City Beat
Strong Mayor?
Strong Mayor? McCarty is perfectly unsuited for the job By R.E. Graswich May 2025 Give me four minutes to explain why Sacramento should be a strong mayor city under Kevin McCarty. Maybe I’m not the most credible messenger. I criticized mayors Joe Serna...
Bait And Switch
The California Highway Patrol was trying something new. Something that needed plenty of open space, “including a range to train patrolmen to fire from moving cars and motorcycles,” CHP brass said.
They settled on 240 farm acres near M.F. Silva’s dairy. Dormitories, classrooms, a cafeteria and gym rose over the bean fields, plus an asphalt track and gun range.
The address was 2812 Meadowview Farm Road. It was 1952. The CHP was building its first permanent cadet academy, an elite school for traffic cops.
Honest Day’s Work
Never expect perfection from an elected official. But it’s nice to see honesty and diligence. By this measure, Mayor Kevin McCarty is off to a rough start.
His honesty rating deflated one week into the job. Reversing position, McCarty voted to fire City Manager Howard Chan. The flip-flop forced the city to find a new top manager while wrestling with a $77 million budget deficit.
Next comes diligence, which really has me worried.
Throughout McCarty’s campaign, I couldn’t shake the memory from those four years I spent working down the hall from him at City Hall.
The image was a locked and darkened office.
Personnel Program
Unlike children, city managers should be neither seen nor heard.
They are more like cinematographers on a movie set, hired to bring light, shadows and texture to a director’s vision and make the stars look beautiful.
As city managers go, Howard Chan wasn’t Hollywood or heaven’s gift to Sacramento. He was a decent bureaucrat, loyal to his lieutenants, but detached to the point of obliviousness.
Significant problems with Chan’s departments, including animal care, parks, public works, even bridge construction, were met with stoicism worthy of Zeno of Citium.
Fresh Start
Fresh Start 2100 Q St. deserves an ambitious future By R.E. Graswich January 2024 The good stuff is gone. The presses were dismantled and sold for scrap in 2021, the hand-painted honeybee wallpaper stripped from the cafeteria decades ago. Last time I...
Officer Involved
Fifty years ago, at 12:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, 1974, a Sacramento Police homicide lieutenant named Robbie Waters left the bar at Neptune’s Table restaurant on South Land Park Drive and killed Terry Lee Miranda with a bullet between the eyes.
There were mitigating circumstances. Moments before Waters pulled the trigger on his service revolver, Miranda pointed a shotgun at the detective and said, “We want your money.”
Miranda and his crime partner, Christopher Thomas Garland, were young criminals, Miranda 22, Garland 21. Neither expected to meet a plain-clothes policeman in the suburban mall parking lot.
They realized their mistake when Waters said, “I’m a cop. Drop the shotgun.”
