ALL OF UKIAH has wanted something done for a very long time about the abandoned three-story Palace Hotel in the center of town. Some city officials have said it’s beyond rehab and should be torn down. Outside opinion, as expressed in a letter to the editor by a long-time Ukiah architect, Robert Axt, says the building is structurally sound and might again, as it did for nearly a hundred years, be restored to anchor a vibrant downtown.
EMPHATIC that the Palace’s owner, an eccentric and scattered Marin County woman named Eladia Laines, was doing nothing to either reboot or otherwise properly care for the building, the City of Ukiah has declared the Palace a public nuisance.
THE PUBLIC NUISANCE declaration was, it seemed, a large step towards demolishing the old hotel. But Ms. Laines, to everyone’s astonishment, hired a local contractor, Norman Hudson, to get to work cleaning up the premises, which Hudson has quickly and efficiently been doing, but not, it seems, to the satisfaction of the City of Ukiah, which has now red tagged the building, meaning Hudson must stop work because, the city says, he doesn’t have a permit to work inside the building. That permit must clear bureaucratic hurdles not simply negotiated.
BOTTOM LINE: A typical Mendo snafu. The city wanted something done about the Palace, the owner finally begins to do it, the city says stop.
DIRT GATE. When fuel-contaminated earth from construction of the Mendocino Transit Authority’s lavish new bus barn and office complex at the south end of Ukiah was moved to the Ukiah Speedway on the Ukiah Fairgrounds at the north end of town, it soon developed that somehow MTA and the race track’s proprietor had arranged to move the dirt outside normal processes, and the dirt, at huge expense to whom is still not known, subsequently had to be trucked outtahere to distant landfills licensed to take contaminated materials.
THE UKIAH FAIRGROUNDS is now in a hassle with Blair Aikin, the man who runs the popular racetrack, which remains closed while the dispute between Aikin and the Ukiah Fair Board is sorted out.
FREDDY CHAMPAGNE of the Champagne Racing Team told the Ukiah Daily Journal, “The decision to delay or suspend operations at this track has cost all of us in the community many dollars in preparation of our race season. The promoters are losing money, the fair is losing money, and the racers and sponsors are losing money.”
AIKIN LEARNED that the Fair Board was poised to terminate his lease from the Board’s meeting agenda, prompting him and more than a hundred racing fans and race drivers to show up at the meeting to complain that this was a heckuva underhanded thing to do to Aikin, a long-time NorCal fixture on the stock car circuit and a productive Fairgrounds tenant.
RACING WAS SUPPOSED to start at the end of March, but the whole annual show at the Fairgrounds Speedway is on hold. As Aikin and his supporters point out, before Aikins stepped forward the track at the Fairgrounds had been unused for years. The Ukiah-based entrepreneur created a valuable and popular business where there had been none, but then here comes Dirt Gate and the rug is pulled out from beneath the guy.
AS IT STANDS, Ukiah Fair officials and the feckless management at MTA each claim they didn’t know (1) the dirt was contaminated (2) who authorized it being trucked from one end of town to the other, (3) who’s going to pay for it being trucked from the Fairgrounds to distant landfills? The Fairgrounds people claim they didn’t even know the dirt was being hauled to the racetrack from MTA.
EVERYONE ELSE wonders, so what? Fuel-laden earth packed beneath a racecar track? It’s not like atomic fuel rods had been plunked down in an organic garden.
SO, WHO ARRANGED for the soiled soil to be hauled from MTA to the racetrack at the Ukiah Fairgrounds? Glenna Blake sits on the Ukiah Fair Board and she’s a long-time employee of MTA. Someone might ask her.
THE COMPLICATED plan to prevent the closing of 50 state parks freshly devised by state senators Joe Simitian and Noreen Evans seems unlikely to fly. It would route funds from a federal water quality program, state transportation and another state parks account to provide the millions needed to keep the parks open. A lot depends on the forthcoming state budget Governor Brown presents next week, and the Evans-Simitian plan is on hold anyway pending a vote that may never come. Meanwhile, in Mendocino County, community-based groups, such as the one formed in Anderson Valley to keep the economically essential Hendy Woods up and running, are working on their own plans to spare local state parks.
FROM A CHP Press Release issued May 9, 2012: “The California Highway Patrol will be sending out extra officers targeting DUI drivers during the 16th annual Boonville Beer Festival on Saturday May 12, 2012. The added enforcement, which begins at noon, is part of the California Highway Patrol’s effort to remove drivers from the highway who are impaired from alcoholic beverages and or drugs.”
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