Santa Ana Ca

After years of disrepair, Santa Ana's crumbling streets will get a $100-million face-lift following a vote by the Santa Ana City Council. The council Monday night unanimously approved a five-year plan that will use about $40 million in county, state and federal grants and $60 million in bonds, backed by gas tax revenues, to fund the repairs. In 2006, state voters approved a governor's infrastructure bond and Proposition 42, a sales tax on gasoline.

Santa Ana is poised to spend $100 million over the next five years in an aggressive push to repair aging city streets. The effort will increase the city's spending on its road projects by about one-third. The money will come from a statewide infrastructure bond approved last year, as well as from Orange County's Measure M funding. The City Council voted unanimously Monday night to approve the additional funding.

A Santa Ana commissioner who had been asked to resign his appointed post earlier this year because of his critical writings on the Internet has been removed from the city's anti-gang commission. The City Council took the action Monday night but offered no public explanation. Thomas Gordon is one of three city commissioners who were asked to resign earlier this year because of their contributions to an Internet blog that is frequently critical of the city's government and leadership.

A group of Santa Ana leaders, including a City Council member, a planning commissioner and a community college trustee, have opened the city's first locally owned bank in 40 years, with the hope of finding customers in the area's huge Latino business community. The Santa Ana Business Bank, which opened in October, hopes to provide loans to small businesses that often are turned down by larger banks.

A motorcyclist was killed Wednesday in a three-vehicle crash on southbound Interstate 5, authorities said. The accident occurred about 11:30 a.m. south of 17th Street when a 2002 black Ford Mustang traveling at a high speed hit a white Ford F-250 that then hit the motorcycle. The motorcyclist, whose name has not been released pending notification of relatives, was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the Mustang, Alexander Jakusin, 24, of Aliso Viejo, was arrested.

Unless you're from Veracruz, Mexico, or a historian of Mexican music, the songs emanating from the Mexican Cultural Center in Santa Ana might be something of a mystery. Although Latin American in flavor, the melodies and rhythms aren't typical folkloric music, mariachi or trios romanticos. The dozen or so musicians are playing son jarocho, a 400-year-old Mexican genre that blends indigenous, Spanish and African styles into foot-stomping, hand-clapping songs often with ad-libbed lyrics.

Santa Ana resident Jose Contreras, 77, had great hopes for the Bristol Street expansion project, believing that the road-widening would spruce up his tough-luck neighborhood. To make room for two new lanes, the city bought the home next to Contreras' for $565,000 in August. But when his longtime neighbors left in September and vagrants began slipping through the boarded-up back door, Contreras began to question the way the city was going about the widening.

Government actions in a deportation case involving a Vietnamese refugee family in Santa Ana drew fire Thursday as political and community leaders accused immigration agents of intimidation. Agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency last week arrested the parents and brother of Tam Tran, a 24-year-old UCLA graduate who testified before Congress about the plight of undocumented immigrant students in May.

The badly beaten body of a 9-year-old girl was discovered in a storm drain by a group of children in 1987 only a short distance from the Santa Ana elementary school where she was last seen leaving her third-grade class. Stumped, authorities theorized that Patricia Lopez might have been killed by gang members, whose presence was increasing rapidly in Santa Ana in those days. One of the girl's brothers had been grazed on the forehead by a bullet in a gang dispute, lending weight to the theory.

Federal and local authorities have uncovered new evidence in the bombing that killed a prominent Arab American civil rights leader in Santa Ana 22 years ago today, in one of the first acts of modern-day terrorism in the United States.