The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 killed a lot of small hospitals. As its name implies, the law was intended to balance the federal budget by 2002, reducing spending by $160 billion in the process. To achieve its self-imposed fiscal goal, which was forgotten after 9/11, Congress cut $119 billion in health care spending over […]
Kings County Sheriff Dave Robinson believes building a bigger jail can lead to fewer people ending up behind bars, and the county and state are going to spend $21 million to find out if he’s right. When the US Supreme Court ruled in 2011, that intense overcrowding and a wide lack of health services in […]
McDermont Field House will stay open, furloughs for city employees will end on December 5, and the proposal to add a half-percent to Lindsay’s sales tax is dead for now–but the city is still operating in the red and no plan to make up the gap is yet in the works as strife continues among […]
With plans for a new acute-care hospital in downtown Visalia already underway, the Kaweah Delta Health Care District has approved $100 million in additional expansion and upgrades. Included in the long list of construction projects are a new urgent-care facility in northwest Visalia and a doubling of ER beds downtown. “The short of it is […]
The Kings County Superior Court will shutter the doors of courthouses in Avenal and Corcoran on December 18. Staff from the two locations will be reassigned to the Hanford Courthouse, and all court business will be conducted there after that date. The closures, the result of years of funding shortfalls in the state budget, are […]
The City of Tulare and the Cal Water Company say a group of chemical manufacturers spent decades contaminating local groundwater with a dangerous, cancer-causing pollutant, and now they’re looking to make the alleged polluters clean up their mess. Lawyers for the City of Tulare could be in court as soon as February 8 to take […]
The state of Mooney Grove Park seems to have become a hot potato no one in county government wants to handle for fear of being burned. The number of public complaints about the declining state of the county-maintained park – where benches lie broken, ponds are choked with decay, and trees are dying, if not […]
Authorities have closed the books on half a dozen unsolved murders in Tulare County dating back as far as 1980, and the man responsible will spend the rest of his life behind bars. On October 6, Jose Manuel Martinez, 53, also known as the Black Hand or El Mano Negro, plead guilty in Tulare County […]
The Central Valley has a slavery problem of which most residents are unaware. It is a center for human trafficking, much of it focused on the sex trade, but now an effort is underway in Tulare County to change that. Centrally located in the state with an entrenched criminal element and a high population of […]
By an interesting quirk of fate, two statistics regarding Tulare County are nearly identical: About 20% of the county’s land is taken up by national parks, and almost 20% of the students fail to graduate high school. While these statistics seemingly have little to do with each other, at least one local educator thinks there […]