BY VIC POLLARD, Californian columnist | Wednesday, Jul 4 2007 10:20 PM

Last Updated: Thursday, Jul 5 2007 7:27 AM

SACRAMENTO -- Sadly, I have to report that this is the last one of these columns.

It may reappear at some point in a different form, but my role as The Californian's Sacramento reporter will end next week.

As you may have noticed in a story we published last week, The Californian is closing the Sacramento reporting office for financial reasons. This company joins a long and growing list of newspapers forced to make painful cuts under the relentless changes in the economics of the modern media world.

I am disappointed but not surprised, and I count myself lucky for many reasons.

An alarming number of my colleagues in the Sacramento press corps have preceded me into other lines of work and other phases in their lives.

That this office lasted so long is a tribute to the commitment of the owners and editors of The Californian to providing readers and voters in Kern County with a steady flow of information about the impact of state government on their lives. It's expensive to maintain a remote office 300 miles away from Bakersfield.

The paper has been represented by someone in Sacramento most of the time since 1970.

Its first correspondent here was Mary K. Shell. Yes, Mary K. Shell, who went on to become mayor of Bakersfield and a Kern County supervisor.

"That was before we even had fax machines," Shell recalled the other day. She wrote a weekly column on a typewriter and shipped it to Bakersfield on a Greyhound bus.

That went on until 1979, when she decided to run for mayor and moved back to Bakersfield.

In 1982, the paper sent Bruce Scheidt, then a young reporter in the newsroom, to become a full-time reporter covering state government and politics. Scheidt, who spent his nights and weekends studying law, left in 1989 to become an attorney.

Scheidt was followed by Mike Otten, a former Sacramento Union reporter, and Lois Henry, now the paper's assistant managing editor.

I came to work for The Californian in 1994.

Although I had spent part of my youth in Bakersfield, graduating from Arvin High and attending Bakersfield College, I was no stranger to Sacramento. I had been a reporter here for most of the time since 1973, working for several newspapers owned by the Gannett Co.

When I arrived, Ronald Reagan was governor and Jerry Brown was running to succeed him.

Now, I plan to take some time off, and then see what might come next.

I don't plan to write a book, but at a time like this, it's impossible not to think about what you've learned.

In more than three decades of watching state government up close, with a fair amount of national reporting thrown in, the lesson can be summed up in one word: VOTE.

It sounds corny, but when you get down to the basics of what this country is all about, that's it.

It's increasingly fashionable to say one's vote doesn't count, that all politicians are on the take, that the big-money interests will always get what they want anyway.

But remember this: If just a few more people, relatively speaking, had voted for Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in either Tennessee or Florida in 2000, we almost certainly would not have the war in Iraq that has become so unpopular.

The lesson is, you can't always tell in advance how much influence your vote will have.

But when it turns out that you could have helped fix something bad, and you didn't try, it's too late.