Feb 28, 2025
People are excited about the team once known as the Oakland A’s playing home games in a minor-league ballpark in West Sacramento. Not me.
This fascination with the A’s and Major League Baseball is a sucker’s game, a modern version of the old carnival stall hook-a-duck.
The A’s are carpetbaggers. They swoop into town in search of accommodation, untethered to commitment. They linger as long as convenience allows, then vanish into the night. They won’t even mention their stopover city’s name.
Smart people tell me the A’s three-season residency makes Sacramento a contender for big league permanence, either through expansion or the A’s themselves. This is nonsense.
Feb 28, 2025
The city doesn’t know how to tell a story.
In January, I asked the city for documents related to the Del Rio Trail bicycle bridge across Interstate 5 and Riverside Boulevard.
You know the bridge.
It’s the $12 million span that never opened. The one with wooden construction forms still hanging above the freeway. Built with substandard concrete and rebar. Now facing demolition.
And begging questions about how the city waited until last summer, when the bridge was ready for its ribbon cutting, before anyone started screaming about the problems.
That bridge.
Feb 28, 2025
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.
Jan 28, 2025
Fifi Scott must be the only woman who flipped a car while skidding around the track at Hughes Stadium. She did this while chasing Stan Mulock and 18 other men in an automobile race not meant for women.
Scott was running 10th when she flipped with five laps to go. It’s unknown what type of car she drove, though she liked Hudsons. Reports from that night in June 1955 describe all 20 vehicles as jalopies, battered 1940s precursors to NASCAR machines.
Fifi walked away. Her jalopy died.
Jan 28, 2025
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.
Jan 28, 2025
I keep hoping flood protection agencies will wise up to tricks pulled by people who want to torpedo the Sacramento River Parkway levee bike trail.
The tricks are tiresome. But flood agencies are easy marks. They love to play the fool.
The latest embarrassment happened last year. The game involved five temporary levee fences in Pocket and Little Pocket authorized by Central Valley Flood Protection Board Executive Officer Chris Lief in 2023.
