MENDO CRIME OF THE WEEK: A 41-year-old Santa Cruz man was arrested in Willits during a traffic stop after he was found carrying $62,800 in cash allegedly derived from marijuana sales, Mendocino County sheriff's officials said.
A deputy pulled Jason Anderson over on South Main Street near Highway 20 in Willits at about 9pm Tuesday for an unspecified traffic violation, Lt. Kirk Mason said. During the stop, a police dog trained in drug detection signaled to the deputy, launching a search of the car. The deputy found bundles of cash in numerous bill denominations in a backpack as well as a bag of pot and a pipe on the ground under the vehicle, Mason said. Anderson declined to explain where the cash and pot came from, according to Mason. Anderson was arrested on suspicion of having proceeds acquired from drug transactions and booked into the Mendocino County Jail. The cash was seized. Jason Anderson posted $10,000 bail and was released, according to arrest records.
WHICH MEANS the County of Mendocino made money Tuesday, better than $62,000. If Mr. Anderson can prove he was just taking his dough for a country drive, airing it out so to speak, he'll get it back, but if you drive around loaded, well, 62 grand is a lotta dumb.
STATE LEGISLATORS have ordered the State Auditor to investigate the “culture of deception and entitlement” that enabled Parks to hide $54 million in special funds over a dozen years. Since it was discovered last month that State Parks had stashed $54 million in two special funds while at the same time soliciting private funds to keep dozens of parks from closing, State Parks has become a sort of poster child for state mismanagement, although millions more in stashed public funds have since been found hidden away unaccounted for by other state bureaucracies.
THE STATE AUDITOR'S OFFICE has been directed to find out how long the hidden money had been accumulating; how the Parks Department reports financial data to the Finance Department and state Controller's office; and whether State Controller's office has the ability to ensure the data is accurate.
THEY WISH NOW they'd googled Trinity Managment “because we'd never have rented from them.”
HERE'S THE STORY, one I happened to be in on as friends of the ripped off family of three — a young man, his young wife and their two-year-old. Until a couple of weeks ago, the young family had been living in Washington DC where the young man worked as a mathematician for the government. Desperate to get out of DC, the young man, whose skills are much in demand, found a job with a start-up in San Francisco. The young couple immediately went on-line looking for a rental in Baghdad by the Bay. They soon had a list of possibles. My wife and I were delegated to look at these possibles and report back to them.
WE SPENT a weekend shuffling to “open houses,” all of them crammed with so many young people looking for shelter that we applicants spilled out into the halls. Landlords have never had it so good. Even in rural Boonville they're getting rents out of all proportion to the value of what they're renting, assuming value is not established solely by demand. Which it is in an unregulated capitalist economy like ours.
I THOUGHT BACK to when I was a kid in SF. For under $200 I always found a place, often a two-bedroom, either in the Mission or the Haight-Ashbury. I even found one once at Sacramento and Stockton in Chinatown for $200. That was in 1969.
THE APARTMENTS we looked at in July of 2012, 43 years later, were going from $2500 and up. To move in to one of these charmless, one-bedroom cubbyholes the renter would have to come up with $6 thousand, which seemed to explain the older people, presumably parents and grandparents, accompanying many of the young people begging the landlord or his haughty rep to please-o-please sir consider them.
MY YOUNG FRIENDS were in a hurry. Mister had a job in SF that started yesterday. They'd found a place on-line at 2200 Jackson that was advertised as move-in ready. The ad came with photos purporting to be the advertised unit, which turned out to be photos of another place, but we didn't figure that out until it was too late.
WE WENT TO SEE the place for ourselves so we could report back to our friends. It was a tiny one bedroom dump, and I speak here as a person who spent his youth living in Frisco dumps, including wino dumps south of Market with fetid bathrooms down the hall. But this dump was at 2200 Jackson in the upper Fillmore, a dull neighborhood traditionally favored by the haute bourgeosie. And it was a dump.
ADVERTISED as live-in ready, this place had no tile in the shower, no showerhead, no countertops or cabinet doors. The seal on the bay window was eroded and looked ready to fall into the street. A two-year-old toddler would have a good chance of doing a three-story header. And the place hadn't been cleaned. A welcoming turd had been left floating in the unflushed commode in a tiny bathroom reeking of urine. $2600 a month for this?
THE NICE LADIES at Trinity Managment promised us that the apartment would be fully ready for safe occupancy by the time young Mister arrived to start work at his new job, Missus and Child to follow. It could be done. I've moved in to less promising shelter.
THE YOUNG FAMILY ponied up the required six grand long-distance. They assumed they'd secured a conventionally hygienic apartment in a serene neighborhood. We'd warned them that it needed some work but nothing that couldn't be accomplished in the weekend promised by the smiling ladies at Trinity Management, secure in their ground floor office in a concrete high rise at 2000 Broadway, an awful building in a block of awful buildings in that soul-destroying wasteland between Van Ness on the east and Dianne Feinstein's mausoleum to the west in Pacific Heights. San Francisco looks great from the Golden Gate Bridge but up close much of it is pure Fresno.
WHEN THE TENANT arrived the Sunday afternoon before the Monday morning he was to begin his new job, his six thousand dollar apartment had been gutted. It had been merely dirty and in need of minor repairs when we'd seen it a few days before. A major rehab was now underway. The space had become totally uninhabitable and seemed likely to stay that way for some time.
THE YOUNG TENANTS asked Trinity to nullify the lease. The nice ladies at 2000 Broadway answered with an emphatic NO. They informed the young tenants that not only would Trinity Management not cancel the rental agreement that Trinity had clearly violated, but the young family was now responsible for paying the rent on their unlivable apartment until a new tenant could be found! And, the nice ladies at Trinity Management added, the young family's rent was now $2799, the lease agreement for $2600 for six months having been unilaterally adjusted upwards by $199.
AND THE NICE LADIES at Trinity, moving seamlessly from larceny to straight-up fraud, blithely went on to say that they'd told the young couple about the condition of the apartment and that the young couple had said that they would accept the place as it was. Which they might have done if, in the interim, the apartment hadn't become a major remodel site. But they hadn't agreed to move into the place as they found it, gutted and less habitable than a doorway on a cold street.
AS OF THE SECOND week of August, our young friends are paying a big rent on an apartment they cannot and will not live in. We've got our war paint on. Trinity won't get away with this, and we shall see what we shall see.
ACCORDING TO THE CHP, a hazmat team is still working to clean up a large diesel spill after a tanker truck overturned and hit a tree on Orr Springs Road just before noon Wednesday. The tanker crashed at 11:42pm and spilled 500 gallons of diesel into Ackerman Creek west of Montgomery Woods, closing Orr Springs Road for three hours. Driver William Pipes, 68, of Redwood Valley, was hauling 1,800 gallons of diesel west on Orr Springs Road when, for reasons still under investigation, the truck ran off the south edge of the road, rolled and hit a tree, causing the fuel spill, according to CHP spokesman officer Steven Krul. CalFire extricated Pipes, who was flown to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital with moderate injuries where he was treated and released. The cause of the crash is under investigation. Pipes wasn't wearing his seatbelt at the time of the crash; the CHP does not believe he was driving under the influence. The truck, a 1980 International, belongs to Redwood Coast Fuels, Inc., of Ukiah.
IN OTHER CHP NEWS, a Texas murder suspect, Zachary Ryan Price, was arrested by CHP officers today (Thursday) at noon near Laytonville. “The Garberville Area office of the California Highway Patrol received a tip of an unoccupied white 2000 Pontiac Bonneville near the Black Oak Ranch north of Laytonville in northern Mendocino County. The vehicle was registered out of Cedar Park, Texas, and was believed to be associated with 20-year old Zachary Ryan Price, also of Texas. Price is the suspect in the stabbing death of one of his family members in Liberty Hill, Texas. The murder took place in early July of this year. Price was believed to be camping in the area of the Black Oak Ranch, the site of the Gaia Festival this past weekend. CHP officers and a CHP aircraft responded to the area in an attempt to locate Price. Through the coordinated efforts of the California Highway Patrol Garberville Area, the US Marshall's Service, Williamson County, Texas, Sheriff's Department, the Liberty Hill, Texas, Police Department, and the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department, Highway Patrol officers took the boy into custody.”
ROSEANNE BARR ANNOUNCES RUNNING MATE FOR PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN. Roseanne Barr announced last week that Cindy Sheehan will be her running mate in her bid for the Peace and Freedom Party’s nomination for President. Sheehan is an anti-war activist who first gained national attention for her protest camp outside then-President Bush’s Texas ranch. Barr said, “Cindy and I are the ‘Throw The Bums Out’ ticket and the ‘Ballot Access’ ticket. We want people to register in the Peace and Freedom Party so that the party can keep its ballot status in California.” After the passage of the “Top Two primary” in 2010, alternative political parties lost one of their ways of staying on the ballot. The Peace and Freedom Party needs approximately 40,000 more registrants to maintain its ballot status beyond 2014. “We also want people to start Peace and Freedom Parties in other states,” added Barr. Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who has been working closely with Barr on this campaign, commented, “Access to the ballot is a civil rights issue that needs attention across the country. If voters only have two choices, both of which represent the same interests, then we don’t really have a democracy.” McKinney went on to describe a higher standard of democracy, “When I was in Congress, I promoted proportional representation for legislatures. This is the only way to make our democracy representative of the people, rather than the corporate donors.” Cat Woods, an officer of the Peace & Freedom Party, echoed Barr on the party’s emphasis on ballot access. She said that the party hoped to “draw attention to the ongoing erosion of alternative parties’ access to the ballot and how this directly deprives voters of control of their government.” When asked whether she supported the Barr ticket, Woods added, “Our party needs to reach a wider audience with its message of socialist solutions. Roseanne Barr and Cindy Sheehan can bring that.” Responding to charges that she could “steal votes” from Obama or “spoil the election,” Barr said, “The American people are sick and tired of this ‘lesser evil’ garbage they get fed every election year. Both the Democrats and the Republicans do the same evils once they’re in office. I’m here to tell the voters: if you want to tell the government and the two domineering parties that you’re sick and tired of all their evil, register in the Peace and Freedom Party and vote for me and Cindy.”
To contact the Roseanne for President campaign, contact campaign@roseanneforpresident.org
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