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Las Positas College offers quality and valueiew:
It's where you finish higher education that counts.
Congrats to the marketing folks at Las Positas College in Livermore for smart print ad selling one of the paths that it excels at—transfer to elite universities. The ad appearing last week touts former students who have moved on to Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Colombia and Yale. That makes the A list for almost any ambitious student seeking a quality higher education.
I have a few friends who took a similar path realizing it’s not where you start that’s important —it’s where you finish. Both consider UC’s their alma mater although their first higher education came from other places. I can speak with some experience having spent a year at Chabot College (Las Positas’ sister institution in Hayward) during my seven-year journey to a Cal degree. The right classes transferred directly and I’m a Cal guy—when it comes to sports—not much else given how whacko it’s become and it was weird when I was there in the wake of the Free Speech Movement.
One Las Positas question: why the silent ad on TV—many people listen (myself included) as much or more than they watch particularly during the day on cable channels. Hard to believe there’s not a communications or marketing student who can do a voice-over to accompany the images.
I have been sharply critical of public transit agencies refusal to bring their very well-compensated staff in line with current ridership. David Crane, a public policy lecturer at Stanford and president of the non-partisan Govern for California group, publicly criticized BART to Sacramento legislators during the discussion of the $750 million loan that unfortunately made it into the budget.
He wrote, “Between 2019 and 2024, BART’s boardings fell 57 percent yet staffing grew and annual payments to employees rose 32 percent. That’s a big problem because payments to employees now amount to $171,000 per employee, up from $140,000 in 2019 and constitute 54 percent of BART’s net operating expenses.”
Crane is no light weight. A Democrat with degrees from the University of Michigan and UC Hastings law school, he served in the Schwartznegger administration as well as on the high-speed rail board, the UC Board of Regents, the State Teachers Retirement System, the California Economic Development Commission and the Environmental Defense Fund among others.
Sadly, the Legislature and governor did not heed his voice.
More congrats are due for the Sunset Development Co. Team as they transition their 585-acre business park into a mixed use walkable community. The addition in 2019 of City Center has been a home run as has opening up the man-made lake that had been out-of-sight behind the sprawling million-square-feet at 2600 Camino Ramon.
The latest initiative announced with the first park space in the re-envisioned park is Heritage Park next to the Bemont Villages senior community. The focus is “The Little Big House”, public art by Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt of R&R Studios. It an oversized playhouse designed for interaction while providing seating and shade.
It’s first installation of what will be a $20 million public art program funded by Sunset over the next decade. The press release describes it as “Bishop Ranch’s first folly” and promises future follies of differing materials, scale and form that will be integrated in the redevelopment of the park.
It’s nice to see Sunset joining the public art effort that the late Dublin Mayor Peter Snyder launched at the Dublin Civic Center with Gaia, the centerpiece artwork.
TEASER: Look tomorrow for my Pleasanton Weekly cover story. One of the guys I interviewed who marched for 41 years was Brad Hirst who loves to have fun as evidenced by this photo from the Matterhorn and one of its rescue dogs. He’s posing with the Weekly.
