GLENN, WE HARDLY KNEW YE
Subject: Press release
Mendocino County 1st District Supervisor Glenn McGourty has announced that he is not running for a second term on the Board of Supervisors in 2024. “After 35 years in public service, including 33 as a UC Cooperative Extension Farm Advisor and 2.5 as a Supervisor, I will be ready to call it a day when my term is up in 2024. I still have many adventures ahead of me, and when this term is over, it will be time to pursue them,” he remarked.
With the firsthand knowledge that the county faces many complex natural resource and economic issues, McGourty ran for supervisor in 2020 and won the election, backed by a broad coalition of voters with different interests. His term is marked by many challenges and changes for Mendocino County, including the COVID-19 Pandemic, appointing a new Chief Executive Officer, a generational turnover in county staff, multiple natural resource issues and natural disasters, economic challenges, and redistricting. McGourty presently serves as Chair of the Board of Supervisors.
Reflecting on his service as a supervisor, McGourty said, “I will always be grateful to my supporters who helped my campaign, voted for me, and continue to remain engaged in local government. Equally important, I appreciate the constituents who sometimes hold different views but share my commitment to civic engagement and improving our county. We all recognize the importance of caring for the place where we live. It is an honor to serve, and I am humbled by the trust you have given me as your supervisor.”
Glenn McGourty <glennmcgourty@gmail.com>
BETSY CAWN WRITES:
I ventured this morning to call Mr. Norman de Vall over on the Coast, in pursuit of obscure historical information about our shared “cultural” histories (Mendo and Lake Counties). Mr. de Vall of course is well versed in the long-term issues besetting our battered watersheds, and I mentioned that Will Parrish had written extensively about our ecosystem issues back in 2014.
I’m writing today to thank you for archiving all of the works of your contributors, and especially for Will’s wonderful efforts. In this case, the 2014 essays comprise three of the most valuable explanations of global, regional, and local “impacts” of our collective bull-headedness, illuminated through the lens of poor old Clear Lake.
As always, I am profoundly grateful to you and your beloved crew for enduring and never yielding to the muck and madness, providing an exceptional public service, and giving all of us the opportunity to “express” our concerns or opinions in return.
Love from Upper Lake,
THOUGHT this on Redheaded Blackbelt’s comment line hit the mark: “The plight of missing and murdered indigenous women is very real, but in too many cases friends and family members are covering up for the perpetrators, either out of fear or misplaced loyalty. Passing proclamations, lighting candles and marching are all fine but the awareness that needs to be raised is within and among each and every Anglo, Native and Hispanic family. Every child needs to be taught that no amount of violence is acceptable and every family member needs to be taught that silence is not acceptable. Women need to know that if he hits you once, he’ll hit you again. All the apologies and promises will mean nothing when he gets triggered the next time. And there will be a next time. Don’t stick around and wait for it to happen. The State needs to provide enough funding to guarantee that every woman leaving an abusive relationship has a safe place to live and financial resources to support her and her children.”
MIKE GENIELLA responds to the recent Maureen Dowd nostalgic piece about the demise of the American newsroom…
“INK IN THE BLOOD. I am grateful my hometown newspaper decided to take a chance on a kid who started drinking in local bars with reporters and editors before he turned 21.
The Appeal-Democrat, one of the oldest daily newspapers in California, became my School of Journalism. My first City Editor was a woman who graduated from Stanford University and then went on to obtain a master's degree from Columbia University. Dorothy Dodge ended up in Marysville because it was the only “news” job she could find. Most women were still confined to the food and society pages back in the day. Dorothy, along with seasoned reporters, editors, and owners at the Appeal-Democrat, took me under their wings and taught me a craft that I still cling to with passion. I remain friends with some of my earliest newsroom colleagues. I read this Maureen Dowd piece, and damn near wept as a flood of memories washed over me.”
MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: Another good description of those “old-school” newspaper days can be found in Roger Ebert’s autobiography, “Life Itself.” Before he became a movie reviewer, Ebert was a copy boy and cub reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times in its heyday.
MIKE GENIELLA ALSO SUGGESTS that Mendo supervisors note that the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors have moved to limit the pell mell conversion of vacation rental regulations by making it harder to convert single family homes to B&B’s. The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors “have voted to change vacation rental regulations, create caps and exclusion zones for vacation rentals and to define fractionally owned housing as timeshares. The first action involved creating a business license program that standardizes operating requirements for vacation rentals to protect neighbors from nuisances, while the second action placed caps and exclusion zones in specific neighborhoods in the first, fourth and fifth supervisorial districts to reduce over-concentration of vacation rentals in these areas.”
THE OLD PONZO-RONZO is looking kinda shaky these days, what with the San Francisco-based First Republic Bank being the third bank to collapse in the past two months after Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank went under in March. These three banks held a total of $532 billion in assets, which, according to the New York Times and when adjusted for inflation, is more than the $526 billion held by all the banks that collapsed in 2008 at the peak of the last financial crisis.
AMONG THE LA WRITER'S STRIKE is their stated fear that Artificial Intelligence could replace a lot of them. And the man who invented A.I., Geoffrey Hinton, 75, who lives in Toronto, says he's having second thoughts, that he now feels like the people who invented the atomic bomb. Hinton is credited with creating the technology that became the bedrock of A.I. systems like ChatGPT and Google Bard. He fears the systems may prompt the spread of more misinformation and could even start to replace people in the workforce. Jobs at risk he thought included “drudge” work as well as those who are paralegals, personal assistants and translators. He also revealed he has to tell himself excuses like: ‘If I didn't build it, someone else would have.’”
ADD to the history I should have known both as a Californian and an Americano is the true origins of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the real thing lost in the gringo-inspired irrelevance of Cinco de Mayo, an annual reinforcement of absurd stereotypes which, if they annoy me, must outrage Mexicans who know their true history. But until I read Kelly Hernandez's excellent ‘Bad Mexicans,’ all I knew about that period was the enmity our government at the time, in league with the utterly corrupt Diaz government, had for the handful of Mexican revolutionaries who did the spade work for the eventual reform governments that followed the uprising. Not surprising that Diaz, having gifted the great American imperialists of the time — Rockefeller, Hearst et al — huge swathes of Mexico and crucial Mexican industries, got together with Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt to hunt down and murder the Mexican anarchists and socialists whose agitation made the revolution possible. I had no idea that these ‘Bad Mexicans’ — magonistas after the Magon brothers — moved throughout the United States and the towns along the Mexico-U.S. border, encouraging armed rebellion and against all odds, managing to regularly publish their crucial newspaper Regeneracion, and managing to publish it on the run.
WE COULD USE a latter day version of the Magon Brothers here in our doomed country where 6 in 10 workers have to go back to class to stay competitive as whole industries are upended by automation, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. A staggering 83 million jobs will be nixed globally in the next five years as bank and postal clerks, cashiers, secretaries and other roles are pushed out by new technology, analysts predict. At the same time, say the propagandists of capital, 69 million jobs will be created in “emerging industries,” such as artificial intelligence, sustainability, and robotics. Still, that's a net loss of 14 million jobs, or 2 percent of the current global workforce.
BERNIE NORVELL, CANDIDATE: 4th District,
Good morning and thank you for the mention. To be clear I watch and follow all the supervisor meetings. I don’t always get to watch them live in their entirety but do follow up with the recordings. I stay in touch with at least three of the current supervisors. You are correct there are in fact several positions I have taken on council that are opposite of the county’s current direction. This is no different than when I first arrived on council. My plan is to bring change on many levels to the county. Starting with the ones you mentioned. I have however learned that change takes time and one cannot just come in like a wrecking ball and expect to work well with others. I have learned progress and change comes with compromise and hard work. Neither of which scares me. Do your homework, bring facts to the table, don’t be afraid to make a mistake or be wrong, always fail forward and get started yesterday. “Either get on the bus or get out of the way.”
SCARAMELLA NOTES: When my uncle Joe Scaramella was first elected Fifth District Supervisor in 1952 after four previous unsuccessful runs (a record he was very proud of) he was considered to be a “troublemaker” by the old guard that he had been criticizing and complaining about for two previous decades. As Joe described it:
“I was elected at a special election because the incumbent had passed away and there was no election intervening between then and the end of the term. I walked into the boardroom one day and there was a lady by the name of Edith Beck who was the clerk of the board. I was highly critical of the board and she knew about my criticisms. So I walked in and she says, ‘Am I going to have a job?’ — just like that. I came back with, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Well everybody tells me that you're a troublemaker and you're going to change the whole damn thing.’ I said, ‘Let's get this thing straight. Anybody can get an axe and demolish things. It's not my job to demolish things. My job is to construct things.’ I said, ‘You just do your job and you'll have nothing to fear from me.’ And she was one of my best friends from that point on. So you see how they fostered that notion that I was a troublemaker because I was critical. Perhaps sometimes unnecessarily. But, criticism in my judgment is an essential part of life and of the job. If nobody says anything negative, how can you expect things to improve? See?”
Joe Scaramella went on to become the most accomplished Supervisor in Mendocino County history. Among many other things during his 18-year tenure, he created the civil service commission and wrote their operating procedures. He wrote the first version of the Board rules (and used them effectively throughout his tenure to advance his objectives), insisted that all board business take place in the open in the Board chambers (Pre-Brown Act), helped Richard Wilson stop the flooding of Round Valley, supported the County Assessor in increasing assessments of under-assessed large timber and ranch parcels (against serious opposition), was the sole vote to increase the County’s share of ownership of Coyote Dam. Once as Chair he turned down Union Lumber company’s demand that they be allowed to take over a county road for a day, and more.
These difficult times and the deep holes the Board has dug for themselves require more than the ordinary Mendo go-along/get along chumminess that pervades local political circles these days. They require leadership that includes direct but fair criticism of colleagues and staff and taking strong positions for the things an elected official wants to pursue and accomplish. We hope that if Mr. Norvell becomes Supervisor he doesn’t soften his positions or observations in the name of “working well with others.” Perhaps a more current model would be former Supervisor John Pinches who was never reluctant to offer his blunt opinions and disagreements on the important issues that came before the Board.
ANYBODY READ SWEDE?
A Comptche resident has three feet of books in the Swedish Language looking for a new home, all topics. If you would like an instant Swedish language library contact Katy Tahja at ktahja@mcn.org and she’ll tell you how to claim them.
THE TINY TOWN OF COVELO, California (19369 located in a valley east of HWY 101 in Mendocino County was a huge part of the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939 and 1940. The descendants of the Yuki, Concow Maidu, Little Lake and other Pomo, Nomlaki, Cahto, Wailaki, Pit River nations formed a new tribe on the reservation, later to be called the Round Valley Indian Tribes. They were known at the time of the event as the Covelo Indian Community. They traveled to Treasure Island in San Francisco and actually had a building called the Indian Court. They sold or displayed arts and crafts from the different tribal nations across the USA. This particular poster has a Pomo basket on it. At the time, there was a huge art appreciation of all cultures and it may have been a positive experience, compared to past actions that brought them together in the first place. The event was actually structured to have people from different places performing dances or working on their crafts while attendees observed their creations or performances. Hence, the title The Golden Gate International Exposition that celebrated the new Bay and Golden Gate Bridges which both opened between 1936 and 1937.
ON THIS DAY IN MENDOCINO HISTORY…
April 25, 1965 - Artist Esther Nichols was killed in a tragic traffic accident on Interstate 5 near Albany, Oregon. She had traveled to Oregon to deliver a stained glass window she had completed for a church there and to attend a religious retreat in Beaverton. Esther was on her way back to her home in Mendocino when the accident occurred. A rear tire on the car she was driving blew out, causing the small sports car to careen out of control into the freeway median, hit a culvert, and roll over several times.
Esther had visited Mendocino in 1964 to take Dorr Bothwell’s Color and Design course. While she was here, Bill Zacha was converting the water tower located on Albion Street near Kasten (most recently occupied by Loot & Lore) into a novel home.
The space was described by the Beacon as “three levels, each with a practically 360 degree visibility through the windows. The tiny top floor room can look out over Mendocino, all the way to the ocean.” The levels were connected by a spiral metal staircase that arrived in pieces “like a great tinker toy set,” and a group that included Ted and Jean Spazek, Jim and Anna Louise Myers, Bob and Sue Erlenkotter, Chuck Stevenson, Dorr Bothwell, Erma Gillaspie, Jennie and Bill Zacha, and Esther helped install the staircase.
The water tower became Esther’s studio and home. People were so curious about the finished tower that she proposed a studio tour for the 1964 Mendocino Art Center Fair. The tour, which also included the studios of Dorr Bothwell and Charles Stevenson, was the highlight of the fair, with 172 people touring the three studio apartments.
Esther was an enthusiastic member of the Mendocino Art Center and devoted many hours to assisting with major projects and working in the gardens. In addition to her volunteer work at the Art Center, Esther was involved in Catholic Action and St. Anthony's Guild and taught weekly catechism classes for young children. A special mass was celebrated at St. Anthony’s Church in Esther’s memory, and she was buried next to her husband in Denver, Colorado. (Kelley House Museum)
MORE BUDGET PRESSURE ON THE SUPERVISORS. Sonoma County, famous for poaching Mendo employees with tempting offers of increased pay but more traffic and a potentially longer commute, is poised to give their employees a new contract with a 13% raise over three years, starting with a 5% boost in July, plus an “equity adjustment” of over 4% for the lower two-thirds of those employees.
JOE BIDEN is no accident. Why, right here in Mendocino County, the cold, dead hand of the Democratic Party corrupts everything political, as the copious evidence above proves beyond all doubt. These boilerplate endorsements from our Demo-Lockstep supervisors for this Mockel character, following the vacuous statements of the candidate, are, together, a signal to the grinning, perpetually “excited” Democratic squid to tighten its grasping tentacles on the doomed people of the Northcoast.
This guy Mockel, the self-alleged Mr. Clean of Redwood Valley, to clear-headed people like, ahem, ava readers, the message is clear — Anybody But Mockel.
JOHNNY PINCHES was the last adult-type person to function as supervisor, and before him, Jim Eddie. Downhill ever since culminating in an unbalanced, probably psychotic CEO, mercifully departed, and five supervisors who functioned as auto-votes for whatever she put in front of their cringing pusses. And here we are, in a broke county going broker.
SUPERVISOR DAN GJERDE informs us that we were incorrect in saying that the supervisors turned down the Planning Commission’s modest proposal (to require use permits for certain vacation rentals) unanimously. “Actually, it was a 4-1 split vote,” Gjerde notes, “with myself voting to uphold the planning commission interpretation of County code.”
A RURAL FEEB GOES DEEP. Considering the weekend mayhem, now a daily occurrence, it's obvious something has snapped. I think The Snap snapped with the Kennedy Assassination and its tsunami of implausible characters, the whole of it implausibly summed up in the bi-partisan Warren Report drafted by Gerald Ford and comparable heavy hitters. For sure the great consensus was in shatters by '67, and the popular culture, an audio-visual banquet of round-the-clock vulgarity nicely summed up in the annual Super Bowl half-time show, ate the minds of the young, and the internet finished off the rest of the world.
I THOUGHT these gloomy thoughts as I watched the Warrior's collapse in L.A. Saturday night. Whenever the camera panned the spectators, I said to my friend, “Have you ever seen more debauched-looking people in one place?” He said, “Any pro football game. The DNC. Any gathering of MAGAS. The Mendocino County Courthouse, for crissakes. Your own puss is kinda frightening, too, if you don't mind my saying so. It comes with citizenship. We're a violent, dangerous people. Always have been. Live with it.”
SPEAKING OF THE DEBAUCHED, where's Adam Schiff? Ubiquitous on TV for the past two years with his claim that Trump was a Russian agent. Then, when his own rigged hearings found that Trump, bad enough in his own right without dragging in the Russkies, was not a Russian agent, Schiff disappeared. Trump, as the country continues its great slide into pure chaos, is still the Democrat's sole issue.
THE DEMOCRATS have the Northcoast in a permanent headlock. Willie Brown gerrymandered us so we'd have these deeply superficial hustlers of the McGuire-Wood type “representing” us forever. (Congressman Huffman? We could do worse. We have done worse, cf Doug Bosco, magically bounced out from Congress by the Republican cipher Frank Riggs with a huge boost from the now defunct Peace and Freedom Party, Bosco winds up owning the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and the remnant Northwest Pacific Railroad.)
IF YOU DON'T THINK local Democrats dominate Mendocino County, how does it happen that Mike McGuire's staffer, a young bullethead from Redwood Valley named Mockel, is immediately and simultaneously endorsed by all five county supervisors for 1st District supervisor? It happens because all five supervisors met on-line and serially endorsed Mockel, violating the Brown Act as they did it, I'd say.
TED WILLIAMS SAYS: "With all due respect, I don't think you understand the Brown Act."
ED REPLY: Public business is supposed to be conducted in public. A public endorsement of a political candidate by a public body is public business, in this case arrived at non-publicly, hence a violation of the Brown Act. I think you five McGuire tools probably just signed off on letters of support forwarded to you by this Mockel character. You then checked with each other on-line or in closed session and signed on to his campaign, deluding yourselves that your endorsement wouldn't have opposite effect of the one intended.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] If you have ever tried to catch an armadillo? You are in for a real chase. When I was a kid in Texas our entire track team tried to catch one in a football field. The armadillo won! Now a shotgun is not fair, nor a .22; just try to catch one bare handed. BTW: the way their shells work, you better wear welding gloves to pick them up.
[2] “If you can cut boobs off a woman and call her a man, then why not poke pencils into your eyes and claim disability so you can be deemed legally blind? ”
This is the kind of thing that poor families in third world countries used to do (or still do?) to make their children more convincing as beggars.
Like genital mutilation, this kind of mutilation (also, say, breaking legs to produce paraplegic children to beg form sympathetic strangers, for the benefit of the family) used to be decried.
[3] With all of the Sturm und Drang swirling around about what/which pronouns are to be used, I’ve decided to address everybody else as “consumer”.. “excuse me consumer, can I get by you please”? They look puzzled.
[4] DO NOT GO GENTLE…
An on-line comment re senior medical care: Senior Citizens are treated like scum by pharmacies like CVS and Wal-Mart since California passed so many restrictions on Schedule II, III, and IV drugs!
McKesson, CVS and Wal-Mart paid BILLIONS in fines for over-dispensing, and now they don’t like “addicts”…
Pharmacists spend half their time “counseling” patients who should just be handed their pills, and getting a prescription entails a ream of extra paperwork, verification, getting out your ID, and the lack of refills, transferability, paper scripts and phone orders…
Your provider now is forced to keep detailed records for each prescription, and a massive amount of time spent in record-keeping…
The Federal Government keeps track of every controlled substance dispensed, and any provider has access to this database! Without your permission!
Our Government spends nearly all its time thinking of ways to restrict our access to healthcare and making it more expensive…
Meanwhile, we are about 100,000 doctors short!
It’s a great time to be a Senior Citizen, let’s see, no providers, get treated like an addict if you get a tooth pulled and ask for a Vicodin, a system of expensive “Part D” “benefits” dispensed by contractors and insurance companies, and ever increasing costs…
My “Social Security” (oxymorons again) went up 8% and my Insurance, both “Secondary” and Medicare B went up for more than the SS “benefit”…
DON’T get old and have a “drug problem,” because it’s getting harder and harder!
I went to Inpatient Rehab for 28 Days to kick my “pain management drugs” over 10 years ago, and now I just live with the pain…
BTW, anyone stupid enough to inject “Street Drugs” should not be surprised to wake up dead…
Hard drug addiction is about wanting to die, so let’s not kid ourselves…
All drugs should be legal, cheap, and pure, and easily available. There’s just no other way to reduce harm, control crime, and lower costs for society and the people who feel drugs are necessary…
I asked a Doctor, once, “are drugs good, or are drugs bad?”
He replied “neither one”, “Drugs are necessary”.
[5] Call me naive but I was surprised to learn that the 6 years of Trump hatred from the likes of Kimmel & Colbert is totally scripted; late night comedians simply deliver what’s written for them. They have no original thoughts.
[6] FANTASY BELIEF SYSTEMS, an on-line comment: I’ve noticed that there seems to be a sort of mental-health issue in this country where people imagine that harms are being intentionally done and then assign blame to groups or to people for those imagined harms. People imagine that the borders are open and that Mexicans are to blame for America’s drug problem. People imagine that China was responsible for Covid. People somehow conflate the LGBT community with pedophilia. People imagine that the scientific community has concocted the climate change crisis we’re currently facing in order to somehow turn America communist… or something.
I think that researching how so many people have become so detached from reality could be a good first step in making America into the great nation that so many people imagine we once were.
[7] This war should never have started. It started because there is no longer any capacity for dialogue among world leaders. Brazil condemns it because Russia has no right to invade Ukraine. The Russians are wrong. The rest of us now have a choice: either feed the war or try to end it…We cannot have another war in Europe. Didn’t we learn this lesson from the two world wars? With more peace, the world will be more productive and just. That is what I’m proposing and defending…And if you’re part of the war, then you can’t talk about peace. I want to engage countries that are not linked to the war. If we succeed in achieving peace, it will be good for humanity. Otherwise, this war will never end, because Putin thinks he’s right and Zelensky is justified in defending his invaded nation. So, who is going to put an end to the war? I am worried that this war is linked to political interests and election strategies. That has happened before in the world, and I don’t think it’s right that no one is attempting to build peace…Russia has been in Crimea for a long time and has invaded other territories. I don’t know what type of agreement Zelensky and Putin are going to accept. Putin certainly doesn’t want NATO on Russian borders, and Zelensky certainly doesn’t want an occupied Ukraine. So impartial outsiders are the only ones who can forge an agreement to stop this war. Don’t ask me how – first we have to sit down at the negotiating table. Both sides want to win, but a war doesn’t always need a winner. Stop fighting, come to an agreement and get everything back to normal. I believe it’s possible because it happened after World War II. The European Union is proof of our capacity and intelligence as human beings to work together. Russia and Ukraine can do this and I intend to help them.
— Lula da Silva
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