The Sacramento City Council is expected to join other local governments Tuesday in opposing an area adjacent to the American River Parkway near the Nimbus Dam as a proposed site for a federal and state joint operations center handling flood control. Warren Truitt, president of the Save the American River Association (SARA), said the operations center, if built at Nimbus, would be a “visual blight” on the area. “It’s absolutely outrageous to place this high-security facility next to the parkway,” he said, “and it needs to be in a higher area, not at 28 feet. If the dam were to break, this area would flood along with other residences in that area.” Currently, three sites are under conside

The Grassroots Working Group (GWG) will be back before the County Board of Supervisors at 4:00 pm on Tuesday, August 9th, in the supervisor’s chambers at 700 H Street, Sacramento. For Grassroots, this will be the most important Board decision of the year.   The Board is considering whether to sponsor state legislation this year that would give the county the authority to place before the voters a 1/10 % sales tax for parks purposes (one penny for every $10 spent). The county is already authorized to place a sales tax before the voters, but not one this small.  Save the American River Association supports this.   The revenue from a sales tax must to go to a governmental agency. SARA believe

County supervisors will discuss the future of regional parks on Tuesday after hearing recommendations from a local group trying to rescue the parks from extinction. The Grassroots Working Group (GWG), an independent citizen-volunteer group, was formed in 2010 to explore ways to keep area parks open without further straining the county budget. “We consider the current condition of the County Regional Parks Department to be beyond critical,” wrote Charlea Moore, an Elverta resident and Grassroots Working Group member, in a letter to the Board of Supervisors. “Something must be done very soon in order to rescue our regional parks and open space system, or the result will be an enormous los

We call it the Crown Jewel of Sacramento and are stingy about keeping it polished and protected. It generates an estimated $365,000,000 annually and more visits than Yosemite, yet it is underfunded and undervalued as a regional asset. The American River Parkway provides our water, improves our air quality and supports diverse wildlife, including some of the last West Coast salmon runs. We go there to rest, recreate and reflect. The 23 mile stretch from Nimbus Dam to the confluence with the Sacramento River is officially designated as a Wild and Scenic River. It is the most heavily used recreation river in California.  TV news crews try to scare us silly when the river rises "near Flood S

Sacramento officials should consider requiring special use permits for large water users, including water and beverage bottling companies such as Nestlé, a City Council committee decided Thursday. The council's Law & Legislation Committee passed a recommendation that the City Council approve a working group to explore whether the city's biggest water users should be subject to conditional use permits that would help give the city more ability to monitor and regulate their water use. The recommendation was approved unanimously Thursday afternoon by the committee's three present members, Chair Sandy Sheedy and councilmen Steve Cohn and Robbie Waters. "We have a scarce resource that we don