In the late 1980s, I worked in the mayor’s office in Houston, Texas. One of my colleagues was a police officer named Alan who worked […]
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Homeless: HEART Team Helps a Vet — For Now
Every city and town had them. They were the old men on small pensions nodding on park benches or leaning up against buildings with their hands clutching small bottles of Night Train, Thunderbird, or rotgut whiskey wrapped in brown paper sacks. The boarding houses and cheap hotels they inhabited were called “flophouses” or “rat traps.” The elevators and stairwells smelled of urine and Lysol. Some, like Louis X (not his […]
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Merrill Goodall: Water Monopolies and the Public Interest
“The lands have no value without water. If the water rights fall into the hands of irrigating companies and … individual owners, … eventually the monopoly of water rights will be an intolerable burden to the people…. The question for legislators to solve is to devise some practical means by which water rights may be distributed among individual farmers and water monopolies prevented.” John Wesley Powell, Report on the Arid […]
Are Water Sales Delaying Development of Alternative Sources?
If one wants to know how bad a drought is, ask someone whose business it is to plumb the water table and test the effectiveness of wells and pumps. A gentleman in the business told this writer that he is busier than ever. Businesses that rely on well water need to keep the water flowing. Wells need testing to make sure they don’t go dry and to check pumps for […]
Reasons For Low Vaccination Rates in Stanislaus County
As of this writing, fewer than 50% of Stanislaus County residents have been fully vaccinated. Statewide, 56% of California residents are fully vaccinated. In Stanislaus County, the number drops to 43.1%. Nearby Bay Area counties are all over 60%, with Marin County leading the way at 74.5%. The county has large groups of folks with different reasons for avoiding Covid inoculation. The reasons are varied and the unvaccinated are difficult […]
Homeless: One City, One County
By October 1, 2015, homelessness in Modesto and Stanislaus County had become the region’s most urgent social and political issue. That’s when Stanislaus County Supervisors hosted their “Focus on Prevention” symposium to announce, “a ten-year journey of Stanislaus County toward community transformation and prosperity. A primary focus….is to reduce homelessness.” At the time, a few observers noted that “prevention” wasn’t possible for the hundreds of people already in the region […]