Restaurants, retail stores and salons are among the businesses finding assistance and resources from the Downtown Stockton Alliance, a public-private partnership uniting property owners and downtown businesses with a 2018-2019 strategic plan that focuses on specific steps to increase safety and cleanliness for a more more vibrant downtown.

The message popped into UC Berkeley sophomore Varsha Sarveshwar’s inbox a few days before the start of her Introduction to General Astronomy course in the fall of her freshman year. It contained the usual details about class times and textbooks. But then there was something surprising: a plea from the professor to skip the first day of class.

In 2016, when husband-and-wife team Kale Wisnia and Catherine Reon were scouting locations for Kletterwald USA — planned as the Sacramento region’s first tree top adventure park — they immediately fell in love with the undeveloped park, just 10 minutes from downtown Sacramento.

Virginia Varela, Golden Pacific Bank president and CEO, offers her insight into the region’s community banks.

In November, the Sacramento Region Business Association launched Region Finance, a trade association created to help local governments do more business with community banks. Its board consists of executives from local banks — including River City Bank, American River Bank and others — pushing to keep businesses, resources and funds local to spur economic growth.

The political whirlwind raging around California’s “sanctuary” laws isn’t doing much damage to the laws themselves, according to many state legal experts. In fact, the brunt of any legal damage may be felt most by the small city that started the rebellion.

I’m not here to throw anyone under the bus, but let’s talk about these seminars and the reality of flipping homes in Sacramento.

When Lodi’s General Mills plant closed in 2015, it left unused a nearly two-mile stretch of Union Pacific spur track. A vestige of a 19th century rail, the track had been converted into a service line, but today weeds grow between its ties, and the line seems to have little use but for safely recreating scenes from the 1986 movie Stand by Me.

Squaw Valley is on a quest to reduce its carbon footprint and achieve 100 percent renewable energy by as soon as the end of this year. In doing so, the company is undertaking one of the most aggressive eco-friendly efforts by the ski industry across the nation.

California’s major revenue sources have shifted over time. Until 1995, the biggest was property taxes. Today, it’s personal income taxes.

And California ranks fairly high in overall taxation: 10th highest both per capita and as a percentage of personal income, based on the latest available data from the U.S. Census.