Sacramento Current

I’m still kind of stunned by the way the City has handled released of the arena term sheet–detailing (sort of) the basics of the deal with the investor whales to build a new Kings basketball arena on the site of … Continue reading →

On Thursday the Sacramento City school board will likely vote to shut down 20 percent of the district’s elementary schools. It’s eleven schools in all, and all are in low income neighborhoods. The move will save about $2.5 million dollars, … Continue reading →

If you’ve been following this school closure saga, you may have heard that the school closure list is about to change The rumor is that Tahoe Park will likely be spared, and Mark Twain elementary is now on the chopping … Continue reading →

Parents and neighbors are feeling pretty ambushed by the Sac City school district’s decision to “right-size” 20 percent of its elementary schools out of existence. The premise is that these 11 schools are “severely under-enrolled,” inefficient money losers, and that the … Continue reading →

Note: This is a somewhat longer version of a column that will appear tomorrow in the Sacramento News and Review.  The more you peel back the layers of the Sac City school district’s brutal “right-sizing” plan, the weirder it gets. … Continue reading →

My barber has been frustrated the last few times I have gotten a trim. Barbers – especially barbers who use a straight razor – are people you want to be in a good mood when they cut your hair. He … Continue reading →

An article ran yesterday at Atlantic Cities highlighting the best data releases of the year by cities around the country. (Atlantic Cities is a very cool website highlighting ideas and reasearch in urban development.) These include a number of projects … Continue reading →

When Ellyn Bell made public her intention to leave the Sacramento City Unified School District board of trustees–so she could live closer to her new job in San Francisco–her colleagues on the school board decided it was too late and … Continue reading →

Big ideas week continues at Sacramento Current. The last episode was about new notions in California state budgeting. In this podcast, we drill down on a new idea for local governments that I’ve been really excited about. It’s called participatory … Continue reading →

So, Proposition 30 passed. That’s good, right? But what keeps us from ending up with tens of billions in deficits next time? Not much. In fact, a lot of people say that deficits and volatility are built-in to California’s system–with … Continue reading →