Paul Shigley's blog

A bomb detonated in my front yard at 3:30 a.m. on June 21. Actually, it was an explosive from the sky in the form of lightning, and it was the start of an electrical storm that continued for 11 hours.
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The Calaveras County Community Development Agency is in the political cross-hairs after the county grand jury issued a scathing report that questions the agency’s hiring practices, the director’s management style and the use of consultants.

Sound familiar? Not the details, but the tone. Your local newspaper has probably struck similar notes recently. That’s because it is the season for grand juries to release their annual reports on local government.
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The California Air Resources Board’s release of a draft scoping plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions strikes me as important for several reasons. The plan provides a starting point for how California will dramatically reduce its output of gases that cause global climate change, and the plan downplays the role of land use planning in those reductions.

Perhaps most important, however, the plan marks the State of California’s return to the role of public policy leader.
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The city with the best vacation downtown is the Rodney Dangerfield of beach towns. It gets no respect, and it is often overshadowed by its more glamorous neighbor.

Still, Carpinteria has the best downtown for a vacation in California. We’ll tell you why.
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When we listed the best small-city downtowns in the Central Valley, we didn’t include Exeter, a Tulare County community eight miles east of Visalia. Exeter was in our discussion, but it didn’t make the cut for reasons that I don’t recall.

After spending part of one day last week in Exeter, I’m convinced we made a mistake. In fact, Exeter has one of the best downtowns for a city of its size (about 10,700 people) not only in the Central Valley, but in the entire state.
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Some of California’s best-known Gold Rush towns feel like museums that are operated for the benefit of tourists and transplanted retirees. Although the towns are genuinely historic, they may or may not be genuine places today.

Yreka is different. The historic district in the county seat of Siskiyou County can match the historic qualities of just about any Gold Rush city in California. But it’s no museum. Downtown Yreka is very much a functioning and evolving district.
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If you’ve ever shopped around for securities or mutual funds, you’ve heard the caveat that past results are no guarantee of future performance. The same warning apparently applies to California’s water system.
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When gasoline costs $5 a gallon, and diesel $6, who is going to buy a house in the exurbs?

With those fuel prices appearing inevitable within a year or two, I have been posing that question in casual conversations with people. Their answers is, well … no one.
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The campaign in Napa County over a ballot measure that would impose a 1% growth limit may be a microcosm of the entire Bay Area.

On one side are slow-growth advocates with the usual arguments about density, traffic, greedy developers and untrustworthy politicians. On the other side are developers with promises for creating housing in a very nice setting within a few miles of tens of thousands of jobs. In between are local government officials, who may end up arm wrestling with lawyers over who should review the project.
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