Ron Fink

Extending the boundaries of the city of Lompoc west to Bailey Avenue has been a dream of politicians, property owners, and developers for several decades. Going back over 50 years, we can see evidence on the extreme west side of town that all the intersections are four-way and dead end in farm fields; there are […]

Facts are a strange thing. Often they can come back to bite a politician when he or she least expects it. One Lompoc City Council member is an expert at misrepresenting facts, and he usually gets away with it. Recently though, he picked the wrong subject and the wrong city employee to pick on publicly. […]

Everyone in Lompoc who either lives in one of the gang-infested areas, reads the local newspapers, follows social media, or watches the evening news knows that there is a crime/gang problem in Lompoc. Two weeks ago, the Canary summed it up this way: “It sounds like a youth violence problem, one that the city of […]

This is a question many people have been asking for several years; so far, the progress has been minimal when compared to the scope of the problem. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently visited California in response to a request for more federal funding to solve the problem; a letter “Homeless […]

For the past several months, more than 100 public speakers in Lompoc have been asking for the right to vote on a general sales tax measure that would add revenue to the general fund. After initially resisting, the council has decided unanimously to let the folks do just that in March 2020. Back in 2008 […]

What do you do with an apartment complex that historically has been a center for drug dealing, gang activity, assaults, rapes, and murders in Lompoc for the last four decades? That question was answered at a council meeting on Sept. 17. Every city in the country has these types of apartments filled with low-income families; […]

The homeless are everywhere. Just take a walk down any street with commercial frontage in Lompoc and almost any other city, and you will see them with their signs and sleeping in the bushes or on the sidewalk. A case a couple of years ago—involving a law enacted in Boise, Idaho, that tried to get […]

Lompoc needs help going forward, and one would think the City Council would be leading the charge of positive change, hearing the needs of the citizens, deciding what is best to move the city forward, and so on.  If you have people seated as political leaders of a city who are intent on encouraging appeals […]

At the Aug. 6 Lompoc City Council meeting, Mayor Jenelle Osborne requested a “public safety and infrastructure report.” This is critical, as you will see below. Firefighters need reliable and safe equipment to not only get them to your emergency promptly, but also to remedy the situation they have been asked to help with. In […]

Who is held accountable when a major utility doesn’t maintain its distribution systems so that the places the conveyances (pipes and wires) run through are safe for the people living there, and who pays for their mistakes? The city of Lompoc has owned the electric utility serving city residents since 1923, however Pacific Gas and […]

The budget-busting trio of Councilmen Jim Mosby, Dirk Starbuck, and Victor Vega has a funny way of saving money. You would think that the trio would do everything it could to save the money for the essential things of government, but it just depends on their personal agenda. In January, Police Chief Pat Walsh was […]

On June 24, the Lompoc City Council had a special meeting concerning the budget. At the end of the meeting, they adopted a budget with some serious flaws. However, there was one big surprise. Reading the city budget is like studying the printed circuit of an Alexa device and trying to figure out how it […]