|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
After a grueling 4-hour meeting, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors selected a new district attorney Tuesday to replace the recalled and incompetent Pamela Price.
The appointee, Judge Ursula Jones Dickson, will be sworn in Tuesday. She brings a strong pedigree to the job—serving the last 11 years on the county bench after working previous for the DA’s office as a prosecutor. Gov. Jerry Brown appointed her to the court.
By all appearances, she is a good choice by the board that had a strong field of final candidates. The quality of the finalists showed in the three votes that it took to decide on Jones Dickson. She will need to hit the ground running to rebuild morale and staff in the DA’s office that Price had started to dismantle.
She will presumably stand for election in 2026 to finish out Price’s term and, should she be re-elected, run as an incumbent in 2028.
I must pick a bone with Livermore Mayor John Marchand who was interviewed in the East Bay Times recently. He… said both cities have had ongoing discussions about the Dublin Boulevard extension, and he maintains that Livermore will not pay for any part of the road if Dublin annexes the area. He wants to maintain an “open space buffer” between the cities.
“When you drive along the Peninsula, you leave one town and enter another one. You don’t know where one town ends and the other begins. There’s not distance between the two towns,” Marchand said. “When you come into the Tri-Valley, there’s actually this breathing space between these two communities. Livermore voters believe that an open space boundary is incredibly important for quality of life.”
North of I-580, there are some bare hills, Look in the other direction and it’s either historic gravel pits along Stanley Boulevard or the San Francisco Premium Outlets that border Pleasanton’s Asian shopping center and the car dealerships.
There’s no open space until you get to Livermore’s Las Positas Golf Course. Livermore leaders were happy to grab the sales tax from the outlets and adjoining hotels, and let Pleasanton and Dublin deal with the local traffic and the backed-up freeway.
President Donald Trump either needs to listen to his advisors or get much better staff work. His comments about California water—admittedly a complex subject—show a stunning lack of understanding. His notion that waters flows out of the Pacific Northwest and could connect to reservoirs in Southern California is absurd. He probably has avoided the deeply blue Northwest thus knows nothing about the magnificent Columbia River that divides Oregon and Washington as it flows to the Pacific Ocean.
That’s true of rivers up and down the coast that flow east to west and end up in the Pacific Ocean.—even those in California. Water from the Sacramento River is diverted from its normal east-west route to flow south through the Delta to the pumps, while the San Joaquin River actually flows backward (that’s a common measure of how much water the pumps are moving).
Certainly, Trump and others can debate whether saving the Delta Smelt is worth shutting down or limiting the huge pumps near Tracy, but judges appointed by presidents of both parties have upheld the law. The problem is the law and that’s a Congressional responsibility—one that cost former Tracy Rep. Richard Pombo his seat when his lack of attention to his district opened the way for Jerry McInerney to upset him. Until there’s a consensus in Congress to change the law and—given the religion of climate change that the green lobby follows—that will be quite a while.
Trump’s questioning the time to rebuild and the reservoir situation are valid. He was critical of local officials and their failure to move quickly to allow burned-out residents to get started with the rebuilding process. It’s worth remembering how quickly L.A. area freeways were rebuilt after earthquakes when the red (green) tape was cut. We saw the same thing with how quickly the Bay Bridge Maza re-opened after the damaging fires. The re-route I-880 and the eastern span of the Bay Bridge had the opposite results.
Pleasanton council shows early support for annexation, downtown plan, other priority projectsMarch 25, 2026 2:36 pm
Nighttime lane closures on I-580 near Pleasanton, I-680 through San Ramon ValleyMarch 25, 2026 2:05 pm
Trump and Pamala Price have something in common, neither one is competent for the offices that they were elected. Hoping the balance of power will hold our Country together after seeing the cabinet appointments he has made this time around.