FORT BRAGG'S big bag of last week's AVA's was lost and remains lost somewhere in the mail, probably at the mammoth distribution center in Petaluma. Call, write or e-mail us for replacement copies.
DARRYL CHERNEY, the cash and carry environmentalist based in Garberville, is being sued by his sister. Sis says Darryl was supported for years by their well-to-do parents and has now managed to cheat Sis out of her fair share of the family inheritance.
TWO SEATS are up for election to the Russian River Flood Control District. The deceptively dubbed Flood Control District manages Mendocino’s portion of the water rights to Lake Mendocino, approximately 8,000 acre-feet, or upwards of 20% of the lake's capacity. The rest is owned by Sonoma County. Most of those 8,000 acre-feet are now sold to grape growers to irrigate and frost-protect grapes in the water-scarce Ukiah Valley, even though water law says that the water is supposed to first go to domestic uses. The two incumbents running for re-election are Richard Shoemaker, whose “Smart Growth Coalition” has never said word-one about inland Mendocino County's exponential development of water-intensive vineyards, and grape grower/rentier Judy Hatch. Challenging the grape-friendly incumbents are the wine industry's Alfred White, of Husch Vineyards, who's on record as complaining that grape growers have to submit too much paperwork to get virtually unlimited access to cheap water, and Paul Zellman, of Brutacao Cellars, who thinks the Flood Control District should “continue to be a leader” in delivering water to grapes. (White cites his experience as a Boonville school trustee as relevant to water affairs, but if White does for Ukiah water what he did for the Boonville schools, Ukiah people better start investing in camels.)
MS. HATCH says her priority is grabbing more water for grapes, but she wants help getting the water to booze-fruit. “We all should be working together,” she says. Incumbent Shoemaker claims to have “turned around the agency,” but neglects to say from what to what. Shoemaker also claims credit for hiring the District’s general manager Sean White and says the District is now “well poised to oversee a recycled water project in the Ukiah area” — a meaningless assurance calculated to satisfy delusional inland liberals of the Shoemaker type that they and their leaders are on the cutting edge of advanced environmental policy. Like the grape growers, Shoemaker also wants to see that the District “continues to be a leader in the community and the region,” which translates as water for grapes, since that’s pretty much all the district does — or tries to do even in drought years.
SUPERVISOR David Colfax represents Mendocino County on the North Coast Railroad Authority Board. Last week Colfax told his fellow Supervisors that he had good news and bad news about the railroad. The good news is the track between Napa and Windsor is nearly operational; just a few more minor repairs and it’ll be ready for a train, not that there's a huge demand, or any demand at all, for train transport between Napa and Windsor. The bad news, Colfax said, was that the NCRA is broke. Nevertheless, Colfax insisted, “The NCRA is moving along. All we need now is money.” Which would be millions more on top of the millions already spent on the local Democratic Party's ongoing boondoggle. Colfax's good news, bad news approach to trains reminds us of the airline pilot who told passengers he had good news and bad news. “The good news is we’re making record time. The bad news is we’ll be landing in Pyongyang in about 20 minutes.”
TWO MONTHS ago the Board of Supervisors blithely went along with a plan to borrow $3 million dollars from the bond market to make up for the $3 million the state grabbed to make its budget look balanced. A skeptical supervisor John Pinches now wonders, “We were told two months ago that the $3 million was no problem. Now there’s scrutinization? I don't get it.” Colfax thought that the idea of going for the big bond with bigger counties was unwise: “This is getting in bed with wheeler dealers, Wall Street types,” said Colfax. “It’s, ‘Trust me. There’s no risk. We're all covered.’ Then three years later this will come back in a different form and could bite us in the butt. What happens when it doesn't work?” asked Colfax. “The money may not and probably will not be forthcoming.” Pinches thought the County should consider borrowing the $3 million from its own $142 million investment pool (which is drawing practically nothing in interest these days). But that money is not the County’s money; mostly it belongs to Schools and Special Districts and cannot be borrowed for County operational needs. Reading the fine print of the text of the bond issue prepared by staff, however, we see that “Bondholders will have no recourse to the County if the State does not make the repayment” (in three years). Nevertheless, the Board voted 3-2 to join with bond issuance, Pinches and Colfax dissenting.
IS IT JUST US, or is it looking like more and more County employees are deserting the leaky Good Ship Mendo? Last Tuesday the Board discussed filling a string of accumulated vacancies. CEO Tom Mitchell said that after reviewing the Departmental hiring requests he denied about six of them but approved 12, a few of which are part-time. All of the positions are budgeted meaning there is money to pay for them. But a review of the individual “vacancies” shows that more and more experienced people are simply resigning or retiring or taking medical leave, which frequently precedes resigning or retiring. In expressing his concerns about all the new hires, Supervisor Pinches noted, “It seems like there’s a flood of vacant positions. Pinches said it looked like the Board is using vacancies as “our budget balancing strategy.”
ONE OF THE hiring requests that CEO Mitchell denied was a library tech for the Fort Bragg Library. According to the request prepared by the County librarian the new hire was requested to replace a “layoffee.”
HONEY OIL, also called hash oil, was in the news recently when Sheriff Allman was ordered to return “hash patties” to two Redwood Valley stoners. According to Ukiah Daily Journal reporter Tiffany Revelle: “Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman has been ordered to give back 32 marijuana hash patties to two Redwood Valley defendants after criminal charges against them were dropped. Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Ronald Brown signed the order, which was filed Oct. 1, after he dismissed the case against Shelton Rain Sutherland, 29, and John Bennett Henderson, 34, in July. According to court documents, Brown ruled ‘there would not have been probable cause for a (search) warrant.’ ‘We return marijuana with court orders all the time,’ Allman said, adding that cases where hash is returned are rare. He still has the hash patties that were seized, and said he plans to follow the court order and arrange a time with the defendants to give them back.
“THE FLAT, hard patties are each less than a quarter-inch thick, about as big around as a baseball, and appear to have been made by pouring a concentrated, liquid form of marijuana into a mold. The patties each weigh about 27 grams, a little less than an ounce. Henderson and Sutherland will receive 32 patties because the legal amount for a marijuana patient to have at the time of the seizure was eight ounces, according to the order, and four doctors' recommendations were admitted as evidence in the case. Addressing whether hash is legal, Allman referred to an opinion former state Attorney General Bill Lockyer gave in October 2003 at the request of former Mendocino County Sheriff Anthony Craver. Craver asked if hash were included in the meaning of the term ‘marijuana’ as it is used in the Compassionate Use Act of 1996. Lockyer said it was. Deputies arrested Sutherland and Henderson after a compliance check on Aug. 7, 2008, that led to a search warrant at Sutherland's home in the 13000 block of Tomki Road. Authorities seized more than 100 marijuana plants, 12 pounds of dried marijuana, 160 hash patties and $20,000 in cash. Sutherland was arrested the same day on suspicion of cultivating marijuana, possession of marijuana for sale and possession of concentrated cannabis. Major Crimes Task Force Special Agent Raymond Hendry arrested her, according to the sheriff's booking log.
“HENDERSON was arrested Sept. 26, 2008, on suspicion of cultivating marijuana and possessing marijuana for sale. According to his booking information, he was arrested by Correctional Officer William Hardman. Henderson and Sutherland were charged together, and defense attorney Omar Figueroa defended them, along with renowned attorney J. Tony Serra, both from San Francisco. Figueroa argued the deputies didn't reveal evidence in the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant that Sutherland and others in her home had tried to present doctors' recommendations for the marijuana. Figueroa argued in his motion for the County to return the marijuana that it was for medical use, and produced copies of four doctors' recommendations for Sutherland, Henderson, Michael Carter and Todd Moore.
“WILLIAM KROGER, a Los Angeles defense attorney specializing in marijuana cases, said he's been able to get all of his cases involving hash dismissed using Lockyer's opinion. He argues in court that eight ounces of marijuana is equal to eight ounces of medical cannabis, and state law allows a person to have eight ounces if they have a doctor's recommendation. ‘When you manufacture hash, you're changing one form of the plant to another form of the plant,’ Kroger said. He added that most of his clients used butane as a solvent to extract the resin and oil from the stems, leaves and seeds of the plant in a concentrated, liquid form. Using butane makes the process dangerous, according to Kroger, and Allman agrees. Allman said that also makes manufacturing hash illegal, because it is a chemical drug manufacturing process, prohibited under state law. ‘You're allowed to have it, but you're not allowed to make it,’ Kroger said.”
FOR BACKGROUND we went to YouTube to see what there was about “hash oil” where in one video a clerk-ish looking middle-aged man walks viewers through detailed instructions on how to extract the potent “oil” from the shake by boiling it in isopropyl alcohol. He warns viewers of the dangers of the stuff blowing up, concluding that if you snort or sniff or inhale the pot-oil goop for three straight months “it will cure any form of cancer.”
CRITICS of the Mendocino Art Center Board and its new Executive Director, Karen Ely, are hoping that the board meeting scheduled for Thursday, November 19, 2009, at 2pm will jolt the board alert to the wild spending and abruptly indefensible changes Ms. Ely has initiated at the Center. A bullying attorney called Brandt Stickel, the Art Center board chair, has threatened to sue Ely's critics for allegedly “going too far” in their assessments of Ely's and, by extension, his board's tumultuous management of the Center.
LAST WEEK, Art Center Board Member/Treasurer Tom Becker resigned, saying that it was clear to him that the Board wasn’t listening to valid criticism, adding that he’d had “enough” of the stonewalling while the Art Center’s finances grow ever more precarious.
MS. ELY, who hails from the woo-woo capital of the world, Sedona, Arizona, is also using the Art Center’s website to advertise the dubious services and even more dubious links to her pal's enterprises in Arizona. (A Woo-Woo, incidentally, is a Wah-Hoo who wears crystals.) The craziest link Ely has placed on the Art Center’s website is one to the World Bible Society based in Nashville which has ties to the legendarily nutball group, Jews For Jesus. The World Bible Society published a book in 1988 entitled “88 Reasons Why The Rapture Will Occur in 1988.” When the great day arrived, Doug Robarchek of the Charlotte Observer wrote: “Goodbye to those readers who are catching the bus to heaven today. Have a nice trip. Don't forget to write.” According to Robarchek, the priapic Jim Bakker “Raptured early while picking up Tammy Faye's makeup bag. But doctors later determined that this was not the Rapture, but merely the Rupture.”
ROD JONES WRITES: “A Few Good Volunteers Can Stem Abalone Poaching. How about you? Abalone grow slowly, taking about 12 years to reach the minimum legal limit (7 inches) for harvesting. It can be another five years before an abalone grows another inch and after that annual growth slows more. Poachers can clean out areas in days, leaving nothing for divers who play by the rules. Join Mendocino Abalone Watch — a volunteer citizen group that patrols the coastline and reports poachers to the Department of Fish & Game. Your commitment is three hours per month with free training. Learn more and sign up!” www.mendoabwatch.com or email abalonewatch@gmail.com.
EARLY THE MORNING of October 26th, deputies Paoli and Massey were on patrol in Redwood Valley. As the deputies approached East Road and School Way, they couldn't help but see a pick-up truck with two men sitting inside it in the otherwise deserted Redwood Valley Industrial Center at 8500 East Road. The men in the pick-up truck identified themselves as Ryan Alvin Cranford, 22, of Redwood Valley, and Michael Jason Vasquez, 27, also of Redwood Valley. A search of their truck revealed more than a hundred morphine pills, $5,500 in one hundred dollar bills, and a Taurus 9mm handgun, which turned out to be stolen. Vasquez was on probation for drug possession. So, two guys, one on probation, sitting on private property in the middle of the night when the only other people not asleep in Mendocino County are the cops. And the two lurks have a felony quantity of dope, an improbable amount of cash in the even more improbably denomination of one hundred dollar bills, and a stolen gun. Boys, you need to seriously think about a career change.
THE BEST WORK on the Bari Bombing case, always referred to as a “mystery” by those profiting from it, was done by Steve Talbot of PBS. His documentary film for KQED Television on the unsolved crime remains the seminal assessment of it, the best single statement of who and what was involved. Unfortunately, few people on the Northcoast have seen the film. More unfortunately, most people’s knowledge of what turned out to be Bari's murder — she enjoyed perfect health prior to the bombing — is confined to the propaganda they’ve heard on KMUD, KPFA and, of course, KZYX, all of which rivals in pure bushwa anything Fox News might come up with. In all the furor of the Bari controversy Talbot was the one person the cover-up artists and cult-brains dared not attack, even when he said on KQED’s This Week In California that the late Bari had told him that her ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, was the agent of her destruction. Sweeney, the proverbial elephant in the room writ so large he spills out the windows, would not have gotten away with the attack on his ex without the combined services of those unlikely co-dependents, the FBI and the Pacifica Network, plus the strenuous cover-up services of now-supervisor John McCowen who, in a just world, would be considered an accessory to murder. If the feds and the pwogs hadn’t so assiduously combined to shut down an honest investigation and a real debate about what happened, Sweeney would be running a recycling program for a federal prison somewhere. (Pressure from large circulation newspapers would also have worked to clear the case; individual reporters were interested at the Press Democrat and the SF Chronicle, but these reporters were shut down by their editors, none more timid than those at the Press Democrat.) Sweeney’s career trajectory is unusual, even by the amnesiac standards of Mendocino County, where everyone is whatever he says he is and history starts all over again every day. Sweeney has gone from Maoist to trash czar; he's now pulling in a hundred tax-paid thou a year from Mendocino County in a job whose specs he got to write himself. He also re-wrote Mendocino County's marijuana laws as a means to get his buddy McCowen elected supervisor, taking advantage of the inevitable anti-pot backlash in the County prompted by the influx of outside growers. But there’s another book on the Bari case underway, and Susan Faludi has said her book on Judi Bari will also eventually appear. In the meantime, the curious are invited to visit the AVA’s website where the key arguments, none of which have ever been refuted, are located. Justice may be done in this one yet, but until it is Sweeney, as a resident of what amounts to a political Paraguay, will enjoy perfect sanctuary. Appended is a sample of Sweeney at work when he and then-supervisor Richard Shoemaker were scheming to place a trash transfer station on deep North State Street:MEMO OF THE WEEK
June 9, 1997
To: Richard Shoemaker
From: Mike Sweeney
Re: June 6 proposal from Jerry Ward to City of Fort Bragg
Ward's latest is actually a retreat from what he put out on May 27.
• He admits that he cannot provide service by September 1, and suggests that Fort Bragg go to the Ukiah landfill for the time being.
• Rather than just the Franklin Avenue site, he now suggests two other “options” — a long-haul facility at the Willits landfill, or a long-haul facility at “another industrially zoned site within the City of Willits” (unspecified).
• He says that he “believes” the previously quoted $48.84 (truck) and $51.00 tipping fees “can be supported” by each of his three options. But those prices don't include a $1 per ton “contract administration fee” to go to the City of Willits.
• He admits that he can't offer rail haul “initially,” and therefore the initial mode of transportation will be truck.
All in all, it's a very weak effort that really adds nothing to what he put before Fort Bragg on May 27.
There are numerous weaknesses that can be targeted:
• He claims to have access to the rail line (Operations Plan, p.2), without disclosing that his Franklin Avenue site has no rail frontage and he has no agreement to get rail access.
• Now he lists platform scales as equipment (Op Plan p.6), although he told the Council May 27 they weren't needed.
• He still claims that his rate will be changed only after an audit and not more than 75% of CPI or 5% max (Agreement summary, item 6), but this CONTRADICTS the Lockwood subcontract, p.4, which calls for 100% of CPI automatically every year.
• He never mentioned the provisions in the Lockwood subcontract (p.5) for “extraordinary increases” at Lockwood's sole discretion or the “closure fee” that Lockwood can impose at any time on 90 days notice.
• Ward provides no information whatsoever on who would provide the truck transportation, with what equipment, by what route, contingency plan, turnaround, etc.
• Ward claims he has the option of loading rail containers, but provides no explanation of how this would be done (baler?). A shipping container for rail CANNOT be top-loaded like the truck trailers he says he will use.
• Waste will be stored at the facility for days at a time. See p.4 of the Operations Plan: “Waste will not be held at the Facility for more than 24 hours, except on holidays and weekends.” He should have added, “and except when the gyppo trucker doesn't show up or I run out of trailers.” His equipment list includes only two trailers, enough for storage of less than 1 day's waste.
• Ward lists Clover Flat landfill as a backup (omitting Anderson this time) but provides no evidence of any agreement by Clover Flat for this use.
• Ward promises to meet the AB 939 diversion mandates for Willits and Fort Bragg (Agreement Summary, Item #14), but this is impossible for him to promise, because he offers no system for recycling materials out of mixed waste.
• On May 27, Fort Bragg asked Ward to replace his “conceptual” proposal with a fully-detailed proposal that could be acted upon. Ward failed to do so.
I think that it will be easy to stop Fort Bragg from taking any action on Ward's proposal on Tuesday night. The challenge will be to get them to dismiss Ward as so unreliable and flaky that he doesn't justify any further delay in acting on MSWMA's request.
I would be interested to know how hard you think we should attack Ward's credibility.
WHICH IS A ROUNDABOUT way of informing you that PBS, on January 25th, 10pm, airs Talbot’s latest project, “Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders, which guides viewers into a world of exciting music, exotic destinations and different cultures. Join host Marco Werman and the Sound Tracks reporting team as they travel deep into the heart of international music. Meet the living legacy of superstar Afrobeat creator Fela Kuti and his son, Seun. Examine the raging popularity of Vladimir Putin’s sexy propaganda song. Find out if music can help the creators of the movie Borat make amends with the insulted people Kazakhstan, and capture the mood of a cozy Portuguese bar with Fado diva Mariza. With performances and interviews, Sound Track journeys across the globe on waves of incredible sound.”
TALBOT has hardly been inactive since his definitive film on the Bari case. He’s taught in the graduate journalism program at Cal and produced PBS’s crucial Frontline series. His brother David Talbot is founder of the popular on-line news and comment website, Salon.com
PREDICTION: Measure A will lose, 60-40. It has only tepid support among Ukiah's more is better types, and is almost unanimously opposed by the entire county's sizable lib-posse, whose tediously repetitious letters have swamped the Ukiah Daily Journal's overly indulgent letters pages for weeks now. Yo, Libs! If brevity is the soul of wit, and all you've got is your draw string pants, zip it.
HARROWING midnight hours for our old friend Cora Lee Simmons of Covelo last Wednesday (October 27) when she was awakened by a nearby shotgun blast, which turned out to be an aborted pot theft just above Cora Lee's house. The cops soon arrived in force and found Cora Lee's neighbor, Alex Texas, bleeding from shotgun pellets to his chest. Texas had confronted a late-night intruder who shot him but, fortunately for Texas, not fatally. Cora Lee said Monday that other than the gun play up the hill from her place, she'd had a good time recently in Las Vegas and was about to fly off to Washington, DC, to see about getting Leonard Peltier out of prison.
MENDO'S POT BUSTS continue to take on an international flavor, with an Englishman and two Brazilians arrested last week. If you consider Brooklyn a foreign country, three dudes and a dudette with Brooklyn home addresses were also bud-busted last week, as was a guy from Kailua, Hawaii a gal from Vermont, and a guy whose city of origin was listed as “Philly.”
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