Mendocino County Today: Friday 10/4/2024

By AVA News Service on October 4, 2024

YESTERDAY'S HIGHS: Boonville 102°, Ukiah 100°, Yorkville 98°, Laytonville 98°, Covelo 98°, Fort Bragg 66°, Point Arena 61°

UKIAH BROKE its daily high temperature record Tuesday and Wednesday. 107 is also now the highest temperature ever recorded in Ukiah in the month of October.

ELEVATED FIRE WEATHER conditions today. Temperatures increase again in the interior this weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Another clear 47F this Friday morning on the coast. Clear remains the forecast but there is some fog on the Marin coast, so there you have it. Betcha we see some soon. We might also see some high clouds approaching from the southwest today.

AV UNIFIED NEWS

Welcome, Mr. David Ramalia!

I am delighted to announce that Anderson Valley Elementary School has selected a new principal, Mr. David Ramalia (pronounced Ram-ay-lia “Rhymes with Australia”).

Mr. Ramalia comes to us with an MA in Educational Administrative Services, a Multiple Subject Teaching Credential, and an Administrative Services Credential. He has three years' experience as principal of North Valley School -Victor Treatment Center NPS (a nonpublic school for students with behavioral challenges), three years' experience as summer school principal at West Sonoma County Union High School District, and two years' experience as Director of Independent Study and Director of Alternative Education Program with West Sonoma County Union High School District. Beyond that administrative experience, Mr. Ramalia has taught grades 1st-5th in small, rural school districts.

The interviewing team was impressed by Mr. Ramalia's deep experience with all students, including students with special needs, his excitement about working in Anderson Valley, and his commitment to becoming an active member of our community. Mr. Ramalia is described by those who know him as a "people person" who was a strong leader of his team and who will be an excellent fit for our small, rural elementary school.

Mr. Ramalia shared, “I am honored to be selected as the new principal of Anderson Valley Elementary School. As we embark on the 2024-2025 school year, I am excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for our students, staff, and families.

Collaboration is key to our success, and I believe that working together with parents, community members, and our dedicated staff will create a nurturing environment where our students can thrive. Your insights and involvement are invaluable, and I encourage each of you to engage with us in various ways throughout the year.

I am eager to meet each of you and learn more about what makes our school and the Anderson Valley community unique. Together, let’s make this school year a memorable one, filled with growth, learning, and joy.

Thank you for your warm welcome. Here’s to a fantastic year ahead!”

Mr. Ramalia’s first day as principal of Anderson Valley Elementary School will be Monday, October 7th. Please welcome him!

With respect,

Kristin Larson Balliet, Superintendent,

Anderson Valley Unified School District

COUNTY AGENDA NOTES: YOUR TAX-FUNDED SUPERVISORS AT WORK

Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting has only two non-routine items: a presentation from the Probation Department about the new Pretrial Release program, and a discussion of a possible code change entitled “Guidelines for Development of Wireless Communications Facilities.” No decisions are expected to be made.

Besides these earth-shattering items, everything else is boilerplate or consent calendar requiring zero prep or controversy on the part of the $100k-plus supervisorial manikins. Nothing about county management, policies, budgets, operations, departments, planning, homelessness, audits, or any other issues or projects from supervisors or staff.

Among the items on the consent calendar is approval of about $2500 each for Supervisors-Elect Cline and Norvell to attend an indoctrination training/junket at the California State Association of Counties annual meeting in Pasadena. There’s also an item to rubberstamp (retroactively) the wasting of $140k to help the Visit Mendocino marketing business set up a “Business Improvement District” to collect another $2 mil from tourists to frontload the Visit Mendocino budget to compensate for their unaccountable overspending and lack of county subsidy, a subsidy that was ended because the County said it was broke.

OUR FAVORITE CONSENT CALENDAR ITEM is Item 3s: “Approval of First Amendment to BOS Agreement No. 24-009 with Liebert Cassidy Whitmore in the Amount of $100,000 for a New Agreement Total of $200,000 to Provide Legal Services, Effective January 23, 2024, through June 30, 2025.”

Nowhere in the item does it say what LCW is doing for this particular new $100k gift bringing the total to $200k. (LCW gets millions of dollars a year in piecemeal County legal service contracts.) But when you take the trouble to look back to last January’s agenda you find that Agreement 24-009 is the County’s contract with LCW for legal assistance in the Chamise Cubbison case. We assume this has to do with the wrongful termination civil case that Cubbison has filed, not the Criminal case that is pending dismissal due to the County’s joke of an email archive system on which much of their bogus criminal charge against Cubbison is based.

THE COUNTY COUNSEL’S OFFICE is farming out case evaluation and management services to the tune of $200k “to provide advice and representation regarding municipal liability and litigation.” Apparently the well-staffed and well-compensated County Counsel’s office is incapable of evaluating or managing the many lawsuits that have been filed against the County.

“From time to time [‘time to time,” i.e., often],” the County’s Counsel whimsically begins, “the County has retained various outside law firms to represent the County in a variety of legal matters to provide specialized legal services and to defend and represent the County in complex litigation. [“A variety of legal matters” is a large understatement.] The County is currently in need of litigation defense services with respect to one or more [“one or more”?] recently filed actions and Porter Scott, A Professional Corporation (Firm) will be assigned cases or claims based upon their proven legal ability and specific expertise with public entity representation.”

And of course those experts at the Porter Scott outfit in Sacramento will make their secret “attorney-client” evaluations in the County’s best interest and not their own self-interest based on their proud motto: “handling civil litigation in California since 1976.” (Handling, meaning once they’ve got their hooks into a County, they make sure the handling is sustainable.)

Here’s the Porter Scott facebook page photo:

And here’s one of their $400/hour attorneys gaining legal inspiration from one of the firm’s many pieces of fine art.

Here’s Porter Scott sparing no expense in true Mendo style food obsession to recruit new legal beagles.

Writing with self-serving prose provided by their proposed legal contractor, the County Counsel’s office claims that “The Firm is experienced in a wide variety of municipal legal services and has the ability to draw upon a variety of specialists. They have extensive background and can provide specialized services and expertise, advice, and representation in several areas of law for the County as needed. The Firm comes highly recommended by several public agencies in the State of California as well as individuals experienced in risk assessments and defense of public entities.

“The Agreement proposed is a fee for service contract with no minimum amount of work guaranteed to the firm. [So we can be sure the County Counsel’s office will be very prudent in which cases they hand over to the Sacto firm which of course will produce the lowest cost, but confidential, recommendation.] The law firm will only be assigned work pursuant to the contract if County Counsel determines the demands of the particular case exceed the capacity of in-house counsel and if the affected department or agency has the budget for (or will seek a budget amendment in the future [on the consent calendar]) for the services. The Agreement also contains a termination clause that allows the County to terminate the agreement at any time. County Counsel and Risk will monitor and approve the law firm’s legal representation in all aspects. All legal services invoices will be reviewed by Risk for payment.”

Where is the money coming for this latest dubious legal expense?

Answer: “GL-863320” Which, of course, under the County’s wonderful transparency policy is completely unexplained. So we checked the current budget book where there’s no reference to “GL-863320,” or anything remotely like it. However, after going the extra mile, under one of the County’s many revised budget schedule category add-ons called “General Liability Insurance/Risk Management” there is an “Other charges/Judgement/Damages” budget line item number 863320 with a budget of $320k. So look for this outfit to get at least another $120k in no questions asked additional assignments before the end of the fiscal year.

GEIGER’S HOPLAND MARKET APPARENTLY IN DEFAULT ON SECOND LOAN

By Jim Shields

Last week I told you about the Board of Supervisors learning from a CEO staffer that one of the recipients of the CDBG low-interest loan program has defaulted on their loan. That would be Geiger’s Market of Hopland, which closed their doors this past July. The Hopland store is a Limited Liability Company (LLC) created by former Laytonville Geiger’s grocery store owner, Michael Braught, shortly before he put the Laytonville Geiger’s Long Valley Market up for sale in 2023. The amount of the loan was $180k, at 1% interest for 10 years, which was used for inventory and working capital. The loan required that 6 full-time equivalent jobs be created by July 1, 2024.

Adam Gaska, a member of the Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Council and also President of the Redwood Valley Water District, posted a comment on my column about Braught’s financial problems.

Gaska reports that, “Re: Jim Shields report on the Hopland Geiger’s market. Not only is the building [Geiger’s Hopland Market] encumbered with $180,000 in debt for the CBDG loan, it also has a $500,000-1,000,000 PACE loan attached to it. It looks as though the County is paying the PACE loan obligations to the tune of $67,000 a year and the taxes are currently delinquent. Hopefully there is a faster recourse to collect than a tax lien sale. The County needs to investigate how someone who was publicly known to be in financial duress was able to get approved for a second loan. Whoever signed off on it should be reprimanded and safeguards put in place to avoid such situations in the future.”

Another commenter posted: “Geiger’s market: Yes, who at the county signed off on the loan? Public information right? Just another example of mismanagement of public funds. It never ends and no one ever learns to do better. There is no incentive to do so.”

At their last meeting on Sept. 24th, the Supes were informed by staff that even though Geiger’s (Hopland Market) is currently in default of their loan they have not responded to letters, phone messages or attempts to contact the business owners.

It appears that Braught and his partners have gone dark.

Wonder why?

Assembly Passes Minimum Gasoline Inventories Bill To Curb Gouging

This past Monday as I drove by the Laytonville Chevron station I saw that the price of regular gas had dropped from $5.19 per gallon the previous day to $4.99.

So it appears that last week’s column reporting on the recent special legislative session that focused on the dire need for the state’s politicians to establish a minimum inventory requirement of 15 to 18 days if it wants to avoid gas price spikes that led to billions in excessive profits for oil refiners during the last two years.

As discussed last week, Consumer Watchdog, a California consumer protection organization that does a better job than anyone else safeguarding the rights and interests of consumers across the state, pushed for the Legislature and Governor Newsom to expedite enactment of a minimum inventory law.

On Tuesday, October 1, the California Assembly passed a bill (AB X2-1), which requires oil refiners to keep minimum inventories in order to protect Californians from price spikes that occur when refineries go down, by a vote of 44 to 17.

The bill allows the state to require oil refiners to manage a minimum inventory of fuel to avoid supply shortages that create higher gasoline prices for consumers — and higher profits for the industry. It would also authorize the California Energy Commission to require refiners to plan for resupply during refiner maintenance outages.

The measure now heads to the Senate for consideration.

“This is a critical consumer victory that takes away a tactic oil refiners have used for decades to keep gas prices and refiner profits artificially high,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog. “ABX2-1 will set a national example in how to fight back against outrageous price gouging at the pump. The Assembly and Governor are to be congratulated on taking on this powerful industry on behalf of beleaguered consumers. This bill simply requires resupply commitments to guarantee there are no artificial shortages that drive price spikes. Nothing in this bill endangers communities or workers. It’s a complete red herring raised by greedy oil companies and their allies who simply want to keep making too much money at the expense of California consumers. Shame on the industry and those who stand with them.”

Newsom fully backs the proposed law, saying it will “prevent gas price spikes and save Californians money at the pump. Just last year, price spikes cost Californians more than $2 billion – forcing many families to make tough decisions like choosing between fueling up or putting food on the table. This has to end, and with the legislature’s support, we’ll get this done for California families.”

According to Consumer Watchdog, the drop in inventories corresponded to gasoline prices spiking at over $5 per gallon in September 2023 and April 2024 and oil refiners reporting to the state record profits per gallon of more than $1.20 per gallon through their gross refining margins reporting now required under the law (SB 1322).

Supporters of the bill include yours truly, consumer organizations, environmental advocates, labor unions, small businesses and consumer groups.

(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)

SKUNK TRAIN FILES NEW LAWSUIT AGAINST CITY OF FORT BRAGG

by Mary Benjamin

On August 7, 2024, the Mendocino Railway filed suit in federal court against the City of Fort Bragg. The lawsuit lists six complaints for damages, stating that city stormwater runoff is currently depositing toxic chemical residue onto Mendocino Railway property.

Mendocino Railway, locally known as the Skunk Train, purchased the two large Georgia Pacific mill site parcels, the north portion in 2019 and the south portion in 2021. As part of the sale agreements, Mendocino Railway assumed Georgia Pacific’s responsibility to remove all toxins from the soil to meet environmental standards.

The Skunk Train’s lawsuit contends that two city culverts direct toxic storm water drainage onto their property just north of the City’s sewer treatment plant. This location of about eight acres is also referred to as Mill Pond 8, a part of the north mill site parcel.

According to the filed suit, this location “has received storm water on an on-going basis from two catchments located within and controlled by the City of Fort Bragg, which drain into Mill Pond through the culverted Maple and Alder Creeks.”

In the lawsuit, the drainage is described as “running unabated” and that it was “tested for the presence of hazardous substances. Two such substances have been found in concentrations that exceed applicable water quality standards by one or two orders of magnitude—dioxins and furans.”

Dioxin is a highly toxic group of chemicals described as “persistent environmental pollutants.” Dioxin is often one of the results of combustion processes such as commercial or municipal waste incineration.

Byproducts of this type of burning or other industrial processes can also create PCBs. Exposure to dioxin can cause cancers, reproductive issues, damage to the immune system, or hormone interference.

Furan is a colorless, flammable and volatile organic compound that is considered a contaminant and a health hazard. Furan is a chemical compound used in manufacturing herbicides, pharmaceuticals, and plastics.

The compound is considered to have the potential for reproductive damage and may damage the liver and kidneys as well. It is usually found in canned or jarred foods that have been thermal treated.

The lawsuit states that the “stormwater entering Mill Pond leaves through a dam spillway that discharges to the Pacific Ocean at Fort Bragg Landing. Thus, the City’s stormwater has a direct connection to navigable waters of the United States.”

The documents assert that “plaintiffs are entitled to relief and recovery.” The Mendocino Railway claim is asking that damages to the property, which has lost value and “cannot be enjoyed,” be held against the City. “Remediation and removal of dioxins and furans is estimated to cost anywhere from $8 million to $50 million.”

In a summary of Mendocino Railway’s official contacts with the City regarding the drainage, the suit states that “on January 22, 2024, the Train submitted a letter to the City a Claim For Money or Damages Against the City of Fort Bragg.”

On January 28, 2024, the City’s Claims Administrator, George Hills, sent the Skunk Train an acknowledgment of receipt, “but no action was taken.”

On April 24, 2024, the Skunk Train sent a letter to City Manager Isaac Whippy, but “the City did not respond.” On June 20, 2024, the Skunk Train filed an “Amended Claim for Money or Damages against the City of Fort Bragg.”

The documents contend that “to date, the City has not responded,” and that the City “continues to allow its stormwater to pollute the Property,” and that the railway was “forced to bring this complaint as a result.”

When contacted, the attorney representing the Skunk Train did not respond. However, Robert Pinoli, President and CEO of Mendocino Railway, provided a statement about the company’s lawsuit against the City.

Pinoli stated, “Stormwater is the runoff from paved or impervious surfaces, such as roads, parking lots, driveways, and rooftops, that drain directly into the City’s storm drain system. Stormwater is untreated and picks up pollutants along the way and carries these pollutants into our streams, ponds, wetlands, and the Pacific Ocean.”

Pinoli continued, “Storm water pollutants include litter, sediment, bacteria, and chemicals such as fertilizer and herbicides from lawns, as well as oil and gas from cars. The City of Fort Bragg has long conveyed this waste into Pond 8 on the mill site. This action seeks to hold them accountable as a responsible party for the continued discharges.”

He concluded, “It seems that the crumbling stormwater system that resulted in last week’s sinkhole is just the tip of the iceberg. While our property receives a significant amount of the City’s runoff, whose property gets the rest, or does it go into the ocean?”

City of Fort Bragg Director of Public Works John Smith declined to speak about the lawsuit itself, but he did respond to Robert Pinoli’s comment about a sinkhole. Smith said,” Public Works routinely replaces sections of stormwater pipes as needed.”

Smith continued, “Any small sinkholes that occur are first covered with a plate for public safety. The replacement of old infrastructure is an ongoing goal of the City as money becomes available.”

The Mendocino Railway suit was filed in the US District Court, the Northern District of California, located in San Francisco. The suit also requested a jury trial.

AFTER LISTENING TO COUNCILMAN LINDY PETERS at the League of Women Voters’ Candidate Forum, it’s clearer than ever why the insane lawsuit between the city and the Skunk drags on—Peters has no grasp of the facts.

Peters proudly declared he’s on the litigation team, but he was just appointed a few days prior and hasn’t attended a single settlement negotiation or mediation. That didn’t stop him from revealing confidential details, admitting the “last obstacle” in mediation. Not only did he break mediation rules, but anyone involved knows there are more than just one issue left.

Peters also bungled the lawsuit’s focus, claiming it’s about federal common carrier status. It’s not. The lawsuit is about state public utility status. This is not a trivial mistake. You’d think the most senior Council member, supposedly part of the litigation team, would know this.

Peters went further, saying, “the courts will decide if they’re an excursion train or a common carrier.” Actually, the courts will decide whether to change the railway’s state public utility status. The city’s lawsuit acknowledges we are a federal common carrier, which automatically makes us a public utility by state guidelines. If the City gets its way, it could create a legal mess that will continue for years. Peter’s lack of understanding of the case, much less the purpose, exemplify the costly and misguided actions by the City.

He stated, “They should play by the same rules as everyone else,” which sounds nice but is misleading. Peters claims the lawsuit is to prevent Mendocino Railway from using Federal preemption to cover hotel, residential, and retail development, but that was never the case. In 2019, the railroad agreed to the City suggestion of a master development agreement to lay out what was or wasn’t preempted. If the City felt the railroad strayed from the agreement, they could then challenge it. For whatever reason, however, the City ignored their own suggestion and launched a legal attack against the railroad in anticipation of what they thought the company might do, costing all of us over a million dollars in taxpayer money.

And as to railroad operations, does Peters claim the City has the expertise to inspect and oversee a railroad? If they annex the harbor, should the harbor commission be worried they’ll have to “play by the same rules” too? Unique entities like an airport, railroad or harbor follow special rules because they perform unique tasks. These unique entities have state and federal organizations that oversee them. In the case of railroads, it is the CPUC and FRA. But Peters apparently feels the City should have local, state and federal powers.

Peters also falsely claimed, “railroads can pollute without environmental review.” That’s 100% fiction. If this is the City’s legal understanding, it’s no wonder we’re in this fight. They should fire the City Attorney and get someone who knows the law.

He then stated, “They haven’t submitted any permits.” Peters ignores that the City has spent well over a million dollars of public funds suing us and worked for three years to block our funding to reopen Tunnel #1. What company would move forward with development under such a hostile Council? Nevertheless, in August 2022, we opened a developer’s account to begin the development process. The current focus is the remediation of the property. We’re waiting on the City to develop the EIR.

Peters also misleadingly said we “only have three miles of track,” ignoring that we have another 37 miles from Tunnel #1 to Willits, actively used for freight and passenger service. He’s played a key role in blocking our efforts to reopen the tunnel but criticizes us for not doing so. Peters shows hypocrisy at its worst.

He claimed the City’s zoning effort was shot down by a lawsuit, but the only zoning effort I know of was the City’s LCP planning process, which we participated in until January 2021, when the City canceled it with one day’s notice. Peters doesn’t even seem aware that it was he and the Council who killed it.

Peters also complained about our company’s letters to the editor. He must have forgotten his own letter from February 2022, apparently ghostwritten by KP Public Relations. Peters has the platform to speak publicly regularly. We don’t have that luxury, so yes, we submit letters like this one.

Given Peters’ poor grasp of the facts, it’s no surprise he’s a major reason the City’s misguided lawsuit continues.

— Chris Hart, Vice President of Mendocino Railway

MR.HART, co-owner of the Skunk Train, has fully endorsed two of my opponents. That is his right. So we all know where this is coming from.

However Mr. Hart, need I remind you we are meeting in mediation negotiations next week to try and resolve our differences out-of-court. I think we can both agree on that course of action. As a negotiating partner at the table during ongoing mediation, you don't negotiate through the press. Ever. In most negotiations, there is language actually preventing either side from doing so. I'm surprised Mr. Hart, co-owner of the railroad, failed to realize this. In view of this fact, his team certainly doesn't want to be negotiating in bad faith. This attack piece is an obvious political ad thinly veiled as an Op-Ed. Moreover, it is directed at a member of the upcoming mediation team. Namely me.

On behalf of the constituents I represent, it is better not to comment on Mr. Hart's allegations through the media. I will be negotiating in good faith. I'll respectfully decline any further comment on his misrepresentation of the candidates forum other than to suggest to readers that they should watch it for themselves if they haven't already.

This town is not for sale.

Lindy Peters

JOINT COMMUNICATION - Restructure Adventist Health has informed the Mendocino Coast Health Care District (MCHCD) of its desire to restructure the terms of the agreement to provide care for the community. Since Adventist Health took over management of the hospital in 2020, local residents have had access to a growing number of services. It remains our goal to continue being an integral part of delivering quality healthcare on the Coast. “The Mendocino Coast Healthcare District welcomes the opportunity to strengthen our partnership with Adventist Health. We recognize that this is an appropriate time in our five-year relationship to reevaluate the terms of our partnership,” said Paul Garza, Chair of the Mendocino Coast Health Care District. Adventist Health and MCHCD look forward to collaborating on a path forward to expand access to care. Over the next 60 days, the two organizations will work through the details of a new agreement. “Adventist Health has a long history of serving rural communities and is grateful to have played a pivotal role in sustaining care on the Coast. Together, we have improved the quality, safety, and patient experience in our local hospital and clinics,” stated Eric Stevens, President of Adventist Health Northern California Network. Both organizations remain committed to providing high-quality healthcare on the Coast and will strive to keep the community informed about the progress of the new agreement. More information may be found at the District’s website: https://www.mendocinochcd.gov/ Contact information: Kathy Wylie, MS Ed Agency Administrator, Mendocino Coast Health Care District kwylie@mendocinochcd.gov

SUPERVISOR TED WILLIAMS:

With the termination of Governor Newsom's emergency orders for Mendocino County, agricultural and industrial water well applications will no longer face the additional requirements that were imposed under the emergency orders. Moving forward, the water well permitting process will return to the standard procedures that were in place before the executive orders. Environmental Health will update application forms and materials to reflect this change, and outreach efforts will be made to inform well drilling firms. The updated documents will be available on the county's website, marking a return to pre-emergency operations for water well permits.

ALBION RIVER BRIDGE PROJECT

On September 26th, Albion residents learned why Caltrans recommends replacing the Albion River Bridge with a safe and reliable alternative. Hear directly from bridge engineers and project team members why the existing bridge is structurally deficient and why continued maintenance is not a long-term solution.

Deadline Approaching: The comment period for the Albion River Bridge Draft Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS) and Draft Section 4(f) will end on Wednesday, October 9, 2024. Submit comments via email to: albionbridge@dot.ca.gov

The document and related technical studies may be downloaded at www.albionriverbridgeproject.com

MANDATED MASKING and Strong Recommendation for Up-To-Date Seasonal Influenza for Personnel in Mendocino County Health Care Delivery Facilities

Under The Authority Of California Health And Safety Code Sections 120175, And Effective November 1, 2024, Through April 30, 2025, Until Rescinded, Superseded Or Ammended In Writing By The Health Officer, The Deputy Health Officer Of The County Of Mendocino Orders:

Effective immediately I respectfully rescind the previous mandated masking order implemented on October 26, 2023.  
Influenza Vaccinations for Health Care Workers (HCW’s) Strongly Recommended: HCW’s and operators of Health Care Delivery Facilities shall develop and implement policies which strongly recommend up-to-date seasonal influenza vaccinations for all such employees. The Deputy Health Officer recommends health care workers in patient care areas wear a mask during the Seasonal Influenza regardless of vaccination.  
Summary: This Order of the Deputy Health Officer requires HCW’s that are not vaccinated for flu to wear Face Masks while in Patient Care Areas of Health Care Delivery Facilities during the annual respiratory virus season from November 1, 2024, through April 30, 2025. This Order also requires Employers of HCW’s to develop and implement policies which strongly recommends up-to-date seasonal influenza.  
History: Since the 2017-2018 influenza season the Mendocino County Health Officer has required HCW’s to vaccinate or mask to protect themselves and patients in their care against influenza.
Basis for this Order: The Health Officer makes this Order due to higher rates of viral infections that can cause severe respiratory illness among people living in Mendocino County annually between late fall and spring. This seasonal increase in circulation of multiple respiratory viruses causes a particular risk to populations more likely to experience severe disease and death if infected, including infants, older adults, and people with impaired immune systems.  
The Order also requires the operators of Health Care Facilities make Face masks available to all HCW’s at each Health Care Facility and to develop and implement a plan to enforce the masking requirement. N95 or KN95 masks are strongly recommended. If these are not available a tight-fitting surgical mask may be used.
Exemptions and Accommodations: The following personnel may be exempt from wearing masks:
- Persons with a diagnosed medical condition, mental health condition, or disability  that prevents the individual from wearing a face mask. This includes persons with  a medical condition for whom wearing a mask could obstruct breathing.  
- Persons who are hearing impaired, or communicating with a person who is hearing  impaired, where the ability to see the mouth is essential for communication.  
- Persons for whom wearing a mask would create a risk to the person related to their work, as determined by local, state or federal regulators or workplace safety guidelines.  
Definitions:
- Face Mask means surgical mask, KN95, K94, or N95 respirator. A scarf, ski mask, balaclava, bandana, turtleneck, collar, cloth mask or any mask that has an unfiltered one-way exhaust valve does not qualify as a Face Mask under this Order.  
- Health Care Delivery Facility means a setting where patient care is provided indoors. Health Care Facilities include hospitals, clinics, surgery centers, infusion centers, dialysis center, sites that provide inpatient or outpatient health care, skilled nursing facilities, portions of long-term care facilities where nursing care is provided, and other facilities where patient care provided indoors.  
- Patient Care Areas means any area that patients regularly access to receive healthcare within a Health Care Delivery Facility. Patient care areas include lobbies, waiting rooms, examination rooms, patient wings, elevators, and hallways use by patients. Patient Care Areas do not include areas such as cafeterias, break rooms or gift shops that are not used for the provision of healthcare or access to areas where healthcare services are provided.  
- Personnel Subject to the Order: This Order applies to HCW’s which means all paid and unpaid persons who work in indoor settings where (1) health care is provided to individuals, or where (2) persons in care have access for any purpose. This includes workers in health care or other health care settings as well as workers in other direct care settings who have the potential for direct or indirect exposure to patients/clients/residents or influenza airborne aerosols. Workers include, but are not limited to, nurses, nursing assistants, physicians, technicians, therapists, phlebotomists, pharmacists, students and trainees, contractual staff not employed by the covered facility, and persons not directly involved in patient care, but who could be exposed to infectious agents that can be transmitted in the covered setting.  
Copies of this order shall promptly be (1) made available at the County Public Health, 1120 Dora Street, Ukiah, CA 95482; (2) posted on the Mendocino County Public Health website: https://www.mendocinocounty.org/departments/public-health and (3) provided to any member of the public upon request. Questions or comments regarding this order may be directed to Mendocino County Public Health Communicable Disease program at (707) 472- 2713.

— Dr. Charles Evans, Deputy Public Health Officer, County of Mendocino

LOCAL FARM STANDS

Brock Farms farmstand in Boonville is closed now for most produce, but we are selling PUMPKINS. Thursdays-Sundays, 10-5

Velma's Farm Stand at Filigreen Farm (Anderson Valley Way, Boonville)

Friday 2-5pm and Saturday-Sunday 11-4pm

For fresh produce this week: table grapes, pears, apples, winter squash (delicata and kabocha), eggplant, tomatoes (heirlooms, cherry tomatoes, new girls), sweet peppers, hot peppers, sprouting broccoli, green cabbage, hakurei turnips, potatoes, celery, onions, spinach, arugula, beets, carrots, kale, chard, basil and flowers. We will also have dried fruit, tea blends, frozen blueberries, olive oil, everlasting bouquets and wreaths available. Plus some delicious flavors of Wilder Kombucha!

All produce is certified biodynamic and organic.

Follow us on Instagram for updates @filigreenfarm or email annie@filigreenfarm.com with any questions. We accept cash, credit card, check, and EBT/SNAP (with Market Match)!

Petit Teton Farm (just south of Boonville)

Petit Teton Farm is open Mon-Sat 9-4:30, Sun 12-4:30. Right now we have sungold and heirloom tomatoes along with the large inventory of jams, pickles, soups, hot sauces, apple sauces, and drink mixers made from everything we grow. We sell frozen USDA beef and pork from our perfectly raised pigs and cows, as well as stewing hens and eggs. Squab is also available at times. Contact us for what's in stock at 707.684.4146 or farmer@petitteton.com. Nikki and Steve

Blue Meadow Farm

Open Tuesday - Sunday

10 AM - 7 PM

Closed Monday

Blue Meadow Farm

Holmes Ranch Rd & Hwy 128

Philo, CA 95466

(707) 895-2071

EXTRA EXTRAS!

Mendocino County peeps - our good friends are shooting a feature film in Anderson Valley next week and are looking for extras to appear in two group scenes. I am coordinating folks to appear on set on Wednesday October 9 in the afternoon, and Sunday October 13 in the morning. I’m looking for 10 to 15 people for both days. You will get a chance to appear in the film, your name in the credits, and a behind the scenes look at a feature film being made. It’s going to be great fun. If you, or someone you know would like to participate, please comment below, or better yet send me a DM and I will give you more details. (Anonymous facebook post)

HENDY WOODS STATE PARK WALK/ROLL

Tuesday Oct 15th, 11 AM to 12:30 PM

Meet at the Day Use Area

Contact: Anica Williams, anica.williams@parks.ca.gov

Tuesday, October 15 @ 11:00 a.m. (approximately 90-minute walk/roll with stops). Cal State Parks Senior Park Aide-Led All Access Trail at Hendy Woods State Park in Philo. Join Park Interpreter, Anica Williams, for a short accessible walk through the old-growth redwood forest of Hendy Woods State Park. In the Big Hendy Grove we will discover some of the incredible connections that are vital to the survival of this unique ecosystem.

Around 12 pm we’ll relax and explore nature journaling; feel free to bring a sketch pad and pens/pencils/paints along with a snack. Meet at Hendy Woods State Park Day Use area. Parking is Limited, consider carpooling. Bring water, sturdy walking shoes, mobility aides, dress in layers and only service dogs are allowed on the trails.

Parking fees: $8/car; for seniors over 62 years old the day use is only $7 – if you have a Disabled Discount Pass for State Parks Day Use is half price ($4) – you can get the pass at the district office (Sonoma-Mendocino Coast District12301 North Hwy 1, Mendocino, CA 95460) before 4:30 pm on weekdays – Pass info on the website: www.parks.ca.gov

THE GHOSTS ALWAYS TELL THEIR STORIES

by Rob Hawthorn

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from walking around the charming town of Mendocino, it’s that the town itself is alive. It breathes. It moves. Mendocino even talks to us. As I take people around town and tell them about the haunted houses, phantom horses, and the hotel guests that refuse to leave after 150 years, I realize that the ghosts also talk to us. They always tell their stories. I share what I’ve been told by the people who live, or lived here—in old newspaper articles or notes left, or stories related to me in somber tones—but if I miss any little detail, I’m always corrected by the ghosts who are still with us.

That’s a living woman in the lobby of the Mendocino Hotel, but some spirits occupy one of the rooms upstairs.

I met a couple outside the Kelley House Museum one evening arguing about whether or not they should take my Haunted Mendocino tour. The man said that they had dinner reservations, but the woman said that this was why they were here to begin with. Of course, I had to know what she was talking about. Exactly a year before, the couple had stayed in the historic Mendocino Hotel. While they were in their room one night, they heard a woman’s voice, muffled by what they thought was the wall between rooms. Investigating closer, they found that they could actually be on both sides of the noise: there was no wall between them and the eerie muffled voice.

The next day, as they were getting ready to spend time in town, they sat on the bed to apply some sun screen. The woman put some on her arms and returned the bottle to the end table. The man put some on his face, then returned the bottle to the end table. When the woman reached over to the end table to put sun screen on her face, she found the bottle missing. They quibbled about who misplaced the sun screen, but gave up and started to head outside. Before they left, they looked back and spotted the bottle in the bathroom, where neither of them had been for a while.

Their third encounter was on the final night of their stay. The man got out of bed for a glass of water and saw a woman standing in the room. She was tall, wore a pale-colored nightgown, and was facing their bed. He froze in fear and the woman vanished, but the man said he felt a cold energy rush through him and out through the balcony door.

A year later they were here, staying in the Mendocino Hotel and considering taking my haunted tour. She won the debate and they joined me on the tour. When we got to the front of the hotel, the man walked to his car and pulled out a bag of surveillance equipment. He had motion sensors and infrared cameras and was preparing to monitor his room through an app on his phone. This guy was ready to bust a ghost!

We entered the hotel and I told my usual stories. The couple loved it. They asked for my contact information, in case anything spooky happened during their stay. The following morning, I bumped into the man at the grocery store. A look on his face said he had something to show me. “What do you think about orbs?” he asked. Ghost hunters believe that orbs are the spirits of people, but not in a shape we would associate with a person. “I’m skeptical,” I said. “On the videos I’ve seen, I mostly think they’re moths or dust particles.” “Then I have something for you,” he said.

He brought up the image of his room in the hotel. All of his high-tech ghost detection gear was in place and working. He told me that at 8:22 pm he and his partner were at dinner. He got a notification that there was movement in their room. He pulled up the app and saw two pale orbs hovering close to each other. They came into camera view, stopped, then went forward again, vanishing at the balcony door. The orbs weren’t like any dust particles I’d seen on TV and they didn’t really move like moths. They floated in unison then stopped and were hovering for a moment, after which they whooshed off together. The man nudged me with his elbow and said that his equipment can identify things, through patterns of movement. He showed me that emblazoned on the screen was “PERSON.”

(Join me for a special Haunted Halloween Mendocino Walking Tour, October 31st at 7:00 pm. Tickets can be purchased for $25 at kelleyhousemuseum.org. Before that, every Saturday in October, I will lead a Haunted Mendocino Walking Tour at 1:30 pm. $25 adults, $15 under 12. The Kelley House Museum is open from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM Thursday through Monday. Walking tours of the historic district depart from the Kelley House regularly; for a tour schedule, visit kelleyhousemuseum.org.)

When I purchased the Sea Gull Restaurant in 1972 the owners had numerous Mendocino ghost stories. The one I most liked was about Laing Chambers. She was a retired school teacher. There was a Laing special on the menu. She lived in the Mendosa apartments just above the barber shop. It isn’t exactly a ghost story but a strange coincidence. They told me whenever Laing was seen standing by the window looking out the fire siren would go off. By the time I arrived Laing was gone but apparently you could catch a glimpse of her in the window whenever the fire sirens went off. So they said. But sadly I never witnessed it. I’m a forlorn skeptic. There were also thought to be many ghosts in the Sea Gull building but they was exorcised in the fire of December 12th 1976. (David Herstle Jones)

ED NOTES

BALLPARK MEMORIES, a prose poem. The fog, having bum rushed the Golden Gate to punch Alcatraz square on the jaw, was just poking its fingers into the sunset golden windows of the Berkeley hills as I pedaled my spare parts bike down through the Presidio, along the Marina Green, racing past the piers odd and even on the Embarcadero, hurrying to the ballpark where I bought an uppermost bleacher’s seat for 16 bucks, recalling 1948 Seals Stadium where kids got in for a nickel, and there I sat happy at the very top edge of waterfront San Francisco behind eight Chinese girls who’d been down on the playing field for Camera Day, and throughout the usual losing anguish of the next three hours the girls giddily showed each other photos of themselves arrayed with Barry Zito, who must be very big with young Chinese girls because Zito was the only ballplayer picture they seemed to have captured, and when one girl remarked, “I wish he take his shirt off,” all the girls laughed and laughed, their hands shyly in front of their mouths at such a daring expression of desire, and when a leather-lunged drunk behind us yelled at Zito, who was staggering through his usual five innings, “Give the money back, Zito!” the Chinese girls turned sixteen disapproving eyes on him, as a nearly full moon rose up over centerfield and a million lights came on from the Oakland shipyards to the San Mateo Bridge.

RUMMAGING through the fascinating Friends of the San Francisco Library book store at Fort Mason, I found a monograph called, “The Actor from Point Arena, excerpts taken from the ‘Memories of an Old Theatrical Man” by Frederick G. Ross. As a child, Mr. Ross’s family moved from San Francisco to Point Arena. The year of the Ross family’s move from the city to the untamed Mendocino coast was 1868. Young Fred, as a city kid, had already been bitten by the theater bug. He’d spent his formative years hanging around the numerous show biz venues clustered around San Francisco's Portsmouth Square, dreaming of one day becoming a performer himself. The lad was not eager to leave the excitements of the city for frontier Point Arena where, still not quite into his teens, the boy became a ranch hand. “My father was a believer in hard work; he worked hard himself. So, from the age of twelve or thirteen, my time at first was spent with the roughest woodsmen. I soon learned to swear as well as the best of them. Let me say right here that with the men it was but a habit, for they were real men. Later it was my lot, after my father closed the years of his mill career, to do about everything on the ranch a young fellow was able to do. And let me say right here that ranch and farm life is real hard work. But how to attain my ambition to act was the question. I mustered courage to ask my father for permission to leave home and go to work in San Francisco. He was a just man, and finally, after a long talk, he agreed, with the proviso that I learn a trade, and preferably his own trade, that of carpenter. This was agreed upon.”

BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO, Ross became an apprentice carpenter at fifty cents a day. He soon parlayed his newly acquired skills into work as a stagehand then, when various performances required emergency replacements, Ross got his first roles, all be them temporary. But he had talent, and before long Ross was earning a handsome living as a full-time thespian, going on to become nationally famous with long runs in character roles on Broadway, some of them in plays starring the Booth brothers, one of them John Wilkes, Lincoln’s assassin.

I’VE NEVER SEEN so much as a reference to Frederick Ross, Mendocino County’s most famous actor, in any of the local histories, but then Frederick was still Little Freddy when he labored like a man in Point Arena, which was then not much older than he was.

WHEN JIM MITCHELL, of the exciting Mitchell Brother’s Theater in San Francisco, shot his brother Artie to death back in 1991, Jim and his supporters were very unhappy with the prejudicial coverage the event was receiving in the Bay Area papers. Warren Hinckle decided Jim would get fairer treatment in the AVA, especially if Warren wrote the coverage himself. So every week while Jim’s trial was underway in Marin, I’d print up a couple thousand extra papers and trundle them down to the theater. I was handsomely compensated for the extra effort, and not only by the fleshly visuals of naked women I couldn’t help but see as they roamed the busy premises as I, an all-business bumpkin from Boonville, lugged the papers to the theater’s upstairs office. From the O’Farrell Street flesh palace the papers were driven to Marin where they were distributed the next day throughout the Marin County Courthouse. Maybe the counter-coverage worked because Jim got three years for ending his brother’s turbulent, apparently menacing life. Naked women in the aggregate might as well be a field of sunflowers so I came away with only one vivid memory of the theater — an old man in a walker emerging from one of the sinning alcoves with a big smile on his face. “Do you get a lot of old guys?” I asked theater manager Jim Armstrong. “Right around the first of the month, we do,” he said, “when their social security checks come in.”

STEVE HEILIG ASKS: Wanda Tinasky?

ED NOTE: Wanda gets around.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, October 3, 2024

ARIANA ARNOLD, 20, Ukiah. Contempt of court.

ALEXANDER BARGER, 20, Ukiah. Vandalism, criminal threats, suspended license for refusing DUI chemical test, failure to appear.

TYLER CALES, 27, Willits. Parole violation.

JERRY DEGURSE, 64, Willits. Under influence, probation revocation.

KENNETH DEWITT JR., 43, Ukiah. Parole violation.

VANESSA ELIZABETH, 55, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation violation. (Frequent flyer.)

JONATHAN LARSEN, 26, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, disobeying court order, failure to appear.

HEATHER MASCHERINI, 42, Covelo. Failure to appear.

JOEL NEELY II, 40, Willits. Domestic battery.

JESSICA PETERSON, 44, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

MONICA HUETTL WRITES:

Zanzibar to Andalusia CIA/Obama

I loved Zanzibar to Andalusia’s post about Obama’s family and the CIA.

Is ZtoA Zack Anderson?

I personally stumbled across two different CIA operations in my life.

I started a blog on Medium.com, where I posted about my experiences observing a couple of CIA operations. You may post the link below if you want to.

Re Z to A post about Obama/CIA links

I had a job interview in 1979 at the Bank of Hawaii with a woman VP, who I now think was probably Barack Obama’s grandmother. I immediately called my employment agency and told them this was not the job for me. She was a real hard driver who demanded A LOT from her staff. At the time, I was a young hippie slacker working super easy temp jobs and wasn’t in the frame of mind to work hard. How many haole women VPs were at Bank of Honolulu in 1979? Had to be her.

The link below from my Medium blog describes a job in Honolulu that I took a couple of years later when I was ready to work harder. I learned a lot about the CIA in that job. This was pre-internet and got barely any national attention, although it was front page news in Honolulu for over a year.

https://medium.com/@monicahuettl/ronald-rewald-and-bishop-baldwin-rewald-dillingham-wong-cia-proprietary-or-ponzi-scheme-30e40b3b7944

SORRY, YOU DON'T QUALIFY

Editor:

“Corporate greed,” said the man ahead of me when he paid for groceries. Groceries? Try medications. For five years, I have taken Methotrexate for psoriasis — inflammation of the skin due to a poor autoimmune system. Thinking the medication may harm my kidneys and liver, the doctor suggested a Skyrizi injection. “I stay away from injections; I’ve heard they are expensive,” I said. “There are ways around the cost,” the doctor assured me.

Never have I asked for help, but I requested it, hoping to receive a discount. The pharmacy needed my OK to start sending it. When I called, only a machine asked questions, so I called my health insurer to ask about the cost. My illness increased when I heard: Each injection is $21,000. My co-pay: $3,257. Such abuse!

I receive my teacher pension, so I wasn’t surprised when a letter from AbbVie arrived: “Sir or Madam: Sorry! You don’t qualify for assistance” — No courtesy to address it to me. Double greed. But why is it allowed? We in the middle-income bracket don’t deserve a break? I’ll stay with the tablet. The man at the grocery store was right.

Yolanda Vera Martinez

Santa Rosa

HAVE YOU EVER Seen a Hobo Nickel?

Hobo nickels were popular among hobos during the Great Depression because they were inexpensive, portable, and could be used to increase the value of a nickel. Hobos would trade their hobo nickels for food, rides, or to avoid train cops. Some hobo nickels have sold for thousands of dollars at auction.

ESTHER MOBLEY: WHAT I'M READING

In the New York Times, Eric Asimov observes that people in their 20s and 30s are gravitating toward natural wine, filling seats in wine bars at a time when the overall industry is struggling. Articles in mainstream press about natural wine never fail to set off a discourse, and if you would like to engage, may I recommend Aaron Ayscough’s Substack, Not Drinking Poison. “It is not really correct to suggest there’s a nationwide Beatle-mania for natural wine among the youth of today,” Ayscough writes. In fact, he predicts that today’s young folks will eventually gravitate toward “conventional wines.”

Luxury conglomerate LVMH, which owns Champagne houses including Dom Perignon and Krug, will invest in the nonalcoholic sparkling wine brand French Bloom, reports Nick Kostov in the Wall Street Journal. French Bloom’s highest-end bottling goes for $109 a bottle.

Some local media news: The Napa Valley Register and its sister publications have new owners. Florida’s Hoffman Media Group, which owns a dozen local newspapers among other businesses, purchased the publishing group, announces Jennifer Huffman in the Register.

I admit I’d been completely oblivious to the rise of over-the-top beverage chains throughout the U.S. until reading this New York Times story by Priya Krishna. (Somehow I’d never heard of Dutch Bros., which has 900 locations?!) These are fast food-like cafes that invite you to customize your drinks in completely unhinged ways. One Florida woman’s daily order, for example: “a Brown Sugar Shaken Espresso with oat milk, which she doctors with a scoop of vanilla bean powder, a few pumps of vanilla syrup, cinnamon cold foam and a lining of caramel syrup. It costs her roughly $9.73.”

This has nothing to do with wine, but it does have to do with great journalism: My colleague John King wrote his final column after 23 years as the Chronicle’s urban design critic. John has always been one of my north stars when it comes to criticism, modeling how to blend elegant, engrossing prose with the urgent accountability that great criticism should prioritize. The San Francisco of 2024 is quite different from the city that John encountered when he started the beat in 2001 — “The Presidio was an atmospheric question mark, and freeway ramps still shadowed parts of Hayes Valley” — and he documented a heady, consequential era. We’ll miss you in the newsroom, John.

(SF Chronicle)

NORTHERN LIGHTS COULD BE VISIBLE IN CALIFORNIA AGAIN

by Jack Lee

Recent bursts of solar activity could mean the northern lights are visible from Northern California as early as Thursday night, experts say.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center has issued watches for strong geomagnetic storms Friday through Sunday, with a severity of 3 out of 5. This means Californians could have additional viewing opportunities throughout the weekend.

If the conditions are right, “seeing the aurora in far Northern California is certainly possible,” said Shawn Dahl, service coordinator for the Space Weather Prediction Center. This is especially true with digital technology, like sensitive cell phone cameras, Dahl added.

“On the other hand, if it’s the low end of a G3, the chances really significantly go down for Northern California,” Dahl added.

The sun has produced solar flares Tuesday and Thursday this week, both associated with coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, plumes of solar material and magnetic fields currently en route toward Earth. The solar flare Thursday was the largest of the current solar cycle, and the biggest since 2017.

After hurtling 93 million miles through space, a coronal mass ejection is expected to arrive Friday, with another expected to appear Saturday afternoon or evening. When CMEs interact with Earth’s magnetic field, they can potentially damage power grids and interfere with satellite activity. But they can also produce the bright colors associated with the northern lights.

A vivid display, however, is not guaranteed.

“There is quite a bit of uncertainty in both the strength and the orientation of the magnetic field that will be embedded in the cloud that hits us,” said Mark Conde, a professor of physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Space Weather Prediction Center forecasters are waiting to see how the first CME unfolds.

“We may upgrade from a G3 to a G4 or just keep things as they are,” Dahl said.

Solar activity, which rises and falls on an 11-year cycle, is currently peaking, meaning there may continue to be opportunities to view the northern lights over California.

(SF Chronicle)

CALIFORNIA’S RECORD-SHATTERING HEAT WAVE

by Anthony Edwards & Jack Lee

A scorching October heat wave has sent temperatures soaring across California this week and numerous daily and monthly temperature records tumbling. Even San Francisco and other coastal cities weren’t spared from the unrelenting heat, with temperatures in the 90s and little overnight relief.

Here are five numbers to put the autumn heat wave in perspective.

95 Degrees

San Francisco hit 95 degrees Wednesday, the hottest October day since 1996 and the 10th hottest since weather records began in 1874. The city’s official weather station, located at Mint Hill near Duboce Triangle, also hit 94 degrees Tuesday.

Back-to-back October days of 94 degrees or higher are rare in San Francisco and have occurred just five times in recorded history — all in the past half century.

A heat advisory remains in place in San Francisco until 11 p.m. Friday for highs in the 80s and lows in the 60s.

35 Million

Thirty-five million people across California and Arizona are under an excessive-heat warning or advisory as unusually high October temperatures plague the Southwest U.S.

Excessive-heat warnings stretched from the Phoenix area to the Inland Empire to Silicon Valley. Heat advisories covered Sacramento, San Francisco, Fresno, Bakersfield and East Los Angeles.

The National Weather Service warned of major to extreme risk of heat-related health impacts, with multiple days of 90-110 degrees threatening daily and monthly records across the Southwest.

117 Degrees

Temperatures in Palm Springs and Indio reached 117 degrees Tuesday, the highest temperature recorded across the entire United States that day.

Palm Springs has faced sweltering heat all summer, particularly during a prolonged heat wave that shattered records across California. The city hit an all-time high of 124 degrees on July 5.

Temperatures at Palm Springs International Airport have exceeded 110 degrees 79 times this year. The previous record was 66 days, set in 2020.

132 Years

San Jose reached 106 degrees Wednesday, making for the city’s hottest October day in at least 132 years. Temperature records for San Jose began in 1893.

The high of 106 is San Jose’s eighth-highest temperature for any month.

An excessive-heat warning remains in place in the South Bay, including San Jose, until 11 p.m. Friday for highs in the mid-90s to low 100s.

3.1 Degrees

California’s fall temperatures have increased on average by about 3.1 degrees since 1896, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The burning of fossil fuels traps planet-warming gasses, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. As the planet warms from human-caused climate change, heat waves are becoming hotter, more frequent and lasting longer.

BACK in the 50s and 60s the milkman would deliver milk to your front door, whole milk or chocolate milk or orange juice! Glass bottles! That’s back when life was simple and people were so nice, this lady is giving him a piece of homemade pie for his Delivery!

SUNDAY’S 49ERS GAME SET TO BE HOTTEST IN LEVI'S STADIUM HISTORY

National Weather Service meteorologist: 'Near certainty' Sunday's game will be hottest in stadium history

by Alex Simon

Sunday’s San Francisco 49ers game at Levi’s Stadium is set to be the hottest game in the history of the Santa Clara venue.

According to the National Weather Service, the temperature is forecast to be 92 degrees Sunday afternoon. The 1:05 p.m. kickoff time means fans will almost certainly be in their seats for the hottest point in the day.

Dylan Flynn, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Bay Area office, told SFGate there’s a greater than 90% chance of Sunday’s temperature being in the 90s. He noted that it is a good drop in temperature from the record-breaking highs of this week — San Jose hit 100 degrees Tuesday, for example — but will still be classified as a “moderate heat risk” by NWS.

“Still hot, still warmer than normal for October, but not as extreme as we saw over the last three days,” Flynn said.

It would be a record for a 49ers game at Levi’s. Since the stadium opened in 2014, two games are tied for the hottest at kickoff on record: Sept. 10, 2017, when it was 87 degrees against the Carolina Panthers, and Oct. 7, 2019, when it hit the same mark in a Monday night game against the Cleveland Browns. Flynn said it is a “near certainty” that Sunday’s forecast will be at or above 88 degrees and break the record.

Sunday’s forecast will surely bring one of the most consistent complaints about Levi’s Stadium back to the forefront: how the stadium’s orientation means the majority of the fans in attendance sit in direct sunlight on the east side of the stadium. When the 49ers recently announced $200 million in stadium renovations, none of the plans entailed trying to add shade or reduce the impact of the sun.

For the most part, the team’s way around the heat impact has just been to try to avoid getting scheduled to play afternoon games early in the season, 49ers owner Jed York told the Athletic in a story last month.

“We’ve really pushed for that,” York said. “Obviously, the NFL has 32 different teams they need to work with as far as scheduling. But they’ve been great and willing to help us.”

There’s no avoiding them entirely, though, and the second of back-to-back Sunday day games for the 49ers is set to be a scorcher. The 49ers did not respond to SFGate’s request for comment by the time of publication, so it’s unclear what, if anything, the team will do for fans about the heat.

The weather is already a subject of heavy discussion on Reddit, with multiple posts up about the heat. One Reddit user wrote that last week’s game against the Patriots was “rough” even in 75 degrees and was dreading the heat this week. Another said they were considering attending Sunday's game, but since they “can’t afford a suite” — suites are mostly on the west side of the stadium and out of the sun — then “f—k that lol.”

Flynn advised fans to take any and all measures to protect themselves from the sun: sunscreen, hat and sunglasses, loose-fitting and light-colored clothing, and most importantly, staying as hydrated as possible.

“That’s the most important thing, just to stay well hydrated before you show up and then while you’re at the game,” Flynn said. “And that doesn’t mean alcoholic beverages, by the way — that means water and electrolytes.”

(SFGate)

ELITIST LOGIC IN NEWSOM’S BILL SIGNINGS, VETOES

Governor’s situational French Laundry logic informed his decision on legislation affecting health care, farmworkers and late-night revelers at a new NBA arena.

by Tom Philp

Gavin Newsom’s infamous 2020 dinner at the exclusive French Laundry restaurant in Yountville, where he flouted state health guidelines by gathering unmasked and indoors with other big shots at the height of the COVID pandemic, did not have to be a defining moment as governor.

But with some recent decisions on legislation, Newsom has tapped into the same elitism that blinds him to his own hypocrisy.

The governor’s decision to require private insurance coverage of fertility treatments marked a complete reversal on new such mandates from a year ago. He sided against farmworkers suffering in California’s intensifying heat, but he was all for after-hours drinking for VIP patrons at California’s newest arena with the big bucks to gain entry.

It was Newsom’s situational French Laundry logic.

It was merely a year ago when Newsom, in a wildly heartless moment, vetoed a bill that would have required health insurers to provide hearing aids to infants born without the ability to detect a single sound. Fortunately, only 1,000 or so children are born in the state in any given year with this devastating condition. The statewide cost of providing the hearing aid, to ensure the child’s cognitive development proceeds (costs capped at $3,000 per infant in the legislation) smoothly, would have been insignificant. But Newsom vetoed it nonetheless.

Why? Newsom was in love with his own state-run program to dispense hearing aids to these children, never mind that relatively few kids had benefited from it at the time. And he was worried about rising health care costs. Or so he said.

“A pattern of new coverage mandate bills like this could open the state to millions to billions of dollars in new costs to cover services relating to other health conditions,” Newsom wrote in his veto message. “This creates uncertainty for our healthcare system’s affordability.”

Fast forward to this year. Ever since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos outside the womb are considered children, the fertility treatment known as in vitro fertilization has become a political cause célèbre.

In the California Legislature, three previous attempts to require insurers to cover IVF had gotten nowhere dating back to 2019, the bills all authored by Democrats. But thanks to the nation’s far political right, this year’s attempt at the same mandate suddenly had legs. Ironically, the bill was authored by the same legislator, Democrat Caroline Menjivar of Van Nuys, who had championed hearing aids for infants in the previous year.

This year, Newsom was all too eager to sign Menjivar’s Senate Bill 729. The governor seemed to care less about costs. After all, it was time to stick it to Republicans. In his press release., Newsom said, “We are proud to help every Californian make their own choices about the family they want.”

Christina Janes, a Rocklin mother of an infant who needed hearing aids and who pushed for the 2023 legislation, said Newsom “has apparently reversed course and done what he said he wouldn’t,” namely add a new mandate to insurance coverage. She thinks Newsom should care just as much about children needing hearing aids as well. “There is nothing standing in his way now. When it comes to supporting families and our most vulnerable kids, we shouldn’t pick and choose.”

In the fields — and the luxury box

The ongoing heat wave in the Central Valley, with triple-digit weather in October becoming the norm, is a reminder of the dangers of farm labor. State Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, authored a straightforward piece of legislation that presumed that if a farmworker ended up suffering a heat-related injury, the cause of that ailment was his or her job. It would streamline a farmworker’s ability to gain access to the state’s workers' compensation system, a much-needed safety net for farmworker families who can be living paycheck to paycheck.

Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 1299. His logic?

“There is no doubt that climate change is causing an increase in extreme temperatures and that California farmworkers need strong protections from the risk of heat-related illness. However, the creation of a heat-illness presumption in the workers’ compensation system is not an effective way to accomplish this goal,” he wrote?

Where else would the farmworker have gotten heat illness? Getting a poolside tan a little too long at the club?

The governor was far more sympathetic, however, to the needs of some special privileged partyers to keep drinking long after the arena event is over.

Our hard-at-work Democratically controlled Legislature somehow found the time to pass a bill to allow the state’s fancy new arena, the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, to become the rarest of California locales, one that can serve alcohol until 4 a.m. A Los Angeles Clippers fan in the cheap seats, however, would not qualify for after-hours drinking under Assembly Bill 3206 by Tina McKinnor, D-Inglewood. Rather, stipulates AB 3206, “The sales occur in a private area in the arena that is available only to members of a private club who are assessed dues in order to belong to the club and thereby gain access to the area, and guests of those members, when the member is in attendance.”

This bill reeked of French Laundry. It barely passed out of the Senate, some Democrats unable to get to yes.

It would be perfectly in character for Gavin Newsom to go ahead and sign AB 3206.

Which, of course, he did.

At least the revelers, at 4 a.m., do not have to worry about heat illness. As these tipsy patrons are hopefully driven home, our farmworkers are waking up at 4 a.m. to harvest our food and battle the sun. Newsom, in vintage French Laundry mode this bill-signing season, only seems to care about certain Californians, with a shifting logic that fits his personal politics.

(Sacramento Bee)

THE LEGISLATURE COULD OVERRIDE NEARLY EVERY NEWSOM VETO. WHY DON’T THEY?

by Sameca Kamal

Nearly all of the 189 bills vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom this year passed the Legislature with support from more than two-thirds of lawmakers — meaning the same votes from those legislators would be enough to override the governor’s veto.

But that almost never happens. In fact, the last time the Legislature overrode a governor’s veto was 1979.

So why don’t legislators fight for the bills that have such broad support?

Party loyalty, and self-protection, says Dan Schnur, politics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine University.

“A governor who’s been overridden is generally not a happy governor — and unhappy governors tend to issue more vetoes, especially against the members who voted to override,” he said.

The current Democratic supermajority — 93 of 120 seats – also means that a legislator who goes against the governor can be easily replaced among the politically favored.

In other words, Schnur said, it’s the modern-day version of, “if you come for the king, you’d best not miss.”

Monday was the deadline for the governor to act on the 1,206 bills the Legislature sent to his desk of the 2,159 introduced during the regular session this year. Newsom vetoed about 15.7% of the total bills passed – slightly higher than the state’s 15% average in recent years.

Of the 189 vetoes, 170 of the bills — about 90% — passed by more than a two-thirds majority in both the Assembly and Senate, according to a Digital Democracy analysis. About 96% of the vetoed bills passed with a two-thirds majority in at least one chamber.

A veto override requires a two-thirds vote in each chamber: which would mean at least 52 members in the Assembly and 26 in the Senate. (Democrats currently make up 62 of 79 Assemblymembers, and 31 of 40 state senators).

The governor vetoed bills for different reasons, as expressed through his veto messages. According to an analysis by lobbyist and Capitol-watcher Chris Micheli, Newsom rejected 30% of bills due to budget concerns and 27% due to disagreements over policy. He vetoed another 22% because he said they were unnecessary or stepped on the toes of other state agencies or local governments.

Asked whether the number of vetoed bills that passed with broad legislative support showed a disconnect with the executive branch, Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for the governor, said: “The executive branch and legislative branch are independent branches of government. The governor’s decisions on legislation are made solely on the merits of each bill.”

The last veto override in 1979 was on a bill by then-Assemblymember Lou Papan that banned banks from selling insurance. It was vetoed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown. It was the second override of a Brown veto in 11 days.

If there is going to be an override, legislative leadership would have to be involved in the political mutiny.

Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, a Democrat from Santa Rosa, showed some willingness to stand up to Newsom recently by initially refusing to convene the Senate for the governor’s desired special session on gas prices. He declined to comment, however, on when he would consider an override of a governor’s veto.

Robert Rivas, speaker of the state Assembly, also declined to comment.

Thad Kousser, politics professor at the University of California, San Diego, said one reason the Legislature may let a governor’s veto go unchallenged is to let the governor do the dirty work.

“They’re happy to let the governor be the naysayer and kill the bill without them having to vote against it,” he said.

Sen. Scott Wiener, whose bill to reduce drug costs was vetoed last month despite broad support, described the governor’s action as “a really, deeply bad veto,” but he stopped short of calling for an override.

The bill, which had both Democratic and Republican co-authors, passed with wide margins in both chambers: 70-0 in the Assembly and 38-2 in the Senate. If signed, it would have required licensing of pharmacy benefit managers — companies that serve as intermediaries between insurance companies and drug manufacturers to process claims and negotiate drug prices.

The governor said in his Sept. 28 veto message that he didn’t think the licensing plan would address rising drug costs, and that more data was needed.

But Susan Bonilla, chief executive officer of the California Pharmacists Association, which sponsored the bill, pushed back on that reason. She said a study was already done in 2020, and those recommendations were added to the bill.

Bonilla — a former Assemblymember from 2010 to 2016 — said the Legislature should consider a veto override rather than try to pass a bill again next year because patients’ access to medication is a pressing issue — and implementing protections will take time.

She added that sponsors have spent years working on the bill with various legislative committees as well as with the state’s insurance and justice departments.

To go through the process again, she said, is not a wise use of legislators’ time or taxpayers’ resources.

“We had our elected representatives strongly support this bill,” she said. “They see the need for it, and I think it’s very, very important that they push ahead and seek a veto override.”

Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, told CalMatters he was evaluating next steps for the bill, including reintroducing it next year.

“I firmly believe that the Legislature should be willing to override vetoes from time to time,” he said. “We are a co-equal branch of government, and we have the power to override. I’m not saying we should do it willy-nilly, but periodically, on important issues, we should be willing to override.”

That said, since it hasn’t happened in nearly half a century, Wiener isn’t holding his breath.

“It’s been a cultural dynamic in the Capitol where veto overrides just don’t happen,” he said. “I think the thinking is, work things out ahead of time, which, of course, is always the preferred route,” he said. “But in a case like this … there’s nothing really to work out.”

Some legislators also say they understand the governor’s reasons for a veto of their bills.

Assemblymember Juan Alanis, a Republican from Modesto, gave credit to the governor for keeping the state’s budget in mind when he vetoed Alanis’ bill on homelessness and youth unemployment.

The bill passed unanimously through nearly every committee; by 97% in its Assembly floor vote and 100% support in the Senate.

“I believe as legislators, it’s our duty also to be mindful about where the taxpayers’ dollars go, so I also see where he’s coming from,” he said.

Alanis said he’ll take the cost concerns the governor listed in his veto message into consideration, and try again next year.

If the Legislature were to override a veto, they might only have that option so many times, he said. That’s why he thinks it’s worth reserving that option for the big issues worth fighting for — public safety issues, for example.

“I think, and I hope and I wish that we would push it and use our authority on that,” he said. “I guess time will tell if we’re going to be doing that in the future — if he does veto some bills that we really, really feel need to happen here in California.”

(CalMatters.org)

GOVERNOR ISSUES WATER RESILIENCE UPDATE, TOUTING 'PROGRESS' ON DELTA TUNNEL AND SITES RESERVOIR

by Dan Bacher

In his Water Resilience One Year update issued on October 2, Governor Gavin Newsom claimed the State of California has made “significant strides” in securing and enhancing water supplies over the past year while building climate resilience

“Over the past year, California has implemented innovative water management strategies and invested heavily in drinking water systems, groundwater protection and infrastructure projects, benefitting millions of residents statewide,” the Governor wrote.

He pointed to “progress” on the Delta Conveyance Project, a giant and enormously expensive tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that is opposed by a coalition of Tribes, fishing groups, conservation organizations, Delta residents, scientists and water ratepayers. Opponents say the tunnel, by diverting Sacramento River water before it reaches the Delta, will hasten the extinction of imperiled Delta smelt, longfin smelt, salmon, steelhead and other fish species.

“California released the final Environmental Impact Report for this critical project, as well as a new cost-benefit analysis showing that it would create billions of dollars in benefits for California communities — including reliable water supplies, climate change adaptation, earthquake preparedness and improved water quality,” Newsom claimed. “With every $1 spent, $2.20 in benefits would be generated.

He also noted that through the end of the year, local water districts that depend upon the State Water Project will vote on funding the project. To date, the boards of the first three such districts to vote have committed to providing planning funds for the project, said Newsom.

In response, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Executive Director of Restore the Delta, described the Delta Tunnel as a “pipe dream” that would drain the estuary.

"Governor Newsom claims the Delta Tunnel is about water resilience, but the truth is this project will drain our wallets and the Delta itself with declining water supplies resulting from climate change,” said Barrigan-Parrilla. “His rosy cost-benefit analysis conveniently ignores the environmental destruction to environmental justice communities, harm to tribal communities, and massive financial risks for Southern California ratepayers.”

“He is pushing a $20 billion gamble on a pipe dream for the benefit of powerful political donors. California needs real climate solutions that reduce Delta reliance, not a boondoggle that benefits a few at the expense of our most vital ecosystems, economies, and people,” stated Barrigan-Parrilla.

Newson also touted his “streamlining Sites Reservoir project,” another boondoggle opposed by many of the same organizations opposing the Delta Tunnel, in his update.

“California is forging ahead with this major water storage project which could store enough water for 3 million households’ yearly usage. The Sites Reservoir project cleared a legal hurdle last month under expedited judicial review enabled by the Governor’s infrastructure streamlining law,” argued Newsom.

Kasil Willie, Staff Attorney for Save California Salmon, summed up the reasons why Tribes and environmental groups oppose the construction of Sites Reservoir, in reference to the favorable California Appeals Court Ruling last month regarding the project’s environmental impact report that Newsom cites.

“Tribes and other project opponents have valid concerns including contamination of drinking water supplies, salmon extinction, and inundation of lands that hold irreplaceable Native American sacred sites and cultural resources,” stated Willie. “The Project as proposed will cause irreparable harm to Tribal Cultural Resources, including ancestral village sites and burial sites.”

On the day before the governor issued his water portfolio update, representatives of fishing and environmental groups blasted the California Department of Water Resources and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for cancelling the fall flow protections for the few remaining Delta Smelt.

The Delta Smelt, once the most abundant fish species in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, is virtually extinct in the wild, due to massive water exports to agribusiness and other factors over the past several decades.

Zero smelt have been caught over the past six years in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater Trawl Survey. The Delta Smelt, found only in the Delta, is an “indicator species” that shows the health of the San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem.

Current state and federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) permits require DWR and Reclamation to release a pulse of water through the Delta to the San Francisco Bay in September and October to improve habitat conditions for the listed Delta Smelt, according to a statement from environmental and fishing groups. This fall outflow requirement is only triggered in years when it is wetter than normal and is often referred to as “Fall X2.”

“It is incredibly disappointing to see the Newsom and Biden administrations willing to implement Trump-era water policies,” said Ashley Overhouse, Water Policy Advisor with Defenders of Wildlife. “This decision marks a somber start to the new water year, undercutting years of collaborative work to ensure the best available science is informing our water management decisions.”

Wendys in Biltmore Village, Asheville, North Carolina, post-Hurricane Helene

HIGH RISK IN THE HILLS

Editor:

Despite the risk of catastrophic wildfires and blizzards and the lack of affordable insurance, it’s easy to understand why residents of the San Bernardino Mountains want to stay. What’s not easy is addressing the long-term sustainability of our housing choices in high-risk zones.

The San Bernardino Mountains aren’t alone in this dilemma — 446,000 more people moved in than out of the U.S. counties with the highest risk of wildfire in 2021 and 2022. The reality is that some of the most dangerous wildfires, heat waves, floods and droughts are found in some of the fastest-growing residential markets.

If we’re going to avoid a vicious and costly recovery and rebuilding cycle, we need to change our land use policies. One of our best tools is adopting the use of “sacrifice zones” — allowing state and local governments to pre-emptively limit or prohibit development in disaster-prone areas where human development has not yet occurred.

It may seem abstract, but it has worked — “urban growth boundaries” in places like Pitkin County, Colo., and Washington State and “conservation zones” in Hartford, Conn., and Shreveport, La., have protected communities from catastrophic loss, while ensuring that property values do not decline as a result of repeated devastation.

Giving current residents resources to rebuild and protect against future disasters is important, but continuing to build developments in high-risk areas and expecting a different outcome is misguided and dangerous.

It’s time we stop pretending we can outsmart nature. Sometimes nature tries to tell us, “You shouldn’t live here.” And, quite frankly, we should listen.

Jonathan Rosenbloom

Albany, New York

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Funny how the "Blue Team" posters talk about inflation being back to "normal" and ignore that the 20% and more inflation prices are still in effect. Everything you buy is still at the higher prices, nothing has gone back to anywhere normal. I guess if your IRA is up $100,000 and you have 5.25& CD's, todays prices are of no concern to you.

ALL WE GET…

Editor:

Three months ago, Democrats were demanding that Kamala Harris be dumped from the Democrat ticket. Then Joe Biden imploded during his debate with Republican Donald Trump. Within weeks, Biden was convinced to pull his name from the ballot. Suddenly, Harris was no longer considered the word salad, inept, braying, frequent guest on television gabfests. She morphed into the savior of America. She was praised by the bought-and-sold liberal media, Hollywood dolts and other celebrities. These groups never challenged her. And many people who buy into the media were duped.

What are her ideas and policies to make America better? We don’t know. All we get from her is nonsensical tripe repeated over and over to different groups. No accepting responsibility for the failed border policy when she was in charge of it. Crime? Economy? Taxing corporations? Fracking? Every time she is asked a question, out comes the verbal mess punctuated by laughter and no answer. Now that she is a serious candidate and gets asked a question, her response starts with “I grew up in a middle-class family …” She won’t talk to the press unless they are part of her circle. What is she afraid of?

Anthony Morgan

Cotati

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JILL STEIN IS KILLING THE GREEN PARTY

With membership at new lows and no electoral wins to their name, it’s time for the Greens to ditch the malignant narcissist who’s presided over its decline.

by Peter Rothpletz

With membership at new lows and no electoral wins to their name, it’s time for the Greens to ditch the malignant narcissist who’s presided over its decline.

Over the last several years, much ink has been spilled over the fact that one of America’s political parties has been captured—if not contorted into an outright cult of personality—by an aging, megalomaniacal autocrat apologist and repeat loser who cares about little outside accruing power and personal enrichment. You are probably conjuring the image of Donald Trump. You’re not wrong, but this dynamic actually applies to two of America’s political parties: the GOP under Trump and the Green Party under Dr. Jill Stein.

Stein, now in the midst of her third long-shot bid for the White House, has been largely ignored by both major-party nominees—that is, until recently. As reported by The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo, in just the last few days, Democrats appear to have launched an effort to snuff out her campaign. Last Monday, DNC spokesperson Matt Corridoni released a statement reading: “Jill Stein is a useful idiot for Russia. After parroting Kremlin talking points and being propped up by bad actors in 2016 she’s at it again. Jill Stein won’t become president, but her spoiler candidacy—that both the GOP and Putin have previously shown interest in—can help decide who wins. A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump.” Corridoni’s criticism was likely spurred by a recent Stein event in Tampa, where she championed the cause of three members of the African People’s Socialist Party indicted back in April for participating in a “malign influence campaign” on behalf of the Russian government.

On Thursday, famed comms knife-fighter and DNC operative Lis Smith tweeted a video of Stein floundering in response to a question from Angela Rye on The Breakfast Club about the number of members in the House of Representatives. “WOW” Smith wrote, “Jill Stein doesn’t know how many members of the House there are in Congress. 600?!?! Just the latest sign she’s a deeply unserious candidate only there to help Trump win.”

Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the fray as well, circulating another clip from The Breakfast Club interview with the caption: “Nobody needs talking points to know Jill Stein hasn’t won so much as a bingo game in the last decade and if you actually give a damn about people, you organize, build power and infrastructure, and win.” It was the second broadside AOC sent Stein’s way last week. On Sunday, the congresswoman posted a now viral video to Instagram eviscerating the Green standard-bearer.

“Y’all, this is a little spicy, but I have thoughts,” Ocasio-Cortez began. “What I have a problem with is the fact that if you’re running for president, you are the de facto leader of your party.… Trust me on this, I’ve run as a third-party candidate in New York. I’ve also run as a Working Families Party candidate in addition to running as a Democrat.… I’ve been on record about my criticisms of the two-party system, so this is not about that.… If you run for years and years and years and years in a row, and your party has not grown and you don’t add city council seats and you don’t add downballot candidates and you don’t add state electeds, that’s bad leadership. That, to me, is what is upsetting. If you have been your party’s nominee for 12 years in a row, four years ago and four years before that and four years before that, and you cannot grow your movement pretty much at all and can’t pursue any successful strategy, and all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious. To me, it does not read as authentic, it reads as predatory.”

How has Stein fared as a leader? By AOC’s perfectly reasonable standard, she’s done abysmally. As of July 2024, a mere 143 officeholders in the United States are affiliated with the Green Party. None of them are in statewide or federal offices. In fact, no Green Party candidate has ever won federal office. And Stein’s reign has been a period of indisputable decline, during which time the party’s membership—which peaked in 2004 at 319,000 registered members—has fallen to 234,000 today.

This meager coalition can’t possibly kick-start a legitimate political movement, capable of organizing voters and advancing ideas outside of perennial electoral events. It’s just large enough, however, to spoil the work of those who put in this kind of work. That’s why even if you put aside Stein’s toxic brand of leadership, Democrats’ broader disdain for Stein is understandable. Back in 2016, had Pennsylvanian, Michigan, and Wisconsin voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton in lieu of Stein, Trump never would have entered the Oval Office. Naturally, reasonable people can argue that Clinton herself should have been capable of doing more in those states to win (at the very least, she could have stepped foot in Wisconsin). Fair enough: But unleashing the MAGA king on the American people is far from the only reason many find Stein detestable. Leaving the complaints and condemnations of Democrats aside, the people who should be most aggrieved with Stein are anyone who aspires to have a functional, effective Green Party. As long as she’s mixed up with it, it’s dead in the water.

The Ivy League–educated doctor is less an earnest political practitioner than a cynical narcissist addicted to media attention—much like the man she put in the White House. In 2016, to much fanfare, she crashed the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with a Fox News crew in tow. Later that year, she used an interview with Politicoto describe Clinton as a far greater threat to the American system than Donald Trump: “Donald Trump, I think, will have a lot of trouble moving things through Congress.… Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won’t…. Hillary has the potential to do a whole lot more damage, get us into more wars, faster to pass her fracking disastrous climate program, much more easily than Donald Trump could do his.” Curiously, in earning her two Harvard degrees, it seems Stein never took time to learn how the Supreme Court works, or who gets to appoint replacements to it. When Stein hasn’t been busy lobbing patently deranged criticisms at centrist Democrats, she’s worked to smear progressives. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, is a D.C. insider “corrupted” by corporate money, according to Stein—a bizarre charge, given that she herself has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.

Indeed, Stein has long had a complicated relationship with money. As Yashar Ali reported for The Daily Beast in 2017, the Green Party icon has a particular penchant for railing against big banks, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Carbon, and defense contractors while simultaneously holding sizable investments in them via mutual or index funds. Ali noted that “on October 26, 2015, Stein’s campaign sent out a statement calling for Exxon to get the death penalty for its ‘climate-change fraud.’ Yet, according to her financial disclosures, Stein has invested $995,011 to $2.2 million in funds such as Vanguard 500 that maintain significant stakes in Exxon and other energy companies like Chevron, Duke Energy, Conoco Phillips, and Toho Gas.”

To be clear, making use of mutual and index funds is an extremely common practice in Washington—even by avowed progressives. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, for a time, was even invested in the same Vanguard fund as Stein. However, the Green Party leader’s predilections for hard-line purity tests and uber-priggish rhetoric are difficult to square with her wealth management.

Always quick to forgive herself for the sins for which she excommunicates others, Stein has defended herself in the past by asserting that she has no control over the investment decisions of the mutual and index funds that are enriching her. That is correct, but as Ali observes, “she did have a choice of whether to invest in these funds to begin with.” He continues, “While Stein claims that she had difficulty finding funds that aligned with her values, she didn’t explain why she chose to remain in funds that are completely disjointed from her values.”

Ali ends his piece by noting that Stein retired from teaching and medicine in 2006 in order to fully dedicate herself to politics—a decision likely only possible because of the payoff from investments in companies she claims to abhor.

Stein’s ethical compromises have led to meaningful results, as long as you’re not invested in the success of the party upon which she has so famously forced herself. The Green Party is arguably weaker now than it’s been in years. It’s quite literally become a laughingstock; social media erupted this week after it was reported that the Nevada Green Party inadvertently filed forms to put up “Jill Stein” as a public referendum question instead of as a candidate for president. It is to be hoped that the Green Party’s been so enfeebled by Stein’s leadership that it won’t end up electing Donald Trump president once again.

Perhaps one day the Green Party will blossom and become a real player in American politics, instead of the host body for a malignant egomaniac to cling to in perpetuity. Our politics could use some alternatives: With young people’s growing concerns around climate change, it would be beneficial if the Greens could send a candidate to be one of the House’s 435—not, as Stein would have you believe, 600—members in the next decade. For that to happen, though, the party will need to summon courage and good sense to dump Jill Stein once and for all.

(NewRepublic.com)

HOW AN ‘OCTOBER SURPRISE’ FROM ISRAEL AND IRAN COULD SHAKE UP THE US ELECTION

by Craig Unger

Today, former president Jimmy Carter is in hospice care in Plains, Georgia, where he has just celebrated his 100th birthday. But even now, some 44 years after his presidency ended, he has not gotten his due. Carter was defeated at the polls by Ronald Reagan in 1980, having been wrongfully characterised as a failed leader who allowed America to be humiliated by Iran.

In fact, he was the victim of a traitorous covert operation for which the Republicans were never held accountable. The real story has never been fully told. In 1980, the term “October Surprise” first became widely used in reference to efforts to win the release of 52 American hostages incarcerated at the American embassy in Tehran. Obtaining their freedom became a decisive factor in determining who would win the election – Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter.

At the time, of course, the Republicans were not even in power, so they had no authority to make any kind of deal at all with Iran. Nevertheless, the Republicans secretly sent weapons to Iran, for which they demanded an extraordinary quid pro quo: they wanted the Islamic Republic to keep the Americans in custody until after the presidential election.

That’s right: the Republicans were arming Iran, a terrorist state, in return for which they wanted Iran to prolong the captivity of American hostages.

Transgressive as the Republicans’ position seemed, there was a powerful logic behind it; if the hostages were released before the election, the thinking went, the patriotic fervour that ensued might well put Carter over the top.…

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-october-surprise-israel-iran-b2621978.html

TWO WEEKS IN BEIRUT

by Stefan Tarnowski

On 19 September, in what turned out to be his final speech, Seyed Hassan Nasrallah repeated the message he had been sending to Israel’s leaders for almost a year: ‘You will not be able to return the northern residents to the north … the only way is to end the aggression and war on the people of Gaza.’ But something seemed off. Nasrallah looked and sounded despondent. It was widely rumored that Hizbullah had been penetrated by Israeli intelligence. Nasrallah seemed to acknowledge as much. He called the pager and walkie-talkie attacks of the previous days “unprecedented.” They demanded “just retribution,” he said, but for the moment he would “leave the matter be”: “We will settle scores. Their nature, scale, how, where? This, for sure, we will keep to ourselves, and within our narrowest circles.”

As Nasrallah spoke, Israeli jets flew low over Beirut, breaking the sound barrier. The sonic boom sounds like a bomb exploding in the sky over your head. It was a common occurrence in Beirut in the 1990s, and never really stopped in south Lebanon. Since October 8, 2023 it has once again become frequent over Beirut, but it had never been this loud before. The windows shook. In south Lebanon, Israel launched more than twenty airstrikes. Nasrallah continued: “But since this battle has had invisible aspects, allow me to change approach today. I will not talk of time, or form, or place, or date. Leave the matter be. The news is what you see, not what you hear.”

A week later, on Friday, September 27, we felt the whole of Beirut shake. A huge plume of smoke was visible across the city. Israeli jets had dropped more than eighty bombs, flattening six apartment buildings in Haret Hreik without warning. Their target was one man. The rest of the still uncounted dead – many hundreds incinerated – were collateral damage. The Western press described it as a “targeted strike.” The US president and vice-president called it a “measure of justice.”

A building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Choueifat, south-east of Beirut, on Saturday, 28 September 2024. Photograph © AP Photo / Hussein Malla / Alamy

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had just finished giving his own speech to the UN General Assembly. He had repeated a claim made two days earlier in an address to the Lebanese people: Hizbullah had “placed rockets in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings, and in the private homes of the citizens of Lebanon. They endanger their own people. They put a missile in every kitchen. A rocket in every garage.” The Lebanese, he claimed, were being turned into “human shields.” The discourse was hair-raisingly familiar from a year of carpet-bombing Gaza. There’s an Arabic phrase for this kind of threatening talk: “legalizing blood.”

As Netanyahu finished his speech to the half-empty general assembly, the blasts shook Beirut. Images published later showed Netanyahu ordering the strike from a hotel room in New York. It’s hard to imagine another foreign leader brazenly broadcasting that they had ordered such a strike from US soil. It’s also hard to imagine a US administration more pliant to Israeli policy. Reuters later reported that munitions used by Israel to kill one man by destroying six apartment buildings were made and supplied by the US. The day before, Israel announced that it had secured its latest military aid package from the US, worth $8.7 billion. This was the brute reality undermining the empty talk of a Biden-Macron ceasefire plan at the UN.

Nasrallah had made it clear he intended to continue the policy of support (isnad) for Gaza through border skirmishes. Though Israel launched four airstrikes for every Hizbullah rocket, there was some kind of parity. Israelis and Lebanese living within five kilometers of the border were forcibly displaced. Hizbullah’s aims were plainly stated and limited in scale: to force Israel to divert troops from Gaza.

For a year, many in Lebanon asked when the war would start. For a year, I thought the border skirmishes were the war. Nasrallah seemed to have forged as close to a consensus as is possible in this fractured country. Not everyone supported his position: there were billboards in Beirut demanding the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 2006, which calls for a “full cessation of hostilities” between Hizbullah and Israel. This has been a favorite talking point of the politicians in the bloc opposed to Hizbullah, such as the right-wing Christian former warlord Samir Geagea. And it wasn’t uncommon to hear people grumble that Lebanon was being dragged into a war against our choosing at the behest of Iran. On the other hand, Hizbullah’s limited response had left them open to criticism – from the 250,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon as well as among their Shia base – that they weren’t doing enough. Broadly speaking, until last week, the so-called tawāzun al-ra‘b (“balance of terror”) seemed to hold.

In engaging on October 8, 2023, Hizbullah was fulfilling its raison d’être as a resistance movement. As the Lebanese political scientist Nadim Shehadi has argued, since 2000, when Hizbullah forced Israel to withdraw from the territory it had occupied in southern Lebanon since 1982, Hizbullah has been a resistance movement in search of an occupation. The war of July 2006, with its so-called “divine victory,” marked a momentary high. But the intervention in Syria to prop up a brutal dictator eroded Hizbullah’s support. Hizbullah used its “resistance” arsenal to besiege, starve, rape, kill and displace Syrians who had risen up against the Assad regime. Hizbullah’s resistance discourse was like a stopped clock; the world turned to realign with it last October.

Israel’s escalation began with the pager and walkie-talkie attacks on September 17 and 18. If everyday electronics in Europe or the US were laced with undetectable amounts of explosives, there would be media outrage. But the Western press lauded the attacks in Lebanon as “innovative” and “audacious,” extolling the spycraft behind the explosions that killed dozens and maimed thousands. I went to visit a friend recovering from pneumonia in hospital on September 19 and was advised not to bring my daughter because the injuries she would have encountered on the ward were too gruesome. Many have lost one or two eyes or three fingers. A nurse described the ordeal of changing the bandages, so painful that the wounded, including children, pass out from the pain.

Some commentators, such as Marwan Bishara, have cast the fight between Hizbullah and Israel as one between ideology and technology. As I write, a drone is buzzing overhead. It has been there incessantly for the last week, turning Beirut into terabytes of data to be crunched in Israel and transformed into targets for airstrikes. The sound of the drone is meant to remind us that resistance is futile, that we must live with the injustice of Israel’s longstanding dispensation in Palestine and, by all signs, its renewed dispensation in Lebanon.

On Monday, September 23, Israel’s military spokesman Daniel Hagari released a video warning to Lebanese citizens, a sequel to his viral content from Gaza, such as his tour through the basement of al-Rantisi Hospital, where he claimed that an elevator shaft was the entrance to a Hamas tunnel, a baby bottle was suspicious evidence, a hospital roster was a hostage list, and the days of the week written in Arabic “the names of terrorists.” Now, to the Lebanese, he said: “This is a village in southern Lebanon.” He didn’t specify which village. The visuals showed a 3D mock-up, possibly produced by AI. As he spoke, the houses turned hollow, revealing “cruise missiles, rockets, launchers, UAVs inside civilian homes, hidden behind the Lebanese population living in the village.” On cue, the computer-generated weaponry turned red. Military vehicles reversed out of garages, pointing their weapons at the viewer.

The Israeli airstrikes began soon afterwards. According to the New York Times it was one of the heaviest days of aerial bombardment in contemporary warfare. Israel launched 1600 airstrikes, killing over 551 people in a single day, half the total number killed in the month-long 2006 war. There were 1300 strikes on the first day of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, where it took 13 days for the death toll to reach 500. Among the dead in Lebanon were 94 women and 50 children. But why not count the men? Unless you accept Israel’s logic that all men in Lebanon are potential terrorists, legalizing our blood.

On Tuesday, September 24 in Joun, one such “village in southern Lebanon,” where my family comes from, an Israeli airstrike hit a house on the outskirts, killing eleven people, including three Syrian refugees and a Lebanese mother, father and child.

In the hours following Israel’s assassination of Nasrallah, they “eliminated” at least eighteen other senior Hizbullah leaders. Rumors spread in Beirut that Iran had betrayed the group for the sake of a nuclear deal or sanctions relief. The Iranian missiles launched at Israel on October 1 imply otherwise.

In any case, the politics of assassination must be condemned. Hizbullah itself is no stranger to it. Its members have been tried and found guilty of killing Lebanese leaders such as Rafik al-Hariri, and are accused of killing the likes of Lokman Slim. It is senseless and self-defeating to celebrate the ‘elimination’ of one’s enemies and grieve the assassination of one’s friends.

As Israeli commandos trudge into southern Lebanon, it feels as if we are returning to 1982, when the Israelis also sought to establish a so-called “buffer zone” and hubris, mission creep and the desire to shape a “new Middle East” took Ariel Sharon all the way to Lebanon’s capital. After the Sabra and Shatila massacres he became known as the “Butcher of Beirut.” If history must repeat, then Hizbullah, a resistance movement formed in 1982 which has spent the last 24 years in search of an occupation, will be given a new lease of life.

Clearly, Hizbullah has made grave mistakes since 2000. As the FT reports, propping up Assad exposed it to the notoriously corrupt Syrian secret services. All the while, Israel was gathering data on the group. But Nasrallah’s last broadcast may yet be proved right: “This fool,” he said, with his disarming speech impediment and his alarming index finger raised, “the commander of the north, is suggesting to establish a ‘buffer zone’ inside Lebanese territory … This ‘buffer zone’ will turn into a swamp, a trap, an ambush, an abyss, hell.”

Since Israel, in the hubris of a fortnight of victories, refuses to learn from the history of its defeats in Lebanon, I cling to the distant hope that Hizbullah, in the humility of these defeats, will remember to hand over its weapons to the Lebanese state and disband itself when the coming years of struggle against Israel’s invasion and occupation at last come to an end.

The Lebanese caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said that a million Lebanese have been displaced in the space of a week. The streets of Beirut are filled with people who have been forced to leave their homes with only the clothes on their backs. They sleep on thin bits of foam in the open air. It’s still warm, but it rained the night of the ground invasion. They faced the “humanitarian” choice proffered by Israel’s “most moral army”: leave your homes immediately or you will die. Some received a call or text message at 1 a.m., two hours before their homes were bombed. The residents of the six apartment buildings in Haret Hreik received no call. Nor did the residents of the apartment building in Ain el-Delb, where an Israeli airstrike killed at least 37 on Sunday, September 29.

If the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah had failed, it’s doubtful Israel would have dared invade Lebanon. It isn’t surprising that his killing leaves many Lebanese feeling more exposed, not less. On Saturday, September 29, in a small shop up the hill from the Corniche, the shopkeeper described the efforts she had taken to house people in abandoned apartments and buildings. No matter how much she did, she felt she hadn’t done enough. So many are still out on the streets. “If I were a house,” she said, “I would have slept them all inside of me.”

17 Comments

Lee Edmundson October 4, 2024

I used to see my urologist over here in her office on Sequoia Drive in Fort Bragg. She was in residence there twice a month. Whenever I saw her, my payment flowed through our Coast Hospital coffers.
She no longer attends here on the Coast. To see her, I have to drive over to Ukiah. Thus, my payments for my visits no longer flow through the Coast Hospital, but through Ukiah’s facility of Adventist Health.
I strongly suspect this factor — looked at over the entire sphere of medical practice of Adventist Health’s tenure running our coast hospital — suggests a very good reason the Coast Hospital runs at such a deep deficit: Adventist doesn’t send its medical practitioners over to the Coast, instead requiring us (the patients) to drive over there to Ukiah.
Thus bleeding the Coast Hospital’s revenue stream dry. Someone tell me I’m mistaken here.
To take another point (as long as I’m on this): The Coast Hospital District’s Board should be lobbying full-time and strongly for Sacramento to push back the Seismic Standards requirements to 2040, or beyond. We don’t need a new hospital, only our existing one retrofitted. The cost/plus benefit analysis should plainly show this to be true.
Finally, the Hospital Board should be lobbying Sacramento and Washington DC to pass legislation nationwide to subsidize rural Health Care Facilities, i.e. Hospitals. What’s going on here on the Mendocino Coast is occurring throughout rural America. Duh! As long as Medical Care in America is driven by the profit motive — as Adventist Health’s is — there will always be a shortfall of dollars. Health Care should not be considered a money making enterprise.
My 2-cents worth…

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- Sarah Kennedy Owen October 4, 2024
  
  It is true that we have problems with health care, due to the “economic status” of many people. Those in the “middle income” class
  are required to pay for health insurance (though it is regulated by Obamacare) but the service we receive is not really up to the expense, at least for many of us. Meanwhile the entire medical field continues to rake in profits, especially drug companies, but also doctors and hospitals.
  This reflects our (all of humanity’s) historic prejudice and discrimination. We favor the rich and/or famous/well-heeled which has a snowball effect, favoring and enriching the already favored and enriched. It is a pity that the opportunity to make things more equal through Obamacare has fallen into the same old trap of favoring the wealthy. I must say, however, that this favoring , while it may give extra service to the well-off, does not spare them the same fate all of us must suffer, sooner or later. Doctors cannot (at least yet) offer immortality. All of us have the opportunity to raise our chances of a long, healthy life through our habits. Sorry if this sounds judgmental and smug, I am not dismissing the suffering of all of us who have conditions that are badly served by “health care plans”, but drawing a little attention to the fact that we may be able to help ourselves via less expensive alternatives such as good eating habits and just a daily walk, or work in the garden. It may not cure us, but it could possibly keep the hospitals and exorbitant drugs at bay. If that fails, there is still the option of writing to our representatives to make sure our needs are at least considered and not just shelved as “solved” by Obamacare. If that fails, then we need to exercise our right to vote these representatives out of office.
  
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- Jim Armstrong October 4, 2024
  
  “I strongly suspect this factor — looked at over the entire sphere of medical practice of Adventist Health’s tenure running our coast hospital.”
  I read that first as “ruining,” closer to the fact, I think.
  And having to travel over the hill to see that doctor adds insult to injury.
  
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Chuck Dunbar October 4, 2024

Lee, all strong points made here, thank you—this is a really big deal for the coast, and as you say, an issue for all of rural America.

THE TRUTH “Health Care should not be considered a money making enterprise.”

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Harvey Reading October 4, 2024

GOVERNOR ISSUES WATER RESILIENCE UPDATE, TOUTING ‘PROGRESS’ ON DELTA TUNNEL AND SITES RESERVOIR

So, the peripheral canal may finally be built, underground. That’s it for the delta and its fisheries. Stupidity will have prevailed. Typical human move.

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Craig Stehr October 4, 2024

It’s a pleasant afternoon at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. , following the weekly 12:10 p.m. Mass in the Basilica’s lower Crypt Church. The daily world news is broadcast in the district, like everywhere else, and yet there is a calm abidance. Less of the emotional “let’s get riled” vibe, and more of the measured, experienced, contextualizing it all in an eternity context. The eternal witness, which is definitive of God, is more pronounced. Have a great weekend everybody. The social security disbursements are in, and the not-yet-reduced amount was received. Also, the California EBT amount was increased, and added to last month’s remaining balance. Am backing up the diet of fried chicken at the homeless shelter with trips to the impressive Whole Foods salad bar on H Street. Not identified with the body. Not identified with the mind. Immortal Self I am!
Craig Louis Stehr, Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter, 2210 Adams Place NE #1, Washington, D.C. 20018 Telephone: (202) 832-8317 Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com 4.X.’24

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- Sarah Kennedy Owen October 4, 2024
  
  Yay salad!! Love it! Glad you are doing well in D.C.
  
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Chuck Dunbar October 4, 2024

COUNTY AGENDA NOTES: YOUR TAX-FUNDED SUPERVISORS AT WORK

Gratitude, AVA— Mark and Bruce— for again taking the County to the woodshed regarding its overuse of lavishly paid outside attorneys, with little transparency and little thought as large amounts of public funds go down the litigation drain. If we knew the truth of some of the issues involved, especially of cruel and stupid managerial decisions and poor treatment of staff resulting in numerous lawsuits, we’d all gag at the scandal of it. The Cubbison case is the most obvious one, but others less-known are out there, past and present.

A nice touch—the accompanying photos of these private law firms’ hardworking staff. $400 per hour makes for happy times for the few! Keep on the County over this issue, no else around here has the guts or courage to do it.

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- Jacob October 4, 2024
  
  Couldn’t agree more.
  
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  - Mark Donegan October 4, 2024
    
    Ditto. I’d say more but it’s not yet the time. There is improper procedure that will be passed with this consent calendar. I’m waiting to see if anyone else notices before it gets rubber stamped.
    
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Sarah Kennedy Owen October 4, 2024

The photo of the ladies getting their sugar fix at Porter Scott gives an idea of the probably wholly unconscious way we divide the “haves” and “have nots”, the servers and the served. In the photo, the servers both wear masks and latex gloves, while the “recruits” need not wear any protection. Granted, they will be eating soon, but it is a safe bet they did not wear them at all. Also, one of the “served” has some money out, so it looks like the well-heeled law firm won’t even give away a cookie or slice of cake to potential employees. Typical attorneys.

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Zanzibar to Andalusia October 4, 2024

I was planning to retire this nym and leave everyone alone, but wanted to say thank you to Monica Huettl for her shout-out, and also to deny being Zack Anderson. Our esteemed editor could probably confirm. I certainly wouldn’t want to sully anyone’s reputation. I’m a complete nobody here in the Valley, unworthy of note.

The article I posted about Obama and the CIA was 100% factual. It veered into speculation on the topic of Obama’s father, but that part was presented as speculation.

The response from a “fact-checking” site was weak. The site used is:

run by one person
does not cite any facts in the article
does not debunk any facts in the article
attributes statements to magazine without citation
touts 100% non-factual things like ‘the US and NATO had nothing to do with Maidan’ (Victoria Nuland and her $5billion apparently never existed)

The editor’s response – that it’s normal for Neoliberals to be Neoliberals – sidesteps the issue. Kamala Harris is also a Globalist Neoliberal, but there’s no evidence that her parents and grandparents worked for the CIA. There’s no evidence that she worked for a CIA front company and then denied it. But Obama’s parents and grandparents were CIA-adjacent, and he did work for a CIA front. That’s a qualitative difference between Obama and Harris – both Globalist Neoliberals, but only one factually linked to the CIA before becoming POTUS/VPOTUS.

I took some time to have a look at Monica’s Medium.. the article on the Spanish princess and the Philippine oligarch was a good read. I love a good first-person ‘brush with history’ story…
https://medium.com/@monicahuettl/the-first-time-i-encountered-a-cia-operation-35846cef389f

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- Bruce Anderson October 5, 2024
  
  “CIA adjacent.” Applies to millions and proves nothing.
  
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James Tippett October 4, 2024

Re: the new Skunk Train Lawsuit-
Mendocino Railway’s latest lawsuit against the City of Fort Bragg is a replay of a 2013 lawsuit filed by Georgia Pacific against the City of Fort Bragg. Mendocino Railway’s goal now, like Georgia Pacific’s back then, is to offload financial responsibility for the toxic cleanup of the Fort Bragg mill site onto the City of Fort Bragg. Both lawsuits allege that dioxins and furans found on the mill site originated from the City of Fort Bragg, not the sawmill. Georgia Pacific, however, dropped their lawsuit entirely in 2014, rather than release documents the city had filed for under discovery. (See https://savenoyoheadlands.com/#snr-v-fb)

We do know that from 1971 to 2002 Georgia Pacific distributed fly ash containing dioxins and furans from the sawmill’s co-generation burner as soil amendments, fertilizer for lawns and gardens, given to employees and property owners, including school districts. Long term Fort Bragg residents still talk about hosing fly ash off their cars every morning. Any dioxins and furans found in current city runoff are most likely residual from that long term pollution by Georgia Pacific. (See https://savenoyoheadlands.com/#off-site-contamination)

Likely driving this new legal foray by Mendocino Railway is the Department of Toxic Substances Control’s unhappiness with their plan to permanently fence off the mill pond where the toxins are found and the runoff flows through, instead of cleaning it up. Mendocino Railway has lost every other lawsuit brought so far. My hope is that the city counter-sues and forces release of those documents Georgia Pacific kept hidden. (See https://savenoyoheadlands.com/#oue-eir)

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- Jacob October 5, 2024
  
  The Skunk Train likely won’t have access to the GP records so the City would need to get them from GP. Also, although superficially similar to the earlier litigation, this case is distinct in that it only deals with alleged contamination that has occurred since the settlement date. DTSC hasn’t expressed any formal opinion regarding the Skunk’s plans regarding the dam and mill pond so far as I know so your speculation regarding that aspect is not accurate. I agree that the dioxins originated from the mill operations and power plant on the mill site but that doesn’t make the Skunk Train legally responsible for the spread of the toxins around town and then the subsequent contamination distributed throughout the storm drain system and onto their property and into the ocean. The City has liability related to how their storm drain system operates and if it contributes to contamination as a result. If the City loses the current case, I imagine they could sue GP for indemnity as the ultimate origin of the toxic substances but maybe not and they wouldn’t have any cause of action against the Skunk Train to countersue since the Skunk didn’t create the pollution or distribute it around town. As the current owners of the mill site property, the Skunk has liability for cleanup of toxins on their property that originated and stayed on the property but they don’t carry the liability from all the operations of the prior mill or for off-site contamination. A lot of the contaminated fly ash was purposefully distributed to non-mill site property and was done with the property owners’ permission so this is not a straight forward issue as Jade suggests.
  
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James Tippett October 4, 2024

RE: Chris Hart’s diatribe on Lindy Peters-

After the train guys secured ownership of the mill site, instead of coming to the people of Fort Bragg in an open process, asking how can we work together to develop the site for the best interest and future of the community, they carpet bombed the community with their Little Stinker PR salvo, a Knott’s Berry Farm Choo-Choo Land hookah dream that totally failed to account for the land use covenants attached to the property. When the city and the people recoiled at this, they doubled down with a second proposal to pave the whole mill site with loops of train track like an amusement park, to maximize their claimed immunity from local and state law due to federal preemption. That’s when the city put the brakes on. Later, the Coastal Commission joined in.

The Brown Act places stringent limits on what may be heard in closed session (Government Code Sections 54956-57). One of those topics is litigation or pending litigation. The train guys could have asked that the negotiations be held in open session if they wanted, but given Chris’s kvetching about Lindy’s slip, clearly they don’t. My take is that keeping any real discussions behind closed doors is part of their strategy to split off the city administration and City Council from the people, keeping the people ill informed and easily propagandized by missives like Chris Hart’s above.

The real issue here is power, whether a couple of wealthy outsiders get to colonize a community economically, expecting to be welcomed as saviors, as colonizers often do, ignoring the autonomy and agency of the community following the devastation of the mill closure. Or whether the Fort Bragg community should have a real say from the beginning about what happens to the most valuable third of the city’s land area.
The train guys are still operating under the assumptions of neoliberalism and shareholder value capitalism, both of which say that the owner of property should have absolute license to dispose of the property as they will. Concerns of the common good, rights of nature or other stakeholders, the people of Fort Bragg that will be impacted, are irrelevant to the quest for maximum return on investment. In case they haven’t gotten the memo, neoliberalism is over. Stakeholders and the common good are coming back into favor.

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- Chris Hart October 5, 2024
  
  After we bought the north millsite in 2019, we participated in the City-led LCP process. This was an open process with 20+ public meetings on a variety of details. This process was abruptly halted in January 2021 when the City – with one day notice – canceled it. They directed us to finish up the work on our own and come back with a master plan for them to review. Shortly thereafter the City’s Mill Site Ad Hoc Committee presented us with their north millsite. map. While not exactly what we wanted, we supported it. There was a lot more work to be done to have a complete plan, but we participated in an open process for 3 years, accepted their map, and were working on their request for a master plan. We were similarly prepared to engage in an open process for the south millsite.
  
  You may think of the plans as a “hookah dream”, but those were the plans developed between 2019-21. I don’t recall you participating in a single one of those community meetings, but perhaps you were elsewhere with your hookah. You may not like the plans, but it is idiotic for you complain about a lack of openness and ignore the community process that created those plans.
  
  If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been openly talking for 3 years about this stuff. There is nothing preventing a City representative to talk. Once again, you make up theories and are wrong.
  
  You think the City can’t talk because of the Brown Act? Nah, the City could say plenty but they don’t want to. They have told the community to “hold my beer” as they went charging off one reckless act after another. They didn’t explain how they expected to master develop 210 acres despite having no experience or money. They didn’t offer details on their May 4, 2021 decision to betray our company. They don’t want to talk about their million dollar lawsuit against one of their biggest companies while asking the community to support a tax increase. If they were talking you could ask them what does a legal victory looks like. If they’re truthful, they’d admit a victory for the City means millions more in legal bills, 20 more years of zero progress on the millsite, and perhaps the closure of the North Coast’s largest attraction.
  
  Finally, I see that you barely talked about the contents of my post and instead went on a lengthy attack. You brushed aside Lindy’s comments as a “slip”. Really? The guy said literally said on tv that I can’t say this but I’m going to anyways. You’ve endorsed a person who states he is the most experienced guy around and yet he makes a series of significant false statements. Your off-topic attacks on my company are an obvious attempt to divert attention away from your candidate’s actions.
  
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Mendocino County Today: Friday 10/4/2024

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