TWO WEEKS AGO, as the North Pass Fire raged northeast of Covelo, CalFire received a frantic call from “a non-English speaking male” who said he was about to be consumed by fast moving flames. The man didn't know exactly he was, but the Forest Service dispatched a helicopter and CalFire sent out a rescue ground crew to look for him without success.
THEN, LAST SATURDAY, (September 8th), “14 members of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Search and Rescue unit conducted a search of the area in and around Boardman Ridge in Covelo, the area the 911 caller was thought to have been in when he called. Two GPS coordinates were obtained from two of the 911 calls made. Both of these positions, the areas around them, and four roads leading in and out of this area were searched with no success. As part of the investigative effort the caller's cellular telephone records were obtained from the cellular phone provider.”
THROUGH THESE RECORDS, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office determined that the caller was Diego Diaz, 37, of Santa Rosa. Deputies were soon talking with Diaz himself who said he was alive and well.
THE PLOT THINS. Diaz said he'd been “swimming” in the Mendocino National Forest when the North Pass Fire started rapidly moving east from the Middle Fork of the Eel River near Boardman Ridge. He'd driven up from Santa Rosa to go for a dip, hiking way to hell and gone to a remote section of the Eel where the water runs clear and swift if it hasn't been diverted to forest agriculture. This is a guy who likes his privacy. No swimming pools for him!
DIAZ said he outran the fire, and eventually made his way to the road near the Black Butte Country Store where a friend picked him up and gave him a ride home. Diaz said he'd gone for that swim by himself, and had been alone when the flames came at him. He said he was in an area where cell phone reception was poor, and he'd lost contact with the Cal Fire Dispatch Center when he'd called for help. He didn't say why he hadn't contacted CalFire to report that he'd made it out safely, but a skeptic might think Mr. Diaz was managing a marijuana grow site when he'd had to run for his life.
MENDOCINO'S HERITAGE HOUSE, presently in the hands of dubious outside ownership that promised the famous inn would be reopened months ago, is still not open. As reported here last year when the famous inn was sold to them, a family synonymous with Baltimore slum housing by the name of Schlesinger, wound up with the property after its previous owners had gone bankrupt. Once a fairly major Mendocino Coast employer, Heritage House has been closed for four years, and now its latest owners say they may re-model the aging buildings that comprise the inn before they revive it. The Schlesingers also maintain a chain of hotels.
THE HERITAGE HOUSE is synonymous with a popular moving filmed there starring Alan Alda, about whom a recent commentator said, “If there's ever a Mount Rushmore for wusses, Alda will be on it.”
SO MANY WACKY young parents are refusing to vaccinate their children, that the state legislature to approve a bill requiring parents to discuss vaccinations with a pediatrician or a school nurse before they can opt-out. Governor Brown has until the end of September to sign or veto it.
PATRICK REILLEY, 28, of Oak View (near Santa Barbara), has been identified as the abalone diver found dead Friday afternoon (31 August) in about 18 feet of water near the Sea Arch rock formation off Mendocino Headlands State Park. The young man had apparently drowned but his cause of death has yet to be officially confirmed pending results of an autopsy.
THE LARGEST POT RAID of the 2012 season (so far) occurred last Thursday just up the road from Sheriff's Department headquarters on Low Gap Road, Ukiah. On one of the raided properties more then 230 large plants and processed marijuana were found along with $5,471 in cash. Taken into custody were Susan Applebaum, 58 and senior citizen Sidney Sittig, 61. Max Rapoport, 26, and Jonathan Sells, 27, of Hawaii were also arrested.
AT A SECOND PROPERTY, the pot team confiscated 280 plants and arrested Edward Husiar, 55. A search of nearby fields turned up 335 marijuana plants in five gardens. More gardeners believed to be affiliated with these particular ag projects are being sought. State fish and game wardens are investigating illegal water diversions to some of the gardens.
SPEAKING OF Senior Citizens, Walt Schneider, 78, of Albion was popped last week on pot-related charges to which was added the intriguing felony, possession of methamphetamine. So? If a 78-year-old man wants a little tweek with his morning coffee is that anybody's business but Walt's and his cardiologist's?
MS. COLLEEN CROSS is Point Arena's school superintendent. She's only been on the job for a couple of years but wants a new multi-year contract and ten annual grand more. Staff is mostly resistant, rightly fearing that the ten grand will be achieved by layoffs of crucial personnel. The school board? The usual wrongway rubber stamp.
IN OTHER SCHOOL NEWS, and with apologies to Jennifer Poole of The Willits News who was assigned to announce the town's interim school boss, it's the kind of assignment that can drive a reporter cross-eyed, mainstream media reporters have no option but to report these things straight while silently screaming.
SO, JENNIFER tells Willits that Debra Pearson is the former superintendent of uninspiring school districts in Sutter and Yuba counties who will now serve Willits as interim superintendent for the 2012/13 school year. Natch, Deb said that she was “both excited and honored to have this opportunity to serve the Willits community, staff, students and parents. I am dedicated to providing the best education possible for our students in a collaborative effort. I look forward to getting to know everyone in the district, and getting out to all the school sites. I have heard wonderful things about the teaching staff, parental involvement, social consciousness of our students, and efforts the district is making to increase student achievement. I look forward to being a part of this community.”
AND SO ON. I suppose if Deb had been any further removed from all known Willits realities she wouldn't have gotten the job, and not to go all existential on you here, but don't you worry about Debra's spiritual welfare, her soul? Can she go through life lying like this, spending her miraculous days on this cosmic accident of an obscure whirlygig in a remote corner of the universe pretending not to see what's in front of her in-service face? Debra! Please! You are seriously out of psychic balance! Listen to me! We can help you! Come to the Boonville Fair! Talk to us. We'll group on your case, and by the goddess you'll drive north to that hellishly hopeless widespot on 101 a new woman!
THE BASSLER MATTER continues to create an undercurrent of vague recriminations. Bassler, you will certainly recall, was the young Fort Bragg mountain man who shot and killed Matt Coleman and Jere Melo in the fall of 2011. Bassler, after the Melo shooting, managed to elude law enforcement for more than a month before he was shot to death by a Sacramento swat team. It then developed that both Bassler's mother and father suspected that their son may have murdered Coleman near Westport but failed to report their suspicions to law enforcement. Bassler's mother had dropped her son, armed with a rifle, at the gate of the property where Coleman would soon be killed. Aware of the Coleman murder, Bassler's mother, at a family picnic about two weeks after Coleman's death, mentioned to her former husband that she'd deposited their disturbed, rifle bearing son in the vicinity of Coleman's murder. Neither parent reported that fact to the police who were, at the time, mystified by what appeared to be the absolutely senseless, and perhaps random, shooting of Coleman. Bassler subsequently shot Melo to death. If the cops had known that Bassler, armed and in precarious mental health, often isolated himself in the forests between Westport and Rockport, and roamed even farther north into Southern Humboldt County, he could have been stopped long before he killed Melo.
BUT FISH AND GAME had Bassler down among a number of suspects in the shooting of an elk in the Usal area a month before the Coleman murder. Elk range north of the Usal campground but seldom south of the campground. And we should pause here for a word about that campground. Two words. Don't go. Or if you do go, hike up the Lost Coast Trail a ways if you desire a wilderness experience sans wild drunks and loudmouthed party dudes and dudettes. All kinds of drunks and nuts, gun nuts among them, are found at the Usal campground because it is mostly unsupervised. The awful people at Usal, of course, are mostly sedentary. They don't walk far from their tents and vehicles. You can elude them simply by hiking north up the Lost Coast Trail and throw your sleeping bag off the trail somewhere, out of the hearing of the depraved oafs below. Knowing that Bassler was an isolate, it is unlikely he spent time in the area of either the campground or the elk shooting. And he was not known to be a hunter.
USAL is a hard slog from where Coleman was shot, and the elk range north of Usal is a harder slog yet, but Bassler, as we now know, was very fit and certainly capable of moving great distances very fast on foot. At one point while he was the subject of the huge manhunt that finally resulted in his death, he appeared at Four Corners at the north end of the seldom traveled Usal Road, far to the north of where the police were looking for him.
FOR FISH AND GAME to associate the shooting of the elk north of Usal with the subsequent shooting of Coleman near Rockport wouldn't necessarily be an association Fish and Game might make, especially in a suspect pool that includes people from the campgrounds just south of elk habitat. But Fish and Game wardens based in Fort Bragg did know that Bassler, whom they regarded as odd, camped in the wild country from Westport north to Usal, and they did talk to Bassler's father about the shooting of the elk. And cleared Bassler.
DID FISH AND GAME tell the Sheriff's Department at the time of the Coleman shooting that this strange young man was known to them, that they suspected him of shooting the elk even though Bassler was not known to hunt game? Yes, but that information included other people and Fish and Game was certain that Bassler had not shot the elk. The cops had no reason to red flag Bassler when Coleman was murdered on the basis of the broad information supplied to them by Fish and Game.
THE UNHAPPY FACT remains, that if Bassler's parents had reported their suspicions that their son might be responsible for Coleman's death, Jerry Melo would still be with us; the Sheriff's Department would have had a month between Coleman's shooting and the shooting of Melo to bring Bassler in, dead or alive.
JOHN SACKOWICZ hosted a lively debate on his KZYX radio show, All About the Money, a couple of Friday's ago. Gadfly financial analyst John Dickerson and County Supervisor John McCowen went mano y mano. Dickerson is the pugnacious former head of the Mendocino County Promotional Alliance (MCPA). He famously stonewalled the Grand Jury when they wanted to see how MCPA was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money. Judge Richard Henderson, a reliable go-to guy for the local entitlement class (who tried to unseat Dan Hamburg in a failed recall attempt 30 years ago when Hamburg first served as Supervisor) ruled that how Dickerson and the MCPA spent the public's money was none of the Grand Jury's business. But Dickerson went too far by constantly antagonizing the Board of Supes, who had the power each year to decide whether or not to continue the sweetheart deal that transferred $300,000 in public money with no accountability. The Promo Alliance first banned Dickerson from speaking to the Board of Supes ('every time you speak, we lose money', said one board member) and finally canned him. Dickerson still blames the Board of Supes and Jim Andersen, the CAO at the time, for his demise, but it was his own hubris that did him in.
DICKERSON, a self-proclaimed 'life long Democrat' (and whenever anyone feels compelled to say that you know they vote Republican every chance they get) later became head of the Employer's Council of Mendocino County (ECMC), a front group for the extremist views of a handful of wealthy wahoos who include Ukiah real estate honcho Dick Seltzer, John Mayfield, Jr., Margie Handley and Paul Clark. County businesses are 'invited' to join up and contribute dues, (with the implied threat of a boycott from the uber rich if they don't), but are not allowed to have a say in any positions the ECMC takes or who sits on the board of directors, all of which is decided exclusively by the board of directors, who only select wealthy, right wing carbon copies of themselves to run the organization. Dickerson, who sees himself as a big picture kind of guy, was fired from this sinecure when he couldn't be bothered to pay the utility bill and the lights got turned off for non payment, much to the embarrassment of the ECMC wanks. Dickerson also embarked on a failed winery venture, acting as the Chief Financial Officer until the firm dissolved in bankruptcy. One might conclude from this cv that the guy's financial analyst credentials are shaky.
DICKERSON has since become the chicken little of local government finance, constantly sounding the alarm that the County is on the brink of bankruptcy and will soon be unable to provide services, pay its current employees or meet its obligations to its retirees. There is certainly reason to sound the alarm. Government financing at all levels is a house of cards, with virtually all public pension systems heavily dependent on the Wall Street Ponzi, which hasn't been working out so well lately. The whole system could, and almost did, come down in an instant, taking several trillion dollars of government pension funds with it.
PREVIOUS BOARDS OF SUPES, putative conservatives and lib labs alike, made a series of bad financial decisions that either increased County long term debt or drove more cost onto the retirement system. They issued Pension Obligation Bonds and Certificates of Participation (a real estate financing scheme). They botched the Teeter Plan. They dramatically increased wages via the Slavin study without calculating the impact to the retirement system. Tom Lucier, the supposed conservative businessman from Willits, was the driving force behind the completely unnecessary and grandly titled “Willits Justice Center” and “Willits Integrated Service Center.” The so-called Justice Center sits empty on land owned by the City of Willits. The County can't sell the building or even give it away without approval from the state controlled Administrative Office of the Courts which is in no hurry to act. Meanwhile, the County is forced to continue maintaining the building and making the payments. (That structure, incidentally, is the ugliest structure ever erected in Mendocino County and ought to be demolished.)
HERE IN MENDO, the fiscal problems have been compounded by the manipulations of former long time County Treasurer Tim Knudsen and long time former County Auditor Controller Dennis Huey. They ran the County retirement system as a closed corporation for thirty years, including nutty calculations that claimed the pension systems had racked up excess earnings that did not exist. The phony excess earnings were used to fund retiree health insurance, a benefit that Knudsen and Huey were happy to take advantage of, but for which a legitimate funding source had never been identified. Dickerson helped focus attention on the excess earnings scam, which probably drained $50 million or more out of the retirement system, but his over the top rhetorical approach brings more heat than light to the on-going problem.
DICKERSON BEGAN his stint on the Sackowicz show with the usual doom and gloom by claiming that changes by GASB (the Government Accounting Standards Board) were going to decimate the ability of the County to fund its retirement system without shutting down services and laying off hundreds of employees. Dickerson predicted County pension costs for 2011 would increase from $15 million to a GASB required amount of $40 million. Dickerson then claimed the County was about to get hit with a double whammy as Moody's Investors Services, a major credit rating firm, was about to adjust the way it determines government credit ratings for purposes of calculating interest rates.
MCCOWEN countered that the new GASB rules only require changes in how information is reported, makes no change in funding requirements, and will only become effective for financial reports issued beginning in 2016. McCowen also questioned the assumptions and calculations that Dickerson used to create what he claimed was a model of the GASB changes as applied to Mendocino County. This led to a lengthy exchange with Dickerson defending his claims that Mendocino County has the highest per capita government debt of any county in the state and that the Mendocino County Employees Retirement System (MCERA) has the lowest rate of return on its investment of any of the 21 counties (including Mendo) that participate in the 1937 Act Retirement System. McCowen pointed out that an independent review of all 37 Act counties rated MCERA fifth from the top, a fact confirmed by Sackowicz, who sits on the retirement board. Dickerson then said that was for a different year and that he no longer rated MCERA. McCowen got in a nice dig when he observed that MCERA deserved credit for its stunning turnaround, going from last to near the top in only one year. But if Dickerson is so sure of his numbers, why would he blandly accept the independent survey?
THINGS HEATED UP a bit when McCowen quoted from Dickerson's blog that “Moody's new calculation is that Mendocino should have paid $42 million into the pension fund in 2011,” instead of a measly $15 million, and that “Moody's new calculation is that Mendocino's unfunded pension liability is really $267 million,” which is more than double the currently reported amount of $125 million. McCowen, apparently aware that no such report exists, pointedly asked to see a copy of the Moody's report for Mendocino County. Dickerson admitted there was no such report and apologized for not making that clear. McCowen drove home the point that neither the current GASB changes or Moody's proposed changes will set the funding requirements for public pensions; that the GASB changes don't take effect for several years; and that it is a disservice to the employees and retirees to make them think their pensions will be cut off tomorrow.
SACKOWICZ, who generally talks as much as his guests, largely stayed out of this one, only cutting in at the end to ask each of his guests to take a minute to sum up. Dickerson, not surprisingly, stood by his prediction that Mendocino County and the retirement system were about to be hit by a ton of bricks. McCowen frankly admitted that everyone should be concerned about the financial health of the retirement system and the County, but that it was irresponsible to engage in fear mongering.
DICKERSON'S THEATRICS are calculated to create the impression that the retirement system is about to go over the cliff and take the County with it and that the people in charge at the retirement board and the County are too dumb to take the obvious steps that are needed to avert disaster. But Dickerson himself never says what the solution is. The main prob is that the retirement system, based on a series of bad decisions over the last couple of decades, is already over the cliff and has entered into a sort of slo mo free fall, (much like the Social Security system), and will bottom out years down the road. But current projections, even assuming a zero return on the investment, are that the retirement system can meet its current and future obligations for the next twenty plus years.
DICKERSON is unlikely to admit it, but the retirement board and the Supes have limited options. The current Board of Supes, led by Pinches, Brown and McCowen, (who all have real world financial experience), have mostly made smart budget decisions, including reducing wages and numbers of employees and acquiring the right to adopt a new retirement tier for new hires. But state and local governments nationwide (who have mostly made their own bonehead financial decisions) will continue to struggle to pay past obligations incurred when the economic outlook was a lot rosier than it is now. And increasing numbers of them will continue to fail. But from what we understand, there will be plenty of examples of what public sector bankruptcy looks like before Mendo is forced to take its turn.
THE GOVERNOR'S so-called pension reform package (that passed the legislature on Friday) might address the worst cases of pension spiking and may offer genuine reform for new employees, but it does little or nothing to address the basic prob, which is that current employees have been promised retirement benefits that are simply not affordable for state and local governments without large tax increases and just try to raise taxes in a political climate dominated by greedheads and demagogues. The courts have so far held that public sector employees are entitled to the full slate of benefits that are offered as of the day they are first hired. Since today's employees, on average, will retire in about 15 years, that means they will continue to earn unaffordable retirement benefits well into the future. San Jose and San Diego voters recently passed initiatives that will reset the clock for future benefits that have not yet been earned, provided they survive the inevitable legal challenges. If San Jose and San Diego prevail, expect Mendo and everyone else to scramble to get on board. Without the ability to reduce unearned future benefits for current employees, the slo mo free fall will continue.
SPORTS NOTES. A friend gave me a box seat ticket to Saturday's Giants vs. Dodgers game, a box seat in section 101, deep in the right field corner. A few steps away from the Will Call window I looked at this unexpected blessing and read that the seat had cost $136. Better not wave this baby around, I thought. Someone might snatch it out of my palsied hand and sprint off to Scalper Land with it. $136? This must mean free drinks and all the negative food value items you can eat. But I remembered that the Giants maintain a “flexible pricing system,” meaning that they jack up ticket prices for those games that people are especially keen to see. The flex policy flexes downward for games people don't want to see. My seat was five rows up from the visitor's bullpen. It was a seat like any other, and it came with no freebies. No sooner had I settled in than I had to duck a screaming line drive that ricocheted around the empty seats behind me until it was finally grabbed by a tattooed man dressed like a small boy in a Giant's jersey and a pair of pants that ended just below his knees. He carried his own baseball glove. The left handed hitters were drilling lots of batting practice foul balls right at us. I'd forgotten how hard major league ballplayers can hit a baseball. I once saw Orlando Cepeda hit one so hard it knuckled all the way to the left field wall. I haven't owned a baseball glove in years, but I could have used one Saturday, imagining myself jumping up and snagging one from the tattooed 'tard in the short pants. There was also an unsuccessfully tattooed cop standing behind the bullpen, or maybe his right arm was beginning to age and his tats were all running together. As it was, he looked like a leper. I suppose he was positioned there to keep drunks from rushing the field, but at these prices the people seated around me were a sedate mix of the middle-aged-to-old with a few grandkids who constantly chirped, “I wanna wanna wanna wanna, Dadeeeee!” Four forty-ish women in front of me got steadily drunk, taking turns for the trek to the liquor stand, laughing uproariously at the mildly lewd hip thrusts of Lou Seal, the Giants mascot, and constant ballpark reminder of how infantilized the population of our fine, fat land has become. I yearned for the Candlestick days when fans so often assaulted Krazy Krab the Giants had to retire him for the safety of the guy inside the costume. The ballpark demographic has changed from rowdy to well behaved, but then the ballpark has also changed from post-industrial Candlestick to gizmo-corporate AT&T with thousands of seats now occupied by non-fans who get their tickets as part of their signing bonuses down the street at Cubicle.com in China Basin. Candlestick was often wayyyyy outtahand, but how can you knock fans with the aesthetic good sense to pelt a cartoon character with beer bottles? Bochy probably lost Saturday's game 3-2 when he let Cain hit with two outs and the bases loaded, and Cain, who struck out, was pulled anyway the next inning, and the seagulls swooped down on the tons of garbage left in the stands by the departing gourmands, and off we went into the cool sunshine on the water, a great mass of sated Americans moving like shoals of landlocked Belugas, homeward bound.
ALICE BERNICE CARRISON, 62, a long-time resident of Fort Bragg, died Wednesday (August 26th) at about 11:30 when she jumped, mid-span, from Fort Bragg's Noyo Bridge to the river below, a distance of nearly 100 feet. Ms. Carrison's body was floating face down when Coast Guard personnel aboard a rescue boat, summoned from its base close by in Noyo Harbor, pulled her from the water and attempted resuscitation. Ms. Carrison, who had family in Fort Bragg, had ridden a bicycle to the bridge and, without hesitation, went over the span's east side, dying, it was surmised at the scene, instantly.
CALTRANS ANNOUNCED last week that DeSilva Gates Construction (Sacramento) and Flatiron West Inc/ (Denver) have been awarded $107 million to complete the first phase of the Willits Bypass. The bypass is about nine miles long, beginning about a mile south of the Haehl Creek Overhead and veering back to 101 a mile and a half north of Reynolds Highway. The $210 million project is funded out of $136 million in Proposition 1B funds, the 2006 voter-approved transportation bond.
THE COUNTY COMMUNICATIONS PLAN, as previously noted, was also on last week's consent calendar for a progress report. Boiled down, the progress report is that there is no progress to report, except that the contractors sent out a bunch of questionnaires and talked to a bunch of people who mostly like their jobs but don't like the people they work for. They needed a survey for that? SEIU has been critical of the decision to spend the $8,000 on a communications plan without checking with them first. The hawkeyed union has also been critical of the survey and claims they have a lot of questions to ask about the process. But just like Mental Health, County budget discussions, and a lot of other issues SEIU claims to be interested in, no one from SEIU showed up to address the Supes about the communications plan.
THE SEIU LEADERSHIP, after ignoring the interests of its members during the botched labor negotiation process, has come to the conclusion there is room for improvement with their own communications. Sources within SEIU say the union has begun a monthly newsletter, is trying to organize committees to work on areas like communication, health benefits and the budget and has been holding worksite meetings to find out what the members think. Except some people showed up for the scheduled meetings only to find a sign on the door saying the meeting was canceled. But it's no mystery that many employees think the County and SEIU are mutually indifferent to the day to day reality of coping with an ever expanding workload with fewer staff. A workload consisting mostly of increasingly desperate and frustrated people who are being slowly crushed between a collapsed economy and steadily rising prices for the necessities of life. County workers, like most Americans, are anxious about their futures and don't see the union doing anything to make their lives better.
SEIU's most recent local rep, Carl Carr, who introduced himself to the Board of Supes several months ago, has been seldom seen since, and not at all for the last couple of months. Which leaves Paul Kaplan as the public face of SEIU in Mendo. We are told that Kaplan has now been given the title of “field representative,” which kind of sums up the demise of SEIU as a true union local. Until just a few years ago, SEIU was represented by a locally-based business agent who was hired and fired by the local members. SEIU shot callers based in Oakland probably concluded that Kaplan and Carr combined were costing too much money. Besides, why pay two people to go through the motions if you can get away with only paying one? And the local SEIU members seem not to notice or care that they are getting ripped off for their dues and getting next to nothing in return.
A READER WRITES: “I was surprised to see Sheriff Allman buying into the far right agenda of the ‘Constitutional Sheriffs,’ who leave no doubt they intend for local law enforcement to become their dream militia to overthrow the authority of the federal government. The only complaints Allman could come up with was the feds don't notify him of road closures and cancellation of grazing leases in the national forest. And why should they? Did the feds notify him before they removed the historic mural from the old post office building in downtown Ukiah? Should they notify him when they want to raise the price of stamps? Am I the only one who thinks the Constitutional Sheriffs are a bunch of nut pies and Tom Allman should distance himself from them as fast as he can?”
POINT ARENA will field eight candidates, including two incumbents, for three open seats on the City Council. They include incumbent Brian Riehl, aka Hoolis C. Nation, (hallu-ci-nation — get it?) who chose not to file for re-election. Riehl recently launched an unhinged attack on the City Clerk, demanding that she be fired because she had not completed a state required technical report on the sewer system. Except the report is to be filed by the sewer plant operator, not the City Clerk who can not be expected to have expertise in the field. The Council engaged in a lengthy discussion of the issue before the City Attorney finally stepped in to say there was no point in putting the issue on the next agenda because the vote would be 4-1 against firing the City Clerk. Which means the City Attorney should have shut the discussion down well before the Council members all weighed in on it. It is clearly a Brown Act violation to deliberate on an issue and decide it when the issue is not on the agenda. Ironically, a technical violation of the Brown Act, which Riehl himself participated in, was one of the issues the re-callers used in their successful overthrow of the previous Council.
ANOTHER COMPLAINT by the recallers was that some members of the Council were appointed instead of elected. But when no candidates step forward what else do you do but appoint the next warm body? Two members of the current Council, ironically, are appointed, including incumbent Jim Koogle, who replaced recaller Lloyd Cross who resigned when he moved out of town. Incumbent Trevor Sanders, another recaller (and a drinking buddy of Hoolis C. Nation/Riehl), is also running for a full term. Rounding out the field are David Liebenstein, Richard Marino, Phil Burfoot, Brian Murphy, Leonard Ochs and Jennifer Iversen. And if the recallers are doing such a good job, why are so many people running to replace them?
LAUREN SINNOTT, former Mayor and ten-year council veteran, aka the “Art Goddess,” and a victim of the recallers, was the only candidate to file for the position of City Treasurer. If the incumbent recallers are elected to full terms they will be required to serve the next four years alongside the former object of their political ire. Meanwhile, the Safe Routes to Schools grant that Sinnott prepared on her own time while she was Mayor is moving forward, including a mural for the newly designed retaining wall that is part of the project. The winning design was submitted by inland ceramic artist and muralist Elizabeth Raybee who specializes in projects that involve the community, like the mural in downtown Ukiah on the State Street side of the Family and Child Support building.
IN TURNING DOWN LAURA'S LAW a couple of months ago, the Board of Supervisors directed staff to return with a report on alternatives, including the possible creation of a mental health/homeless court. Reliable sources say two planning meetings have been held and another is scheduled. The meetings are convened under the tattered umbrella of the County Mental Health Department, but major players are Judge Ann Moorman and Public Defender Linda Thompson. The DA and Probation are also represented along with the usual “caring professionals” who regard the homeless and mentally ill as their personal funding units. The first meeting concluded that everybody needed more info about what services everyone else provided. Everyone was requested to prepare a short info sheet for distribution to the group, but almost no one did. So the second meeting was taken up with everyone tediously explaining what they did. So far, this is shaping up as the usual lib lab gabfest where issues are constantly discussed but no action is ever taken.
NONE OF THE POT measures have qualified for the November ballot. All six initiatives failed to get enough valid signatures to put them before the voters, an estimated half of whom are in favor of some form of decriminalization. Dale Gierenger, state director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, said the initiatives' sponsors didn't have the money to pay the necessary professional signature gatherers. Gierenger said it costs between $2 million and $3 million to garner the 500,000 signatures required within the state’s 150-day deadline.
EVERY FALL for the last few years, an outside chain company called Halloween City has set up shop in Ukiah to sell Halloween gear at discounted prices. These fly-by-nights are opposed by many of the town's struggling small businesses, especially the long-time Ukiah business called Incognito, which sells a lot of the same stuff. Tracy Oswald, the owner of Incognito, a store in competition with Halloween City, is represented by the law firm of Carter, Momsen and Knight.
JARED CARTER, representing Ms. Oswald, told the Ukiah City Council at an appeal hearing Wednesday night that allowing the temporary use permit for a visiting vampire business that annually swoops in to undercut locals, was inconsistent with Ukiah's General Plan and zoning laws. In addition, Carter said the “full impacts, both environmental and economic, of such destructive short-term, 'hit-and-run' operations” had not been adequately studied in the staff report.
CARTER, echoed by other small business owners, said if Incognito was forced to close because of unfair competition, Ukiah's decaying downtown would suffer further decay.
AFTER THE HEARING, the City Council voted 4-1 to approve Halloween City’s permit. Councilmembers Landis, Baldwin, Rodin and Crane voting yes; Councilman Thomas voting no. The permit approvers were quoted saying that they didn’t want to interfere with competition.
NO ONE has yet seriously quarreled with the DA's finding that the shooting of Aaron Bassler was justified given Bassler's demonstrated commitment to homicide. Sonya Nesch and Jim Bassler, however, continue to maintain that if Laura's Law had been in effect the murders committed by Bassler, and his own dispatch by a Sacramento swat team, could have been avoided. But Bassler did not meet the criteria for Laura's Law which, in any case, was not in effect in here in Mendoland at the time of the murders.
ROBIN BANKS, writing for the Mendocino Country Independent, formerly published by the late Richard Johnson, aka the One True Green aka OTG, and now published by former KZYX newsman Christina Aanestad, accuses DA Eyster of “an ugly distortion” and a “nasty cover-up on behalf of the county's broken mental health care system.” Banks claims Eyster composed “an adamant and ludicrous sanity diagnosis on a dead guy.” Second, Banks says Eyster “stretches the truth even further to make the county's dysfunctional mental health system sound fantastic.”
EYSTER'S MOTIVE for the alleged cover-up? According to Banks it is “almost certainly to score points with county bosses,” concluding that “an elected DA doing the dirty work for an unelected and already much too powerful county CEO should deeply worry all the sane people out there. By Eyster's standards, that is everybody who says so,” a reference to the fact that Bassler, like most crazy people, didn't think he was crazy.
BANKS' SAYS “Eyster's completely goofy statements about a comprehensive and effective jail mental health system are so far from any reality we have ever seen that one must wonder about his accounts of the shooting, which otherwise seem impartial, reasoned and sensible.”
AS IS BANKS' GOOFY statement that Eyster said any such thing. Eyster merely footnotes Bassler behavior while in custody, which gave no indication he was mentally ill. Crazy people do not turn it off just because they're in jail. Crazy means they can't turn it off.
BANK'S UNINFORMED tirade stands in sharp contrast to Eyster's methodical report with its matter of fact re-telling of the verified facts. There's little indication that Banks even read Eyster's report. If he did his reading comprehension skills are deficient.
EYSTER ALSO NOTES that Bassler's mother described her son as having fits of anger and being “paranoid,” behavior she attributed to her son “taking acid.” Lots of people have failed to return, or return fully from their acid journeys, but Bassler was not the babbling psychotic we associate with acid casualties. Eyster also notes the senior Bassler's opinion that his son was a paranoid schizophrenic and quotes a friend describing Bassler junior “becoming more radical about being able to survive any type of armed encounter with the federal government,” and how he talked about building bunkers and considered himself a survivalist. Several million apocalyptic-oriented Americans say the same kinds of things but don't meet the legal definition of crazy.
AARON BASSLER did lethally crazy things, but until he began his homicidal rampage he wasn't any crazier than, say, militia types, survivalists, religious fundies, Building 7 obsessives, birthers, the typical denizen of the Mendocino Environment Center, and other more or less functional delusionals roaming our wacky land.
AARON BASSLER was rational enough to know when he had to straighten up to avoid having a mental illness jacket hung on him when he was briefly sequestered by the feds after he'd hurled crazy-grams over the fence of the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. He could pull himself together just fine when he was in custody.
THE CHINESE CONSULATE case was resolved by the feds ordering Bassler to get counseling, but according to Bassler's mother after nine months of visits with a therapist based in Santa Rosa, no signs of serious mental illness were noted.
BANKS manages to conclude that Eyster is also a pot-basher. The late OTG, as those of us who had the bracing pleasure of his mortal company will recall, made marijuana the primary cause of his befuddled life. An alarmed Banks somehow concludes that because Bassler was known to have smoked pot, Eyster is a reefer madness guy who believed pot caused Bassler to murder!
ACCORDING to the toxicology report, Bassler had smoked marijuana maybe five hours prior to his own death. Eyster simply reported that fact from the coroner's report, in the same way that he reports that Jere Melo had caffeine and derivatives of tea or cocoa in his system. The sacred herb is not made the scapegoat for any of this.
EYSTER DOES NOT MENTION the letters that the Bassler family claims to have written to “the judge,” the County psychiatrist, and the Public Defender. Supervisor Hamburg said during the Laura's Law discussion that there was no record of those letters being received by the people to which they were addressed. But assuming the letters were written, (and no doubt they were), and assuming they were received and read by the responsible parties, (and this is an unknown), it is still an open question if the letters would have changed anything. These pleas for help with Aaron Bassler may represent a missed opportunity, but our guess is that friends and family members write similar letters all the time which are routinely discounted because the people writing them don't have fancy degrees. And also because lots of times the letters are as crazy as the alleged crazy person, and nobody in the system has the time to sort through every individual case to try to puzzle out which one of hundreds or thousands of unconfined maniacs is the next Aaron Bassler.
THIS BANKS GUY is also upset that Eyster factually reports that if either Mr. or Mrs. B. had reported their suspicions about their son's likely involvement in Matt Coleman's murder prior to Jere Melo's murder, that Jere Melo would not have been shot to death. Why is Eyster so sure? Because Melo reported to the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office that he was going to look at a grow site run by someone named Aaron who had previously crashed his truck into the Fort Bragg tennis courts then fought with the police. The Sheriff's Office emailed Melo back and identified the suspect as Aaron Bassler. So, if either Mom or Dad had gone to the SO with their suspicions about Matt Coleman's death a month before Bassler shot Melo, the Sheriff's Office would have warned Melo to stay away.
INSTEAD OF TRYING to scapegoat a mental health system that everyone knows is seriously defective, Sonya Nesch and Jim Bassler, and the rest of the Only If Choir need to accept the sad fact that only Aaron Bassler is responsible for the deaths of Matt Coleman and Jere Melo. Bassler made the decision to shoot them both in cold blood and tried to shoot the young guy with Melo. He also tried to shoot the Alameda County Sheriff's deputies that he encountered the day before he, himself, was shot. In that confrontation, Bassler circled back for another shot at the Alameda County cops.
WAS AARON BASSLER crazy, paranoid, and delusional? Crazy like a fox, it seems, and certainly higher functioning in an every day sense than any certifiably crazy person one might name. He consistently denied he had any mental health issues. He successfully avoided diagnosis. He was compliant and not crazy whenever he was in custody or in court. And he eluded a massive manhunt for 30 plus days, crisscrossing the woods that he knew like the back of his hand. And he ignored repeated efforts to get him to lay down his rifle without further loss of life. In the end, Aaron Bassler dictated the terms of engagement and went out in the only way he left open to himself.
MARLON CRYER, 40, of Willits, was booked into the Mendocino County Jail on September 5, 2012 for misdemeanor driving under the influence of alcohol and driving with blood alcohol level greater than 0.08. Mr. Cryer is married to Stacey Cryer, head of Mendocino County's Health and Human Services Agency which includes the County’s drug and alcohol programs. Maybe she's amused by her husband’s shirt.
A SANTA ROSA READER COMMENTS: “Why we are screwed, Chapter 217: Check any bank rates lately? On the local scene, Luther Burbank Savings will give you 0.7% on a two year cd of over $100k! Exchange Bank, not to be outdone by this withering number, offers .2 percent (yes, two tenths of a percent) on the same amount for one year, and a gracious .3 on two years. That means EB will be happy to use your $100k for a year and give you a couple hundred bucks. That's about six bags of groceries on a good day, for using your hundred grand for a year. Hello??? This is simple to figure out. The banks already know what many people suspect already; the money is all but worthless. Stuff like this makes me thankful I'm old. But I'm a very healthy old and that's problematic. PS. Recent read suggested by a guitarist friend; Old Gods Almost Dead — the 40 year history of the Rolling Stones. Christ, what a sorry lot of drug-addled fools. Years ago when I read the book on John Belushi (Wired) I felt like taking a shower after I finished the book. With this Stones history, you feel like taking a shower after every chapter. These guys were very lucky to survive their loco lifestyle. They left one hell of a lot of bodies along the trail.”
MENDOCINO COAST District Hospital in Fort Bragg, Mendocino County's only community-owned medical center, continues to suffer financial losses from significantly lower use of the hospital's “ancillary” services — lab tests, medical supplies, radiology and pharmacy. In July alone, the Hospital lost $250k even though more people came through the door and although management salaries had been cut 5%, the cafeteria was closed, and the billing system was improved. But doctor's contracts don't seem to have been re-visited with a view to the medicos sharing the fiscal pain as previously suggested by CEO Ray Hino.
EVEN WITH these losses, Coast Hospital's board proceeded to approve the purchase of 63 new “Baxter Sigma Spectrum IV Pumps.” Since the hospital only has 25 beds, a certain percentage of which are always empty, the number of new pumps seems kinda high. The total bill for the these things came to a little over $150k, which will come out of the hospital’s already depleted “reserves,” which also seems strange since in the past the Hospital Foundation (a separate non-profit which funnels donations to the hospital) has funded new equipment.
WHY DOES COAST HOSPITAL need a bunch of new IV pumps, much less 63 of them? Because the older models are a serious medical hazard.
ACCORDING to a troubling Master’s thesis at the University of Toronto in 2009 by Ms. Sarah Rothwell entitled “The Effect of Dose Error Reduction Software on the Ability of Nurses to Safely and Efficiently Administer Intravenous Medications,” the US Institute of Medicine found that “as many as 98,000 hospitalized patients die annually from medical errors that could have been prevented. Alarmingly, this estimate only represented patients who died in hospitals where a medication error was documented. Deaths from preventable medical errors is the eighth leading cause of death in the USA, exceeding deaths caused from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, and AIDS.”
MS. ROTHWELL continues, “Medication errors occur at all stages in the medication delivery system. The medication delivery system can be broken down into four phases: (1) prescribing, (2) transcribing, (3) dispensing, and (4) administering. … If an error occurs at the final stage of the medication delivery process, there may be no chance of recovering from the error. … More than half the total errors resulting in harm occur at the final stage in the medication delivery system.”
WHEN THEY SAY “IV PUMP,” we’re talking about those complicated-looking machines hooked up to a patient via plastic tubes that hang down from an elevated portable computerized “pump.” It comes with a display screen and buttons that can be set up to deliver a range of medicines automatically. You often see them hooked up to a roll-around pole hauled around hospital corridors by geezerdom, their hospital gowns flying open to reveal, well, the way of all flesh. Eventually. (Hopefully, not from the pump.)
“THE ADMINISTRATION of medications intravenously (IV) is an important part in the management of patients,” says Ms. Rothwell. “Due to the frequency of high-risk-of-harm medications given intravenously, and the rapid onset of infusion medications, medication errors that occur in this therapy method have great potential to cause patient harm. … Whereas it is unlikely that a clinician would give 100 tablets to a single patient as a dose, the same clinician could inadvertently give 100-fold overdose of an IV medication by not recognizing the miscalculated dose.”
THESE NEW “IV PUMPS” have what’s called DERS (Dose Error Reduction Software) and that’s why hospitals are buying them. But the fancy new computerized, programmable pumps have their own problems. In her paper, Ms. Rothwell compared three other brands and models (Not Baxter, the ones Coast Hospital bought) and concluded that there were significant differences between them in terms of how easy they were for nurses to program and use and how reliably they worked. One of Ms. Rothwell’s conclusions was “it becomes increasingly important during the procurement process to consider how the design of the DERS affects nursing performance.” And, “Each smart pump model was found to have its own strengths and weaknesses. Where one smart pump model would excel in the design of an element, it would falter in the design of another.”
IN ANY CASE, if you're hooked up to one of these things you'd better be all the way caught up on your prayers.
LET’S HOPE that Coast Hospital didn’t buy the Baxter units just because they got a nice discount on them (which they did) and that they really are safe, efficient units that the nurses will be able to figure out how to use properly. After all, if the old IV pumps were 20 years old, we expect there might be a significant learning curve as the 63 new ones come on-line.
ON TUESDAY, the Board of Supervisors debated sending the following letter to Governor Brown: “Dear Governor Brown, On behalf of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, we urge you to sign AB 1492 as adopted by the State Legislature. California landowners abide by some of the most stringent environmental and timber harvest regulations in North America and are subject to regulatory costs that far exceed those in neighboring states and countries. These factors hinder the competitiveness of local timber producers and contribute to the fact that 70% of lumber consumed in California is being imported from out-of-state. As the Department of Finance and regulatory agencies continue to seek full cost recovery through increased fees, California is becoming increasingly non-competitive for timber and lumber production with a consequent loss of living wage jobs and state and local revenue. These factors reduce funding that is needed to maintain the integrity of the regulatory process and also reduce the incentive for timberland owners to practice optimum environmental and forest management. AB 1492 will help reverse these trends. AB 1492 will fund the THP regulatory program based on the consumption of lumber and other wood based construction materials; extend the length of a THP to five years with one two-year extension; and require that damages from wildfire liability sought by public entities be quantifiable and reasonable, while still allowing full cost recovery for environmental damages and fire suppression costs. AB 1492 will also provide a source of funding for public agencies, non-profit organizations, and tribes for use in fire protection and suppression and timberland restoration projects. AB 1492 is the best way to provide the necessary funding to implement California’s environmental standards and enhance forestland restoration without further disabling the ability of local timber and forest product producers to be competitive in a global marketplace. AB 1492 does not dilute or roll back regulatory requirements or environmental protections, but instead provides adequate funding for implementation of existing requirements. Page 2 of 2 September 11, 2012 AB 1492 is an important component of re-invigorating Mendocino County’s historic resource based economy by leveling the playing field for California produced timber and timber products. In conclusion, we urge your signature on AB 1492 and thank you for your leadership role on this important issue. Sincerely, John McCowen, Chair, Mendocino County Board of Supervisors”
THE REDWAY-BASED Environmental Protection and Information Center (EPIC) opposes the bill. “Stop AB 1492 -- Timber industry giveaway restricts the public’s rights and saddles Californians with an unnecessary tax — Please contact your California State Senators, Assemblymembers and Governor and urge them to vote NO on AB 1492. This embarrassing piece of legislation is poised to fly through the California legislature this week without any substantive debate whatsoever. It is clearly a cynical attempt by wealthy timber barons at Sierra Pacific Industries and Green Diamond Resource Company to hoodwink the public into paying for damaging logging plans and to tie the hands of prosecutors that attempt to bring claims against the timber giants for causing forest fires that threaten communities and California’s public forests. Please take action now and tell the governor and state legislators to vote NO on AB 1492!”
A READER WONDERS at Brooktrails' endlessly churned, forever unsalable nearly vertical, waterless lots: “My memory of your coverage of the convoluted tax history of Brooktrails leads me to think it was the Major’s work. I can’t really figure out how, but the delinquent tax list in Wednesday’s UDJ might shed some light. This list, pages 12 and 13, shows parcel number, name and amount for taxes in default on July 1, 2009 (that’s the first mystery if not a misprint). Most are single or a couple of parcels per person, but there is one entry of about 100, in the $2000-3000 range for a total of maybe $300,000. A little research shows books 96-100 to be Brooktrails, Peggy and Thomas Porter to be realtors from San Ramon and at least some of the parcels to now be still in default but by smaller amounts. I am wondering if, besides being a muddle, there have been loopholes discovered that are being exploited. Now back to today’s longer-than-usual ‘Mendocino County Today.’ Still very much enjoying the web AVA.”
A TRICKY FELLOW named Tom Porter owns hundreds of Brooktrails lots. He has always been one of the principle buyers of Brooktrails' properties at auction and has been churning the lots, selling them to new unsuspecting suckers, often with Asian or Hispanic surnames and addresses in the Bay Area or greater Los Angeles. Urban buyers of unseen rural lots that seem like a bargain tend to think water comes out of a tap. When they find out they can never get water and sewer hookups to their country lot northwest of Willits they quit paying and the lots go into foreclosure where, until recently, Tom Porter (who himself lives in Deerwood outside of Ukiah, but he may have an office in San Ramon) would buy them back cheap and sell them to the next unsuspecting dupe and the cycle would repeat. But lately, with the economy in freefall, fewer and fewer suckers, er, buyers, are willing to buy cheap country lots, sight unseen, no questions asked. So even Tom Porter has quit buying the lots at auction. He has also quit paying his taxes and assessments on those lots he still owns and can’t sell. It’s hard to get a specific fix on how many lots Porter owes back taxes on, but it looks like he owns about 400 of which maybe a hundred are seriously past due in tens of thousands of dollars worth of property taxes. Porter has told the County that he will not let the lots go to foreclosure auction so the back taxes, plus fees and interest are piling up. But at 10% penalty fee and 18% annual interest, that is an expensive way for a sophisticated player to borrow money. The County lists what Porter owes as receivables, but the County may have to go to court to try to get Porter to receive the receivables.
PORTER IS SOMEWHERE on the 90 side of 80, meaning either his heirs will be stuck with the final bill or the County’s tax liens get paid when his estate is sorted out. Either way, Mendo’s probably not going to get the money back for quite some time, if ever. Meanwhile, under the Teeter Plan, the County has already advanced the basic tax money (that the County doesn't really have) out to local special districts (including a large portion to Brooktrails) in the hopes of getting it back with penalty and interest. Until recently, as long as the economy limped along well enough for the lots to sell at auction when the County got its taxes, fees and penalties back, the Teeter Plan basically worked. But now that the lots are not selling, the Teeter Plan’s Achilles Heel has been exposed. Look for Tom Porter’s name to appear on lots of lots for as long as he lives.
FERNDALE HIGH SCHOOL'S football team is on probation this year for fan behavior. On several occasions, oafs have shouted racist insults at visiting teams and their coaches. Ferndale's school superintendent has reacted to the probation by — get this — banning “media” from the sidelines. The thinking seems to be that if media, all two of them, are sitting in the nearby stands they won't hear the racists, and if the media can't hear the racists they won't report the racism, and if they don't report the racism Ferndale's football team won't face sanctions because a couple of their fans are idiots. As is their superintendent of schools.
ODD PLACE, FERNDALE, a village of restored Victorians so tidy and fresh-scrubbed and silent you find yourself walking around on tiptoes. “Shhhhhhh. Don't wake the Klan.”
ONE REASON central Ukiah is so depressed-looking is the large number of vacant shop spaces, but the reason for the vacancies seems to be that certain landlords charge exorbitant rents for those spaces and can afford to simply sit on them empty if no suckers come along to rent. There's a tumbledown structure on the southeast corner of W. Clay and S. State whose owner wants $3,900 a month for it, which is impossible for most small businesses. But down the street the Dirty Dog Day Care Center has a fresh coat of paint and looks ready to welcome dogs dirty or clean. Or is it daycare for grubby, especially truculent children? Or both?
IT'S BEEN SOME TIME since I've seen my old friend Mike Sweeney, Mendocino County's garbage bureaucrat and easily Mendocino County's most interesting personality, not that the guy has much of a personality in the ordinary sense. But if he fixes his cold, dead stare on you I'd suggest that you rig a mirror to a long pole and check the undercarriage on your vehicle before you drive it anywhere because you're in serious trouble, Bub. So, there I was enjoying a chat with the always merry and bright Dave Smith at Dave's essential Mulligan's Books when who should walk by but the former Stanford Red Guard and unindicted car bomber himself, on his way to Local Flavor just next door. I noted that Mike wasn't carrying his own coffee cup as he was the last time I saw him, writing then that since his perpetually pending felony is pegged to DNA identification, Mike, who thinks of almost everything, never leaves behind so much as a microbe of his telltale bodily fluids. Timing my exit from Mulligan's to encounter him on the sidewalk so I could say hello as he exited Local Flavor, I, betraying my pure joy at encountering him, fairly shouted, “Mike! How are you? So good to see you!” But darned if he pretended not to see me and quickly disappeared into the Lee Harvey Building where he keeps an office at the end of a hall where he has the option of three exits. (Conspiracy buffs will understand the ref to Lee Harvey as they recall that double-entrance place in New Orleans where Lee Harvey Oswald hung out at a building that had at least two doors where Lee Harv walked in one door a conservative ex-Marine and walked out the other as a Fair Play For Cuba lefty.) The last time I ran into Mike Sweeney I had a transforming effect on the guy. That time he was walking east, me west. I began a delighted wave when he was still half a block away. Sweeney immediately crossed the street where, and I'm not exaggerating here, his face turned truly frightful, instantly becoming as black as an old bruise, and his purposeful, confident, Stanford guy gait suddenly became a stiff-legged plod as if he were praying to himself, “Can't I please just torture this guy to death or at least blow him up like I did my ex-wife?” I get plenty of negative reactions in Ukiah, but I'd never had one quite that, that‘ emotional. Lots of people would just as soon I were dead, but very few, I daresay, yearn to be the agent of my destruction! I've never seen anything like Sweeney that day. I thought he was going to implode and I'd have to explain to both the police and one of Sweeney's HazMat clean-up teams how the guy had just seemed to self-immolate at my appearance. A young girl walking behind me exclaimed, “Gawd. What was that all about?”
THE SUPERVISORS COMMENCED budget talks Monday and Tuesday, flying blind because some large costs for the 2012-13 fiscal year aren't yet totaled. Health care costs for County employees and non-Medicare-eligible retirees continue to rise, but CEO Carmel Angelo says she doesn't anticipate layoffs but does anticipate a balanced budget.
IN RESPONSE to ongoing complaints from her Redwood Valley neighbors, and the horse associations of two counties, a beleaguered Redwood Valley woman has again eluded animal cruelty charges as DA David Eyster last week issued this statement: “My Chief Investigator, Captain Smallcomb, and a veterinarian did a site inspection. The conclusion at that time was there was insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution. The opinions of the “horse people’ go back many years (beyond the Statute of Limitations) and their current opinions of ‘abuse’ run counter to what the vet concluded to my investigator at the scene.”
THE BILLY NORBURY MURDER TRIAL has again been delayed, this time until October. Norbury, 33, is white. He's accused of murdering his black Redwood Valley neighbor, Jamal Andrews, the night of January 24th.
NORBURY is represented by Al Kubanis. Kubanis told Judge Behnke that he needed a continuance because his “scientific expert” had been serving on a jury in Alameda County. Kubanis also informed the judge that he anticipated a trial longer than the ten days estimated because, he suggested, Norbury's sanity would be in play. The “scientific expert,” it would seem, is the usual defense-friendly hired gun.
IN JULY, NORBURY changed his not guilty plea to not guilty by reason of insanity (commonly called an NGI plea). When an NGI plea is entered, the court can appoint two or three doctors to evaluate the defendant. Kubanis said previously that he found information in Norbury's divorce file that spurred the need for a psychiatric evaluation.
AS OF JUNE, 46.7 million Americans were drawing food stamps, 3.3% more than June of last year. 47% of recipients are children, 8% are elderly. Natch, the Republicans are claiming the program costs too much.
ACCORDING to one of the endless wine stories appearing in local print media, this one in the Chronicle of Wednesday, September 5th, the most coveted California vineyards are priced at an average of $175,000 to $300,000 an acre in Napa County; $75,000 to $125,000 in Sonoma. The value of Mendo grape acreage was not listed, but the value of our wine grapes, on average, was placed at $1,237 a ton. Last time we checked, it cost between $30,000 to $40,000 to plant an acre of grapes.
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