For more than 40 years, Brice Harris has sat front row in the nation’s community college system. First as a part-time faculty member at a small campus in Kansas City, later as president of Fresno City College and since 1996 as chancellor of Los Rios Community College District. He has spent his career working within multi-college systems. This month, he retires.

Right now our region is in the dumps. We bemoan our high unemployment, our devastated city budgets, our beleaguered school systems. We look enviously at our neighbors to the south and west, whose economies are improving faster than ours.

Failing in the restaurant business is a great way to go broke. The risks are huge, and the collapse rate is high yet there’s always the chance you’ll hit the sweet spot.

Celebrating 30 “wonderful years of life,” this year, Carina Lampkin has been cooking since landing her first job at an Auburn restaurant more than a decade ago. 

Alexander Gonzalez, 66, stands in front of the climbing wall at The WELL gym at Sacramento State. Gonzalez has served as campus president since 2003 and has no plans to retire. 

If the people of California won’t vote to tax Big Tobacco or Big Oil, why does Gov. Jerry Brown think they’ll vote to tax themselves?

An older brain might be more accurate, more thoughtful, more social and better able to use more of its parts: It just works in different and creative ways to compensate.

For business owners like Zennes Faljean, the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Obama’s federal health care overhaul marked far more of a beginning than a conclusion.

It was sometime in 2004 when Larry Booth and his brother Martin swallowed the truth that they wouldn’t live forever.

On a sweltering day in mid-June, more than 100 newly minted teachers assembled for graduation at The Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

Nathan Johnston has contemplated his own death several times over.

When Laurie Grimsman graduated in June from the Graduate School of Management at UC Davis, she was 51 and a self-proclaimed “age outlier.”

Sacramento County will need an estimated 23,000 low- and very low-income housing units in the next nine years. The six-county region stretching from Yuba to Placer to El Dorado would need more than 41,000 units. But without the tax increment financing once provided by redevelopment agencies, city leaders are wondering where they’re going to come up with the cash to build.

When the future of redevelopment agencies started to look shaky last year, West Sacramento decided it could do without one. The city put together a new financing strategy, and in May the Community Investment Action Plan was revealed.

The number of distressed properties on the market in the Capital Region is finally shrinking. And, the so-called shadow inventory — properties that are not yet on the market but which are seriously delinquent, in the foreclosure process or foreclosed — is also declining.

The icy retail climate along the Highway 50 corridor east of Sacramento is slowly beginning to thaw, but an overabundance of standing inventory remains.