Over the years those of us at the Advocates for Arden Arcade have heard from other parts of the county's vast, urbanized, unincorporated UnCity that they have municipal service and governance issues like ours. We do not want to exclude them from our quest to improve the local area. We have always felt a kinship with our neighboring unincorporated nowherelands. Their struggles are our struggles. To…

If you follow the news on TV, radio, or Big Social Media, you will be hearing a lot in 2025 about tensions internationally and nationally. On local TV and radio, on local social media sites like Nextdoor, or if you are among the handful of Sacramento Bee subscribers left, your news feed will no doubt also cover goings-on in the City of Sacramento, with an occasional story or two about something in…

This week contractors started prep work on the construction of the middle school boondoggle at Creekside. That's the $60M (or $120M+ when you figure in the interest) waste of tax money the 5-member,  lame duck San Juan Unified School District Board approved late last year to build a questionably-needed, large middle school on a too-small, marginal site where the old Creekside Elementary School has…

On April 27, 2022, The Bee published a feature story about Arden Arcade on its front page. The story, "The City That's Not" ostensibly set out to answer a reader's question: "Why Hasn't the City of Sacramento ever annexed Arden Arcade?" But even after giving historical evidence that the City of Sacramento HAS bitten off chunks of Arden Arcade, the article doesn't really answer the reader's…

About a year ago Joe Mathews wrote an essay for Zocaló Public Square (similarly reprinted in the S.F. Chroniclce, Modesto Bee and elsewhere) about the underprivileged status of California's unincorporated communities. His article emphasized unincorporated communities in the San Joaquin Valley where low-wage farm workers struggle to provide for their families, where criminals practice their…

There's a famous quote (generally attributed to either Mark Twain or Gideon J. Tucker) about no man's life, liberty or property being safe when the Legislature is in session. Last-minute, hasty legislation in the final week of the legislative session is proving that to be true. Amendments to SB 175 (at Section 3332.2), concerning the state budget, were cleverly placed over the Labor Day weekend…

The other day on Nextdoor there was a post about a cars being stripped on Wyda Way on the Dollar Tree side of the street between Howe and Ethan. The post said there were cars on jacks and chopped and mentioned a truck double parked on the street while guys took parts out of the cars. Comments on the post included pleas to report the matter to the County. Among the other comments:

Regular readers of our publications are no doubt aware that our community's municipal government - Sacramento County - is sometimes, well...let's just say, less than stellar. Fortunately there are several special districts that provide the area with certain municipal services beyond what the County offers and they do it pretty well. We're talking about the variety of independent special districts…

We honestly don't like to dis Sacramento County. But since we have a goal to speak up on behalf of improving our community, there are times we don't have a choice. So when we saw The Bee's latest article about Nav Gill, the now-departed County CEO, we thought we should say something about it.