December 3, 2020

Nextdoor currently has some posts praising the County’s HOT Team for “cleaning up” Alta Arden between Watt and Howe. Residents and businesses along Alta Arden have been concerned about the trash and sanitation problems associated with homeless people camping along the sides of the roadway. They are understandably glad that the County finally did something about those issues. For the time being…

November 30, 2020

Capital Public Radio has reported on Sheriff Scott Jones' announcement that he will not enforce COVID-19 public health directives. "We're not staffed for that," was what the Sheriff's Office told the reporter. Except, as we previously noted, the Sheriff got $104 million from the feds precisely to pay for his pandemic staffing expenses. And it seems he has already spent over $26 million of those…

November 6, 2020

A Joe Mathews column in yesterday’s Desert Sun and today’s Modesto Bee says the pandemic has given everyone a taste of what it is like to live in California, when county government gets to call all the shots. It notes that once the virus gets under control and life resumes as before, thousands of Californians will still be living under the thumbs of their County’s Board of Supervisors. It…

October 18, 2020

Have you ever worked somewhere and had to attend a staff meeting where the boss and other people just droned on and on and very little got accomplished? Did you wonder why they just didn’t send everyone an email instead? So work could get done instead of wasting time? Well it seems like some of the higher-ups in Sacramento County’s wonderful bureaucracy have indeed been in such a meeting. And…

September 29, 2020

The California Department of Public Health issued new Covid-19 guidelines today having to do with playgrounds. Thing is, if you read the guidelines carefully, it is clear the Department doesn't understand how things actually work on the ground:

September 8, 2020

On September 1st, Marcos Breton of The Bee penned an editorial excoriating Sacramento County for how it botched up the distribution of federal Covid-19 relief funds (CARES Act). He minced no words about the Supervisors’ decision to let the County Executive control the money and about the County Executive’s tone-deaf use of the money. Worse, he pointed to the City of Sacramento’s use of CARES Act…

August 25, 2020

The News and Review published a scathing exposé yesterday about how Sacramento County doesn’t exactly have its act together. The article by Foon Rhee, formerly of The Bee, displays some actual journalism for a change. It goes into some detail about the County’s Department of Health Services having a run-in with the County’s top executives. Well, call us jaded, but we’ve heard it all before. Of…

August 10, 2020

The Bee published a story today, August 10th, about how the County used most of its Covid-19 relief money from the federal government to pay salaries and benefits for the Sheriff’s personnel. We said the same thing a week earlier. (Did The Bee get its information from us? LOL!) Our story was about local leaders asking the County for transparency. And it looks like there might be some now, because…

August 8, 2020

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, …” Well, OK, maybe it’s not the best of times here in Arden Arcade, beset with the pandemic as we are. But if we’re thinking along the lines of Charles Dickens’ great book, let’s at least consider the wisdom and foolishness part of his famous opener. You see, we’re not the only ones to…

August 3, 2020

Local leaders in Arden Arcade and Rio Linda Elverta have sent email to County Supervisors Peters and Frost asking for specific information about the Covid-19 pandemic - data and expenditures of federal funds - within the unincorporated UnCity of Sacramento County. The UnCity is enormous. With nearly 600,000 residents - roughly equal to the population of Wyoming - it is the largest political subset…

June 23, 2020

Like all of California’s 58 counties, Sacramento County has important regional responsibilities. Public health is one of those duties, a role that has become top of the mind because of the corona virus. Like other counties, Sacramento County reports the number of cases and deaths attributed to the virus, figures that are essential for managing the crisis. But a look at the County’s online…

May 21, 2020

Lately, there is usually a Sheriff’s Deputy parked right outside the Raley’s store at Watt and Marconi. Why? According to the check-out staff, when “all this” (the pandemic, the social distancing, the masks) started, people were super rude and belligerent. The Raley’s workers believe it has helped to have a cop on scene, but people are still “upset”. No doubt we are all getting a bit frayed around…

May 11, 2020

There was a really thought-provoking article by Steve LeVine published last week on Medium that speculated as to what cities would be like after the pandemic. Cities as places, that is. In a nutshell, it posits that nothing will be as it was before. The widely-expected tanking of the economy, especially retail commercial activity, will disappear most of the amenities of city life as we used to…

April 27, 2020

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic was interviewed today on NPR’s Here and Now program discussing how the pandemic will change local economies. He also wrote about it in an article The Atlantic published today that notes the pandemic is already accelerating pre-existing trends: more online shopping, big businesses crushing small retailers, independent restaurants being replaced by chain take-out food…

April 22, 2020

Imagine if there was no Internet during this pandemic (and thus no cell phones or cable TV), just land-line telephones and over-the-air TV with a few channels. Work-at-home, distance learning, health care delivery, and remote shopping (mail-order catalog+phone orders) would all be different and less functional. There wouldn’t be videoconferencing, video phone calls, interactive gaming or other…

April 19, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic is a serious health problem and its related economic impacts have been severe. Our local economy has a mix of large corporate businesses (e.g. Chevron), independent small businesses (e.g. Mom-and-Pop stores) and government entities that are all suffering from the economic collapse, with the restaurant industry being particularly hard hit. Late last month the federal…

March 30, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic is a serious public health problem with a side effect of cratering the economy. How long it will take to “get back to normal” is anyone’s guess. Still, it’s not like someone dropped a nuclear bomb on us, killing everyone and laying waste to buildings and infrastructure. The economic engine can restart. But how? Strong Towns mused a bit on that subject today. It is an thought-…

March 20, 2020

By now it is apparent that our lives are very different than they used to be. Schools are closed, restaurants are take-out only, the County has issued a stay-at-home order, the Governor declared a state of emergency and has issued a statewide stay-at-home order, and the news media have emphasized Covid-19. The point is to slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus, which is necessary because of intense…