By Larry Weitzman A new El Dorado County budget was presented to the Board of Supervisors on June 13. While it was signed by Don Ashton, it is the budget of outgoing CAO Larry Combs, his final gift to the county. The bills for his one-year tenure are now coming due. A simple analysis of […]
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By Dan Walters, Sacramento Bee California is spending more than $2 billion a year on health care for retired state employees – up more than 80 percent in the last decade, according to Gov. Jerry Brown’s latest budget. However, the state would have to spend over three times as much – $6.6 billion a year […]
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Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the June 23, 2016, Los Angeles Times. The water level in Lake Shasta, California’s largest reservoir, had plunged to less than a third of normal by the end of last year. Then came the El Niño rainfall, which by April had tripled the volume of water in the lake. The […]
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By Char Miller Sometimes it’s the small things that can best tell big stories. Like the Marina Fire, which has burned a modest 654 acres to the north of Lee Vining, threatened but not burned any structures, and whose greatest disruption was periodically to shut down Highway 395. It hardly seems worth much attention. Such […]
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By Darcie Goodman Collins Traffic congestion at Lake Tahoe and the associated pollution due to projects being developed just outside the Tahoe basin present a critical threat to Lake Tahoe clarity. Projects near the lake that are in the final stages of approval circumvent the standards that protect the Lake and will flood the area […]
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To the community, Summer in South Lake Tahoe is already known for its outdoor entertainment – great beaches, hiking trails, kayaking, mountain biking, and more. I don’t often hear talk about South Lake Tahoe as a theatrical hub, but that really should change. On June 30, I had the pleasure of attending the opening night […]
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To the community, OK — I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, but whose idea was it to have a parade on one the busiest days of the year? This town starts to vibrate at 7am on July 4 and the “powers that be” decided it was a good idea to shut down Highway […]
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By John R. McNeill The spread of Zika virus by Aedes aegypti is not the first time a mosquito-borne virus has broken loose in the Americas. Mosquitos and viruses have shaped the history of the Western Hemisphere in surprising ways for centuries; the United States might not be an independent country without them. After the […]
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By Joe Mathews Our state’s leaders keep asking communities to do more to make our local public schools better—even as they keep us in the dark about how those same schools are doing. In the 2013-14 school year, the state suspended the Academic Performance Index, or API, the chief tool Californians had for seeing how […]
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By Joe Mathews If California were a bank, what sort of bank would it be? Banc of California has a new, intriguing answer. In just six years, “California’s bank” has emerged as one of America’s fastest-growing banks—from $700 million in assets in 2010 to nearly $10 billion today. Since the end of 2014, it’s been […]
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