Ryan Nickel works with scientists who fight crime. He’s a crime-busting scientist himself, an expert in DNA analysis. But there’s a difference. Around the office, Nickel is known as the guy who runs marathons.
“We have a great team, but yeah, they don’t see me as a scientist,” he says. “They see me as a distance runner.”
The label carries an ironic touch. Nickel works for the Sacramento County district attorney’s crime lab, where the goal is to nail people after they go running.
Things look good on new sections of the Sacramento River levee. The roadbed gravel is neat and smooth, baking in the summer heat. But wait until winter. Things get ugly when rains come.
I have an idea how much money it costs to repair the levees and bolster them with slurry walls. It’s a big number. The project, which has taken about three years and isn’t finished, carries a price tag of $1.8 billion, paid by taxpayers. Who can bring context to that much money?
People visit the levee to inspect their investment. They walk along the new gravel roadbed and enjoy the views. Sometimes they see new damage, months after Army Corps of Engineers contractors finished another section of seepage walls and levee rehabilitation.
For years, I’ve tried to figure out why the local homeless population grew from 2,700 to roughly 10,000 since Darrell Steinberg became mayor.
I’ve finally figured it out. The answer is obvious. I just couldn’t see it.
Steinberg and the City Council promote homelessness. They encourage an unhoused culture. The city has authority to stop or at least slow the problem. Instead, the mayor and friends search for excuses to help homelessness thrive. They bring gasoline to the bonfire.
It’s been 10 years since I wrote a book about the Kings. Now I can finally write an update.
The fact that my book survived a decade without becoming stale and outdated makes me happy, but I know the truth. Literary brilliance aside, the book stayed fresh because the Kings did absolutely nothing worth writing about between 2013 and 2022.
They moved into a new arena, played a bunch of games that ended in defeat, traded countless players whose names I can’t remember and fired many coaches. They shut down for the pandemic and skipped their rent payments for a few months. They missed the playoffs.
Maybe it wasn’t the smartest move, placing the city’s public safety headquarters at the end of a deadly Executive Airport runway, in a building where a jet crashed and killed 22 people. But so far, so good. The police and fire headquarters survived two decades without incident.
Now Gerald Thomas, a thoughtful Inside Sacramento reader, thinks the runway, known as 12/30 in aviation vernacular, can perform a lifesaving role. With minimal fuss, the runway can transform into an escape route for thousands of residents fleeing high waters from a levee failure.
