Highlights, lowlights from the week’s news

HIT » Look. Try to stay positive. Sure, there’s an ocean of water being dumped on our snow-covered mountains, and whether or not we’re going to have some flooding and other storm-related issues is just a matter of when — not if.

But let’s remember, we needed this. Many of us even prayed for this. And now we’ve got it.

Hearing news of the planned opening of the Oroville Dam spillway felt like the impending return of a longlost friend. And with both Oroville and Lake Shasta already within 60 feet or so of the top, it’s probably a good idea to pause and reflect on just how important, and long overdue, this seemingly never-endingseries of storms has been.

On the other hand, if you want to throw your arms up and say “I’m sick of this! Bring on summer!” we’d completely understand. This has really been a lot to handle, and the end still isn’t in sight.

MISS » We could probably write about government waste and the infamous Bullet Train every week, but we do try to pick our spots. There’s probably never been a better opportunity than this week, so here goes.

To the surprise of absolutely no one who has been paying attention, California’s Bullet Train — sold to California voters in 2008 as a $33 billion investment for a San Francisco to Los Angeles train — has continued its high-speed careening off the fiscal tracks of sanity.

How bad? We’ll let two facts speak for themselves.

• New cost estimates show the full system price tag is now up to $128 billion;

• Even worse, the scaleddown 171-mile segment from Merced to Bakersfield is now estimated to cost $35 billion.

That’s right. The cost of constructing a rail line from Merced to Bakersfield is now more expensive than the original estimate of the entire 500mile route from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

And on yet another front, we didn’t know so many people in Bakersfield were clamoring for high-speed rail service to Merced in the first place.

HIT » We love a good “missing person is found safe” story. When a dog is involved in helping find the person? So much the better.

In mid-February, Chico Police responded to a report of a missing person in the area of East Lassen and

White Avenue. An adult male had walked away from his care home that morning and couldn’t be found.

So, police called in a ringer — K9 Pyro, a 1-year-old Plott Hound, and his partner, Officer William Page.

Pyro, the newest K9 on the Chico force, was provided with an article of clothing belonging to the missing man, and the hunt was on. Pyro followed the scent for approximately 1 mile, enabling officers to narrow their search to a specific area. Soon, they found the man walking toward downtown, and returned him to his care home. He did not require medical attention.

Well done, Pyro!

MISS » We know it’s all politics, and to the victor go the spoils. But it was too bad to see how that played out in a couple of Chico City Council and various committee meetings this week.

Councilors get to nominate people for committee posts, and more often than not, those nominations are rubber-stamped.

But Addison Winslow, the lone progressive on the council, ended up basically being shut out with his nominations, because the council replaced his picks with other people — people who weren’t going to tilt the balance of power on any of those committees anyway.

Meanwhile, Vice Mayor Kasey Reynolds’ motion for a quality-of-life committee died for lack of a second at an Internal Affairs meeting earlier this week. Now, to be clear, we thought the quality-of-life measure as originally drafted was basically yet another lawsuit waiting to happen, and didn’t see much need for the version that voters ended up passing either. (An opinion bolstered by the fact that so far, only two people have bothered to call the quality-of-life hotline.) But the fact remains, voters approved it — by a 60-40% margin, nonetheless — and the council ordered the formation of a citizen panel to discuss quality of life issues. Sounds like the will of the people to us. Now it’ll go back to the council.

Some — maybe most — of these moves involved political payback. Or, Chico being Chico, it could have been payback for payback from years past.

This much we know: There will be more payback in the future. Maybe what we really need is a Bipartisan Payback Committee to sort through the ruckus.