County sees challenging budget season ahead

By Anne Ternus-Bellamy Enterprise staff writer

Yolo County faces what may be a challenging budget season ahead as property tax revenue is impacted by higher interest rates.

The Board of Supervisors received a preliminary assessment of the 2023-24 budget on Tuesday, with the county’s chief financial officer, Chad Rinde, saying, “the housing market has effectively entered a recession.”

“We are seeing a lot of changes in our economy from what we’ve seen over the last few years,” he said. “Interest rates are certainly increasing, especially for anyone who is looking for or planning on taking out a home loan or other type of loan — car, vehicle or otherwise. And a lot of that … is the federal reserve trying to increase interest rates to tamp down on inflation.

“We are seeing housing prices decline across the country as well as locally.”

Property taxes provide the county’s largest source of discretionary revenue, but action by the Federal Reserve to control inflation have caused

Every now and then a kind reader will send me something that absolutely makes my day.

No, not a thousand-dollar tip for an especially well-written column or a Pachamama gift card so I’ll be certain not to miss out on Davis’s latest coffee sensation.

No, what arrived in my inbox the other day was an article that had “fun” written all over it.

Not fun as in funny, but fun as in interesting and something that might teach me something I don’t know.

“The 10 most difficult words to pronounce,” said the headline over the story that had been sent my way by my friend Ijeoma Teunissen-Oligboh, with credit to writingtips.org.

“So many words aren’t pronounced the way we read them,” the story begins.

“As the world has become more multicultural in recent years and as the internet has increased proximity to one another, we’re finding out new words.”

I agree that the internet has dramatically increased our proximity to one another, but I’m certain the world has always been multicultural, even if we weren’t fully aware of it.

Be that as it may, the promise here is finding new words, or at least hard to pronounce words, which is always a worthwhile pursuit.

“Some are trickier than others, so Writing Tips has compiled the Top 10 Most Difficult Words for Americans to Pronounce.”

The great thing about writing, of course, is that it doesn’t matter how the words are pronounced, we just have to spell them correctly.

I frequently pronounce words silently in my mind as I type them, and I wonder how many times I’ve mispronounced them simply because I’ve never heard them spoken.

And I’m not talking about “Albuquerque,” which I do know