Ron Fink

When the first plane flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903, it began an era that has produced some very large aircraft—many of those are military aircraft. In 1937, the U.S. Army Air Corp developed the first firefighting vehicle modified specifically to fight aircraft fires from a commercially produced fire engine. Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSF) […]

When either commercial or government missile and space programs are being planned for launch, the team must prepare the rocket for launch, and the military or the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) must approve the launch team’s “flight hazard area analysis.” The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) applies to commercial space programs and specifically says that […]

There have been more than 50 incidents this year in Lompoc involving misguided people shooting a gun who have no regard for the safety of others. Both their targets and innocent bystanders have been hit and either injured or killed in these incidents. Some were gang related, others were committed by thoughtless people with no […]

Recently every registered voter and city resident received two important pieces of mail; I’ll bet some of you just threw them away, but they were both very important documents, and you should have read them carefully. The first was the Santa Barbara County Voter Guide. There are two important issues on this special election ballot: […]

The budget is a topic that isn’t normally of concern to most people; in fact, I would guess that most residents in Lompoc or anywhere else don’t even know what’s in the budget or how it is prepared. Most certainly very few people know anything about the principles that govern municipal budgets. History suggests that […]

In September 2017 in a locally published commentary, I observed “Broken windows; Lompoc is full of them”; this commentary was based on a theory by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982 that used broken windows as a metaphor for disorder within neighborhoods. Expanding on the theory, they wrote: “If the first […]

In the world of politics, the people we elect think in terms of short spans of time like election cycles, so if an unpopular decision like increasing electric fees needs to be made, rule No. 1 in their playbook is to kick the can down the road and let a future elected body worry about […]

A few weeks ago, I said, “The local government budget is usually the last thing anyone thinks of or is even interested in. The last Lompoc budget document was 189 pages of numbers, staffing charts, service descriptions and explanations of how much funding it takes to run the city. “Even though it is a tedious […]

On June 1, the Lompoc City Council decided on a rare 5-0 vote to allow voters to decide whether or not to tax manufacturers of cannabis products in Lompoc. But first a brief history lesson. The council first considered this idea on March 20, 2018; here is how the discussion went according to the minutes […]

The local government budget is usually the last thing anyone thinks of or is even interested in. The previous Lompoc budget document was 189 pages of numbers, staffing charts, service descriptions, and explanations of how much funding it takes to run the city. Even though it is a tedious read, you should show some interest […]

The homeless (unsheltered population) problem has been festering in our community and virtually every other community in the United States for the last several decades. I can remember that in the 1960s there were scores of “cardboard condos” on Los Angeles’ Skid Row and soup kitchens were abundant in the downtown area. And decades before […]

In Santa Maria, Lompoc, and many other areas of the country, Earth Day was observed a couple of weeks ago as it has been for several decades. It originated in 1970 to recognize and encourage world peace and honor the Earth. In more than 50 years, is the Earth doing any better peacefully or environmentally? […]