MENDO’S FIRST NEWBORN OF 2025
New year, newborn: Welcome the first baby of 2025 in Mendocino County.
Join us in welcoming Baby Duwehni, who made his grand entrance a little after the ball dropped on January 1, at exactly 1:34 am at our Family Birth Center. Coming in at 7 pounds, 8 ounces and 19 inches tall, Baby Duwehni’s proud parents, mom Xelin Fred-Mota and dad Chunn Carrillo are overjoyed to welcome their third bundle of joy during such a special time.
BOB YOUNG (Coast Chat Line): Howdy neighbors, I was told that Down Home Foods needs egg cartons. Don’t throw them in the recycling, take them to Down Home Foods, and check out the amazing produce while you are there.
A FEW YEARS AGO, before they severely restricted their on line comments, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, in an ill-considered effort to get their readers to pat them on their head, ran an on-line forum section entitled: “The Santa Rosa Press Democrat is a very poor newspaper.” Talk about asking for it. Anonymous posters gleefully piled on. “Every time I sit down to read it I can’t help but think what a crappy newspaper it is. Literally no good content at all. Journalism? Forget it! From top to bottom, first page to last this newspaper blows. How can they stay in business? Can someone provide a link to even one story in the last month that would qualify as actual journalism? I’m not counting Lowell Cohn.” Anonymous Comment 2: “What was your first clue? It’s been crappy for years, and since it is owned [it was at the time] by the NY Times which is tanking due to unethical ‘journalistic’ practices (lies and slander) the PD can only print what the NY Times says is ok to feed you. That means regurgitated/censored and pablum style articles that will only slant toward one political agenda. YOU decide which one.” Anonymous Comment 3: “That was GOOD!” Anonymous Comment 4: “I canceled my subscription when they hired an out of town contractor to build their (now empty) palace in Rohnert Park. They actually paid some poor person to call me & ask why!” Anonymous Comment 5: “If that was you… sorry! lol.” Anonymous Comment 6: “I know I’m supporting them just by logging on here but I like to see what the community is up to– and I NEVER click on the ads.” Anonymous Comment 7: “Still no check! But I have ‘HOPE’!!! and ‘Change’!!! LOTS of change.” Anonymous Comment 8: “I don’t see how we can be ‘supporting’ the PD by logging on to the website. Unless you click on the ads (which you nor I never do), then they make NOTHING off us.” Anonymous Comment 9: “They do a pretty good job reporting on any awards they win.” Anonymous Comment 10: “You geniuses are waiting for the day when there are NO newspapers and you can feed your brain with blogs. I suggest you take your meds and suggest an alternative, and then PAY for it.” Anonymous Comment 11: “One thing to keep in mind is: yes, it’s a lousy newspaper, but it never was a good newspaper.” Anonymous Comment 12: “Why should we want newspapers that don’t inform? If your idea of a quality news source is Pravda, then the PD is for you.” Anonymous Comment 14: “For your edification, I do not visit, read, nor write on blogs. Perhaps YOU do, I DON’T. Your PD is STILL a RAG.” Anonymous Comment 15: “Then why are you all here if you think it sucks so much?” Anonymous Comment 16: “For laughs.” Anonymous Comment 17: “Hey, wait, I need the PD! Bottom of the bird cage. Wrapper for dead fish. Kitchen floor for the puppy to pee on.” Anonymous Comment 18: “Here is a partial list of its symptoms: Owned by the NY Times, Biased, Irrelevant, Staffed by 20 year old kids who can’t write, No investigations or research, No content on Monday! Ads are too expensive. Oh my. Why aren’t they out of business? It’s a matter to time. All newspapers are going down the tubes – see the above list. I used to enjoy the morning paper (many, many years ago). It kept me informed and in the loop. I rarely missed a day. But now I usually don’t bother. Oh, I buy a copy every now and then just to see how fast the industry is dying. Sad, really. There was an entire sub-culture built around the newspaper, from the delivery boy down the street to popular writers like Herb Caen. People would ask, ‘Did you see that in the paper today?’ just to start a conversation with their friends. All gone. What will take the place of the daily newspaper? Nothing. The culture will be gone soon, along with the drive-in movie, and within a generation no one will remember what a byline or a soda jerk was.”
(Mark Scaramella)
MAZIE MALONE
I went on Propublica to see if they had updated their nonprofit portal that shows you the income/assets/ expenses… Thought I would share with you.
Redwood Community Services Executive Salaries
- Victoria Kelley*, CEO, $150k/yr
- Brittany Lucas, CFO, $113k/yr
- Tawny Bailey, COO, $121k/yr
- Denise Addison, Program Supervisor, $185k/yr
- Heather Eccarius, Mental Health Rehab Specialist, $147k/yr
- Sarah Llvingston, Crisis Program Director, $146k/yr
- Paulita Peredia, Program Supervisor, $121k/yr
- Jolene Treadaway, Clinical Program Director, $120k/yr
*Victoria Kelley is Camille Schraeder’s daughter.
(Salaries do not include benefits.)
A READER WRITES (regarding Redwood Community Services’ well-paid executive staff as disclosed on their IRS non-profit Form 990):
Quite a matriarchy the old girl has going there, and I don't see her and hubby's take listed. And since it's a private corporation we'll never know the quality of services rendered. Camille [Schraeder] and her husband, I believe, are categorized as part of "Anchor Management," so they would not be listed on RCS's pay roster. Anchor Management is NOT a "non-profit." They're some kind of umbrella corp. Nobody said Camille was stupid. Anchor Management used to be Redwood Quality Management. But they were removed from the picture when the County switched "oversight" from Anchor to Jenine's own county admin department last year. Maybe Camille was ready to retire and turn the RCS op over to her daughter Victoria Kelley and her friends. There wasn't much of announcement about it, but Anchor/Camille never complained as far as I know.
JOHN SAKOWICZ:
“The executive salaries at Redwood Community Services are appalling, to say nothing of the nepotism. Mendocino County gets no value for this money. Homeless 5150s run rampant in the County and the MCSO first responders continue to do all the work. Treatment? Treatment did you say? The focus at Redwood Community Services is treatment? What a joke!”
IF ANYBODY IS IN TOUCH WITH MARY LEE DAVIS…
Re: https://theava.com/archives/143379
Wow, I used to be her neighbor, at 639 North Spring St., I first bought that house in 1985, met her and Eugene that summer of 1985 and we were close friends until I left Ukiah in 1999 for a job in Fort Worth, Texas
Also, one of the facts about myself is that I am her blind neighbor, she attended my masters degree graduation in 1994, and she was a huge support system when I was struck down by a car in that same town.
I used to go every single evening to enjoy a wonderful martini with her and Eugene. Every day at 4 PM, martinis and popcorn. Occasionally, I would be invited to join them for the evening meal.
And often, when I was home, I would join them for cappuccinos at 10 AM, we would all sit out on their back patio and just enjoy the weather. I remember all of the beautiful jasmine flowers.
I have not been able to make contact with her recently while she’s in Rohnert Park, I don’t know whatever happened to her phone number, but I would call about once a month, and often, every year I would call on her birthday. I would also call close to Christmas, this year, I have not been able to make contact. If anybody is reading this, would you please let her know that her friend, out here in Kansas City, Missouri, would love to call her again.
One more thing I do remember well about her and Eugene is that they love my daffodils. Those flowers would pop up every single spring and would stay there for several weeks. They love my little garden. I have such fond memories of that house and of these people.
THE MENDOCINO COUNTY MUSEUM, Willits, deserves to be better known. Given its limited funding, the Museum not only offers both a terrific display of County artifacts, it boasts a growing archive of disparate collections of County records and donated private papers; among the latter those of former supervisor Norman deVall and the late Judi Bari, to name persons whose names might be generally recognized.
FORMER volunteer archivists Russell and Sylvia Bartley have all this stuff coherently stored in user-friendly format to the rear of the public displays where they can be viewed by appointment. (The true Bari archive resides at www.theava.com. If the old girl had told the truth about anything related to her adventures in Mendocino County, her ex-husband would be living out his days in federal prison rather than comfortable self-exile in New Zealand.)
THE MUSEUM'S DISPLAYS are a fascinatingly eclectic collection ranging from Indian artifacts to an archetypal lunch counter familiar to all of us over the age of 60, and even include the late Andree Connors’ hippie van along with a page from her diary which begins, “I first came to the Mendocino Coast in 1977 because I was a moth and Mendocino was a lamp.”
ILLUMINATION is where you find it in Mendoland, but for County history the Held-Poage Library in Ukiah and the County Museum in Willits are two crucial venues without which Mendocino County’s collective memory would be much hazier than it is and, as readers of this fine publication are already aware, we’ve teetered on the brink of local mass amnesia for at least a decade.
I RECALL a happy visit with my friend Don Morris when we especially enjoyed film footage provided by the Northwestern Pacific Railroad of the Eel River flood of 1964 when the rampaging Eel devastated great swathes of rail line and destroyed whole communities in Humboldt County.
I FOUND as much to hold my interest at the County Museum in Willits as I’ve found in any of the Frisco museums. Ditto for Held-Poage in Ukiah. As hard times get harder it will be a struggle to fund the County Museum, but if it’s allowed to crumble Mendocino County’s history will be that much more opaque.
JEFF BLANKFORT
The Democrats are responsible for Trump being elected president in 2016 and again last November, thanks to their devotion to Israel? How so?
Well there is and was a video on YouTube of Sheldon Adelson, the uber Zionist who selected Trump to be the Republican candidate after two candidate auditions at his Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, had previously been filmed and recorded on the say he launched Israel Hayom, his "free paper" (to help Netanyahu) in Israel, apologizing for having served in the US Army and not the IDF but was glad his wife had been in the IDF and hoped that his son would grow up to be a sniper for Israel.
Can one imagine what such a statement the words of this traitor would have had on US veterans and current members of the US military to see and hear the main promoter of Trump utter these words? But it didn't happen because the Democrat National Committee had already sold their souls to Israel, as well, and so paved the way for two Trump presidencies.
Thanks to Alison Weir of "If Americans Knew" for keeping this video available on You Tube!
YOU CAN IGNORE the following of course, but I can't resist and I own the site so I can be as tiresomely preachy as I like even if I'm only talking to myself.
THE BASIC political argument in this country for many years, all the way back to FDR, and before that all the way back to the Founding Fathers, was the fundamental beef between the wealthy who don't want to give up a dime and the wealthy who understand that unless there's a basic social floor the country will get crazy and violent, which it already has, and then violently crazy until the entire privileged edifice comes down.
DUDE, it's happened before.
JEFFERSON thought there ought to be a revolution every few years just to keep power from becoming too entrenched. We're way overdue but something seems to be brewing. Luigi Mangione may have fired the first shot in the correct general direction.
BUT THE PREVALENT MEDIA, and the dominant media at Fox that specifically got Trump elected, assumes the choice is between a little fine tuning — the Democrats — and bigger breaks for the rich with a persecution of the defenseless as a sadistic sideshow — Trump and his Magas. THE blow-dried fools at Fox and their look-alike blondes are only slightly more corrupt than the blow-dried fools and their blondes at ABC etc, both insisting that Medicare for everyone, for instance, is socialism — Fox; or that it's merely one of Bernie's undoable notions — Democrats. MEDICARE for everyone would save everyone money, a lot of money, and why should old people like me be its only beneficiaries while everyone else who needs medical care has to go to a Go Fund Me page? Or dies because they can't get care? (Short answer: geezers vote, ten year olds with leukemia can't)
THE BASIC CHOICE IS THIS: You want a social floor or do you want Big Trouble such as we haven't seen since the 1930s, only this time the Big Trouble will be a lot bigger? There were a lot fewer of us in 1930 and a lot of us still lived on the farm. We didn't have automatic weapons and nearly as many bad attitudes either. And everyone assumed things would get better. Who assumes that now?
TO PROVIDE a social floor means people with money will have to pay higher taxes, much higher, like they used to with Roosevelt and pay now in the stable countries of the world where citizens assume fundamental social obligations, among them universal health care, free education, in-home care for the elderly and the rest of it.
BUT HERE in Liberty Land we have the propagandists for billionaires electing a lunatic blowhard who will make the rich richer while most of the people the blowhard claims to represent are certain to get poorer and poorer.
WHY WERE OBAMA and Hillary, conservative liberals on their best days, and even the pathetic Biden (and his giggling handmaiden), constantly denounced as “socialists”? To make millions of people vote against themselves, that's why, to convince everyday people they don't need the basic civilized guarantees. Not that Hillary, Obama, Biden and Giggles were for any of it.
ASSUMING I'm vertical a year from now, I'll check back with you to see if the above turned out to be more or less true.
LINGERING one afternoon in Ukiah, drinking in the inspiring vistas of State Street in great, greedy gulps, I learned that Mike Sweeney, of all people, had been named the Ukiah Rotary Club’s “Environmentalist of the Year.”
SWEENEY did indeed try to recycle his ex-wife, the late Judi Bari, via a pipe bomb placed in her vehicle, but Ukiah Rotary was hardly the first people fooled by the crafty little psychopath, and hardly likely to be aware of Sweeney's membership in a terrorist organization that murdered people and placed bombs all over the Bay Area in the late 1960s.
BUT ROTARY'S special recognition for Sweeney was, however, one more example of Mendocino County's unique mass amnesia, where history starts all over again every day, and you are whatever you say you are, no questions asked. (Mystified by the occasional reference to Mendocino County's former chief garbage bureaucrat as a car bomber? Check the extensive coverage at the AVA's website (including Steve Talbot’s still relevant documentary and revealing follow-ups): https://theava.com/archives/1235
IT'S AMAZING that anything substantial ever gets done in Mendocino County. Simply to apply to change the zoning on your property costs thousands of dollars. (We can’t keep up with Mendo’s ever-increasing fees, so we don’t know the current cost, sorry.)
There’s no guarantee that the rezone will be approved either. Not that rezones are without peril, but thousands of dollars up front for even non-controversial ones, is quite an obstacle.
Before you can even apply for a zoning change you've got to apply for a “land use designation change.”
Changing a Rural Residential land use designation to Rural Residential-5 (with five specific residential parcels) is a real zoning change which typically costs several additional thousands.
After your land use designation is changed, and your specific zoning is changed, you then have to get a development permit. Then you need a use permit, perhaps major, perhaps minor. Then a building permit. Then a final sign off after construction.
At any step along the way you can be denied based on objections only God, senior members of the Planning Department, the Planning Commission and the Supervisors may raise. Or requirements can be imposed that cost whatever additional amounts. So, after spending considerable funds getting to what you may think is final approval you can still find yourself getting a slam dunk NO from Mendocino County, land that you love.
Oh, and did we mention possible lawsuits from neighbors?
Assuming you've got your project past the County of Mendocino, there may also be easements to consider and, perhaps, Fish and Game permissions and Caltrans or County encroachment permits and traffic studies, a complete set of engineering and geological reports, along with CalFire road approvals, and maybe even an archeological clearance certifying that there are no ancient Indian burial grounds to be disturbed — Mendocino County being much more solicitous of dead Indians than it ever was to live ones.
Unless, of course, you’re applying for a tasting room on your ag land.
Tasting room? No problemo. Go right ahead. Whatever. Fine with Mendo. Come right in. Bon appetite!
Tasting rooms are agriculture, like produce stands, you see, so as long as you’re selling wine that’s at least 50% made from grapes grown on your vineyard (according to you), no steenking rezoning or permit requirements apply.
Tasting rooms do not require use permits, not even minor use permits, thanks to the Board of Supervisors who, even though they say they must have “cost recovery” from other county services to beat back budget deficits, the Supervisors explicitly refused to require minor use permits for roadside wine bars as part of the General Plan Update process a few years ago because, gosh, if they did that then nobody’d build tasting rooms anymore!
Which is what the Tasting Room Lobby told the Planning Commission back in 2008 when Anderson Valley’s own small group of well-meaning volunteer planners tried to get the County to at least require minor use permits for tasting rooms, much as use permits are required for, say, childcare facilities, barbershops, restaurants, curio shops and plain old booze bars stuffed with, ah, less, er, ah, companionable hooch quaffers than are presumably found in the permitless roadside booze boutiques.
We vividly recall that day when the Planning Commission held a special meeting at the Boonville Fairgrounds as they prepared to rubberstamp the multi-million dollar, consultant-prepared General Plan Update. After the local planners made their modest suggestion that tasting rooms be required to obtain minor use permits like everybody else, a local wine guy in a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt came to the podium, presuming to represent his fellow winemakers, to ask, “Why do you hate us so much?” (Mark Scaramella)
ON AN OTHERWISE unamusing medical morning, I suddenly recalled the three funniest cartoons I've ever seen. (1) A troubled man casts his eyes heavenward, pleading, "Why me, God? Why me?" God looks down and says, "There's just something about you that pisses me off." (2) A Stone Age man is sitting in a tree as another primitive passes by below. The man in the tree shouts, “You're nobody! Got that? Nobody!” (3) A man is walking through a desert when he spots a flower some distance off his path. He detours to the flower, stomps it, returns to his path and walks on.
THAT ANONYMOUS HIPPIE who recommended back in '67 that we “let it all hang out” may have lived to regret the advice. In an encounter that would have won a consensus “odd” prior to that pivotal year, a woman sat down next to me the other day at the dying Northgate Mall as I was enjoying the passing parade, as usual noting that the culture has long since passed me by, and nearly to the point of unrecognizability
MY SIMPLETON'S MUG seems to inspire the confidences of strangers, strangers ranging on the Loon Scale from mildly unhinged to pop-eyed bonkers. I pegged this lady of middle years at the mild end of the mental illness charts, although she was too old to be dressed as a teenager.
“Hi,” she began as she seated herself. “Mind if I sit down here?” Without so much as an introductory sentence she proceeded to tell me that her daughter was 23 and had “never been kissed,” but was now engaged to “a Catholic who goes to Mass every day and belongs to that secret society Magna Carta or whatever it's called.”
I MUTTERED an avuncular assurance that her daughter could do worse.
“NOW she's going to Mass every day and they're engaged. Next thing I know my little girl will be a baby factory! Why haven't they invented a birth control pill the Catholics approve of?”
I SAID I didn't know, but that I had every confidence in medical science, Catholic and non-denominational. “He's a rich Catholic, though,” she said ignoring my assurance as she mimed a couple of vigorous overhead pulling motions accompanied by overly loud, “ka-ching, ka-chings."
BECAUSE a Chinese family happened to be walking past I thought for a panicked moment my new friend was delivering an ethnic slur until I realized she was mimicking the ka-ching, ka-ching sounds of a cash register. “At least they'll have the money for a lot of kids,” she said, smiling, perhaps at the thought of her daughter in a velvet nursery.
“SORRY, gotta go. Here comes my husband.”
BRUNO, a reel short movie review. I thought Sasha Cohen's first movie, ‘Borat,’ was funny. I think there's lots of funny stuff in ‘Bruno,’ but the funny is too often dragged down by the unfunny, the excruciatingly unfunny, the painfully unfunny. ‘Bruno’ the movie consists of a series of encounters between Cohen's flamboyantly gay character, Bruno, and guileless patsies, can't miss targets who include a couple of fundamentalist preachers, an astrologer, the audience at an Arkansas cage fight, a uniquely unattractive group of wife swappers, the singer Paula Abdul and, of all people, Ron Paul, the last reacting with zero grace to Cohen's see-through gay schtick.
MOST READERS of this newspaper know that many of our fellow citizens are almost primordially primitive. We don't need to go to a cage fight or an astrologer for confirmation. Put two faux gay men making out in the center of the ring at a cage fight and what do you suppose the cage fight audience's reaction will be? (One guy is so dismayed he looks like he's going to cry, the rest of the spectators start throwing chairs and death threats.)
THE MOVIE'S IDEA, I guess, is to parody homophobia, but ‘Bruno’ is so crude, its targets so defenseless, it never rises to parody. I saw it with my daughter in the middle of the day at a city theater. Of the dozen people in the audience the women laughed the hardest; I have no idea what that means, or if that gender trend would hold up with a larger sampling.
MY DAUGHTER LAMENTED, “If I'd known it was going to be this gross I wouldn't have brought my father.” But if I'd known it was going to be so offensive, so extremely incorrect, so bracingly in yer face, I'd have brought KZYX.
WHY are the public areas of Ukiah so ugly? Come, take my hand as we journey back through time when Ukiah, and thousands of attractive little American towns like it were still coherent, with their pre-WalMart tree lined streets, thriving small business city centers, town squares, and local ruling classes who took pride in what their communities looked like, when the the community big boys understood that it was important to community morale that the places where we lived and worked should be pleasing to the eye.
HERE'S what happened: Following World War Two, the outback pillars of the community began to crumble. Well, not crumble exactly, but withdraw into their bank accounts. The thousands of outback Babbitts no longer cared. Er, check that: Lewis's Babbitt did care. But Mendo's, mostly didn't.
BABBITT had his limitations, but he was committed to the prosperity and appearance of Zenith. He wanted Zenith to look good and be a good place to do free enterprise.
TODAY'S Babbitts take the money and run. Ukiah's civic spirit is confined to its west side. No expense has been spared on the town's admin center where Ukiah's chief admin man, Seldom Seen Sage Sangiacomo, the most lushly compensated, least effective town administrator in County history makes his lair.
THERE'S LOTS OF MONEY in Ukiah, and Mendocino County, overall, is rolling in dough at the same time as ten thousand or so families depend on food banks and food stamps to get by.
UKIAH became the hellish, grease-scented sprawl it has become because the moneybags withdrew into weird little gated communities and their equivalents, hunkered down with their autographed glossies of Nixon, Reagan and Orange Man, checking their burglar alarms every few hours, the cops on speed dial.
THE ONLY AREAS of town that remain attractive are the areas that pre-date World War Two. Everything afterwards is what it is, as the young people say, abominations large and small, the whole show ceded to the love generation who brought in the big box store and generally finished off Mendo's county seat every which way.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] I think an early favorite quote of the year I’ve read is: “Darwin loves medical advice on the internet.” I’m sure in 365 days that will have not changed.
[2] Regular people - even those pushed to the brink - don't tend to commit these kinds of New Orleans acts. Sure, they might murder someone in a fit of pique when drunk, etc. But even that's rare if you look at the stats. No, it takes a particularly screwed up mind in order to commit one of these attacks, and I can almost guarantee it that they have some connection to mind control of some sort.
That the attacks have also risen in sync with the internet also gives us a clue. Really easy to program people electronically rather than in person.
[3] Had some skittles a few years ago. Very sugary. Not horrible. Nice to try once again after decades. Never been a Cheeto eater but like those Jalapeño Cheddar puffs and Buffalo Ranch cauliflower puffs as a mature adult. Is Newsom a food grinch? Sure seems like it. I bet he munches down on Mint It’s Its and Doritos all the time. Should a child never get to sample Cheetos or skittles or Big Hunks? WTF? What’s next, banning SPAM?
[4] What is there that is convincing these shooters to act. Did ISIS turn on a switch in Houston? A couple of questions.
What would cause a Muslim convert to go on a suicide mission to kill as many people as he could? What was in his life to crack his “normal ness” and make him a killer? I would definitely wonder about his dialogues prior to the election and who he voted for, if he did. Same with the Las Vegas guy, a definite suicide. This guy seems to be an idiot, getting a bunch of weird incendiaries together to make a half assed explosion. It is not lost on me that he used a cybertruck full of New Years fireworks to damage the Trump Tower. An active hard core military type? If you are going to go out, go out with a flash bang.
[5] I don't see the need to hop on any Presidential train. I am going to wait in the station until I see what TRUMP does about Gaza, the Ukraine the pardons, etc - I think too many who hopped off the Biden train, just hopped immediately onto TRUMPS - and i am old enough to having believed too many campaign promises that were never mentioned again once the candidate was in office . Trump may indeed dismantle the "system" but I rather believe Glenn Greenwald's position that there is little difference between the Dems and Repubs - I am waiting with a hopeful heart.
[6] “Americans, you deserve exactly what is about to come down on your heads.”
No, I don't. I have strived to live a simple life. I stay out of debt. I drive old cars until they finally die. I live well within my means. I don't harm others and let others live their lives in peace. I love my wife and my children and I have always supported them only from the labors of my own hands. Other than imbibing a hard drink once in a while and cursing from time to time I live a pretty good, moral and decent life. I believe in God and try to govern my actions according to those beliefs.
I'm also a pure blood, no covid vax for me.
I don't deserve what is coming. I didn't create the system. I didn't ask to be born in this system. Neither did my parents. Many Americans do deserve what is coming because of the decadent, false and debt burdened lifestyles they live. But I don't.
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