A) I have said several times that I live in Solano County, or Fairfield or “10 miles south of BKM” and said that you would be at the top of my list for Cyburbanites I would like to meet (in that thread about that) simply because you are “local”. What? Do you have a job or something and can’t keep track of every detail of everything I say in Cyberspace?!!!
(I forgive you for seeming to reject me. Clearly, you just didn’t know. lol).
B) For this highly ethnically diverse county, Vacaville is “lily white”. As a white woman with a multicultural background who routinely gets a rash of scheisse (that’s German for Merde, which is French – trying to keep it clean here) from white folks who do not understand where I am coming from, I am not comfortable in Vacaville and would not want to live there. I feel very at home in my neighborhood, even though I am an ethnic minority here – and we used to get a lot of stares. But as people have gotten to know us, they realize that our skin color is of little importance.
C) Vacaville definitely has it’s good points. As part of my class on Homelessness and Public Policy, I had to do an internship which would allow me to work directly with the homeless population. I called the homeless shelter here and they wouldn’t give me the time of day. The brand new executive director of the homeless shelter in Vacaville said “Come on up. We will FIND a way to put you to work.” She clearly operates on the principle of “Never turn away volunteer labor.” The shelter has come a long way in the time she has run it. (In short, I agree with you that the shelter in Fairfield is “ate up”. They are fools and it is not well-run.)
Because of that internship, I still drive to Vacaville to take my donations to Opportunity House rather than donate them locally in Fairfield. And I still sometimes do volunteer work for them, particularly computer stuff. (I have been assisting the Executive Director and the Supervisor in transitioning from their 19th century paperwork system to the 21st century.) Vacaville has a much more charming downtown than does Fairfield and the restaurants there have more cache. That is part of why I characterize it as a ‘rich town’.
The gated communities in Fairfield are often not ‘upscale’. I live in a gated apartment complex. If I recall right, “Rancho Solano” is South-West of the college. In my opinion, it is only NOMINALLY “in Fairfield”. It is a half hour drive from my apartment to the college and areas around it have been annexed in a manner that makes Fairfield look ‘gerry-mandered’ on a map.
Pull out a map and look at the sliver of land that is claimed by Fairfield and which connects it to the college and areas around there that have been annexed by Fairfield. It is a largely rural area. Like so many colleges, the college located out in the middle of nowhere, where land was cheap so it could get (and afford) the large tract it needed to build a campus with lots of parking, etc.
As the largest community college in probably the entire country (with somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 students), it is practically a separate “municipality” in its own right – and is better run that a lot of universities. (And is very much a victim of its own success at the moment.) But I don’t see the community college being taken into sufficient consideration by county planning efforts either.
Then you have the military base – one of the reasons Fairfield has Issues. Crime on a military base if practically ‘non-existent’. But the human needs and drives that create crime cannot be removed from the humans subjected to such a highly controlled atmosphere (military bases are the ORIGINAL “gated community” and they can enforce community standards to a degree that the most draconian gated community would drool over – wanna hear my rant about the requirement to grow grass in your backyard on Ft. Irwin, in the Mojave Desert, just South of Death Valley?).
Naturally, this means that crime around a military base is inevitably higher than surrounding areas. The first main road North of Ft. Benning Georgia is named Victory Drive. But the locals all just call it VD Drive because of the thriving prostitution business so near the base, whic is full of young studs far from their girlfriend. Additionally, pawn shops and other unsavory but not illegal businesses typically thrive near a military base.
This particular military base, while geographically small, is of international importance as well and I am thrilled to see that the communities of this county are getting together to hire a liaison to represent the base in an attempt to keep from losing it in the next round of base closings – although it OUGHT TO BE a permanent position, in my opinion. It is the largest employer in the county, employing more people than the next 3 largest employees in this county combined. It is worth more than a Billion dollars a year. It is the “Pacific Hub” for the Air Force. It has a Regional Medical Facility, serving military personell and retirees and veterans in 8 states.
Additionally, the state of California considers this base important enough that they wrote a clause into a state law allowing several of the local communities to pool their low-income housing funds to build low-income housing around the base as part of their attempts to keep it here. (Rumor has it that if it leaves, it will go to the Seattle area. Pilots care little which West Coast state they leave from when they all have to stop in Hawaii to refuel anyway on their way to parts in the Far East.)
It really needs its own ‘ambassador’ and the county needs to wise up about how to deal with it. Every planning meeting I have ever attended, I hear statements to the effect of how desperately everyone in this county wants to kiss the butt of the military base and beg it to please not move away, thereby gutting the local economy. But these dummies want to build a train station smack up against the back fence of the housing area on base. And have told me how this is “for the benefit of Travis and to woo them into staying”. Mark my words: if you build that train station, start looking for a job elsewhere, and pronto. The base will be gone sometime thereafter. It is extremely apparent to me, as the daughter of one career military man and the wife of another, who has, therefore, spent my entire life around military bases, that most of the local planners do not know the first thing about the needs of the military.
(The explanation as to why that train station is an extremely bad idea is kind of long and involved. For starters, you could go to my website and read the brochure that is the result of more than 2 years of research and projects I did in 4 different college classes. You can find it in both pdf format and PowerPoint format on this page:
my website The rail plan stuff will be moving soon, but that page will still get you to the page it will be on, when I am done revamping my pages for the third time this month. Ugh. I am sick of revamping my pages.)
In my opinion, Vacaville feels like more of a community because it is not pulled in so many directions. Fairfield has “municipal multiple personality disorder”: it is pulled South West by the huge community college, it is pulled to the East by Travis, it is pulled North-East by UC Davis (the only big university in reasonable commuting distance for most of Solano County) and the Capital, it is the nexus of multiple traffic arteries, in all directions (Highway 12 runs roughly at a 90 degree angle to I-80, and then there is the train station in Suisun, which is practically surrounded by Fairfield and functionally a part of it), and happens to just about be smack dab on top of the geographic mid-point between Sacramento and San Francisco (although it can take 30 minutes longer to get to SF, due to the Bay and toll bridges and traffic, there is about a 3 mile difference in distance).
In my opinion, the future of this entire region will be impacted by how Solano County handles the enormous pressures it is under. If it rises to the occasion, the entire region will benefit (well “Two” regions, because the Sacramento area and the San Francisco Bay Area do not see themselves as ‘related’ – we are the bastard child that connects them both and which everyone hates to acknowledge being related to. A guy in San Francisco said that San Franciscans do not count Solano as really being part of the Bay Area. Called it a “Bastard Step-child.”). If it doesn’t, it will become an even worse cesspool for every regional malady that exists. In fact, the future of California as a whole may be impacted, what with Sacramento being 15 minutes from our border and just the other side of Davis. And California is a cutting edge leader for the nation and has, what? – the 5th or 6th largest economy on the planet? The choices Solano County makes could have global implications. But it is being planned like a small town farming community and sees itself that way, for the most part.
Sorry for the length folks. "It is BKM’s fault " And I plead “antihistamines”. I can’t seem to shut up today.
