City, County and Neighborhood News

I’ve never understood how a few property owners near the Sacramento River made city and state officials think public safety means keeping people off the levee parkway.

For 50 years, the safety and security argument was a smokescreen—a stratagem to give exclusive parkway access to several dozen residents and lock out everyone else.

Now the ruse is dead. Mayor Kevin McCarty and the City Council are ready to finish the paved levee bike trail that links Freeport to Downtown and the American River Parkway.

The safety and security con job was obvious from the start, dating from the late 1970s. But nobody challenged it.

Sacramento finally has a mayor who knows when to shut up. Kevin McCarty gets the beauty of brevity. He realizes the less a politician says, the more people listen.

The city’s long-delayed levee bike path through Pocket, linking Freeport to Land Park, Downtown and the American River trail, gives McCarty the perfect platform to show off his talent for tight speeches.

When the City Council voted unanimously to approve the Environmental Impact Report for the levee bike trail, the mayor boiled a half-century of fences, gates, backroom deals and deceptions into one sentence.

Midtown Farmers Market is a nice place to visit. But I wouldn’t want to stock up there.

The produce is ripe, the salespeople helpful, the prices reasonable. But look past the street theater charm and the Midtown market is a specialty destination.

A moveable feast built on fresh, edible impulses. Great for grazing. A treat for tourists. Not for real grocery shopping.

Real grocery shopping requires a real grocery store.

Fortunately, Sacramento has the best real grocery store in California. I’m talking about Nugget in Lake Crest Village on Florin Road.

I don’t have much use for social media. Deleted my accounts years ago. But I’d like to see what TikTok can do with an Environmental Impact Report.

Despite their reputation as weapons exploited by self-interested neighbors and extortionist labor unions—all true—environmental reports dispense useful information. I’ve read dozens. Learned something every time.

Trouble is they are tough to read—ponderous, repetitive, silted. No narrative energy. No character development. Just facts presented in proscribed formats. Boxes checked, dry as cotton.

Which is why I waited three months to tackle the city’s new environmental report on the Sacramento River Parkway Project, otherwise known as the levee bike path.