Hazel Jackson isn’t coming home.
The young woman who shamed community leaders and brought down Land Park’s “whites only” public swimming pool is buried in a mass grave in Pennsylvania.
Hazel is mixed with eight or 10 other people who died without friends, family or money in 1969.
A representative from Mt. Zion Memorial, the cemetery near Philadelphia International Airport where Hazel is buried, tells me:
Darrell Steinberg exposed his insecurities when he claimed credit for the latest homeless estimate.
The mayor’s performance was by turns narcissistic and self-defeating. His audience walked away confused.
The egomaniacal part was Steinberg’s insistence that his policies over the past eight years worked.
It’s not news that mayoral candidate Flojaune Cofer is OK with homeless camps in city parks. She wants to defund cops, too.
But there’s something else on Cofer’s mind—the end of Sacramento as “full service” city.
Dismantling city services is one of the more bizarre ruminations from a novice politician who thrives on outlandish public policies.
Cofer’s cheerleading for free-range homeless camps and a shrunken police force is typical for progressive candidates. Decriminalization politics are standard in San Francisco and Oakland.
But Cofer veers into another universe when she supports consultants who want to make Sacramento a contract city, where unionized public employees are replaced by private companies and vendors.
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.”
