When it rains it pours, but a silver lining in every cloud.

Some passing thoughts on stories in the news:

It's interesting to note that the widespread damage among San Diego's avocado groves comes at a point when local producers are already under siege from Mexican growers ramping up the competition in the wake of import rule relaxations.

Now with $30 million-plus in damage done by the October wildfires, local growers will find the business that much tougher as they recover.

South of the border growers should be able to further muscle their way into produce departments, and sell at lower costs than U.S.-grown products.

County growers were already dealing with a 30 percent reduction in water supplies, and the lingering impact of last winter's severe cold spell.

Consumers benefit, true enough, but let's face it: A key sector has taken it on the chin this past year.

Meanwhile, new-home builders continue to put existing product on the market at ... how shall we say ... "fire sale prices" in the hopes of driving down inventory to clean up balance sheets.

It's too bad those builders can't effectively construct one, two and three homes at a time, given the sudden need to replace the 1,600-plus homes destroyed by the recent conflagrations.

At least some construction workers who have lost their jobs due to the downturn in new-home sales will find jobs with small contractors rushing to fill the demand for reconstruction projects.

Luckily, the year ahead won't be as bad as some had feared due to the new-home sales slowdown. The flood of $2 billion in insurance money will help break the fall in sales.

During the fiery inferno in the county, Mayor Jerry Sanders proved that he is what he is ... an able politician who knows how to handle himself in a crisis.

He deferred to the experts, the firefighters in this case, and did what he could in his role as the city's top executive, making sure that firefighters on the Witch Tom York Creek and Harris fires had what they needed in terms of resources and support.

His performance solidified his position as a front-runner in the upcoming mayoral election, and begs the question of why anyone would want to run against him in December 2008.

Still something of an outsider, I am trying to understand the who, what, when, where and why ... the back story, if you will ... of City Attorney Michael Aguirre.

Like Mayor Sanders, he's up for election next fall, and despite a spate of controversies during the past three years, he remains as popular as ever with the people who voted him into office.

Obviously, he likes to shoot first and ask questions later, and he's backed himself into a corner a few times with guns blazing, most notably with the trials involving the pension mess.

But he appears to be a straight shooter, so to speak, and what we see is what we get. After decades of smoke and mirrors at City Hall, Aguirre is a bit of fresh air in what had been a back room filled with cigar smoke.

You've no doubt read that the state faces an $8 billion to $10 billion budget deficit in this fiscal year (the actual projected deficit depends on what daily newspaper you read) ... in large part due to the fact that the governor and the Legislature failed to fix fundamental problems with spending. They've had to beg, borrow and, dare we say, steal funds (robbing from Peter to pay Paul) from different sources to hammer together what everyone hailed as a balanced 2007-2008 budget. (A huge chunk of the budget was covered by issuing $11 billion in bonds that will be paid for by our future citizens, so in essence spending will have outrun revenues by more than $21 billion, or almost 20 percent of the state's overall spending plan.)

Sacramento continues to spend far more than it collects in taxes, in large part because the governor and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, D-Los Angeles, and Sen. Pro Tern Don Perata, D-Oakland, don't want to tackle the difficult issue of how state government is funded--we depend far too much on income and sales taxes.

Thankfully, statewide universal health care, underwritten for the most part by very small businesses, is all but dead as Sacramento careens towards it next crisis. But there are more taxes to come. You can count on them.

Tom York is editor of the Business Journal.