YOUR HOMETOWN WEEKLY NEWSPAPER ward Winning News al A pa
Vol. 9, No. 16
Including Surrounding Communities
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City to fight peripheral canal plan by Dave Roberts Staff Writer Oakley officials, who are in charge of one of the few California cities with a shoreline on the Delta, have decided to become more active in the water war currently being fought in the state, including opposing the proposed peripheral canal. The City Council Tuesday night pledged support for efforts by Councilman Bruce Connelley and resident Roger Mammon to fight the proposal to build a canal along the edge of the Delta. The canal would take fresh water from the Sacramento River in the north Delta and ship it south to Central Valley farms and Southern California residents, bypassing the rest of the Delta. “If they build a peripheral canal and start exporting water around the Delta, our west Delta is going to be a stagnant, salt-water pool,” said Mammon. “It’s going to be contaminated with agricultural runoff … for
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April 17, 2009
THIS WEEK
Not the retiring type
She’s leaving after 40 years in school administration, but will be available as a valued volunteer.
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Photo by Dave Roberts
Mayor Carol Rios, right, delivers a proclamation at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting honoring Eduardo Cardona and Nancy Marquez, who recently received Cesar Chavez Spirit awards from Los Medanos College. you and I to consume. “What will happen to the property values out there? Who’s going to want to buy a home by a cesspool? There’s families here and recreation interests here
– and the people who want the water (in southern California) just don’t care. “The city of Oakley needs to get more involved because we are a Delta city and have the largest
tidal estuary on the west coast of North and South America right out our front door – and they are going to kill it if we let see Canal page 21A
Financial counseling vogue in tough times by Dave Roberts Staff Writer It’s no secret that these are tough economic times for many, whether it’s due to a job layoff, salary cut, too much credit card debt or being stuck with a mortgage that’s twice what the home is worth – and payments due to increase. All of which has ratcheted up the stress level, especially for those being hounded by collection agencies, facing foreclosure and trying to figure out how to rob which Peter to pay which Paul. Not surprisingly, one of the businesses booming in this downturn is financial counseling. Inga Mork, financial coach with Trinity Financial Life Strategies, has been hiring and expanding her office space in the Morningstar Properties building in Oakley. Ironically, she and her husband Mikael are themselves quite upside down in their mortgage, having bought at the height of the market and now owing $360,000 more
“ We take the ‘I don’t know what to do’ freak-out moment and see what to do. We bring it all down to the family, because marriages are falling apart and they are all stressed.
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Inga Mork than their house is worth. But she’s not sweating it, because she loves living in Oakley (this is her fourth house here after having lived and traveled for many years in other parts of the world) and she enjoys what she’s doing by helping people get their financial and emotional lives back together. “I realized there is such a deep lack of
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education for what is really required to survive a difficult time,” said Mork. “You don’t know what you’re made of until you’re squeezed. Under pressure is when we find what we have available to us to have serenity and calm in a storm. Having peace in a storm can be enough. With that, a person doesn’t have to fall apart in a difficulty.” Financial issues are often the greatest source of marital and family strife, so Mork often finds herself providing life counseling, in addition to devising financial stratagems and assisting with bank and creditor refinancing. “They bring in their bills, their finances, their marital dispute, their child needs or basic needs for school or sports, and we try to prioritize what’s important between basic food and living,” she said. For many of her clients, “It’s scary; it’s really scary.” One of the challenges in her business is that the financial rules keep changing due see Counseling page 21A
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Installed in the Hall
For some athletes, fame is fleeting. For others, it’s as permanent as a place in history.
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