Opinion

The last time I spoke with my wife was around 8:30 a.m. that Wednesday. I was busy at work so I cut her short but she just wanted to tell me how excited she was to go to Disneyland that weekend and that a family friend Stephanie (who would baby-sit our son) had drawn a charcoal picture of Riley and she was going to pick it up from her brother Dave who had called her and asked that she pick it up. Dave was the loser in the group: no real job, he lived at home with mom, in and out of jail. He was the one guy we all felt sorry for, most of all Heather who always encouraged me to invite him with me on my fishing trips because he needed to have some clean fun.

A company is like a family, and when disaster strikes one part of an organization—and communities we serve—it’s felt throughout. Our newspaper group publishes seven Bay Area weeklies, including the North Bay Bohemian, based in Santa Rosa. When devastating, uncontrolled flames struck Sonoma County on...

Two and a half years ago San Benito County got a wakeup call that the enhanced petroleum extraction juggernaut that has swept large areas of the US can happen anywhere, even here. Mysterious giant thumper trucks showed up in our neighborhood on the western edge of San Benito County, and it soon was revealed that they were prospecting for oil. Neighbors were concerned, and a grass roots effort was launched, Aromas Cares for the Environment or ACE. We educated ourselves about petroleum extraction, and learned that there are new technologies such as fracking being widely used in other states. We also discovered that San Benito County’s regulation of oil drilling was almost non-existent. ACE set out to do something about that. We worked with the Board of Supervisors for almost a year, culminating in the passage of a new County ordinance that brought some scrutiny to the process of obtaining an oil drilling permit here. The ordinance doesn’t have all of the protections that we wanted, but it was the best compromise that could be approved at the time.

Hollister's mayoral position is a default leadership role in some respects because it is not elected by the citywide populace. As Hollister climbs from the depths of a six-year sewer-connection moratorium – all the while during a national recession – this city needs more than a mere figurehead in its top political job. There is, on the contrary, a crucial necessity for more.

Autumn is here and your garden does not need as much water in October as it does in July.  Lawns require watering a maximum of three times per week in the hot summer months and one or two times per week in the spring and...