Rex Ballard

Public safety comes first. That does not make it untouchable. Opinion Piece Political Cartoon - Satire Mark Mezzano, candidate for City Council, has drawn a hard line. Public safety, he says, is off limits for budget cuts. At the Chamber of Commerce forum on September 16, he refused to put police and fire on the table and instead pointed to park promises and other spending. He is not the only candidate talking that way. The priority is right. The blank check is not. A city has three basic...

A shred truck waited behind the Elections Office on Market Street. On September 30, Registrar Clint Curtis opened ten November 2024 boxes and found log sheets in seven of them — sheets that should never have been sealed in with the ballots. Those sheets are part of what Kari Chilson requested on September 4 under Public Records Act request #26-1766: the December 3 canvass file, including batch sheets, tabulator tapes, observer sign-ins, and chain-of-custody logs. The truck left. The request...

The doctors it was built for are not all here yet. The building is open. The roster is not. Dignity Health’s new Sierra Pacific Regional Cancer Center in Redding began seeing patients at the end of August, but Mercy’s own leaders say the $70 million campus is still short of the oncologists it was built for — and the help-wanted ads are still up, even with a five-year guarantee of $770,000 a year. REDDING — Dignity Health spent years, a riverfront site, and $70 million to put North State...

Trump’s master class in handling Xi — and why the pageantry was the point The Beltway press scored the three-day state visit the way it always scores a Trump–Xi meeting: pomp over progress, spectacle over substance, two months of trade truce and a pair of pandas. That scorecard is not wrong on the ledger. It is wrong about the game that is being played. Donald Trump did not host Xi Jinping this week to close a grand bargain on Taiwan, rare earths, or “super intelligence.” He hosted him to...

Trump bans several news outlets from the briefing room, and several others walk out in solidarity. Opinion Piece Sherrill v. Knight is the card the banned outlets will play Wednesday. TRUMP TV is the unfiltered bypass the White House launched the same week. Those two facts do not cancel each other. The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. Once the White House opens this hall to the press as a class, D.C. Circuit law says it cannot empty selected chairs because of editorial viewpoint. Photo:...

Everyone knows the name. Few know the merchant who put a fortune, a ship, and his neck on the line before he ever lifted the pen. Hancock inherited the House of Hancock. John Hancock was born on January 23, 1737, in Braintree — now Quincy, Massachusetts — the same town that produced John Adams. His father, a clergyman, died when John was a boy. An aunt and uncle took him in. Uncle Thomas Hancock was one of Boston’s great merchants. The boy went to Harvard, entered the counting house, and in...

What began as a local fight over how Shasta County runs elections has become a national story. In the past week, FBI agents entered a padlocked room at the county elections office on Market Street, inspected boxes holding November 2024 and June 2026 ballots, and left a green evidence lock marked “SECURED.” A federal grand jury had already subpoenaed Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis to produce June primary materials in Sacramento. California officials, county administrators, and election-integrit

A win for America, Greenland, and Denmark — and a closed door to Beijing and Moscow President Trump addressing Congress - Credit whitehouse.gov President Donald Trump announced Friday that the United States has secured what he called an “Infinite Life” agreement with the Kingdom of Denmark and Greenland — a security pact that gives Washington permanent rights to defend the Arctic island, expand its military footprint, and keep Chinese and Russian bases and sensitive investments off the...

A West Redding resident's real-life encounter with California black bears on this rural ranch. What a single Shasta County case shows about the West’s surge in human-bear conflict. On a 20-acre ranch in the Centerville area west of Redding, a family kept twenty organically fed hens — no hormones, no drugs — for eggs they could trace to their own yard. The coop was closed at night. Fences enclosed the run. For two months this summer the owners were out of state visiting family in Colorado. A...

Diesel moves the North State. Logging trucks, cattle haulers, grocery trailers, gravel, and harvest equipment all drink it. When the national average crossed $6 a gallon this month — and California pumps ran well past $8 — that was not a Redding quirk. It was our bill for a world short of finished diesel, not a world short of oil in the ground. America is pumping crude at record rates. American refineries are running at almost full capacity. The missing piece is diesel that used to be made...

Interim City Manager Michael Webb named Joe Bowers as Interim Redding City Finance Director. Bowers is the utility official who sold rate hikes and explained a $9 million jump in personnel costs. The appointment came four days before Circle 6’s full efficiency report reaches the council dais. REDDING, Calif. — Four days before a $300,000 consultant study is scheduled to tell the City Council where Redding can cut costs, Interim City Manager Michael Webb handed the city’s checkbook to the man...

Thomas Jefferson called him “truly the Man of the Revolution.” Governor Thomas Hutchinson called him the greatest incendiary in the King’s dominions. Both were describing the same Bostonian: Samuel Adams, the organizer who turned local anger into a continental cause. About 1772 – Demanding the troops leave after the Massacre. Adams was born in Boston on September 27, 1722, cousin of John Adams and heir to a malt-making family. He studied at Harvard and even argued, in a thesis, that it could...

Batteries you can buy today. Solar that bends. A Japanese plant that makes power from salt water. Small nuclear plants going up. Beaming power from space. And fusion that still isn’t on the grid. Here’s what’s real — and what isn’t. California power bills are among the highest in the country. In the North State, we feel that every summer: hot days, fire shutdowns, and a grid that was never built for all the new electric cars and air conditioners. Labs have been promising cheaper, cleaner...

In the last ten days, two large Republican-led states have moved against the automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks that have spread across American roads. Florida ordered the cameras off state highways. Texas cut off state money that was paying for them. Neither action is a full statewide ban. Both are a clear signal that the “more cameras, longer databases” model is no longer politically safe. New Hampshire already went further. It does not ban the cameras. It bans the product that...

Dolly Rebecca Parton went home to Jesus on August 25, 2026. She was 80. The world lost a voice. Pigeon Forge lost a daughter. Heaven gained a woman who spent her whole life glorifying God and uplifting mankind. She never hid where she came from. Fourth of twelve children in a two-room cabin on Locust Ridge in Sevier County, Tennessee. Her daddy, Robert Lee, farmed and took whatever work he could find. He could not read or write. Her mama, Avie Lee, sewed a winter coat from donated scraps and,...

Enos Stanley “Stan” Kroenke was born July 29, 1947, in Columbia, Missouri, and raised in Mora, an unincorporated speck of a town whose population could be counted on two hands. His father, Alvin, owned the Mora Lumber Company. By age 10, Stan was sweeping the floors and keeping the books. By 12, he was putting in 10-hour days, six days a week, hauling lumber by hand. His full name honored two St. Louis Cardinals legends his family listened to on the radio: Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial. E....

In a significant development for election integrity efforts, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday lifted a major lower-court block on President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at strengthening safeguards around mail-in ballots. The 6-3 decision represents a clear positive step forward for the administration’s push to ensure only eligible citizens receive and cast federal ballots ahead of the November midterms.

Steve Hilton challenges Xavier Becerra to debate - Credit: latimes.com Steve Hilton wasted little time in making political ads highlighting Xavier Becerra's reluctance to hold a debate ahead of the upcoming November election. Now, it's reported that Xavier Becerra has indicated he will debate Steve Hilton more than once before the November 3 election. For weeks, the Republican challenger accepted every major media invitation and publicly pressed the Democratic frontrunner to commit to...

SNAP Logo - Credit usda.gov Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, known as CalFresh in California) has fallen sharply, declining more than 13% in a single year. Preliminary USDA data shows participation dropping from 42.2 million people in May 2025 to 36.6 million in May 2026. This follows the implementation of expanded work requirements and other reforms in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (also called H.R. 1 or the “big beautiful bill”), signed in...

When Washington was unable to pay troops he said, "Send for Haym Salomon" In the closing months of the Revolutionary War, George Washington faced a crisis more dangerous than any British army. His troops were unpaid, hungry, and edging toward mutiny. The Continental Congress had no money. Robert Morris, the Superintendent of Finance, had none either. Washington’s reply was sharp and immediate: “Send for Haym Salomon.” That summons brought forward one of the most consequential and...

Redding marked a significant milestone today with the grand opening celebration of the Sierra Pacific Regional Cancer Center. The new $70 million outpatient facility, operated by Dignity Health’s Mercy Medical Center Redding, held a ribbon-cutting ceremony this morning at 10 a.m., followed by public tours until 3 p.m. Located at 2396 Henderson Road near the intersection of Cypress and Hartnell avenues along the Sacramento River, the approximately 40,000-square-foot, two-story center...

In Case You Needed Another Reason for Flock Cameras to Go A typical Flock Safety automated license plate reader camera with solar panel, mounted on a pole. These devices photograph vehicle plates and characteristics for law enforcement databases. Credit: theshoestring.org A Shasta Unfiltered reader from Tulsa, OK (raised in Redding and possibly returning) recently forwarded a ReclaimTheNet piece after reading our earlier coverage of Flock Safety cameras. The tip highlighted a Roseville,...

Redding’s inaugural IRONMAN 70.3 Northern California on Sunday, August 16, 2026, delivered a successful debut that highlighted the region’s scenery, community energy, and endurance sports potential. The event drew roughly 1,600+ athletes (plus thousands of supporters and spectators) for the classic 70.3 distances: a 1.2-mile swim in Whiskeytown Lake starting at Oak Bottom Marina, a 56-mile point-to-point bike through rolling Shasta County roads (with a net elevation loss of nearly 1,000 feet...