Democratic Assembly members Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa and Jared Huffman of San Rafael say they approved pay raises for key aides because these folks deserve pay raises and because higher salaries make it easier to retain the most qualified people. Maybe Evans and Huffman should explain to the 63 [...]

“Don't follow leaders, Watch the parkin' meters.” -    Bob Dylan, in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” At last, downtown Santa Rosa has a buzz.  Unfortunately, it’s the sound of city officials talking about what they might do someday, somehow, somewhere to re-energize the downtown. In the latest random event, officials apparently determined [...]

Good news: I may be an Internet junkie, but I'm not the only one. In the New York Times today, writer Verlyn Klinkenborg acknowledges: “I consider myself a moderate user of personal electronics. . .  yet this constant foretaste of the future, (my) hunger for the next electronic blip, feels [...]

In Portland - a city celebrated for the vitality of its downtown neighborhoods - prime parking spaces in commercial areas are given over to bike corrals. Does encouraging bike travel reduce traffic congestion, energy consumption and air pollution? Does it reduce the effects of climate change? Absolutely. But Portland has [...]

A story in the Sacramento Bee this morning offers up an astonishing fact: State government today employes 4,000 more people than it did a year ago. Recession? Budget deficits? Layoffs in local government? It doesn’t matter. Political scientists say state government needs to start over. In the words of David [...]

My Sunday column - here - didn't make any friends among neighborhood opponents of projects proposed in Fountaingrove and Oakmont. When I used developer Bill Gallaher’s complaint about the Santa Rosa city bureaucracy as a starting point for a broader commentary,  people opposed to his projects weren’t going to listen [...]

Developer Bill Gallaher went public last week, voicing resentments that have been eating at the local business community for a long time. In an interview with Staff Writer Kevin McCallum, Gallaher said he was forced to lay off half his local work force – not because of a bad economy [...]

It was so unexpected. On an otherwise  beautiful day, I was checking into the Lake Yellowstone Hotel in the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park when a stranger delivered the shocking news. No sir, there is no cell phone service in this area of the park, and no, the hotel [...]

Martin Espinoza’s story - read it here - testifies to the price Californians will pay for the absence of common sense in state government. It will be only one example among many. In Sonoma County, he reports, some 10,000 kids - children of the poor and the working poor - [...]

Final thoughts at the end of another budget crisis: There are no illusions about what happened in Sacramento last week. One more time, the governor and the state Legislature failed to make the hard choices about spending priorities and the structure of state government. One more time, they failed to [...]