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A confession: Organization has always come to me naturally. And

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U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Raymond Ramos, a native of Hollister, is

I observe the City of Gilroy is switching streetlights from the kind with the orange glow to LEDs and have several questions. What is the replacement cost of each new light being installed? What is the monthly electrical operating cost of a new vs. the old style streetlight? Are the citizens going to see a cost savings in the first year of operating the lights? Will the city be able to recoup the cost of the old lights by selling them to another municipality and not just dumping them in the trash? How many hours of operation should a light provide before the bulb or LED will need to be replaced? Is PGE helping cover part of the cost of replacing? Thank you for investigating.

Honestly, I can’t imagine being on the school board. The way funding is set up – with the bulk of the money going to the state, then trickling down (yes, an exaggeration for demonstration purposes follows) from Assemblyman Luis Alejo’s office to the Gilroy Unified School District, is ridiculous. Every time the state can’t get its financial act together – and really that’s virtually always now – the district gets the screws put to it. Deferred payments, surprise holdbacks, delays and more attached strings than you could dream up, all handcuff the local people trying to do their educational jobs. It’s a nightmare. It’s no way to run a school district, it’s no way to run a state. But if we keep re-electing people to the Assembly and state Senate without virtually any scrutiny, then we get what we deserve because the local school district has precious little control over its own finances. The state giveth and the state taketh away and the GUSD trustees are simply a speck of dust riding the state’s whims. The saddest part is, there’s no revolution demanding wholesale reform on the horizon. It’s a tragic reality plaguing California.

This should be a happy time of year for followers of the Baha'i

San Jose