by Mark Scaramella
Wednesday night’s Community Services District meeting at the Boonville Firehouse was uncharacteristically testy, and grew testier as the evening wore on as trustees traded verbal jabs with each other and aimed a couple of body blows at Fire Chief Colin Wilson. The first skirmish arose when the Recreation Committee proposed a “playgroup” at the preschool [...]
by Don Morris
Skuntown/Willits — Mark Scaramella’s report on the County Supervisors August 3 meeting in Covelo was right on target — a reality-based, bullshit detecting analysis in a few concise paragraphs. The Mendocino National Forest has been “occupied” from the get-go by the locals: logging, livestock grazing, poaching, joyriding, and, more recently, pot growing. Since the current [...]
by Alexander Cockburn
I went to get my hair cut the other day in the town of Fortuna and waited ten minutes while the elderly barber finished buzz-cutting a young Mexican American. After the young man had exited under his thin skullcap of black stubble, Don the barber sighed and said, “That’s the third boy I’ve cut today [...]
by Daniel Mintz
More than a year in the making, an advisory plan for using the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District’s water surplus includes an option that was torpedoed when it was proposed a few years ago — shipping water out of the county, to another municipality. A report by a 15-member Water Resource Planning Advisory Committee was [...]
by Will Parrish
Since 1775, when the Spanish vessels Santiago and Sonora anchored in Trinidad Bay, the surviving American Indian nations of California’s northcoast have withstood violent conquest, systematic land expropriation, kidnapping and forced indoctrination of their children via a residential school system that persisted for nearly a century, destruction of their languages and spiritual traditions, New Age [...]
by Peggy Shaw
We didn’t usually have to leave the waterfront for entertainment. Waldo Point was its own ongoing movie and endlessly entertaining. But when Mark Whittington, the Independent Journal reporter for southern Marin, came over to my houseboat, The Toots & Toots, with an invitation to a dinner and musical revue at the civic center, I couldn’t [...]
by Dan Bacher
In a historic protest on July 21, members of dozens of California Indian Tribes and their allies marched through the streets of downtown Fort Bragg protesting the violation of indigenous fishing and gathering rights under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative. “This is the biggest protest on any issue held on the [...]
by Dan Bacher
In her guest opinion in the Eureka Times-Standard on June 29, Former Democratic Assemblywoman Virginia Strom-Martin claimed that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fast-track Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative is “the most open and transparent process” that she has ever been involved with. However, a historic protest the same day by over 40 activists from the [...]
by Gene Herr
There are three chapters to this story: Subdivision of Albion Head; Piecemeal Development of the Mendocino Outback; Official Waste with Over, Under, and Non-regulation from Characteristic Supervisory Dither and Constipation. Guarding the southern shore of the mouth of the Albion River is a grassy rounded hill, pretty much in its native state and unmarred by [...]
by Mark Scaramella
There were some interesting things about Tuesday’s very preliminary election results which should not go unnoticed.