FILE - An aerial view of Vacaville in December 2025.

The New York Times published a glowing profile this week on Vacaville, a Bay Area city that’s well known, but not always celebrated. And while exposure in the nation’s newspaper of record is a welcome surprise, some Solano County locals were baffled by how their bucolic city was presented to the rest of the country. 

“First of all, I didn’t understand why the article was being written. What was the intent? Was it to discuss ‘vaca’ — a cow? A historical perspective? If so, I don’t think they went about it in the right way,” Sarah Chapman, a member of the Vacaville City Council, told SFGATE on Thursday by phone after reading the piece. 

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Chapman said that Vacaville is an excellent community and it was nice to see it appear in a positive light, but she questioned why the profile, published in the Times’ real estate section, highlighted some areas while overlooking others. 

For instance, Chapman noted that the section on the area’s education relegated the Vacaville Unified School District to a single sentence, but........

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