The most incredible thing about people who live along the Sacramento River is not that they think they can stop public access to the new levee parkway. Of course they think they can stop access. They blocked the parkway for almost 50 years.
The incredible part is how they plan to prevent future access. Desperate and isolated, having lost the political support they exploited for five decades, they are down to their final play. It’s a Hail Mary.
There are many reasons why the Kings are arguably the worst team in professional sports. Coaches always get blamed, but they’re just part of the problem.
Thirty men have coached the Kings since 1948. Only two can be considered heroic—Les Harrison, who founded the team and won its only championship, and Rick Adelman, the best skipper in the Sacramento era.
Other Kings coaches have floated between mediocre, pretty awful and just bad. Only a few fit the definition of totally horrible. But if a scientific connection between coaching and victory existed in the NBA, surely the Kings would have stumbled across it by now. They would have something better to show than seven decades of failure.
On wintery Friday nights when the town is quiet and my friends have gone home, I sometimes treat myself to harness races at Cal Expo. This ritual is not driven by a gambling passion—outside the track, I never bet on anything—but because I find the races peaceful and nostalgic.
If you grew up in Sacramento, horse racing has always been around, a low-profile piece of the sports landscape, faithfully delivering entertainment and fellowship and cold beer and hot dogs. It’s a living museum piece woven into local history.
When Leland Stanford sought photographic proof that racehorses launch themselves into the air as they gallop, he brought his experiment to Union Park, a 19th century track in Midtown. Joe DiMaggio liked to sit in Cal Expo’s dull, gray press box for State Fair thoroughbred races because nobody bothered him there.
Some people get frustrated when local government tells them something obvious. Not me. I find it satisfying, even comforting, to see a municipal report that validates precisely what I’ve been saying all along.
The Pocket Greenhaven Transportation Plan is one such document. The plan is a big deal, sponsored by the city to establish priorities and expenditures in traffic safety and connectivity for decades to come. The work started before the pandemic. Now it’s nearing the finish line.
Bureaucratic delays, combined with a reluctance to bring large groups together in town halls under COVID-19, slowed the project. Opportunities for public discourse were limited. But final opinions are now being solicited, leaving local City Councilmember Rick Jennings with a clear picture of community traffic priorities.
Now we know how Darrell Steinberg’s political story ends. The mayor doesn’t fade away to cheers from sports fans thankful for the soccer stadium he coaxed into existence. There is no stadium. He doesn’t salute a revitalized embarcadero along the Sacramento River. There is no new waterfront.
But there are 11,000 homeless people.
After years of parliamentary gamesmanship, passionate speeches, tax hikes and wasted opportunities, Steinberg will be remembered for one thing—how he took Sacramento and turned it into the capital of homelessness.
It’s getting tough to hold an election without someone claiming the results are rigged or crooked or somehow fixed. But there’s an easy way for Sacramento citizens to tell whether elections are less than honest. Keep an eye on the athletes.
In our modern culture, no collection of humans knows more about cheating than athletes. Name a sport and you’ll find a cheater.
If county and state election officials start to hire athletes—or former athletes or coaches or trainers—and put them anywhere near the polling, counting and certification process, look out. Where athletes go, cheating follows.
