Ron Fink

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 […]

The city of Lompoc’s budget discussion has been going on for a couple of months, and there have been several presentations by the staff. I have been taking each of them at face value because the staff members are supposed to be professionals hired for their skill, so it seemed to be the way to […]

Lompoc City Councilmember Jim Mosby is still searching for truth but can’t seem to find it. His recent statements and the actions he supported on May 28 are indicative of a person who is totally out of touch with the needs of the constituents he serves and seemingly unable to simply tell the truth. Preparing […]

Last Wednesday, May 15, the Lompoc City Council had another budget workshop; they have had four of them so far, but the only work that gets done is when the staff tells them once again that they don’t have enough revenue to run the city effectively. At the last meeting, the city manager and his […]

Lompoc has a revenue problem that looks like it’s not going away anytime soon. Many are arguing that any proposed temporary sales tax to help alleviate the revenue problem should be for a specific purpose, so let’s try and figure out just what that purpose would be. The City Council majority is currently standing by […]

The Lompoc City Council had another discussion about what to do about the next two-year budget. To put it in plain language, they have a serious problem that is only going to get worse. City Manager Jim Throop, who has 30 years of budgeting experience, opened the meeting saying, “This is a very big budget […]

The Santa Maria Sun has a Canary whose opinions grace the paper each week, but this bird is not alone. Preening as she does and chirping away, the Canary is a piker when compared to the avian trio that perch on the dais during Lompoc City Council meetings. One citizen recently complained during a council […]