s budget, San Francisco is being hammered by a new tidal wave of state cuts -- estimated at $26.5 million -- which could put low-income seniors and others on the brink of homelessness and hunger, many advocates say.

Union employees at the University of California gave an overwhelming vote of no confidence in the leadership of UC President Mark Yudof, election organizers said Thursday.