If you follow the news on TV, radio, or Big Social Media, you will be hearing a lot in 2025 about tensions internationally and nationally. On local TV and radio, on local social media sites like Nextdoor, or if you are among the handful of Sacramento Bee subscribers left, your news feed will no doubt also cover goings-on in the City of Sacramento, with an occasional story or two about something in Placer County, the Bay Area or Tahoe. What won't be presented? Stories about our local community. Oh, sure, there will be articles from time to time about crimes or traffic accidents here, but you are unlikely to get any kind of in-depth picture of life in our unincorporated nowhere land.

What that means is you will continue to be kept in the dark about our community, less likely to notice the subtle ways it is manipulated. Our blog has discussed our area's identity problem - we are NOT part of the City of Sacramento even though the Post Office says we are. We have often mentioned that there is no vision for our community; it's just an aged WWII suburb run by people who don't really care about it. Where we live has been easily exploited by commercial investors who don't live here, people (or faceless institutions) for whom the number of vehicles that drive on a major thoroughfare like Watt Avenue is a preferred metric. Consider Amazon's ghost store at Country Club Center. Some bean counters in Seattle compared the drive-by numbers there with the fire-sale rents at CCC and decided to dump a bunch of cash into the place for yet another grocery store. After it was too late to turn back, they noticed some fine print in the local demographics (e.g. homelessness, low incomes, excessive rentals) and decided their spiffy new building would be a useful tax-write off. Why is Country Club Plaza across the street also struggling? It's not a priority for its corporate owners in Cincinnati and Boise, its Bay Area investors, or the property manager in Yuba City. Nothing there will change until the owners' tax situations instruct otherwise. You can see similar circumstances in any of our commercial corridors. Out-of-area owners and investors optimize for themselves, not for us. Land use decisions about where we live are not made here, nor are they made for the public good. And the County, our municipal government that operates under the banner of "something is better than nothing",  has demonstrated over the years that it condones that state of affairs.

With close to 100,000 people and a population density of almost 6,000 people per square mile, Arden Arcade is heavily urbanized. Unlike similar places, though, we have no Mayor and no City Council to tend to our municipal affairs and our urban fabric. We have to depend on the County Board of Supervisors for the well-being of our community. But we only get to elect one of the five Supervisors; a minimum of three Supervisors must support us. Whether our community and its local economy prospers or rots is thus dependent on the kindness of at least two other Supervisors that we can neither elect nor recall from office. Further, our law enforcement situation isn't exactly optimal. The Sheriff's Department and the CHP are both tasked with extensive responsibilities despite being under-resourced to fulfill them. As a result, our local law enforcement needs are typically given low priority. Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors is duty-bound to handle significant areawide responsibilities that cannot be left unattended - a lesson that was driven home by Covid. In the grand scheme of things, then, our daily urban priorities - the things that matter to us - get lost in the noise.

Our job here at the Advocates for Arden Arcade is to inform the community. For nearly 10 years now we have been promoting quality of life for residents, economic prosperity for local businesses and improvements to land use and property values. Progress has been slow, in part due to the nature of the task versus the 900-pound gorillas of tainted media, broken governance and out-of-area influences. But it has also been impeded somewhat by reluctance of local residents and businesses to take hold of their own situation. Team Advocates has made progress of late, but we cannot do this alone or for much longer. We need your help. This doesn't mean that you, Dear Reader, have to give up your job or abandon your family. We know and respect that each of you have significant priorities of your own. Still, even the smallest of efforts matter:

• Some of you have very kindly donated to help defray our minimal costs - with more donations we could step up our activity.
• Others of you have made the effort to call or email the County - can those efforts be ramped up in number and intensity?
• A few of you have generously given time to testify at meetings of the CPAC, the County Planning Commission, and the Board of Supervisors - what if there was more of that?

Informing the community is a different task from promoting the incorporation of our community. A whole new organization is needed to campaign for incorporation. Though IRS rules don't let us conduct a campaign, we can certainly stimulate community discussions. Along those lines, we would like our successful series of meetings about incorporation to re-start. Supervisor Desmond helped us do so last October and we don't want that opportunity to fall by the wayside. Further, his meeting re-iterated our long-held openness to hear from nearby communities like Carmichael and Foothill Farms. For 2025, then, we hope you will talk with your neighbors about local control, will support California (un)Incorporated (our statewide partner organization) in asking the Legislature to make the incorporation process cheaper and less cumbersome, will seek cooperation and fair treatment from the County, and will help engage people in nearby communities to join the discussion.

The media won't pay attention to our community. Neither the Downtown Sacramento Power Elite nor our Out-of-Area Overlords give a hoot about us and our local issues. And the County is - as Supervisor Desmond has said - not up to the job. So if anything here needs to start trending upwards as we begin a new year, it is ultimately up to those of us who live here to take the reins.  If you would like to help out with that, or if you have questions or thoughts about it, please email us at advocatesforardenarcade@gmail.com or use our Contact Us page.