Cover Story

The soft, rhythmic thumping sound of the gray and white pit bull/lab mix Banjo’s tail on Jessie Funes and Audy Macdonald’s living room couch underscores the chatter of the meeting, a sign of appreciation for all the attention he’s getting. A group of volunteers and board members for the House of Pride and Equality (HOPE) […]

  A picture is more than just the image it portrays. It encompasses the way the photographer who captured it sees light and dark, angles and lines, animate and inanimate. Each snapshot is as unique as the person holding the camera.  Since 1994, New Times Media Group has invited local photographers to show us life […]

Dan Vordale’s boots crunch loose dirt and crumpled dead grass as he stomps through a neat row of waist-high flowers.  “Ever since we came into this valley, the one flower we’ve grown is called stock,” he says. “It’s a big part of our company’s sales.” Vordale is a vice president for Ocean View Flowers, a […]

Some of the Central Coast’s most up-and-coming eateries don’t need a restaurant in wine country — they’re on the go. The food truck craze didn’t turn out to be a fad, and local entrepreneurs are starting up their own mobile eateries or enjoying long-term success after lots of hard work. For this week’s cover story, […]

It was the 1980s and teenager Mark Booher decided to audition for PCPA’s (The Pacific Conservatory Theatre) summer cast in Santa Maria. “I remember sitting there thinking, ‘These people are a lot better than me,’” Booher said. He was right. Booher didn’t make the cut that year. But a decade or so later, he returned […]

A few curious neighbors watched as carpenters pieced together the wooden skeleton of a 2,138-square-foot house on the corner of South Bradley Road in Santa Maria’s Sunrise Hills neighborhood on May 8. The finished product would one day include a spacious kitchen, lower and upper level living rooms, three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, […]

Good morning and welcome to Sociology 101, an introduction to the study of society and social behavior among homo sapiens. Humans are social animals. We naturally create and maintain social networks. Some of us have very tight and often exclusive social circles whiles others have large overlapping networks, moving between and belonging to a number […]

It’s not every year that Santa Barbara County voters to choose a new sheriff. It’s every four, of course, but this year’s election is different from those in the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office’s recent history. That’s because Sheriff Bill Brown—who’s running for re-election for his fourth consecutive term—is facing not one, but two challengers […]

The storm is rolling in. It’s January. A parched fall, thus far followed by an abnormally dry winter—which helped produce the largest fire in California’s recorded history—is already giving the state’s farmers and water managers visions of imminent, crippling drought. And while the deluge associated with this particular moisture system rolling in off the Pacific […]

Kevin Lee McLaughlin woke up in the early morning hours of April 13, 2017, feeling unwell. The 60-year-old inmate had been in custody in the SLO County Jail since late January awaiting sentencing on an assault charge. At 2:30 a.m., he saw a jail nurse for an evaluation. He complained of numbness, tingling, and pain […]

The last thing that Amber Davis remembers before the chaos erupted was tying up the laces of her purple Vans. Davis was 15 years old, living at home with her biological mother, stepfather, two brothers, and stepsister. Six months before, Davis had been in and out of Vista Del Mar Hospital in Ventura for multiple […]