Ron Fink

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, […]

Renewable energy has been the poster child for politicians and celebrity personages for the last few years to replace fossil fuel energy sources. In their quest to rid the Earth of the well-paying, job-producing, general-fund pot-of-gold fossil fuel industry, they think that solar/wind power is the answer. The primary justification for their concern is that […]

On Feb. 2, the Lompoc city manager tried to justify using fees collected to operate and maintain the drinking water utility to pay for homeless camp cleanups in the riverbed by saying that “funding the ongoing costs for cleanup and patrolling from the water enterprise fund would be a legitimate use” because the homeless population […]

So, after nearly a year of COVID-19 related closures, let’s give the Lompoc Unified School District (LUSD) a “progress report”; how is it doing and what grade would it get if this were a classroom project? I am not an educator, but I think we can figure this out based on the progress made so […]

Some Lompoc City Council members might think that a CIP is what you do with a cool beverage, but that’s not the case. As a city service area grows, additional facilities and equipment are needed to provide citizens with an adequate level of service. The capital improvement program (CIP) is the long-range overarching management tool […]

Anyone who works for a living gets paid to do it; the amount they receive depends on what the employer feels the job is worth. Most employee unions, large employers, and government agencies employ experts to establish what they call “pay equity.” But how do they do it? This is important information when worker representatives […]

As 2020 comes to an end, it’s time to look forward. This year was one of the most chaotic of any in my adult life. Hopefully, the problems caused by a disease pass by and we can return to what was normal before politicians got into the doctoring business. In September 2017, the Lompoc City […]

When I was a young man, I bought several Dr. Seuss books to help teach my children how to read. These were wonderful little stories, cleverly illustrated with words young children could easily learn in a few minutes each evening. One of the characters was a cynical grump Seuss named “Grinch” who wanted to steal […]

Everyone follows a path through life; some paths are littered with traps and dead ends, others with an easy ride/walk/run and nothing but positive outcomes. In Lompoc, the city used a transportation grant to build a paved path with all of those things wrapped up into one project. Dubbed the Riverbend Bike Path it was […]

By all accounts, the recent election had the highest level of participation in anyone’s memory—a stunning 85 percent countywide! Maybe this is the only positive outcome of the COVID-19 virus pandemic. I think that our county handled this well by allowing four in-person days of voting and counting vote-by-mail ballots as they arrived to provide […]