@lacyfromsacramento , a Sacramento native, has endeavored to walk every street on Sacramento’s downtown and midtown grid. She started walking in the winter of 2024, and started documenting this process on her Instagram page in March of 2025, encouraging people to be more curious about their community. According to her map, which she keeps in a journal and marks down the streets she’s walked in red, she only has about 10 more streets left.
She’s requested to withhold her last name due to privacy concerns. CapRadio joined her on her walk of the entirety of 27th street, and you can find the full interview at the link in our bio.
✍️ 🗣️ 📸 Ruth Finch
Reporters in the Sacramento Bee News Guild, a union of The Sacramento Bee’s reporters, have been withholding their bylines from stories generated by their new Content Scaling Agent, or CSA, that’s powered by artificial intelligence.
The new tool, developed by the Bee’s parent company McClatchy Media, is designed to increase the volume of content the Bee produces, according to the Sac Bee News Guild’s Vice Chair, Ariane Lange.
Stories generated by AI have been published in the Bee, but they are marked as such, saying they were based on original work by a reporter. Lange said that they want to use the bylines of reporters to boost the CSA’s credibility.
“They know the public trusts the reporters,” Lange said. “They’re banking on using our credibility as reporters to shore up the credibility of this AI tool that reporters of the Sacramento Bee do not believe in.”
Every news story, including generated ones, needs to be edited by human editors as is required by the Bee’s AI policy.
The original broadcast of this story aired on 90.9 FM, and you can catch our segment on this story airing today at noon on our talk show, Insight, with a rebroadcast at 7 p.m. You can also find the digital article and more at the link in our bio.
✍️ 🗣️ 📸 Ruth Finch
The Trump administration is renewing efforts to dismantle the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. The policy currently shields over half a million immigrants brought to the U.S. as children from deportation.
Roughly 300 DACA recipients, referred to as Dreamers, have been arrested and dozens have already been deported, according to a February memorandum from the Department of Homeland Security.
In Sacramento, one woman lost her job and is dealing with traumatic memories from childhood detention after learning of the sudden reopening of her case.
Daniela Valladares Hernandez, a 28-year-old Dreamer who came to the United States from Honduras as a child, said her life looked different just weeks ago prior to receiving the letter.
The sudden reopening of the case, which she said was administratively closed over a decade ago, has affected nearly every aspect of her life, including her job.
Valladares said her employer gave her a choice after learning she could be required to leave for court proceedings or potentially be detained: resign now or risk being fired and barred from working for the company again.
The original audio version of this story aired on 90.9 FM. You can read the digital article and more at the link in our bio.
✍️ 📸 🗣️ Gerardo Zavala
This Earth Day, and to celebrate Arbor Day on Friday, our newsletter team reached out to our community and Sacramenknow readers for their favorite trees!
Tell us about your favorite tree in Sacramento in the comments. Which tree should we have shouted out?
You can subscribe to our Sacramenknow newsletter and find more at the link in our bio.
🎨 Ruth Finch
Daniela Valladares Hernandez still remembers what she carried on her more than 1,000-mile journey from Honduras to the U.S.-Mexico border.
A small purple book bag, orange shorts and her Barbie dolls.
Valladares said the outfit was inspired by Dora the Explorer, her childhood obsession.
“They drew me a map the same way Dora had,” Daniela said, recalling the strangers she traveled with. “I knew that as I embarked on the journey by foot that the final destination and the star where I was going to be safe was the U.S.”
The then six-year-old held onto her Swan Lake Princess and Rapunzel dolls the entire trip, even after nearly drowning crossing the Rio Grande.
“My innocence and childhood, I left them at the border the moment those Barbies were dropped and I was handcuffed and put behind bars,” she said.
That was in 2004. The now 28-year-old DACA recipient has since built a life in the United States after first settling in Georgia, where she pushed herself academically to eventually attend George Washington University and graduate from Cornell University.
Valladares has lived in California for the last four years and currently lives in Sacramento, where she’s pursuing a career in finance. But a letter that arrived late last month upended her life.
The original audio version of this story aired on 90.9 FM. You can find the full story and more at the link in our bio.
✍️ 📸 🗣️ Gerardo Zavala
A major media shakeup is set to impact television news across the country.
Last week the media broadcasting company Nexstar announced it received approval from the Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission to merge with its rival TEGNA.
The $6 billion deal would give the new joint company control of more than 250 stations nationwide.
Attorney General Rob Bonta and multiple other states filed a joint lawsuit seeking to block the merger, one day before the acquisition was announced.
Bonta said the deal is expected to raise prices, harm local news and consumers, and reduce competition, and specifically mentioned the Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto metro area being impacted by the new combined company.
Frank Gevurtz is a Distinguished Professor of Law at University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law. He spoke with CapRadio’s Chris Nichols on Insight about the merger.
The audio from this segment originally aired March 24 on Insight. Since then, a federal judge has temporarily halted the merger pending a review for potential antitrust violations.
You can find the full segment, and the highlights of this interview at the link in our bio.
🗣️ Chris Nichols ✍️ Sarit Laschinsky, Chris Nichols
At Corti Brothers in East Sacramento, bottles of @rivercitysoda Root Beer sit chilling near the deli counter. The name on the label is a nod to Sacramento and the waterways that it’s known for.
Janet and Bob Lake created and own the root beer brand, and for them, it’s personal. Their brand reflects the city where they put down roots and built out their business. The couple got their start in the beverage distribution industry in Sacramento in 1999.
After about a decade in that business, the Lakes decided they wanted to take a shot at creating something of their own. They began developing what would eventually become River City Root Beer.
The Lakes say their focus will remain on glass-bottled sodas, which they say are key to its flavor and keep it more old-fashioned.
“We could go to cans and it would become a lot cheaper,” Bob said. “But do you think that product in a can would be just as good as it is in the bottle?”
Today, the brand includes four flavors: classic root beer, ginger beer, orange cream and blueberry lemonade.
For Janet, the most meaningful moments happen when someone walks up to her and shares a story of drinking the soda.
“We’ve discovered actually, we’ve been around long enough that people go, ‘I started drinking that when I was a kid,’” Janet said.
✍️ & 📷 By Tony Rodriguez
Halloween morning, 2025 — in the SAFE Credit Union Plaza, a sculpture of a black plastic body bag sits on a wooden pedestal surrounded by a fence.
A piece of paper was taped to the fence that read:
“This sculptural work serves as both memorial and misremembering - a marker for those who looked upon Lunar Specimen 12038,7, a fragment of the moon brought to Earth in 1969, and affectionately called it "salt lick."
The body bag sat in place of a sculpture that had gone missing. The missing sculpture was made of a clear acrylic resin and was modeled after the shape of a moon rock brought back from the 1969 Apollo 12 moon landing.
Allie Weill lives about a fifteen minute walk from the original sculpture and, when going on walks around the neighborhood, loved seeing it.
Then, one night in late September, it was gone. She was concerned.
“I had this idea come to me to put up a missing sign. Much like someone would put up a lost cat or dog sign walking around the neighborhood,” Weill said. “I often see those kinds of signs as well. And I thought it would just bring a little joy to anyone who happened to see it.”
You can listen or read the full story at the link in our bio. The original audio for this story aired on 90.9 FM.
✍️ 📸 🗣️ Ruth Finch
Some of Michelle Benjamin’s earliest memories take place walking along Sacramento’s 33rd Street, from her grandmother’s preschool to the Oak Park Library when she was a child in the early 1980s.
Block by block, Benjamin would sing the A-B-C song with her classmates, taking in the smell of freshly baked bread and pastries from a bakery as they walked past McClatchy Park in the morning.
“My love for reading really flourished,” she said. “When they closed the library, my neighbor across the street and I ended up making a library in her basement full with all my ‘Sweet Valley High’ twin books.”
The Oak Park Library Branch officially closed in 1989. Almost 40 years later, Michelle Benjamin is now the principal of Taylor Street Elementary School in Del Paso Heights. She’s been leading the effort, along with her mother Dorothy Benjamin, to bring some form of a library back to Oak Park for more than a decade.
Michelle Benjamin, now 47, told CapRadio that the neighborhood she grew up in, a traditionally Black neighborhood that has undergone significant gentrification, deserves a free, in-person space for children to learn outside of school.
“ It's critical and crucial because of the benefits,” Benjamin said. “Just the value and importance of reading … and then the sense of community that comes from having a place like a library, especially a beautiful one.”
The audio version of this story originally aired on 90.9 FM, and you can find the full article and more at the link in our bio.
✍️ 🗣️ Riley Palmer 📸 Ruth Finch
Sacramento leaders are calling for the renaming of the Cesar E. Chavez Memorial Plaza following allegations of sexual assault made against the late Cesar Chavez.
These allegations were made by Dolores Huerta, a fellow leader in the farm labor movement, as well as Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas and were made public as the result of an in-depth investigation from @nytimes .
Mayor Kevin McCarty said in a statement that he wants to recognize city leadership’s responsibility to act, and he wants to rename the downtown plaza.
“The farmer worker movement was never about one individual,” the statement read. “We will continue to find ways to honor farmworker struggles and the labor movement.”
McCarty has appointed a council subcommittee to rename the park: Vice Mayor Karina Talamantes, Mayor Pro Tem Eric Guerra and Councilmember Phil Pluckebaum.
Talamantes said that she wants the new park and memorial to be centered around the labor movement for farm workers.
“I do feel like it needs to be centered around more than one person,” Talamantes said. “And what we will need to do as a subcommittee is create a vision of what we want the park to represent.”
The sound excerpt is from today's episode of Insight, which will rebroadcast at 7 p.m. tonight on 90.9 FM. You'll also be able to find the full episode, web article and more at the link in our bio.
📸 ✍️ Ruth Finch 🗣️Vicki Gonzales
Teachers, parents and students piled into the Twin Rivers Unified School Board meeting Tuesday night in the midst of the fourth day of a teachers strike.
Some educators had been picketing since 7 a.m., also joining fellow union members striking in nearby Natomas Unified.
Wendy Robinson, a teacher at Highlands High School, said many of her colleagues are frustrated with the lack of credentialed teachers and large class sizes.
“Largely, it's about class sizes… they can’t recruit new teachers,” Robinson said. “We have 88 unfilled vacancies right now, so that means there’s over two thousand kids sitting in classrooms with subs. They don’t have credentialed teachers.”
The district has offered a 2.5% salary increase for this school year and a 2.21% increase for next year. It has also offered full Kaiser HMO family health coverage including medical, dental and vision care for employees and their families “at zero cost to the employee,” according to a news release issued last week.
“It is the union’s job to advocate for their teachers, and it is the District’s job to ensure fiscal solvency for students today and tomorrow,” the district added.
Some Twin Rivers teachers went to North Natomas Regional Park to picket with Natomas teachers, who also went on strike Tuesday. Their demands centered around filling critical vacancies at their school. They also demanded family benefits for educators.
Nico Viccaro, a high school special education teacher and president of the Natomas Teachers’ Association, said Natomas schools can’t retain educators.
“We have a crisis going on. We had 106 educators leave last year,” Viccaro said. “We’re fighting to keep them here, to get a fair agreement so families don’t have to worry about paying $1,500 or more for family healthcare every month.”
Head to the link in bio for this story and more.
📸 ✍️ Ruth Finch
Sacramento Republic is kicking off its 13th season of professional soccer tonight at Heart Health Park against FC Tulsa.
And they’re doing so with a new leader at the helm — General Manager and President Tim Holt, whose roots with the team run deep.
Holt was the league president in 2012 when Sacramento was awarded an expansion franchise, and was here for some of its biggest moments during the inaugural 2014 season.
“I've been fortunate enough to have played the game and now be involved in helping shape its future,” Holt said. “Every day feels like I'm living a dream, and no exception here in this next project with Sacramento.”
Now Holt’s ready to lead the Indomitable Club into the future with a new stadium on the way, and dreams of Major League Soccer that refuse to fade.
“It's a club that's just not comfortable with the status quo,” he said. “We’re looking to move forward.”
You can hear more of Holt’s interview and vision at Capradio.org.
✍️ Sarit Laschinsky 📷Sacramento Republic FC
