City Beat
More on “Fenced Out”
Sacramento City Councilmember Steve Hansen has objected to a column published in the July editions of Inside Publications written by R.E. Graswich entitled “Fenced Out: Councilmember Blocks Public From River Parkway.”
To Catch a Thief
Most small businesses operate on a thin profit margin. Burglaries and robberies can make those margins thinner still. How can local businesses combat crime?
Sunil and Pam Hans own and operate the popular Compton’s Market in East Sacramento. “I know my customers,” Sunil says.
National Spotlight
This is definitely not the kind of publicity Sacramento wants or needs, but the city’s homeless crisis continues to draw national attention. The latest spotlight comes from Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, whose crews recently filmed homeless people in public places around the community. Here’s a transcript on the May 13 broadcast.
Larger Than Life
Randy Paragary has never built a hotel before, but he has built plenty of restaurants and bars, more than anyone in Sacramento. He figures the trickiest part of the hotel business, after securing the pile of dollars required to create one, is food service. On the dining and booze front, he’s already a local Conrad Hilton.
His first hotel, the Fort Sutter, is rising at the corner of 28th Street and Capitol Avenue, where Paragary’s flagship Café Bernardo stood for 25 years. Bernardo created a new dining style in Sacramento—a well-priced, classy environment without waitstaff coming around to take orders. Customers order at the counter. The concept still thrives in the region, including three Cafés Bernardo.
Making Tracks
The new parkway trail atop the Sacramento River levee north from Garcia Bend Park to Arabella Way will not disturb song sparrows, bank swallows, burrowing owls or western yellow-billed cuckoos.
The trail might interrupt the landing pattern of a Swainson’s hawk or two, but that’s not likely. Turtles, beetles, snakes, shrimp, badgers and Chinook salmon will not be impacted by the construction work.
Pocket residents are still a couple of years away from being able to walk, run or ride bikes on the new trail. The recreational project must wait for completion of levee repairs, which are underway by the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency and Army Corps of Engineers.
City’s Death by Drugs
As a wife and working mom whose family lives in Land Park, I am thankful Cecily Hastings shed light on the drugs and homeless problems in our city with her column, “Is Sacramento Dying?”
It’s clear our city, county and state leaders are not willing to do anything but exacerbate the situation.
The roots of the crisis are not homelessness itself, but drugs. Sacramento has a drug crisis, not a homeless crisis. We have people whose addictions have caused mental illness. They can’t make decisions for themselves. So they live on the street.
