Ron Fink

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? […]

Have you ever made a decision that had unintended consequences? For example, you decided to paint your house, and the color swatch you chose to pick the paint didn’t match the final outcome when the entire house was painted. The unintended consequence was that instead of admiring the paint job, all you got were complaints […]

More than 25 years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) declared the Western snowy plover a threatened species and afforded “protections” that included nature establishing a sustained plover population of 400 adult birds on three Vandenberg Air Force Base beaches. Apparently the science didn’t support this conclusion then and still doesn’t. In doing […]

Extending the boundaries of the city of Lompoc west to Bailey Avenue has been the dream of politicians, some property owners, and developers for several decades. But there are two opposing arguments, one supporting and another objecting to westward expansion of the city. Supporters of an annexation point out that going back over 50 years, […]