There’s one nugget of good news buried in the budget debacle at City Hall. The $66 million deficit has zero impact on finishing the Sacramento River Parkway bike trail.
While City Council members scramble to produce a balanced budget, vacuuming dimes and quarters from under sofas, money for the levee trail is beyond their reach.
Funds for engineering, environmental analysis, easement acquisition and construction are locked down, under contract or spent. Levee trail dollars are secure. This means the parkway project sails forward, a half-century after it was promised to the community.
Try to imagine the 2025 World Series between the Dodgers and A’s. Picture how Major League Baseball explains why the A’s home field games will move to Oracle Park in San Francisco.
Imagine words like these: “Because the World Series requires an appropriate venue.”
Lucky for Major League Baseball, the A’s have no chance to reach the World Series. Not as long as the club is run by John Fisher, heir to the Gap clothing fortune and one of the cheapest, least effective operators in sports.
Finally got around to reading the city auditor’s “Preliminary Report on the City’s Homeless Response.” Hated it. Then I read it again. Loved it.
People told me the report was a lightweight, whitewashed effort, a statistical compendium lacking analysis on how the city’s political leadership failed to manage encampments, drug sales, fires and crime.
On the surface, critics were right. The report makes zero effort to analyze decisions that turned Sacramento into a national disgrace, a place where tents line sidewalks, enforcement is discouraged and residential pleas for help are answered with, “Sorry, nothing we can do.”
Residents near the Sacramento River who want to block public access have a big advantage over the 500,000 or so people who will benefit from a new levee bike trail.
The residents have a good lawyer.
One attorney working for property owners shouldn’t matter. After all, the rest of us are represented by the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, a state agency whose mission is to serve public interests.
But that’s not how it works.
Documents obtained under the California Public Records Act tell a more complex story. For the past three years, a lawyer hired by property owners near the levee built a relationship with flood board officials.
I’ve reported on the Kings since 1984 when they played in Kansas City. I wrote a book about them a decade ago. It’s taken awhile, but I’ve finally figured out what they need. The Kings need a casino next to Golden 1 Center. Macy’s might be perfect. Everybody needs a casino these days. Wheatland has one. Ione has one. Lincoln has one. Even Elk Grove has one. Seven tribal gambling halls exist within an hour’s drive of the Capitol. They provide punters with 14,575 slot machines, 481 table games, and 54 bars and restaurants. Who says that’s enough?
There must be something we can do for Hazel Jackson. Her bravery brought a reckoning that inspires today.
She forced Land Park gentry to confront their indifference to racism. She shamed local business leaders for their ownership of a sports facility that refused to serve Black people.
Hazel Jackson made a difference. Thanks to her, part of the city’s recreational and sporting life untethered itself from an anchor of institutional bigotry.
