THE ANDERSON VALLEY SCHOOL BOARD seems poised not to renew high school principal James Tomlin's contract. The majority board sentiment to remove Tomlin was apparently expressed at a closed session meeting of the board last week. An open meeting to discuss the Tomlin matter is scheduled for Monday, the 25th of February, 6pm, in the high school cafeteria. It should be a doozy.
CURIOUS as to how and by whom Monday's special meeting of the board was organized, I called the district office where Superintendent Collins came on the line. He said the school board had called the meeting. I called board president Martha Bradford to confirm. She said she'd called the meeting, and said she had the authority to do it as board president. Mrs. Bradford said there had been no closed session vote to fire Tomlin. She said there had been a closed session “conversation to get a feel for the direction of the board.”
MRS BRADFORD went on to say that Superintendent Collins had been sitting in on the closed session “as Tomlin's supervisor,” and that Collins “had spoken with Tomlin about it,” confirming that it was Tomlin who'd soon gotten out an e-mail to his colleagues apparently complaining to them he'd been sacked. Mrs. Bradford went on to say, and to say emphatically, that the Tomlin matter has not been resolved but she hoped it would be at Monday night's meeting where a public vote, up or down on Tomlin, would be called. “We want to get this behind us,” she said.
WE HOPE the board will stand up to the inevitable backlash from Tomlin's in-house supporters, a stance that should be easy for the board knowing, as a majority of the board clearly does or they wouldn't have begun their move on Tomlin in the first place, that most parents in The Valley are delighted that at last we have a school board majority committed to education first the people who allegedly deliver that education second.
(THE LATE TOM SMITH was on the small end of many 4-1 votes, so many that Superintendent Collins and his four board stooges got Smith removed on the phony pretext that Smith, whose wife worked for the schools, maintained an ongoing “conflict of interest.” Collins' wife, of course, taught in the schools for years with not even a mention of “conflict of interest.”) We further hope that the board will permanently retire Superintendent Collins, re-combine the superintendent and principal positions into one, and hire an intelligent, energetic person to fill that position.
NO SECRET where we stand. We applaud the school board for a long-overdue move in what we hope becomes a thorough administrative house cleaning for a school system that has been rife with nepotism, staff sloth, administrative incompetence, and run in its own cabal-like interests for years now, handpicking its own school board as it went. One example of how this appalling little club operates: For years, Superintendent Collins has sat in on the school board's closed sessions. The school board, then, has not met by itself going on three decades, meaning the people you voted to represent you, not Collins, not the staff, have not been permitted to discuss management of the schools out of the hearing of the manager they theoretically supervise. Collins is not our elected school board representative. He has no business sitting in on the school board's business.
YEDIRA MENDOZA AND ERICA LEMONS have probably already found themselves subjected to whining calls and attempts at intimidation from Tomlin's staff supporters. We hope the much larger part of the community that supports a major change in the leadership of the local schools will show up Monday night to support Yedira's and Erica's right to remove Tomlin if that's what they decide to do.
FIRE CHIEF Colin Wilson told the Community Services District Budget Committee last week that Mr. Andres Avila and Mr. Clay Eubank, both of Anderson Valley, have formally expressed interest in replacing him as Fire Chief when he retires in November. Avila is a senior Yorkville volunteer firefighter and Eubank is a retired Capay Valley Fire Chief who moved to the Yorkville area a couple years ago. (The Capay Valley is in Yolo County, about 40 miles southeast of Clearlake.)
AVILA gets our vote because he's the senior member of the community and he's been a terrific volunteer for years now. Nothing against Eubank, who clearly seems qualified for the position, but he's relatively new here and doesn't have Avila's years of local service, Avila's knowledge of terrain and people, Avila's bi-lingual prowess.
DISGUSTING BUT TRUE that poachers are preying on the steelhead run in the Garcia, claiming that as Native Americans they have the hereditary right to nature's bounty. The fish runs in Mendocino County rivers have been precarious for years; a scooping up of the few returning fish for whatever reason, and this one is completely bogus, negates all the formal efforts to help bring the fish back. Here in the Anderson Valley, steelhead in encouraging numbers are presently massed at the Greenwood Bridge where they're waiting for another big rain to get upstream to lay their eggs and back down stream and out to sea. But someone has been gill netting these fish, meaning that some local person or persons will largely destroy this season's steelhead reproduction if they aren't caught.
TEN YEARS AGO now I saw a two-foot steelhead trapped in a pool about a hundred yards from the headwaters of Jimmy Creek, which is darn near to the top of the Ukiah Road (Highway 253) on the Boonville side of the hill. That fish had made it all the way to its ancestral ridgetop home from the Pacific Ocean at Navarro, a gauntlet of industrial wine draws on the entire watershed much of the way, not to mention the array of natural obstacles that steelhead had survived to get home. That intrepid piscine traveler demonstrated to me that the in-County fisheries could be restored with a little more help from their friends, and a serious crackdown on their enemies.
MANDY DILLIN is Location Manager for a road-racing film scheduled for release in 2014. The film is called “Need For Speed.” Ms. Dillin told us last week that she plans to hold several public meetings around the County before filming begins in April. According to an on-line note, the movie will be an adaptation of the video car-racing game also called “Need for Speed.” The film summary says: “Fresh from prison, a street racer who was framed by a wealthy business associate joins a cross country race with revenge in mind. His ex-partner, learning of the plan, places a massive bounty on his head as the race begins.” Among the stars is Michael Keaton. Ms. Dillin, who works for film producers NFS Productions associated with Dreamworks SKG, said there would be some ten days of local filming, some of it requiring brief interruptions of traffic. “We are not taking over any roads for our film,” said Dillin. “We will be driving on the roads as part of our filming activity. Outreach and transparency with the public is important to us. We will try to be as accommodating as possible,” she said. The film company is in the final stages of getting permits from the County, Caltrans, State Parks, and the Coastal Commission. “We don't anyone to be surprised,” said Dillin. “We hope to get notices out in early March. We are also going door to door in the filming zone.” Dillin said the filming will “only have intermittent traffic control — we would only be holding traffic for short periods of time, 15-20 minutes, max.” The production's vehicles will be parked at the Boonville Fairgrounds. “We are trying to keep everything off the roads and be as low impact as possible. We want to be a part of the community while we're here. Mendocino is beautiful. It has everything we need — Wineries. Wine country. Redwoods. The Coast. Everything!” Part of the filming will be accomplished from a helicopter. Highways 253, 128, Highway One, Lighthouse Road, Mountain View Road, and parts of Flynn Creek Road will be scene locations. “A day here, a day there, a day the next place,” Ms. Dillin said.
THE FIRE PREVENTION FEE imposed statewide for the first time last year is very unpopular with outback property owners, although few of them could live in the outback without CalFire's aerial firefighting capacity. Governor Brown wants to extend the tax while the affected try to kill it. The opposed see fiscal chicanery similar to that revealed by the State Parks fiasco when it was learned that the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection funneled money from wildfire damage settlements into a special account instead of the state treasury. That revelation was followed by an opinion from the Legislature's legal counsel that the department is improperly using some of the new fire fee revenue to collect damages from those who maliciously or accidentally start fires, instead of its intended purpose. The debate rages.
FROM SUNDAY'S CHRON: “Looking for a weekend country cooking class, culinary delights such as citrusy quince and apple chutney, apple cider syrup or just fresh apples? This certified organic farm has it all. Can't make it to the farm at 18501 Greenwood Road or catch them at the farmers' market behind the Ferry Building.” We've caught the Apple Farm at both places and can testify that the above is a rare case of truth in advertising.
A YOUNG WOMAN who grew up at the Oz commune on the Garcia near Manchester has sent along a wonderful cartoon account of life in that seminal hippie enclave, told from the perspective of the young people who grew up there. And grew up NOT to be hippies, which was the usual about face hippie kids did as soon as they got clear of their wacky parents. (The woman who sent the book and grew up hippy is now a lawyer which, come to think of it, is not necessarily preferable to hippy, not to be too judgmental about it.) “Tales of a Hippy Kid” is written by former hippy and Oz founder, John Kroll, aka Redwood, art by Dave Bohn. Mr. Kroll has certainly rolled with the punches in this one. As one of the hippy parents he lampoons from the Hippy Kid's perspective he comes off as well-meaning but out of it, which is the way most kids, hippy or whatever, see their parents anyway. But Tales is an hilarious insider's tour of hippy life, circa middle 1970s, and as candid an account as I've seen. Can be ordered on line but, for some reason, not available in local bookstores. It should be considering that Mendo was ground zero for innumerable experiments in group-grope living.
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