Letters (April 30, 2024)

• Restore The Palace
• Measure B Frustration
• Stop Eel River Diversions
• The Great Redwood...
• Leaners & Skewers
• Comparing Rates
• Another Rate Hike
• Save The Tracks
• PG&E's Overpaid Executives
• Leaflets Not Bombs
• Foreign Aid Package, Speaker Johnson’s Courage
• We Were Warned

RESTORE THE PALACE

Editor:

I would like to see the City Of Ukiah take a clear position supporting the restoration of the Palace Hotel, along with some concrete steps in support of that position. Lacking that I can only conclude that the City Council wants it torn down and that the City is actively working to bring about that end for this historic structure. It surely looks like that is what they want.

If you should ask, "why does someone from Boonville want to have a say in this?" I would say that I have made Mendocino County my home since 1973 and that Ukiah, with all of its faults, is my County Seat. I shop in Ukiah, I am entertained there, I eat lunch and dinner there, I pay taxes there, bank there, and I get my hair cut in Ukiah. Ukiah is not what I would like it to be, but it is what it is, and I would like it to be better. Hence my position on the Palace.

As I have said before: I think that preservation of older buildings is important because they give our society as a whole a sense that there is some shared history that we are a part of. On an individual level I think that we gain a sense of ourselves as a part of a whole when we can see and appreciate our history.

Ukiah - would you please step up to the plate here? Or throw a Hail Mary pass? Without the Palace Hotel Ukiah will be less. Make this old building modern — a new building will only be modern, a new building will be lacking the history of the Palace.

Tom McFadden

Boonville

MEASURE B FRUSTRATION

Editor,

I was very involved in mental health planning in the county from 1996-2012 as I ran a contracted agency. I remember when Measure B was adopted and have always had a lot of doubts about whether this Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF) would happen. Not because there isn’t a strong need for services. There is. What people may not understand that in the state/county mental health world, there are various regulations that are required which are important but much harder for small counties to implement. That’s why the PUF closed [in 1999]: they were required to have a certain ratio of staff to patients and not just any staff but staff with specific credentials. We all know how hard it is to find and hire and most importantly retain qualified mental health staff in Mendo. Or any human service staff but that’s a whole other issue. 

It’s much easier to have buildings; it’s really the day-to-day expenses that are the problem. The income to pay for these expenses usually comes – at least a great amount of it – on the county being able to bill for services to the state. A facility requires the same staffing regardless of the number of clients present. So if you have 10 beds, you need to pay for the staffing still if you only have 6 residents. Your budget to pay for these expenses is highly dependent on you being able to bill for the services for each client. Less clients=less billable services=less income to run the program. 

You think, well, there’s no shortage of clients. In the county as a whole, yes. But having however number you need and the required staff is hard unless you can mostly get to this with people in the Ukiah – maybe Willits – area. 

That’s why the coast can’t do a facility. When [former Sheriff Tom] Allman started talking about the need for this, I didn’t support it because of these issues not being addressed adequately. And after all these years, still nothing. I think these services need to be provided in a way which is not focused on facilities but services, using existing resources. It’s sickening that this is still running around after all these years. The clients in the system are so right in their frustration.

Karin Evon Wandrei, PhD, LCSW

Rohnert Park

STOP EEL RIVER DIVERSIONS

Editor,

Regarding the two dams which are coming down on California's Eel River. Will it threaten water supplies? Of course, as described in an SF Chronicle article from March 30. It is true that Potter Valley must make adjustments if water is no longer diverted out of the Eel River watershed.

However, the Chronicle story didn't fully described the great damage that has been done to the Eel River, the fish, the indigenous tribes and small communities whose lives were upended and whose economy was depressed by the loss of a vibrant, healthy wild river.

The Eel River was the lifeblood of local tribes and provided economic opportunities for many.

When the colder headwaters were diverted, the vineyards and farms to the south prospered while the salmon lost their spawning grounds and the tribes and small communities lost a healthy river.

Diversion of water such as what happened on the Eel river should be stopped.

It is damaging to the ecology and to the lives of people who are robbed of their natural resources.

Sandra Mullen

Covelo

THE GREAT REDWOOD...

Editor: 

How ironic that exactly seven days after The Press Democrat ran a front-page story about the Redwood Trail master plan (“Project hits milestone in years-long journey,” April 5), there was a picture in the paper of Sen. Mike McGuire urging his Senate colleagues to approve a bill to reduce the state budget deficit. While the senator is pushing the Coastal Commission (why are they involved?) to support a plan by the trail group to formally abandon the out-of-service rail line north of Cloverdale, he is admitting there will be no funding for his multibillion-dollar dream. I recommend that instead of wasting time and limited funds filing to abandon an existing greenhouse-gas-reducing transportation pathway, the Great Redwood Trail look at how SMART has successfully and in parallel built a trail and operated freight and passenger rail.

Richard C. Brand

Santa Rosa

ED NOTE: SMART is heavily subsidized and lightly patronized, unfortunately, because it doesn't run through Sonoma County's population centers. A basic question about the Great Redwood Trail is this: How did the Democratic Party of the Northcoast come to own the track from Marin north to Eureka? How is it that former Congressman Bosco now owns a lucrative stretch of the line in the Petaluma area? IMO, The Great Redwood Trail is simply the latest iteration of The Great Redwood Scam that began when Bosco and a handful of Democrat hustlers magically assumed ownership of the defunct Northwestern Pacific Railroad. A side note, or mini-scam, occurred in Ukiah when the new County Courthouse nobody but the judges wants was located on the Democrat-owned former rail station site at Ukiah, not that the new courthouse has begun construction.

LEANERS & SKEWERS

Editor, 

I know you’re into a mix of viewpoints in your paper, but lately it seems to me that the balance has been skewing rightward. The comment section in particular. The future storm troopers have found a place that they feel comfortable spewing their authoritarian talking points taken right off of Putin’s and Orban’s greatest hits. I’ve been reading Joe Klein’s columns lately, and although I don’t agree with everything he says, he hits a balance that is refreshing in this time of extreme viewpoints. Might be somebody to put up to balance out the right wing firebrands you print that turn my stomach and pretty much force me to skip over their blather. Glad to hear you’re on the mend. I’m 74 and trying to hang in there too.

Jurgen Stoll

Fortuna

ED NOTE: My opinions (and life) are on the left, but I get tired of the piety from the lib-left and like to throw a hard right provocation at AVA readers, most of them libs, simply to remind them who else is out there. And the consternation caused by Kunstler, for example, is lots of fun. While I have you, a perfect example of the absurd present is the presidential race between Biden and Trump, the former obviously senile, the latter a special ed case with fascist instincts who would have been laughed out of the room not so long ago. But millions of people on the “left” are pretending Biden is fully capable while millions of misinformed, deluded romantics think a blustering degenerate can take America back to 1955. How did we get here? Lockstep thinking encouraged by a biased, lockstep media. I say, let a million flowers bloom!

COMPARING RATES

Editor: 

Do you think PG&E electric rates are high? During a recent conversation with a friend who had moved to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, we compared electric rates for our very similar homes and rate plans. I’m paying $0.42 per kilowatt-hour, and he’s paying $0.07 per kwh. Yes, that’s correct, 42 cents versus 7 cents. And, unless the source of electric power has changed drastically since I lived in that area, there isn’t that much hydro power on the peninsula.

Wes Brubacher

Geyserville

ANOTHER RATE HIKE

Editor: 

Recently, our PG&E rates were arbitrarily raised, again. And again our state representatives did nothing to assist us, the general public. The California Public Utilities Commission, a band of bureaucrats appointed by our governor, bought into the specious arguments that the utility needs to improve their safety upgrades to make us all safer.

I don’t feel any safer, but I am offended by the obvious lies and patronizing attitude from elected representatives and a giant utility that has managed to delay and obfuscate any reasonable compensation. It’s past time to start demanding answers from politicians and the robber barons who have adopted the guise of concerned citizens.

Public commissions are often compromised of pols and other slackers who are being rewarded for past and future favors. These entities often offer bloated salaries and nothing resembling real work. The CPUC is just one blatant example of how government at any level rewards incompetence and sloth. PG&E is not on your side, they don’t have to be, just as pols offer little more than lip service in addressing meaningful issues.

Don’t let the pols off the hook. Make your voice heard, and tell your friends we don’t have to take this lying down.

Terry l. Wolfe

Cotati

SAVE THE TRACKS

Editor: 

State Sen. Mike McGuire touts his Great Redwood Trail as being environmentally viable and says it will help the economy in Mendocino and Humboldt counties. This couldn’t be further from the truth. He wants to abandon the railroad line and replace it with a trail that will never generate the money an operating railroad can with both freight and passenger trains. He wants to spend more money on developing the trail than it would take to reopen the existing out-of-service line from Sonoma County to Willits. Talk about a waste of taxpayers’ money.

The railroad was engineered and built, with great effort, more than 100 years ago to accommodate trains and railroad operations. McGuire wants to trash this valuable asset of precise alignment of constant grades with tunnels and bridges to use as a recreational trail for a few users per day.

By not having the railroad reopened, all the freight and passenger traffic must depend on Highway 101, giving Caltrans an added excuse to widen the highway, let alone cause increased air and tire pollution from vehicles.

Michael Strider

Santa Rosa

PG&E'S OVERPAID EXECUTIVES

Editor,

It boggles the mind why the public is not furious at the executive and stockholder compensation at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Their rising executive pay arrives at a time of soaring customer bills and fast rising company profits.

I have written before to bemoan the way PG&E officials take advantage of their customers. Now I am writing with true disgust about the most recent news stating that CEO Patricia Poppe was "awarded" nearly $17 million from the fiscal year 2023 PG&E budget. This woman is rolling in money while we pitiful customers are paying for her, plus the high compensation for other executives. There are also dividends for stockholders which are way too high.

Boy, are we a bunch of chumps. We have no alternative unless we want to live by candlelight.

Sally Seymour

Larkspur

LEAFLETS NOT BOMBS

To the Editor:

Re “Israel Strikes Iran, but Scope of Attack Appears Limited”:

If Israel has to send drones into Iran again, it should drop leaflets saying, in Persian, English and Hebrew:

“Israel stands with the people of Iran! Overthrow your authoritarian government, stop funding Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Houthi terrorism, and rejoin the community of nations as our partners in peace.”

Stephen A. Silver

San Francisco

FOREIGN AID PACKAGE, SPEAKER JOHNSON’S COURAGE

Dear Editor,

Yesterday it became clear that Speaker of the House Michael Johnson had made a crucial decision; something really big - like Julius Caesar’s decision to risk his career by crossing the Rubican. Johnson risked his own future denying Magga Republicans by advancing four (4) foreign aid bills, totallng $91 billion to be voted on today, Saturday, April 20, 2024.

As I awoke today, it occurred to me what might have given Speaker Johnson the stroke of courage to do what he did. Perhaps he, or someone else on his staff, may have been strolling through a Capital cloakroom one day when they saw a pair of shoes up on the shelf. They might have first belonged to former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. If they were on Speaker Johnson’s feet, perhaps it explains what gave him his new hope. Like that first day you put on that pair of “Big Boy Shoes,” and you took another step toward manhood.

Today the House passed all four bills. They didn’t ask for it but suddenly a lot of American soldiers may not have to get shot at.

Frank H. Bauamgardner, III

Santa Rosa

WE WERE WARNED

Editor: 

No salmon fishing? Insurance rates through the roof? If only we’d had some advance warning! But the first warnings about climate change only came in the 1880s (a bit before Al Gore). And the first warnings about destruction of salmon only in 1875. Perhaps if these warnings had come 100 years earlier we’d have had time to really prepare?

And I’m sure, now that we know, there’s no one in denial about the need to address the issues. Especially no major political parties or presidential candidates. Somewhere in creation there is an advanced technological civilization whose light will shine for a long, long, long time. We are not them.

Philip Tymon

Guerneville