Read all about it! We're not bad Read all about it! We're not bad (March 18, 2005)

by Jeb Bing

I don't know about you, but I always like to read the local newspaper when I'm traveling. That's hard to do at airports where the national dailies dominate the news racks, but it's fun to exit at one of the small towns along the Interstate, grab a cup of coffee and read about where I'm at. So I struck paydirt two weeks ago as a judge at the California Newspaper Publishers Association's Better Newspapers Contest in Sacramento. I had a chance to meet with some of the more than 60 editors from cities up and down the state, from Eureka to the north to Butte County and to San Juan Capistrano down south. As in Pleasanton, traffic is a major concern for everyone, but compared to others, our town is in great shape.

Jeff Forward, Editor of the twice-weekly Elk Grove Citizen, said his fast-growing community at the far south end of Sacramento now has a population of 110,000, up 20,000 in just a year because of a major annexation. Along with that growth has come problems from conflicts of interest on the City Council to an overcrowded school district that must deal with 70 different languages and dialects. Cut-through traffic from I-5 to Highway 99 goes right through the center of town, and even the park district is in trouble, trying to wrest itself from a district that governed the area for decades before there ever was an Elk Grove and doesn't want to give up the tax dollars.

To the west, in an area called the Mendonoma Coast along Highway 1, Julie Verran is a reporter and photographer for the small but well-read Independent Coast Observer in Gualala, an unincorporated community that straddles the Sonoma and Mendocino county line. An avowed environmentalist, she believes the area is losing out to developers of seaside properties and gated communities, with an estimated 25,000 from the Bay Area, Sacramento and the Central Valley streaming into town almost weekly to escape the crowds. That leaves the 10,000 who live there full-time with congested roadways, long lines at grocery stores and ever shrinking access pathways to the beach. On the other hand, the area's popularity has also boosted circulation for Verran's newspaper, which is now mailed out to several thousand out-of-town addresses of the part-time residents who want to keep up with the news in Mendonoma.

Greg Kane, Business Editor of the Lodi News-Sentinel, said his once-peaceful farming and vineyard city is also changing. Lodi has won rave reviews for redeveloping and preserving its historic downtown, and now is adding retailers. One is a proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter that the Lodi City Council approved despite objections, partly to make sure that a second Supercenter in Stockton a few miles south of Lodi doesn't grab all the business.

Los Banos may be this year's surprise boomtown. Most of us see the directional sign on I-5 pointing to this once-sleepy farming community nine miles east unaware that it has become one of Northern California's fastest-growing cities. With a population of 30,000, up from 18,000 in the 2000 Census, homebuyers are gobbling up $350,000 new homes as fast as developers can build them. Lieb said they commute over the Pacheco Pass to jobs in Gilroy, San Jose and the Silicon Valley, leaving town (and their children) before dawn and coming back when it's dark. About the only time they see their community in daylight is on the weekends. Even so, their shopping choices are about to expand, with the old airport to be relocated to a new commuter jet field east of Los Banos, and the site to be redeveloped with a Home Depot, Costco and, yes, another Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Most of the editors I talked to have been to Pleasanton, which they said looks pretty good to them, all things considered, traffic and all.

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