May 28, 2022
West Sacramento is celebrated for its minor league ballpark, River Walk Park and Trail, waterfront housing, bars and restaurants. But who cares? I’ll never forgive West Sac for killing West Capital Raceway.
Local historians say I’m wrong. They say I can’t blame the city of West Sac, because it didn’t exist when West Capital Raceway died in 1980. The city lurched to life in 1987.
They say the Yolo County Planning Commission killed West Cap Raceway. The county refused to issue permits for crowds to gather, engines to roar and dirt to fly. The county encouraged the track’s new owners to sell out and turn California’s heroic quarter-mile dirt speedway into a parking lot for trucks.
Apr 28, 2022
We get emails at Inside Sacramento. Some of them demand my head on a platter.
Not long ago, seven or eight emails arrived at the editor’s desk saying awful things about me. The emails were identical, but people who sent them were different. There may have been a strategy to this, but I didn’t catch it.
The people who sent the emails were angry about my campaign to open the Sacramento River Parkway and levee bike trail. They overlooked one important fact: It’s not my campaign. The parkway and bike trail are the city’s idea.
Apr 28, 2022
Some NBA teams don’t worry about balancing the books. Their owners swim in deep green seas of personal wealth. They treat league membership as an extension of their entitlement, a bragging right with benefits of ballooning equity.
The Kings are different. Their owners are rich, relatively speaking, but can’t matchup against billionaires. A welterweight bank account is a big disadvantage in a game played by heavyweights.
Apr 28, 2022
They needed to say something with six bodies scattered around the sidewalk at 10th and K streets. So Darrell Steinberg and Katie Valenzuela took shelter in the safest place they knew. They blamed guns.
With an actor’s studied passion, Steinberg spoke of broken hearts and school shootings. Valenzuela, newer at this sort of performance, tearfully described a phone call at 2:30 a.m. and waded into the weeds of the nation’s fascination with armaments.
Mar 28, 2022
My friend Bill Conlin would fill the room with unprintable words if he could hear what I’m about to say. But Bill is resting at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery and not likely to notice.
Bill was a baseball guy. The demise of baseball in Sacramento saddened him. He died two years before the River Cats arrived and never had the pleasure of wrapping his hands around a cold beer at Raley Field or Sutter Health Park. As a newspaper sports editor, he covered the burials of two Solons iterations, in 1961 and 1976.
So I hope Bill’s spirit forgives me for saying it’s a good thing Sacramento isn’t a baseball town these days. Because baseball is dying.
Mar 28, 2022
I was walking on Ninth Street near City Hall and passed a tiny homeless encampment burrowed into the porch of a vacant building. Empty wine bottles stood sentry around two people asleep. Garbage spilled across the sidewalk. The little hovel was sad and filthy and carried a stomach-churning stench.
The scene triggered a memory. It made me think about a documentary film I saw two decades ago, “The Marshes of Two Street,” by Richard Simpson.
