Banks throughout the country are putting new practices in place to comply with an onset of new federal regulations prompted by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and other post-meltdown rule changes. Those expensive efforts are sparking major changes and concerns for some of the Capital Region’s smaller lenders.

A 2010 Federal Reserve rule requires banks to ask customers if they want to sign up for overdraft protection programs, which often come with steep penalties for making purchases that exceed the account balance. A Consumer Finance Protection Board report released in June suggests the change may not be enough to protect consumers.  

The state of public education is never far from my mind.

Like most of you, I have been dismayed by our state’s declining support for public education. As support has waned, so has California’s educational ranking: We are now near the bottom on measures such as student/teacher ratios and per-pupil spending.

What started with the advent of online job boards like Monster and Yahoo! HotJobs in the mid-1990s has at last evolved into what some are now calling the Facebook of job searches. In the age of Resume 2.0, where the standard, static and flat resume just won’t cut it, a new company has emerged to help employers and potential hires cut right to the chase.

As a child, Michael Hampton often rode his bike down Folsom’s Sutter Street in search of his grandfather, who spent a great deal of time at the Sutter Club bar and other businesses along the historic drive.

“Today, my uncle owns the Sutter Club,” Hampton says. “And because there’s a lot of family history there, I’ve always wanted to have some type of presence on the street, too.” Last year, that vision became a reality.

Brian King, 49, became chancellor of the Los Rios Community College District in February.

You would be hard pressed to find anyone with a greater breadth of understanding and experience in navigating the complex Golden State health care system than Diana Dooley, California’s secretary of Health and Human Services.

At first glimpse, online classes sound like a revolutionary cure for numerous problems plaguing California universities. They allow scores of students to enroll in college for a nominal fee and gain access to top-notch professors from elite schools.

Asha Canady’s parents didn’t go to college. Her brothers didn’t make it out of high school. But it was expected, from a young age, that Canady and her twin sister would succeed in higher education.

Infill or outpost? Sprawl or smart planning? How some people view the Cordova Hills development proposed for southern Sacramento County may depend on which end of Highway 50 they’re looking from.

A little more than six years ago, the El Dorado Community Foundation tapped William Roby to become its new executive director. Roby had been working for the foundation for only a year as its program director, but the board was seeking a fresh personality to lead the organization. Since then, Roby has concentrated on one goal: getting the foundation to a point of fiscal sustainability so it can pay its own way.

Eighty percent of women say they’d rather be dead than in a nursing home.

As Obamacare begins to take effect in hospitals across the country, it’s becoming clear that the new financial model for Medicare is the polar opposite of a government takeover.