Off the Record (June 16, 2021)

A CONTRACTOR FRIEND works all over the county. His anecdote from memory: “I see places where the whole neighborhood is pot grows but maybe one guy is ‘legal,’ i.e., signed up with the county. Guess who catches full hell from the authorities while his neighbors clearcut hillsides and commit all kinds of environmental atrocities?”

ON JUNE 4, 2021, wildlife officers with the California Department of Fish & Wildlife served a search warrant on the 5200 Block of Hargus Road in Laytonville…. The site was located on unnamed tributaries to Rattlesnake Creek and Ten Mile Creek – both of which feed into the South Fork Eel River watershed. Environmental violations and impacts observed on the site included:

Two on-stream dams, which impounded the natural stream flow.

Several unpermitted, undersized and inappropriately installed stream crossing culverts on roads used to access cannabis cultivation sites.

Delivery of sediment, which is deleterious to aquatic life, from unpermitted stream crossing culverts.

Over 2,700 illegal cannabis plants were eradicated, and 24 pounds of processed cannabis and 187 pounds of shake was destroyed.

Additionally, evidence of potential wildlife poaching activity was discovered and seized along with ammunition and high-capacity magazines, while serving the search warrant.

A formal complaint will be filed with the Mendocino County District Attorney’s office. 

ON-LINE COMMENTS about the Laytonville raid:

(1) The State is 70 years too late on those stream crossings. Most of the “illegal stream crossings” around Mendocino are old logging skid trails left over from the boom and bust logging of the 1950s. It is incredible that the California Wildlife Officers keep on charging people illegal and exorbitant fines for logging practices which absolutely destroyed our county in the 1950’s. Recent evidence shows that the largest impediment to the healthy salmon ecosystem is the rubber compound a washing off our tires and into the streams! Of course the State and the County are using “environmental concerns” as a ruse to gain support for their failed war of oppression against the poor mom and pop farmers who do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars to jump through all the loopholes the County and State purposefully set up to make it impossible for poor people to join their “legal pot farm club”. If the State was truly worried about climate change and our local environment they would immediately put a halt to spraying 250,000 acres of herbicides by Mendocino Redwood Con-pany.. they would stop the liquidation logging of Jackson State Forest. But this is not about environmental concerns, they make these concerns up as they go along…. according to their way of doing business, we all have illegal culverts and stream crossings. Why? Because our subdivisions never had engineered roads and engineered culverts. Most subdivisions are what is left over from logging roads and skid trails. They used to skid the felled logs right down our streams, gullies and river bars! They have environmental concerns only when they wanna steal your land or charge you exorbitant fines. It's a ruse, they care less about real issues like modern logging of our planet's lungs, like the defoliation of our tan oak forests which provide oxygen and moisture to our forests. All they care about is stealing your and my property in the name of “environmental concern”… meanwhile look at all those clearcuts and logging operations. Look at our valley floors and oak woodlands being eaten up 700 -1500 acres at a time for the all so destructive wine grape fields. It's nothing but a ruse, folks.

(2) Right on! I’ll take it a step further….There are terribly destructive weed grows. Many are done by permitted “legal” mega-farms. Some are done by unpermitted greedrushers and I cannot stand with them. Many small scenes I know are done well environmentally yet can never get over the zoning or economic hurdle to become permitted. Some of them have used their cannabis profits to till back into their land and have independently done projects to IMPROVE the habitat for wildlife and for fish- using their own money to remove or improve old crossings and old extraction logging damage. And they are being labelled “criminal” unpermitted bad people in the mainstream press and culture. And they are being choked out by the corporate takeover that many are foolishly applauding.

(3) Many asshole people in Laytonville running around with heavy equipment playing contractor. Cutting down trees, plowing, road scraping, destroying everything and laughing about it. Total disrespect for anything and everything. It’s all about $$$. A place up Fox Rock they got the illegal well drillers up there and they punched 10 dry holes that are over a hundred feet deep, each one cost several thousand dollars to drill. I mean and they aren’t even bothering to fill them just throwing a board over the top . One place just a little north of Laytonville the whole damn forest has been cut down and the waste shoved in the creek. So much so around this place massive mountains of firewood are piled. Clouds of silty soil blowing up in the air. Gallons of chemicals, hydraulic fluids, oil dumping, garbage piles. Right on the main road for all to see. Ah he's a good ol’ boy it’s ok no problem. At this point everything has been out of control for so long just pick a driveway and see what’s up there.

LONG-DISTANCE AMBULANCE CHASERS: Although the Great Redwood Trail exists only and forever in the calculating eyes of State Senator McGuire, a couple of Show Me State legal hustlers are already fishing for clients claiming to be injured by the chimerical rails to trails fantasy cooked up by Northcoast Democrats.

STARVING attorneys Lindsay S. Brinton and Meghan S. Largent from law firm Lewis Rice, based in Missouri but willing to travel if enough suckers sign up with us, “will host educational meetings in Eureka, Bayside, Fortuna and Willits June 28 and 29 to discuss the potential compensation claims of landowners who own property adjacent to the railroad line in Willits, Samoa, Korbel and Korblex that is expected to be converted to a hiking trail under the rails-to-trails program....” 

KEY PHRASE here is “expected to be.” You put up your dollars and I'll put up my Redwood Drive-In donuts — the best donuts in these untied states — that enough saps will sign up to bring these vultures winging westward.

I GOT a kick out of this description of the Kansas City mothership: “About Lewis Rice,” and noting the pretentious missing hyphen as I read, “Throughout the Firm’s history, Lewis Rice attorneys have made excellence the foundation of their practice. Founded in 1909, more than a century of service gives the Firm [sic the capital 'F'] the experience, resources and tools to serve their [our?] clients’ dynamic needs....” Dynamic needs? Excellence? 

THE RUN-UP to Sunday’s midterm elections in the next door failed state of Mexico has been spectacularly brutal, even by Mexican standards. As of the end of last week, 97 politicians were reported to have been assassinated and over 900 assaulted. Election day itself was no different. According to Reuters, a man flung a severed human head at a voting station in the city of Tijuana, and plastic bags filled with human remains were found at multiple polling places. Authorities were unable to decode the message of the severed head or the body parts other than to speculate that groups of someones are very unhappy with the process. But mayhem and all, the Associated Press reported that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s more of the same party and its allies are set to keep their majority in Mexico’s lower chamber of the congress despite the loss of about 50 seats, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional reforms.

THE LOVE THAT HAS NO NAME! (From last week’s meeting of the Supervisors during budget discussions)

DA David Eyster: Kudos to Carmel Angelo. She catches a lot of grief at least by one newspaper in the County which I don’t think she deserves. And mostly because they probably don’t have all the information. 

CEO Carmel Angelo: Thank you to the DA for joining us today. Our DA is a working DA. He’s usually in trial or preparing for a trial. It was really important to have him here today to give us his perspective. When I want a perspective on criminal justice or public safety or the courts our DA is the person I go to. He is very open. He has an open door to county administration… I encourage any board member to visit him at his office. So DA Eyster, thank you very much for joining us today and for all your kind words. Thank you.” 

ED NOTE: The above is the usual whine-dodge that if we had “all the information” our criticisms of county functioning would be valid. So like kind of provide it. 

SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS was on the short end of this week's 4-1 Supe's vote to squander $100,000, at $250 an hour, on yet another consultant whose advice the Supervisors will duly ignore. (cf Marbut, Kemper et al). The new consultant,  a little old lady, Dr. B.J. Bischoff — Gran Smuckers come to life —fairly beamed, and why wouldn't she at $250 per blah-blah” Doc Bischoff was hired to develop a “strategic plan” for the good ship Mendo, rudderless for years now, the captain and her five mates passed out on the bridge. 

A “STRATEGIC PLAN” is your basic self-cancelling phrase, a redundancy. A plan is a strategy, most places, at least places where words still have meaning.

HEREWITH a plan, a strategic plan, for Mendocino County, if you insist Ms. Molgaard.

1. Nothing much to plan, really, given that categories of spending are mandated by the state and federal governments, but if the Supervisors managed their own money like they manage Mendo's dough, they'd also be shuffling up and down State Street with their belongings in a stolen Safeway cart. The old standard was that public officials spent public money like it was their own. What happened?

2. An end to outside consultants. (A consultant, in the old joke, is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.) The Supervisors should establish priorities without passing their buck to “consultants,” then follow up on their planning, which is why they were elected. The Supes can find out everything they need to know by talking with line workers, present and retired.

3. And end to outside lawyers, especially given that we have a grand bunch (9 at last count) already on the County payroll, none of them apparently capable of handling the simplest matters — injury claims, wrongful terminations, mostly.

4. Require monthly budget updates from department heads. Doesn't have to be War and Peace reporting, just a balance against projected spending to the end of the fiscal year.

5. Demand a precise accounting of the roughly $28 million that annually disappears in the blackhole of mental health, as the number of dependent mentally ill wandering the streets steadily increases.

6. Get Measure B done. Laughable that our own psych unit remains in limbo.

CAROL MORDHORST, former Public Health Director, commented Wednesday on the proposal to split HHSA from one amorphous unmanaged blob into two slightly smaller amorphous unmanaged blobs: 

Mordhorst: “In the past 15 years I have watched the erosion of Public Health. Twice I contracted with the County to provide management services during the vacancy of the Public Health Director. I observed the over-bureaucratic process that delayed hiring, processing contracts and timely decision making. Furthermore, I observed poor morale, and exodus of highly skilled, frustrated staff with the lack of knowledgeable leadership. Staffing in community wellness and nursing are less than half of the staff of 15 years ago. The covid pandemic has demonstrated how important public health is and how it affects the entire population. There are many diseases transmitted through food, water, air, saliva and sex that also affect our public health. Public health staff are needed to properly address these issues and be lead by an individual who is not distracted by the many behavior health issues this county faces.”

That last “distraction” comment was in opposition to the proposal to merge behavioral (mental) health with public health as one of the two amorphous unmanagement blobs, which, obviously Mordhorst opposes. Mordhorst also recommended moving environmental health into public health. The Supes seemed flummoxed by Mordhorst who while of course not mentioning CEO Carmel Angelo by name, was certainly talking about problems that are the CEO’s doing. The Supes then pushed the re-org issue into yet another ad-hoc committee to explore further while at the same time requesting that CEO continue in her search to find a replacement for Public Health Director Barbara Howe, fired abruptly more than a year ago by the CEO and resulting in a still pending wrongful termination lawsuit. Since February the CEO has had public health being administered by a woman named Mary Alice Wileford whose expertise, such as it is, is in financial administration not public health. (Mark Scaramella)

SHANNON RILEY is Ukiah's deputy city manager. His eminence, the city manager himself, Sage Sangiacomo, from whom we seldom hear, perhaps because he's a latter day proponent of the old sixties demonstration cry, “Chicks up front,” the theory being the cops would be less likely to club women, a theory demolished as the chicks were duly clubbed wherever they got up front, and one more impetus for the Women's Movement, dispatches Mr. Riley to 'splain a few things to Ukiah's severely put upon citizens. 

THE HUGELY DISRUPTIVE re-do of a length of State Street has been underway now seemingly forever, just as the Palace Hotel, even in its abandoned decrepitude, remains Ukiah's second grandest large building, the first being the Ukiah seat of government itself, a remodeled, pre-World War Two school building replete with posh amenities for the people who've made Ukiah what it is today — a hellish, unplanned sprawl most Mendo citizens dread visiting. 

OF COURSE Ukiah's civic headquarters is situated on Ukiah's Westside, where much of the city's and the county's government lives. You won't catch the homeless camping out west of State Street, one irony being that a large slice of the government-paid residents who make their homes on the Westside's leafy streets derive their livings from the dependent classes east of State.

ALL OF WHICH is preamble to the following highly annoying message from Ms. Riley on a list of annoying messages she titled, “Myth-Busting, part 6: As for the Palace Hotel and the courthouse, the City has very limited influence. The Palace is privately owned, and the City has no mechanism for purchasing and redeveloping it—certainly not with gas tax or Measure Y funds! The courthouse is a State project that the City has no role in. The State has purchased property near the trail depot and started some of the site improvements, but the project has stalled and the State has not yet allocated money for the design or construction of the facility. The City advocates for completion of the project, but that’s about all we can do. (Feel free to send a letter to the State!) — Shannon Riley, deputy city manager”

THE CITY has dithered for years as a series of windy, under-funded investors promised to get the Palace up and running again. Instead of condemning the structure and auctioning it to someone who had the real ability to rehab it, here we are forty or so years later with the Palace in limbo. (There's lots of money in Ukiah, but zero civic pride among that money. Big Chuck Mannon all by himself, could easily restore the Palace to profitability rather than fund, say, the multi-story eyesore he's erected down among the big box eyesores on Airport Blvd.) 

INSTEAD, the city managed to bumble the Palace all the way into receivership from where it has recently been retrieved by the owner of the Fairfield Inn down on Airport, Jitu Ishwar. This guy seems to have the resources to get 'er done, and if he does it will be no thanks to his host city.

(A READER CLARIFIES: The man named in Justine Frederickson's recent story about the new owner of the Palace Hotel in Ukiah, Jitu Ishwar, is affiliated with the Travelodge Hotel in Ukiah. He is involved in a company named Twin Investments. Corporate records and LinkedIn also connect him to AJPJ LLC which is linked on Corporatewiki to Fairfield Inn on Airport Park Blvd in Ukiah. He is on the Ukiah Main Street Program Board.)

WHERE MS. RILEY is all the way wrong is the new county courthouse proposed a lengthy three blocks from the present, perfectly serviceable (well, maybe not perfectly) historic county courthouse where it has sat for 150 years at State and Perkins. For many millions less than the new courthouse will cost — expect a concrete, glass and steel abomination of a high rise popular these days with the legal community — the present courthouse could be restored to its 19th century beauty and, your honors, a contemporary serviceability. 

Butte County’s new Courthouse (typical of modern California courthouses)

(BEFORE WW II even America's mental asylums were beautiful because people understood that what things look like was crucial to civic morale and, by extension, mental health. Talmage, inside its Buddhist fencing, remains a beauty spot perfect for a college, which is what the Buddhists have done with it. Mendo could have had the whole show for a song, but Mendo being Mendo....)

THE NEW COUNTY COURTHOUSE is, as Ms. Riley says, a state matter, but if the host community for which she seems to speak spoke up and said, “We don't want a new county courthouse that serves only the Superior Court because we don't want to kill what's left of our battered town center,” the state, which in this case is the state's publicly-funded state judicial apparatus, it's likely the state would listen.

MENDO being a place without historical memory, Ms. Riley apparently doesn't know the etiology of the proposed new county courthouse, a sad story of Northcoast Democratic Party corruption that managed to first get its grasping hands on the old Northwestern Pacific Railroad, which the party squeezed for its remaining value and jobs for its old boys before raffling off what was left of it. Doug Bosco, Mitch Stogner, Dan Hauser, et al, all the way down to John McCowen and retired judge Dave Nelson in Ukiah were instrumental in arranging the proposed site for the new courthouse where the old train stop was on West Perkins. 

OUT OF THE MUD of all this no new lotus of a new county courthouse will grow. I hope. Covid and our faith-based economy may have finished it off, but in the meantime, as Ms. Riley, with typical Mendo civil service arrogance, challenges us, “Feel free to send a letter to the State!” 

NOT to clamber aboard the Trump Train, but it does more and more appear that China lied about the virus arising from a Wuhan wet market to conceal its true origins in a state lab. These are the people who buried an entire high speed train back in 2011 when it malfunctioned, killing forty people and injuring hundreds, because they didn't want it to get out that their vaunted new high speed technology was imperfect.

MR RED BEARD lent the Elk-Greenwood area a bracing couple of weeks of menace but he seems to have eluded the full-press law enforcement search for him and departed the neighborhood.

IF YOU CAME IN LATE… Red Beard has been identified as William Allan Evers

40 year-old white male adult, 6 feet 1 inch tall, weighing 180 pounds with brown eyes, brown hair and reddish facial hair. Skull or skulls tattoo on his right upper arm, “Demon face” tattoo on his upper left arm and unknown prominent tattoo on his chest. Currently wanted for an active no Bail arrest warrant by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for Criminal Threats and should be considered Armed And Dangerous. On 05-25-2021 the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Investigations Bureau, identified the suspect involved in the series of burglaries in remote areas of Mendocino County and the attempted murder of a Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Deputy on 05-12-2021.

EVERY DAY, the many county chatlines contain a couple of desperate, bordering-on-plaintive pleas for housing, almost all of them from employed people with the means to pay the exorbitant rents this area now demands. Tim McClure gets to the heart of the matter: “Don’t kid yourself, there’s plenty of housing but it sits empty and unavailable for occupancy because it is controlled by someone who already owns many houses. Solution, levy a hefty tax on the multiple houses crowd. I’ve heard that in Holland if a house sits empty you are within your rights to move in! Would that ever become accepted practice in the USA? Time will tell.” And then there's the B&B infestation. My old home on Anderson Valley Way rents for $600 a night and is owned by city yuppos. Believe me, anybody who would pay $600 for a night there is, well… Well, capitalism produces many miracles, and this is definitely one of them.

A PROPOSAL to ban the showing of pornography or any content encouraging gender change or homosexuality to anyone under the age of 18 has aroused (sic) the ire of gay groups. The proposal arises (sic) from Hungary where fascism, always popular in the East European country, is again on the rise. But do you have to be a fascist to see the proposed law as socially desirable? Does anybody want young people watching this stuff, much less considering a sex changes at ages when the young barely know their ding dongs from their ring a lings?

LOTS OF HEADLINES lately like this one: “Ready for a Bloody Summer.” Note the absence of a question mark as the stories promise fentanyl, guns and murder. “Even in the suburbs and rural areas murder was up 15 percent,” a city police chief said. “Crime fell last year in America, but murder rose historically. So what are the most plausible explanations? One likely factor is a jump in the number of guns in America, which somehow has gotten even more out of hand. FBI data suggests nearly 40 million guns were sold last year, a 40% increase from 2019. New data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found roughly 20 percent of those who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners.”

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] I believe the globalist-elite conspiracies are born from an attempt to understand why, and an intuition that, the entire fabric of our world – its assumptions, trajectories, history – is screwed up. It’s off. There’s a deep evil twisting everything. So, maybe it can be explained by elite manipulators who have an evil club through the centuries… 

There is an evil saturating our world, but it’s not explained by an evil club of elite manipulators. It’s explained by the human race’s almost complete dissociation from its natural state, which is to exist as small tribes dependent on wild nature. We have embarked on an experiment with agricultural and technological control over nature’s processes. These methods of control produce surpluses, growth, wealth, civilization, surplus population, slavery, complexity, smartphones. We are addicted to all these things. We are addicted to the short-lived thrills of agro-technical control over nature, to the highs of “success” these mechanisms of control bring. 

Our entire “period of recorded history” is the story of this human experiment with agro-technological control over nature’s processes and the power, surplus and destruction it brings. 

This is the actual source of the “evil” in the fabric of our world… (Of course it springs from natural human proclivity for and attraction to short-sighted successes… a difficulty of long-view foresight… a tendency to stupidity in the species.)

Fighting “evil elites” won’t fix the problem. Democratic revolt won’t fix the problem… We have to unravel our five-to-ten-millennium addiction to agricultural/technological systems of producing “surplus profit” from our environment

I believe the globalist-elite conspiracies are born from an attempt to understand why, and an intuition that, the entire fabric of our world – its assumptions, trajectories, history – is screwed up. It’s off. There’s a deep evil twisting everything. So, maybe it can be explained by elite manipulators who have an evil club through the centuries… 

There is an evil saturating our world, but it’s not explained by an evil club of elite manipulators. It’s explained by the human race’s almost complete dissociation from its natural state, which is to exist as small tribes dependent on wild nature. We have embarked on an experiment with agricultural and technological control over nature’s processes. These methods of control produce surpluses, growth, wealth, civilization, surplus population, slavery, complexity, smartphones. We are addicted to all these things. We are addicted to the short-lived thrills of agro-technical control over nature, to the highs of “success” these mechanisms of control bring. 

Our entire “period of recorded history” is the story of this human experiment with agro-technological control over nature’s processes and the power, surplus and destruction it brings. 

This is the actual source of the “evil” in the fabric of our world… (Of course it springs from natural human proclivity for and attraction to short-sighted successes… a difficulty of long-view foresight… a tendency to stupidity in the species.)

Fighting “evil elites” won’t fix the problem. Democratic revolt won’t fix the problem… We have to unravel our five-to-ten-millennium addiction to agricultural/technological systems of producing “surplus profit” from our environment.

[2] Listening to the local radio station this morning, the hosts were talking about signs they’d seen on a couple of local restaurants –” Please be Patient with us! We have staff shortages!” One of them talked to the owner who told him that not only can they not get anyone to come back to work, getting supplies (like meat, eggs) is harder b/c the suppliers don’t have enough people on the job. Paying people to sit at home has been quite effective.

[3] Maybe a little bit off-topic, but referencing the earlier Britney Spears discussion, her Mickey Mouse Club playmate Natalie Portman turns 40 today. Johnny Depp turns 58. I used to be quite impressed by the acting skills of both. The more I hear from them, the less impressed I am with them as people.

Portman, protesting at last year’s Academy Awards against the lack of female nominees for Best Director, had the names of “all of the female directors who weren’t nominated for Oscars” embroidered onto her Dior cape. At the time, Portman’s production company, Handsome Charlie Films, employed exactly one female director – Portman. In 2009, she signed a petition for the release of Roman Polanski who had been arrested in Zurich in what turned out to be a failed extradition attempt. After getting some heat for her decision, she said that she regretted it, and that she had signed the petition only because someone she trusted suggested she should. 

Depp? Charlie Sheen trying to play Hunter S. Thompson. Highest paid actor at one point but can’t pay his multi-million dollar wine bill. His financial success with Pirates of the Caribbean allowed him to quit acting (now he puts on eye-liner and calls it acting) and just live a life of out-of-control self-indulgence. 

If either decide to return to acting (rather than mind control and mind-out-of-control, as currently employed) I might take a look, based on previous experience. It’s rare that anything out of Hollywood catches my attention (in a positive way) anymore. Propaganda and personality. The more you “know” about an artist, the harder it is to separate that from their art.

[4] A lot of us hate the weed culture, even though we are a part of it.

It literally has been the new gold rush, and it has flooded the west coast with many greedy jerks from all over the world.

Pretentious, self-important grow-tards spending thousands on amendments while people work for poverty wages at the counter.

An absolutely false and full of shit “culture”, and a contributor to a host of social problems.

What we need to do, is value what normal people do for a living, and pay them a living wage.

The west coast doesn’t need anymore greedy blood lusting bud miners.

[5] Tuesday, for the first time in 16 months, I went to the South Shore Plaza, supposedly one of the very highest-grossing malls in New England, to get a new iphone screen protector for my wife’s cell. The mall itself didn’t require masks, but about half the people there were wearing them.

What I get a kick out of are the ones who wear their masks only over their mouths and leave their noses uncovered.

However, when I went into the busy Apple store, they stated masks were mandatory, so I had to put my own on. The sales clerk was very nice. He stated the screen protector (just a small, thin piece of plastic) cost $39.95, but the kiosk in the center aisle opposite the store charged a lot less. I went over there and got the screen protector installed (took maybe 3 or 4 minutes) and was charged only $20. Apple is such a ripoff. I know they have a lot of overhead, but really, double the price of somewhere else? They have a lot of staff wandering around asking customers if they had any questions.

I thought the mall would have a lot of vacant stores, but it didn’t. It was mostly full with a several new businesses.

ON LINE COMMENTS ABOUT THE NORTHCOAST’S GREEN RUSH

(1) Some things that could easily slow this down. Ban on bulk sales of soil unless you have a certificate of need. Apply and pay 25 bucks to get your bulk if you meet the requirements. Has anyone else noticed the hardware stores are limiting amounts of PVC pipe that you can purchase? Massive rolls of plastic thousands of pots. Those types of things should not be allowed out of the nursery or for sale unless there is a certificate proving need. That huge production yard of Sparetime’s on Highway 101 when you’re going past Willits.??? Plastic city. My kids think it is amazing watching the excavator smashing the mountains of used pallets as we drive by. Truly, massive amounts of soil in the yard move in and out damn fast. Extra tax on some of these items? Environmental hazard tax? CRV value on plastic pots? Funding goes to cleanups.

(2) You're right about limiting the pipe, soils, etc. The hardware stores, nurseries are making a killing, lots of cash sales that they probably don’t pay taxes on. And they keep jacking up the prices for us poor ones trying to fix or build on our homes. The city benefits but they cry that they're broke and need more (retirement $$$) Cops crying it’s the cartels but it’s the local cartels that are running the show here. You wouldn’t want the real cartels here! Maybe it’s the Russian, China, Flying Monkey cartels!