Mendocino County Today: Friday 3/14/2025

By AVA News Service on March 14, 2025

STRONG AND GUSTY southerly winds will continue to develop as the front passes through this morning. An atmospheric river will bring a chance for heavy rain as well as strong and damaging winds this weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A windy & rainy 41F with .54" more rainfall this Friday morning on the coast. Today's forecast from the National Weather Service (NWS) "Showers and possibly a thunderstorm before 2pm, then showers likely between 2pm and 5pm, then showers and possibly a thunderstorm after 5pm. High near 52. Breezy, with a southeast wind 15 to 20 mph becoming west 7 to 12 mph in the morning. Winds could gust as high as 34 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New rainfall amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible." Showers after that into Monday then dry on Tuesday.

CAMERA CAPTURE

A Hopland man driving a stolen Jeep was arrested recently with the aid of local FLOCK cameras, the Ukiah Police Department reported.

According to the UPD, officers were alerted around 6 p.m. March 7 to a stolen vehicle being driven in the city by the FLOCK cameras deployed to photograph each license plate driving in and out of the city limits.

After verifying that the Jeep Wrangler had been reported stolen to the Ukiah office of the California Highway Patrol, officers located the Jeep as it headed eastbound on East Perkins Street.

“Due to the propensity of vehicle thieves to carry weapons, a high-risk felony stop was conducted on the Jeep near the intersection of Stella Drive and Warren Drive,” the UPD notes in its press release, identifying the driver of the stolen vehicle as Sesario Rios, 49, of Hopland, and his female passenger as Jenna J. Hatcher , 39, of Ukiah.

The UPD describes both Rios and Hatcher as being on probation out of Mendocino County, and that they “claimed to have purchased the vehicle legally, but were unable to provide any proof of purchase or ownership.” The officers also reported finding “suspected Fentanyl … inside the stolen Jeep, which belonged to Hatcher.”

Both Hatcher and Rios were then booked into Mendocino County Jail on suspicion of possessing a stolen vehicle, conspiracy and violating their probation, and Hatcher was also booked on suspicion of possessing a narcotic.

The UPD notes that “the stolen Jeep was towed and stored so that it could be returned to its lawful owner, (and) the California Highway Patrol will be filing a complaint with the (Mendocino County) District Attorney’s Office against Rios and Hatcher for vehicle theft.”

STICKER SHOCK AT THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE

by Mark Scaramella

Sheriff Matt Kendall appeared before a receptive Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to explain why he wants more money in the next fiscal year, July 2025 to June 2026.

Referring to his present budget, Kendall said: “We are pretty darn close to perfect from what we were given,” meaning, apparently, that he is more or less on budget for this fiscal year.

“But as we move into these things,” Kendall continued in his homespun “Irish country sheriff” style, “it seems like the price of doing business has gone up, but the profit we get from doing business is gone down.”

We’re not sure how the law enforcement business generates a “profit,” but then we’re not trained officers with stripes on our sleeves.

Kendall said he expects to spend about $2.3 million in overtime for patrol and about $1.3 million in overtime for the jail this year — an amount that appears to be substantially over budget, but Sheriff’s office overtime is overbudget every year.

Why so much overtime?

Kendall said that it’s because some of the arrestees are sick: “People who are coming into the jail are not as healthy as they were 30 years ago. They simply aren’t. When a patrol car goes out in the middle of the night and has to take someone to the hospital or something like that, some of these folks are two-man moves. Then we have to lock down the jail or call people in.”

Hopefully, that doesn’t happen all that often.

“Our top five expenditures for overtime are all related to staffing levels,” Kendall continued, stating the obvious. “Staffing levels are coming up. But we gain three and we lose two. That’s just the way this game seems to be played nowadays.”

The Sheriff didn’t provide any reasons why two cops leave for every three that are hired. Presumably, it’s not pay like it used to be because the County gave law enforcement pretty big raises in their last contract.

“So our top five are staffing shortages, when we have to backfill for staffing shortages, and keep enough patrol cars on the street and sometimes we are backfilling with one deputy sheriff to handle an entire area. In the north sector there are times when we have to do that because that’s all that we have.”

Which would imply lower cost, uncomfortable as that may be when it happens.

“Mandated jail duties — we have to have so many personnel working. Trust me, if we ever got to a moment in time when the jail commander, Captain Van Patten, said we have to close down the jail because nobody’s committing crime we would all jump for joy. I think that is something we should work towards as a society. Get the problems worked out so that nobody goes to jail and crime disappears. Trust me, I have plenty of things I can do in retirement. I wouldn’t need to be here any longer.”

This amusing fantasy about crime suddenly disappearing doesn’t have anything to do with the Sheriff’s budget.

“Next would be staffing backfill for comp time and vacation time and things like that,” continued Kendall. “I don’t have indentured servants. They do get some time off. And occasionally I have to send them to training. You either pay for training or you pay for the lawsuit when someone is not trained.

Yes, but as it applies to the budget, that’s always been the case. Training and comp time are not new budget factors. We concede that cops are not slaves with badges.

“Shift extensions due to calls,” Sheriff Kendall added. “When we have calls for service and investigations and they begin or they are going on at noon and when they happen in the Round Valley area or the Point Arena area — these out-of-the-way places. Sometimes these deputies come to work at 6 o’clock in the morning and they catch a hot call at noon and they don’t get home until midnight because there is nobody to relieve them and they have begun that investigation. And then extension of shifts for reports. When we get done, we have to have a report in to the District Attorney and some of these are urgent because he’s going to be arraigning them the next day. If we don’t turn those reports in, that subject is released.. And more people are victimized.”

Again, all true. And interesting. But how do these routine patrol tasks, none of which are expected to significantly increase next year, translate to large budget increases?

Kendall acknowledged that some presumably money-saving efficiencies have been adopted.

“We have made progress in some areas. The District Attorney and our Public Defender are working together for a lot of the video arraignments and things like that and that lowers the price of transportation. My hat is off to the District Attorney and the Public Defender because they are working with us to get these things done.”

Kendall then backtracked: “But we still have to pay for deputies who work night shift to show up and go to court on day shift. We have no say in who gets subpoenaed and who does not. That’s a function of the courts.”

Also, standard, routine staffing factors, no big change expected. We’ve known deputies in the past who avoid giving traffic tickets specifically to avoid day-long court appearances.

The Sheriff then went off topic into some political remarks about California’s stifling bureaucracy and the complexity of timber harvest plans these days, and the cutting down of trees being perceived as evil and so forth. He described the marijuana situation as “a 50 year boom that has now become a bust.” Kendall also complained about “too much reliance on the government.”

With a near-non-sequitur Kendall added that “One of the things we are looking at is that we will not be asking for funding for positions we cannot fill.”

Kendall said he and his staff are working “every single day trying to get these numbers down. We want to be good partners with the CEO’s office. We want to be good partners with the board. Law-enforcement and public safety is probably the single most expensive thing you folks [the Supervisors] are looking at and human resources [personnel] are the biggest expense. But we have to have the best of the best because if you don’t, you can pay me now or pay me later. But if you pay me later that comes with interest and that’s in lawsuits and loss of public trust. We cannot have that. So let’s continue to work together on these things.”

Except for the initial mention of those higher than average overtime costs, Kendall avoided specific numbers, preferring to describe the routine tasks deputies must perform, none of which are new or significantly increased.

Supervisor Ted Williams then asked Sheriff Kendall, “What is your projected increase in this next budget cycle, next fiscal year, just rounded to $1 million?”

Kendall replied, “Right now somewhere between $7 and $10 million, more or less. It could be a heck of a lot more. And it’s a frightening thought to look at.”

Especially frightening since we still don’t know how the routine law enforcement tasks and already high salaries the Sheriff’s staff have already received translate to such a huge increase next year. As the County faces dwindling revenues and increased costs in other areas, how they can absorb or afford a $7 to $10 million increase for the Sheriff and the Jail (which is expected to be opening the new mental health wing sometime next year) remains to be seen.

Unfortunately, nobody on the Board expressed any interest in why the Sheriff’s projected cost increase is so large.

LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)

CUBBISON RETURNS TO WORK:

Supes Mum, CEO Mummer, D.A. Nowhere To Be Found

by Jim Shields

Thanks to Superior Court Judge Ann Moorman’s Feb 25th decision to dismiss the felony prosecution/persecution cases of Mendocino County Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison and former Payroll Manager Paula Kennedy, Cubbison made her first appearance in front of those responsible, the Board of Supervisors, who illegally suspended her 17 months ago.

This past Tuesday, March 11, Cubbison gave a short report to the BOS, and only Chairman John Haschak spoke to her. He said, “Welcome” as she began her 4-minute report, and once she concluded her very business-like two-week recap of her official activities, interwoven with conciliatory comments directed to the Board and other county officials, he uttered “thank you” as she left the speaker’s podium.

Haschak’s four colleagues remained mum during Cubbison’s brief appearance, as did CEO Darcy Antle, who claims her office “found evidence of misappropriation of funds in September 2022.” Of course, Judge Moorman ruled no such evidence ever existed.

Both the public record for the past two years, as well as evidence introduced at the dismissal hearing, clearly establish that District Attorney Dave Eyster orchestrated (with a big assist from CEO Antle and the Supervisors), the sham investigation and prosecution of Cubbison and Kennedy. It goes without saying that the D.A. was nowhere to be found at the March 11th BOS meeting.

In her closing remarks, Cubbison said, “I look forward to meeting with one or two Board Members where we can discuss any concerns or requests of the Board. I look forward to a productive relationship between myself and the Board in the future.” Cubbison showed a lot of class and forgiveness for the very people who tried to get her convicted on non-existent, bogus criminal charges that could have led to her imprisonment. Of course, the Supes gave no thought at all to issuing the two women a public apology for their roles in this sordid affair, solely brought about because they failed miserably to do their jobs.

Here is the report Cubbison made to the Supes:

“I returned to my office on Wednesday, February 26, having been out of the office for nearly 17 months. First let me express my appreciation for the hard work that the staff in the Auditor’s office the Tax Collector’s office have done to continue many of the tasks we had begun prior to my absence, and other projects initiated without me. I recognize that the last couple of years have been very stressful and often challenging. I appreciate the patience and support of the board, other county department heads, county employees, and the public as I endeavor to learn about what has been done in my absence. This includes changes already implemented, changes that are in process and operations that may need to be on the list for further evaluation and change. It is my sincere hope that my staff, with the cooperation of other county departments, will be able to continue moving these things forward without losing momentum. In the last two weeks, I’ve been working with IT to reestablish my access to county systems, and technology equipment. I’ve met individually with some of my staff. I attended the Northern Area Regional State Association Of County Auditors meeting in Colusa last week and submitted next year’s department proposed budget, largely relying on information provided by Sara Pierce and other department employees. In the coming days I will be reviewing the report prepared by Regional Government Services, meeting with RGS and Chandler Asset Management, the treasury pool asset management consulting firm. My aim is that we continue to make positive progress on the various ongoing improvement projects. To ensure that we have the resources to make that happen I plan to bring forward an amendment to the Regional Government Services agreement to extend that agreement through December of 2026. In addition, I ask that the Board fund budget appropriation requests that are deemed to be necessary to continue the important work of the Auditor’s office and the revenue collection efforts of the Treasurer-Tax Collector offices. Also, in order to avoid delays or any need to pause many tasks while I research and revisit all of the areas evaluated while I was out of the office, we could use the help of other departments. It would be especially helpful if the Chief Executive Officer continues to provide access to essential CEO staff, including Sara Pierce so that my staff can obtain necessary transition information and efficiently continue our work. It would be a shame for some of that to be lost, or for the county to have to pay for the services again, or to lose out entirely on the information gained. I look forward to working with one or two board members where we can discuss any concerns or requests of the board. I also look forward to a productive relationship between myself and the board in the future. My staff and I are dedicated to moving forward in order to continue serving the public with fiscal leadership and financial integrity. I will have more to report in the coming weeks. Thank you.”

Regarding Cubbison’s comments about CEO Antle providing “access to essential CEO staff, including Sara Pierce so that my staff can obtain necessary transition information and efficiently continue our work,” it’s noteworthy that Antle, who spoke subsequent to Cubbison’s remarks, was unresponsive to her request. It appears that we’re not quite yet at the “bury the hatchet” stage.

I recently had a conversation with Haschak where I asked him if the Supervisors are planning to send Cubbison and Kennedy public letters of apology given Judge Moorman’s dismissal ruling, buttressed by her scathing reproach of the conduct and performance of bullying high-ranking county officials and their criminal justice counterparts who were hell-bent on prosecuting/persecuting two innocent women. He politely declined comment.

When I stated, “I’m assuming you can’t reply because that’s counsel’s advice,” he responded in the affirmative.

Regardless of what their incompetent attorneys are telling them, they owe Cubbison and Kennedy public apologies, as well as the citizens of this county. To do so is called doing the right thing, as in it’s the decent thing to do.

But obviously that’s expecting and asking too much of a Board of Supervisors who spinelessly capitulated to their CEO, staff, and DA in all out assault to rid “their” county of a fellow elected official who was just doing her job when she opposed the imprudent consolidation of two separate financial departments and also rejected the DA’s re-imbursement claim for a holiday party he hosted at a local steak house.

It seems as if the only place where you find this kind ongoing dysfunction is right here in Mendocino County.

Over and out.

(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)

FORT BRAGG CITY COUNCIL MULLS MILL SITE PLAN AMID LAWSUIT

by Mary Benjamin

At the City Council meeting on Monday, the only item on the agenda was a review of the proposed Mill Site Master Development Plan. The question for council members was whether the rough draft plan looked promising enough to be a good faith resolution to the lawsuit against Mendocino Railway or if the city should return to court now that the legal stay had ended.

The meeting opened with Mayor Godeke, who provided time for the public to comment on the litigation before the upcoming closed session about the status of the city’s lawsuit. Mendocino Railway President and CEO Robert Pinoli and Sierra Railroad Vice President Chris Hart were also present to answer questions.

City Manager Isaac Whippy opened the meeting’s agenda item by explaining how the two litigating sides had come together to resolve their differences during the court-ordered stay. A planning team was put together with Isaac Whippy, planning consultant Walter Keiser, consultant Marie Jones, two assistants, Chris Hart, and architect Burton Miller.

Whippy stressed that no binding decisions had been made and that the City Council Ad Hoc Committee had been kept informed. He then turned to Walter Keiser and Marie Jones to lay out the details of the team’s Mill Site Phase 1 Development Strategy Report to the council and an audience of about 50 people.

Keiser spent substantial time explaining how the Phase 1 Plan was just a starting point for finding common ground between the two sides regarding potential plans for land use. He stressed, “You have to start somewhere,” in response to public concerns that the team’s planning decisions had been set without any further public input.

He explained the flow chart the team had developed for the decision-making process and who and what was included in each step or decision. Phase 1 is completed with agreement on the structure of a continued planning process and clarified understanding of some basic constraints on both parties. Stakeholders from other agencies were also contacted to provide input on the latest map.

Concerning the development maps presented at the February 25 town hall meeting, Keiser stated that about 80% of the new map’s development plans were derived from the map given to the public in 2018 and 2019.

Although there are still site-specific constraints to work out, Keiser reported that there is now agreement that 93% of the entire property will be under city and state jurisdiction. The remaining 7% will be under the control of Mendocino Railway and all its relevant binding federal regulations.

Phase 2 is intended to lead to an agreement describing a holistic view, laying out potential development, and identifying the benefits for all groups. Also included would be a description of all actions, needed investments, and third-party regulation requirements and how they will be met.

An agreement for a Memo of Understanding (MOU) would then be developed to determine how the interests of the city, the railway, and the California Coastal Commission can be met. At this point, all parties would need to commit to settling the suit, identify funding, and agree on real estate transactions.

Keiser stated that this complicated phase would need a second lawsuit court stay of six months “to gather all the information needed.” He stressed that an MOU would happen only if “all the different issues seen feasible to be solved.” As an example, he noted that the remediation of Mill Pond #8 “would cost about $30 million, perhaps double that.” He added, “The burden of financing generally falls to the property owner.”

Phase 3 would involve land use approvals, regulatory clearances, a financing plan, and real estate transactions, such as city acquisition of land for a nature area. All during this process, which Keiser estimated would take two years, there would be public hearings and the creation of a project management team.

Nothing would be final until the entire project is approved first by the City Planning Commission and then sent to City Council for approval. A final public hearing for city adoption would then take place. Keiser noted that if the City Council does adopt the final development plan, Phase 4 “will take years to evolve,” meaning that developers would need to come in and purchase parcels.

Chris Hart then spoke about the Mendocino Railway’s desire to find a resolution, although he commented that he believed the railway would win the Superior Court lawsuit. He noted all the concessions the railway has already made to the city and that more were possible. He described Phase 1 as “only talking about planning with no decisions made.” He also stressed that “both sides need confidence in each other.”

At the request of the City Council, Mendocino Railway President and CEO Robert Pinoli explained the layers of federal oversight that bind the railway’s infrastructure, proper maintenance, and adherence to inspection recommendations from a variety of federal and state agencies. He noted that since 9/11, even TSA now has a regulatory role in the railway’s operations.

City Council members were then given time to ask Pinoli and Hart questions as long as the questions did not entail closed session litigation issues. One question ended up being asked multiple times through the night. Would Mendocino Railway be bound by the final Master Development Agreement if approved by the city?

Both Chris Hart and Walter Keiser pointed out that a signed contract legally binds the parties. Hart suggested that city inspectors should participate and advise. Pinoli stressed that Mendocino Railway complies with all the multiple laws that regulate it and that, as a public utility, it is not bound by city permit regulations.

A few council members’ questions related to the planned track extension to Glass Beach and the trolley station. Lindy Peters noted that the train tracks and trolley station would “interfere with the coastal trail.” He then asked if the railway would alter the map “if the community really wants it.”

Hart responded, “There will be trade-offs.” Marie Jones, who has been working on the city’s behalf for many years, wisely commented that “negotiations mean nobody is going to be completely happy.”

The meeting was then opened up to a second session of public comment. Many who spoke advised the city “to slow down.” Some also recommended a discovery process first “to get all the facts” to protect the city from any possible rogue action from the other party. Many wanted assurance that the public would be involved at every step, including the Sherwood Pomo Band.

During the time allotted to phone-in comments, Alex Helperin, an assistant counsel for the California Coastal Commission, expressed his dissatisfaction with comments made by Mendocino Railway’s lawyer at the February 25 town hall. He stated that Nilsson had misled the public as to the Commission’s interests and involvement in the lawsuit.

As an example, he pointed to Nilsson’s statement that the goal of the California Coastal Commission was to shut down the Skunk Train. Helperin stated, “We never sought to do that or said anything that ever suggested we had any interest in doing that. We simply want to make sure the railway abides by the city’s coastal program and Coastal Act.”

At the conclusion of the meeting, Council member Lindy Peters expressed his willingness to work with Mendocino Railway and clarified his long time position which has been interpreted by some as anti-train. He described a few land use projects he had repeatedly favored and promoted, such as a small dairy and a small mill. He then said, “We’re not enemies. I have to think of the long term for future citizens in Fort Bragg to sustain themselves.”

The City Council then went into closed session for discussions with its attorney about the next step to take in the litigation lawsuit.

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

NEW CALFIRE BATTALION CHIEF SHARES 2024 WRAP-UP, PLANS FOR 2025

(photo credit: Sara Reith, Fire Safe Council)

Shane Lamkin joined CAL FIRE’s Mendocino Unit as the new Battalion Chief for the Public Information Officer and EMS Coordinator in late December. He’s in charge of CAL FIRE’s local social media and email list, alerting the public to any incidents as well as vegetation management projects.

Chief Lamkin has been in the fire service for over 20 years and has held a variety of positions. He comes to Mendocino from the Shasta-Trinity Unit, where he served as a captain at a fire station, managed a hand crew and worked in the training bureau. He has worked as an engineer at a station in Burney, which is part of the Shasta-Trinity Unit, and as a firefighter in the Tehama-Glenn Unit. He’s also worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and for the Shasta-Lake Fire Protection District. “I got my feet into the program going through the Shasta College Fire Academy,” he recalled. “I’ve been doing this ever since 2002, and I’m excited to keep doing this for the next ten to fifteen years.”

Chief Lamkin met with the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council to provide a brief summary of CAL FIRE’s activities in the county last year and to highlight priorities for the upcoming year. He reported that CAL FIRE conducted 31 fuels-reduction projects in 2024, completing over 5,000 acres. Almost half of that was accomplished through broadcast (prescribed) burns. The rest was done by crews using chainsaws and either chipping the brush or burning the piles of vegetation when conditions were not conducive to controlled burns.

A newly appointed prescribed fire Battalion Chief, Kevin Ryan, will coordinate the broadcast burns in the upcoming year. But Lamkin notes that these projects are complicated. “We have a lot of moving parts that are involved with this,” he explained. We’ve got to meet with landowners to get approval to burn on their land. Weather also gets involved - we have to make sure the conditions warrant a successful burn. We can’t get out there and burn while it’s raining, or while the humidity is high, because the fire just doesn’t want to carry. We have to find that perfect window where we have dry fuels, but not so dry that it’s going to cause a hazard, and then we have to have perfect wind.”

In addition to perfect weather, the burn has to coincide with a moment that is just right for the landowner and the availability of CAL FIRE resources. “We’re trying to get these broadcast burns done at a time where it's right at the edge of fire season,” Lamkin concluded. “And sometimes fire season comes quicker than expected.”

The Mendocino County Fire Safe Council heard from a lot of locals who thought 2024 was a “light” fire season. It was actually a busy fire season in which CAL FIRE did a lot of work to keep the community safe. CAL FIRE’s aim is to keep all wildfires under ten acres, though some did exceed that last year. In July, the Mina Fire near Covelo grew to 98 acres and led to the year’s first human fatality in a wildfire. Later that month, the Grange Fire in Anderson Valley reached 90 acres. No one died in that blaze, though one family did lose their home. But Lamkin said a lot of fires were contained early. “Last year, the unit ran 127 fires,” he said. “We had huge success last year, keeping our fires relatively small, squashing them as soon as we could, and the crew is doing great work out there.”

He is also optimistic about 2025, saying, “We started off the year pretty strong. We’ve already hired back over 85 firefighters to staff ten fire engines and two crews. These firefighters are going to be used to start the season early,” which means that more people will be available for heavy-duty fire prevention work in a timely manner, especially with trying to meet deadlines in between weather windows. “This is crucial to our efforts in getting these projects done,” he declared. “We want to make this place better and protect it with all that we can. With the fire prevention efforts of fuels reduction, of the broadcast burn, we’re here to make sure that our communities are safe.”

Lamkin got a good look at what wildfires can do to a community just a few months ago, when he served on a strike team in LA as a heavy equipment boss, guiding private bulldozers as they cut firelines. Mendocino County sent over 50 people, a helicopter and multiple engines to the other end of the state. “This county showed a great presence down in Southern California to help the people that were in need,” he concluded. “And we expect that for the people of California. If there's a significant fire in this area, we’re going to do what we can to draw resources in to help. We don’t want to see a fire like that in this community, but if there’s potential for it, we’re going to make sure that we’re ready.”

Anyone interested in following CAL FIRE on social media or signing up for email alerts can type linktree CAL FIRE MEU into their browser.

Real Sarahs Take A Nap (photo by Steve Derwinski)

A HEALING JOURNEY HOME

Sarah, a single mother raising three young children under the age of five, welcomed me into her home to share her journey—a story of resilience, healing, and hope. As we sat at her kitchen table, she spoke candidly about her experiences with homelessness, the child welfare system, and the pursuit of stability for herself and her children.

In 2015, Sarah faced a devastating loss when her mother, a vital part of her life, passed away. Overwhelmed with grief, she found herself in an unhealthy place, ultimately engaging with the child welfare system. “I was grieving and not in a healthy space. I wasn’t in the position to be a parent at that time,” she admitted. Knowing she couldn’t provide the stability her children needed, Sarah made the heart-wrenching decision to allow them to be adopted by their foster family. “I knew their foster parents could give them a life I couldn’t. They’ve always been open with my kids about how much I love them, and I know they are happy and loved.”

For several years, Sarah struggled with homelessness, moving between local hotels while trying to find the support she needed to heal. During this time, she gave birth to her son and began her journey toward a healthier future.

A turning point came when she was offered housing at Live Oak Apartments, a Project Homekey program in Ukiah. Pregnant and with her young son in tow, Sarah moved into Live Oak, where she saw her first real chance at stability. “From my point of view, Live Oak saved me,” she shared.

Live Oak, a former hotel renovated into small apartments, focuses on housing seniors, veterans, and families with children. The County of Mendocino purchased the property in 2020, renovated and re-opened the building as interim and permanent housing in early 2021. “Live Oak provides not just housing, but a foundation for people to rebuild their lives,” said Heather Criss, Program Administrator with the Mendocino County Department of Social Services. “The program is designed to offer both structure and support, which can be life-changing for those ready to embrace it. Recovering from homelessness can require deep emotional and personal effort, and our team is so proud of our residents for the work they do, every day, to regain their confidence and maintain self-sufficiency.”

For Sarah, that structure was crucial. She embraced the services offered, recognizing that stability and support were essential to her and her children’s healing. “Not everyone is ready for that level of structure, but for me, it was a steppingstone to growth,” she explained. “When you’re ready, the program is a lifesaver.”

Part of that growth included navigating the child welfare system. Sarah had an open case with Mendocino County Department of Social Services, a process she admitted was difficult. “It’s hard to trust a social worker, but when you’re ready, it can be your wake-up call.” One of those wake-up calls came from her social worker, Josh, who saw her potential. “He stood firm on his boundaries, which pushed me to do the same.” Determined to create a better life, Sarah committed herself fully to the process, and her children spent only a short time in foster care before being reunited with her.

Beyond the services provided by Live Oak, Sarah engaged with Project Sanctuary, where she continues to receive counseling. She also utilizes multiple programs to support her son, who is autistic. “When you choose yourself, the grass really is greener on the other side. I now know that I deserve self-love and stability.”

For nearly four years, Live Oak provided Sarah with housing, resources, and a supportive community as she rebuilt her life. In October 2024, she reached a major milestone—receiving the keys to her new apartment. Through the Make It Home program, a nonprofit based in Marin County, Sarah’s new home was furnished with gently used furniture and household goods, much of it donated by realtors from home staging projects.

(County Press Release)

CITY OF UKIAH AND UKIAH VALLEY FIRE AUTHORITY SEEK COMMUNITY INPUT FOR STRATEGIC PLAN

The City of Ukiah invites residents and stakeholders to a Community Stakeholder Meeting on Tuesday, March 18, at 5:30 PM at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center to help shape the future of local fire services.

As part of the development of a strategic plan for the Ukiah Valley Fire Authority (UVFA), the City has partnered with the Center for Public Safety Management (CPSM) to assess current services and identify priorities for the coming years. This meeting will provide an opportunity for the community to share experiences, discuss needs, and contribute to a long-term plan for fire and emergency services.

“We want to ensure our fire services align with community expectations and future challenges,” said Fire Chief Doug Hutchison. “Your input is critical to this planning process.”

Date: Tuesday, March 18, 2025 Time: 5:30 PM Location: Ukiah Valley Conference Center, 200 S. School St., Ukiah, CA

For more information, contact Doug Hutchison, Fire Chief at: dhutchison@cityofukiah.com or 707-462-7921

PETIT TETON FARM

Free: organic asparagus starts, organic Seascape strawberry starts. Fresh now: chard, kale, broccolini, herbs, mizuna mustard. All the preserved foods from jams to pickles, soups to hot sauces, made from everything we grow. We sell frozen USDA beef and pork from perfectly raised pigs and cows. Stewing hens and Squab are also available at times. Contact us for what’s available at 707.684.4146 or farmer@petitteton.com.

BUY TWO AND YOU TOO CAN BE A SLUMLORD

Debra Bryant: One bedroom, living and solid. 3 propane tanks, on demand hot water.

ED NOTES

CITY NOTES from long ago. One warm Saturday in July I ran straight into then-Mayor GAVIN Newsom. He was greeting passersby in connection with a petition drive whose purpose I didn’t note. The Mayor looked me manfully in the eye and said, “Hello, nice to see you.” I said, “Hello, good to see you, too,” and walked on about my business — the purchase of a pork bun. I’d never seen The Mayor live. If I hadn’t known he was a famous (or infamous) professional officeholder I would have been surprised he pretended to know me, and he would have wondered why I pretended to know him, but I was just being polite, and who am I to break the great circle of pretense? He seemed unnaturally pale, with one of those unhealthy, dead man pallors you see on serious juicers. He didn’t look well, but then how could he given the givens of his career path? I beat back an impulse to urge him, “Flee, kid. Run. This is all very bad for you. You’ll get cancer walking around faking it all day. You’re young. Get out while you can.”

ON THE NEXT corner my then-supervisor, Jake McGoldrick, was standing with a couple of middle-aged men in short pants. In the San Francisco of my youth all grown men wore trousers, but youth has since become eternal in America, and youth older than ever. Anyway, McGoldrick, up close, also looked like a serious boozer. His face was turning purple and he had an emergency room gut. He also greeted me like he knew me. “Great to see you,” and I replied I was happy to see him, too, not that I was particularly, but he had greeted me first, and with a superlative yet! I’m old school when it comes to manners.

McGOLDRICK was fending off an attempt to recall him by people who couldn’t beat him in an election. I said I looked forward to voting for him against the recallers, adding that I hoped he’d consider closing Golden Gate Park to all motorized traffic forever, not just the Saturdays and Sundays the recallers were after him for doing. He laughed the laugh people laugh when it occurs to them they’re dealing with a nut of some kind, and I moved on. The recallers also wanted McGoldrick out of office because he was for a speedo bus lane the length of Geary. I didn’t see the need myself because the Geary buses run often and more or less on time. They, like all other vehicular traffic, bog down east of Van Ness because there are too many vehicles downtown for SF’s small-size. A rapid bus lane would make no difference in bus speed east of Van Ness where everything is slowed by congestion. Neither issue, of course, was grounds for a recall election, but Frisco, like Mendo, is teeming with contentious citizens certain they can do it better.

FARTHER down Clement towards 10th there was a Mexican guy working a fruit and vegetable stand who speaks fluent Chinese, or a dialect thereof. A Chinese guy said to him in English, “You speak Chinese better than I do.” The Mexican guy replied, “I speak better English than you do, too.” They both laughed.

LIVING in the city, as I did for many years going all the way back to infancy in 1941, you do a lot of scuttling. You walk sideways with your garbage cans through narrow passage ways, ducking beneath overhead plumbing, locking the sidewalk door coming and going. “Ten years ago a burglar got into the building.” That’s the lock box rationale I’m constantly given because the lock box people know I secretly hope someone will break in simply to confirm a decade’s worth of pre-emptive suspicion. So, we all scuttle in and out of our expensive spaces, hyper-aware of all movement at all times, assuming menace everywhere.

I KNEW the people in my building, half of whom were related to me, and the Korean family across the street, and a young couple who lived next door, and a Chinese woman in her middle sixties who also lived next door. This woman watched the street all day from her upstairs window. She introduced herself to me only, I suspect, to scope me out for my criminal potential, although that potential is about in the middle of the pack, but undoubtedly much greater than hers. I must have passed muster because she was very friendly ever since. But I never saw a single person on our block who even looked like he or she might be malevolently disposed, but everyone on the block was perpetually on high alert.

ON GARBAGE DAYS, before dawn, an ancient Chinese couple systematically rooted through the trash containers for items of cash value. 150,000 San Franciscans depend on various kinds of “food assistance.” Lots of old people who’ve had hard lives scrap right to the end no matter how prosperous they become. The Depression scared hell out of my parent’s generation. Few of them threw their money around even after they had some. I knew Arkies in Boonville who kept all their cash hidden in their homes, and they had the best vegetable gardens I’ve ever seen, large enough to live off of, long before the small farm movement got rolling.

ONE OLD Boonville man I knew had so much cash in his wallet he wrapped it in wire to keep it all contained between the wallet’s sprung-seam covers. The Depression generation knew in their bones the whole system could fail any time like it did when they were young. (And may be doing again in 2025.) Who can imagine the terrors an elderly pair of immigrant Chinese have survived, but there they are, the old man working the cans on one side of the street, the old lady the other side. They stack their finds at the end of the block, haul it off somewhere, then come back and work another block. I’ve wanted to follow them to see their total operation, but I couldn’t do it without scaring them. And I’ve tried to talk to them but they just smile and keep on moving, on task, not needing to share trade secrets with some hulking busybody of an Ang Mo Qui (Long-nosed monkey or, depending on inflection, Red-haired devil in the Hakka dialect.) The old couple has no competition for ten blocks around. I see them working the trash most mornings and some nights in all kinds of weather.

ONE AFTERNOON a young woman, two small boys in tow, was tying lengths of rope from the spindly limbs of a smallish tree outside my building. She and the two boys looked happy so I assumed she wasn’t about to hang them or herself, but I asked her for a clarification anyway. “I want my kids to rope swing like I got to do when I was a kid,” she explained, “and they won’t let us do it in the parks like this. You don’t mind, do you?”

THE MENDOCINO WHALE WAR

by Nicholas Wilson

The little coastal town of Mendocino, California, has long been a hotbed of progressive activism. In 1976, the cause was saving whales from slaughter by Russian and Japanese whaling fleets. In June, 1975, a Greenpeace patrol boat located a Russian fleet killing sperm whales off Cape Mendocino. Activists used a high-speed Zodiac inflatable to maneuver themselves between the harpooners and the whales, capturing dramatic footage of a harpoon flying over their heads and striking a whale. When the film aired on national television, some Mendocino locals were inspired to get involved in stopping the whale slaughter.

Byrd Baker, a local wood sculptor, likely came up with the name “Mendocino Whale War,” in contrast to the peace in Greenpeace. He and other locals formed the Mendocino Whale War Association in December, 1975. Byrd was a charismatic fellow who could spin a good yarn, and he looked the part of an old-time sea captain. With the help of media-savvy locals like John Bear, an advertising man and the first president of the MWW Association, and magazine writer Jules Siegel, the media soon picked up the story. Major coverage began early in 1976 with a big feature in the Detroit Free Press that hyped the idea of a small California coastal town declaring war on Japan and the Soviet Union … at the height of the Cold War!

The MWW Association organized the 1st Annual Whale Festival in Mendocino in March, 1976. The goal was to make the public aware that whales were still being hunted and turned into dog food, lipstick, and lubricant for nuclear missiles. The festival was also a fundraiser for an ocean voyage to challenge the whalers off the Mendocino Coast.

Byrd traveled to Vancouver and, with help from Greenpeace, he was able to charter the same boat Greenpeace had used in 1975. The Phyllis Cormack was a 66-foot wooden fishing boat, owned and captained by John Cormack, a seasoned Gulf of Alaska fishing skipper who was eager to take on the Russian whalers again. In late June, the Phyllis Cormack anchored briefly in Mendocino Bay before heading to San Francisco. After loading up two Zodiac inflatables, fuel, and provisions, the boat headed out under the Golden Gate Bridge with four Mendocino warriors aboard: Byrd Baker, J.D. Mayhew, John Griffith, and Nicholas Wilson, the official photographer, who is the only one of the four left to tell the tale.

The MWW boat had a planned rendezvous with Greenpeace on July 1 about 100 miles off Cape Mendocino, near where they had found the Russian whalers the year before. Both ships launched Zodiacs bearing their leaders for a secret strategy meeting. They agreed that the MWW would stay in the vicinity patrolling for whalers while Greenpeace went on to San Francisco to do media work and fundraising. We were to return to San Francisco July 5 for a big media welcome arranged by Greenpeace.

The Phyllis Cormack rendezvous with Greenpeace boat. Nicholas Wilson photo.

We didn’t spot any whalers, but we did find a large fleet of Soviet trawlers scraping the ocean bottom with huge nets just outside the 12-mile limit that was then in place. We shot photos and film of the big ships hauling in nets loaded with tons of fish. We also photographed a Korean crabber deploying a couple hundred crab pots just outside the 12-mile limit. The Coast Guard was on scene observing, but no law was broken. Some experts had been urging the extension of the 12-mile limit farther out to regulate the excessive taking of resources off our coast. The photos of the Russian and Korean boats were sold to the San Francisco papers, UPI wire service, and Oceans magazine, helping add to political pressure that brought about the present 200 mile limit.

The MWW voyage ended with a brief stop at Mendocino on July 4, before the boat returned to San Francisco the next morning. The big media welcome promised by Greenpeace ended up being me and my camera in a Zodiac piloted by Paul Watson, who later split from Greenpeace and formed the Sea Shepherd organization. I had gone ashore in Mendocino, stayed up all night developing film and making prints to distribute to the media, and then had driven to San Francisco. There I found the Greenpeacers mostly still asleep, but Paul fired up a Zodiac and rushed me out to photograph the Phyllis Cormack just as she came in under the Golden Gate Bridge.

After dealing photos to media outlets, that was the end of the war for me, but Byrd converted an old school bus and campaigned around the country, talking at schools and civic organizations, spreading his message to “Save God’s Whales.” In 1986 the International Whaling Commission finally yielded to growing public pressure and diminishing numbers of whales, and passed a moratorium on commercial whaling that continues today, although neither Norway, Iceland, nor Japan refrain from it completely.

(KelleyHouseMuseum.org)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, March 13, 2025

LEONARDO AVALOS-BUCIO, 56, Ukiah. Cultivation of marijuana & illegal water diversion, marijuana for sale.

KINDRA CARTER, 26, Clearlake/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

BRETT FAIR, 54, Elmira/Ukiah. DUI.

ALLYSSA HANN, 26, Vacaville/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

HENSLEY HOLT, 42, Arcata/Ukiah. DUI.

SAVIOR LYKES, 21, Willits. Probation revocation.

DANIEL MILLER, 33, Ukiah. Obstruction of student/teacher.

BRETT NORGARD, 35, Ukiah. Controlled substance, failure to appear, probation violation, smuggling controlled substance into jail.

JOSE TAPIA-RODRIGUEZ, 37, Philo. Disobeying court order, paraphernalia, failure to appear.

THOMAS WILLIAMS, 41, Redwood Valley. Assault with firearm, felon-addict with firearm, shooting at inhabited dwelling.

DAVID WORTHY, 45, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

A NOTE ON THE PRESENT DAY APPLICATION OF MENTAL HEALTH DIAGNOSES IN COURT PROCEEDINGS (Betsy Cawn)

Man charged with break-in, domestic violence assault considered for mental health diversion

Should a man with a history of violent physical abuse against the mother of his children — who seven months ago broke into her home and assaulted her again — be considered eligible for mental health diversion and no prison sentence?

That’s the question before Lake County Superior Court Judge Shanda Harry as she considers the case of Justin Simon Lord, 42, of Middletown.

Harry held a hearing Tuesday afternoon in an effort to make a decision on the matter, which is expected to be handed down when Lord — who attended via Zoom from the Lake County Jail — next appears in court at 1:30 p.m. April 8.

https://www.lakeconews.com/news/81051-man-charged-with-break-in-domestic-violence-assault-considered-for-mental-health-diversion

WHAT I’M READING

Terlato Wine Group has rebranded the Federalist, a patriotic-feeling $20-$25 label that is apparently popular overseas, reports Richard Siddle in the Buyer. Instead of the founding fathers, the Federalist wines now feature a bald eagle in an effort to drop “the political connotation,” the company’s director of marketing said.

Francis Ford Coppola discussed the financial distress that led him to sell his Francis Ford Coppola Winery and Virginia Dare Winery to Delicato in 2021. It was because the production of “Megalopolis,” which flopped, had drained his finances. “It’s basically gone. I think it’ll come back over 15 or 20 years, but I don’t have it now,” he said of his money. The Chronicle’s Zara Irshad has more.

Donald L. Bryant, Jr., the founder of Bryant Family Vineyard — one of the original “cult Cabernets” that rose to fame in the 1990s — died on March 1 of natural causes. Here’s the family’s obituary for the vintner.

— Esther Mobley, Chronicle wine writer

A STORY ABOUT SALMON THAT ALMOST HAD A HAPPY ENDING

by Jacque Leslie

Completion of the world’s largest dam removal project — which demolished four Klamath River hydroelectric dams on both sides of the California-Oregon border — has been celebrated as a monumental achievement, signaling the emerging political power of Native American tribes and the river-protection movement.

True enough. It is fortunate that the project was approved in 2022 and completed last October, before the environmentally hostile Trump administration could interfere, and it is a reminder that committed, persistent campaigning for worthy environmental goals can sometimes overcome even the most formidable obstacles.

How tribal leaders, commercial fisherman and a few modestly sized environmental groups won an uphill campaign to dismantle the dams is a serpentine, setback-studded saga worthy of inclusion in a collection of inspirational tales. The number of dams, their collective height (400 feet) and the extent of potential river habitat that has been reopened to salmon (420 miles) are all unprecedented.

The event is a crucial turning point, marking an end to efforts to harness the Klamath’s overexploited waterways to generate still more economic productivity, and at last addressing the basin’s many environmental problems by subtracting technology instead of adding it, by respecting nature instead of trying to overcome it. It’s an acknowledgment that dams have lifetimes, like everything else, and that their value in hydropower and irrigated water often ends up being dwarfed by their enormous environmental and social costs.

But removing the Klamath dams is no panacea. It is a necessary but far from sufficient step toward restoring the serially ravaged Klamath River basin, once home to the nation’s third-largest salmon fishery, so thick with salmon before the arrival of Euro-Americans that local tribal members still speak of the time, possibly mythical, when their ancestors could walk across the river on migrating salmons’ backs.

By the turn of this century, all of the river’s seven salmon species were extinct or headed that way, and the basin’s tribes suffered from diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cultural breakdown in their absence.

The first Euro-American known to set foot in the Klamath basin, Peter Skene Ogden, in 1826, brought with him Western ideas about capitalism, resource extraction and the disposability of natural landscapes — and began the basin’s environmental dismemberment. He led a beaver-trapping expedition for the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose 40 or so members trudged up and down the Maryland-size basin in pursuit of furs to meet European demand for beaver hats.

So many trapping expeditions followed Ogden’s that within a few decades, the basin’s beavers were gone. Without the calm produced by beaver dams (which, unlike man-made dams, are water-permeable), rivers and streams flowed more rapidly, producing erosion and sediment that smothered fish-spawning grounds and upset water bodies’ chemical balances.

Over the second half of the 19th century, miners, loggers and salmon and sucker canners took turns despoiling the basin.

In their search for gold, the miners deployed huge dredging machines that destroyed riverbeds. They blasted away whole hillsides by diverting entire creek systems into water cannons that pushed out powerful jets through giant nozzles at a rate of 30,000 gallons a minute — so-called hydraulic mining. The process spread astonishing quantities of sediment throughout downstream rivers and passages, clogging fish habitat, and the mercury used to separate gold from sediment contaminated waterways and food chains.

Loggers found that the trees lining basin riverbanks, including majestic Ponderosa pines, were easiest to reach, so they generated still more erosion when the trees were cut down. They turned the rivers into product conveyances, floating the logs downstream. The logs scoured riverbeds and shorelines and sometimes became entangled in mile-long snarls that were dislodged with dynamite, killing fish and further damaging fish habitat.

Environmental health wasn’t a consideration.

But none of these depredations produced as much environmental damage as the undermining of the upper basin’s hydrology carried out by farmers, ranchers and their allies in the federal government. Early in the 20th century, they drained two of the Klamath’s three largest lakes and most of its wetlands to create agricultural fields. The loss of those two lakes and about 80 percent of the basin’s wetlands is the blow from which the upper basin can’t recover.

It’s perhaps unjust to label the lake-drainers as villains, as they were merely mimicking what had already happened throughout much of the United States in the 19th century, and they were oblivious to drainage’s long-term consequences. But over time it eliminated the upper basin water systems’ resilience.

Before Euro-Americans’ arrival, the upper basin was a unique watery landscape miraculously perched on top of sagebrush-dry terrain, in the 4,000-foot-altitude high desert of south-central Oregon and far-northeastern California. Upper Klamath Lake, the lake that survives, was smaller than Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Lake, the two drained lakes. The three lakes, nestled close to one another at slightly different altitudes and interspersed with large tracts of wetlands, each had their own rhythm and composition: Tule Lake’s water level, for example, rose and fell over a 20-year cycle, while Lower Klamath Lake fluctuated on a seasonal and yearly basis.

The variations from lake to lake and from lake to wetlands fostered biodiversity. Two species of suckers are sacred to the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, the predominant upper basin tribe that is an agglomeration of three separate tribes required by the federal government in 1864; a juvenile sucker could grow up in relatively protected wetland waters, then circulate as an adult in more treacherous Upper Klamath Lake. But without the wetlands and two of the three lakes, the sucker population was vulnerable. By the 1990s, populations of the two sucker species had plummeted, and they are now on the verge of extinction.

To the farmers and ranchers of the early 20th century, the wetlands were useless quagmires, riddled with insects and inhospitable to humans — the word “wetlands” didn’t even come into common usage until the 1950s, when their invaluable ecosystem benefits began to be understood.

Wetlands acted as the Klamath ecosystems’ kidneys and lungs: They filtered pollutants, captured nutrients that juvenile fish ate, and, as a result of their spongy composition, mitigated natural upheavals by retaining water during floods and releasing it during droughts. By eliminating the wetlands and drastically reducing lake water, the basin’s settlers rendered Upper Klamath Lake incapable of performing the ecological services that the three lakes had carried out together for thousands of years.

The basin’s hydroelectric dams, built between 1918 and 1962, were merely the crowning blows, the walls across the river that definitively blocked salmon from upper basin spawning grounds. By the end of the 20th century, the Klamath basin contained only about 5 percent of the salmon numbers that existed before Ogden began setting his traps nearly two centuries earlier.

Back when the lakes were drained, the upper basin was an unlikely national trendsetter. Irrigation throughout the arid American West was jump-started by what Donald Worster, author of the 1985 classic “Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West,” calls “the most important single piece of legislation in the history of the West” — the National Reclamation Act of 1902. The Klamath Reclamation Project, which made farming possible there, was the largest of the 12 projects in the first tranche authorized by the act. Since then, so-called Project farmers, some now in their fourth and fifth generation, have relied on irrigated water diverted from Upper Klamath Lake.

But with the arrival of extended drought intensified by climate change at the turn of this century, the basin’s vulnerability was exposed. By then, the two revered fish species, the Lost River and shortnose suckers (c’waam and koptu to upper basin tribes), had been listed as endangered, and coho salmon that still populated the lower basin were designated as threatened.

When, adhering to provisions of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation suspended water deliveries to Project farmers in April 2001 so that more water would remain in Upper Klamath Lake and the Klamath River to benefit fish, it set off a social conflagration. Outraged farmers carried out acts of civil disobedience in protests that went on for four months. The cutoff led some Project farmers to sell their properties to bigger operators or go into bankruptcy; at least one died by suicide.

Though the drought continued, the next year the George W. Bush administration made sure that the farmers got their allocations, but that left so little water in the Klamath River that disease spread among spawning salmon, resulting in the deaths of some 70,000 salmon whose carcasses washed onto the shores of the lower river in September 2002, in the biggest fish die-off in the history of the American West. Lower basin tribes mourned.

The basin, in other words, was in the grip of revolving crises. And as the upper basin continued to dry out throughout this century, Project farmers received scant water allocations in most years, and more and more of them went out of business.

The same story of agricultural decline is now unfolding throughout the West, as the century-long irrigation era edges toward collapse. Depletion of groundwater for agriculture is so widespread that “it could threaten America’s status as a food superpower,” a New York Times investigation found in 2023.

“The ongoing megadrought has severely contracted water supply and rendered Western agriculture inviable at its present scale,” wrote the legal scholars Stephanie Stern and A. Dan Tarlock in a paper published in December in the Ecology Law Quarterly. “An increasing number of farms, particularly small farms, are shuttering agricultural operations, filing bankruptcy, fallowing fields, slaughtering livestock and selling water rights. And the pain is only beginning.”

Dam removal has already restored the Klamath’s reputation as a trendsetter, a $500 million signifier of dams’ environmental harm and the feasibility of dismantling them. Now it has a chance to do something even more important: show a way toward environmentally sustainable agriculture. In the first large salmon run since dam removal was completed, at least 6,000 salmon swam upstream past the demolished dam sites, exceeding biologists’ expectations by orders of magnitude.

As a result, many upper basin residents were feeling something they were unaccustomed to: hope. River-rafting outfitters began mapping out portions of the river exposed by dam removal, including steep, fast-moving rapids and newly formed streams that reflect the river’s revival. In the restored portion of the river, great blue herons have already established rookeries, and bald eagles are, as a surveying rafter put it, “all over the place.”

Thinking in watershed terms has long been an environmental tenet; now salmon are making the idea come alive. Their presence in the upper Klamath is spreading awareness of the interconnectedness of the whole basin, prompting cooperation between entities at both ends, from upper basin farming districts to the coastal Yurok tribe.

At the base of the Klamath’s potential recovery is the redressing of Euro-Americans’ most egregious environmental sin, their draining of upper basin wetlands. Some Project farmers resist wetland restoration, understandably viewing it as a way of shrinking agricultural fields. But expansive wetlands could be the remaining farms’ best hope, preventing the lowering of water tables and the ongoing drying-out of the upper basin.

In December, in what was conceived as the first phase of the largest freshwater wetland restoration project ever carried out in the Western United States, a contractor hired by the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, Ducks Unlimited and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began breaching a 60-year-old dike that had separated 22 square miles of wetlands from Upper Klamath Lake and had turned the drained wetlands into cattle pasture. This and other restoration projects made it possible to imagine that the long-running Klamath River recovery epic, full of reversals that were overcome, was finally approaching a just, environmentally responsible resolution.

In the past month, however, the Trump administration suspended funding authorized in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other Biden-era legislation for the wetlands restoration and other Klamath projects, and laid off U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees who facilitated those projects.

“These are small rural communities, and these investments are a big deal to local economies,” said Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the Humboldt Area Foundation, which funds Klamath River restoration projects. “These are projects that improve people’s lives, and now they’re frozen. The uncertainty is just frustrating people. No one knows what to do.”

Coming so close to a happy ending to the long-running Klamath saga, these rash, heedless cuts may be the cruelest setback of all.

(Jacques Leslie is a contributing opinion writer for The Los Angeles Times and the author of “Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment.” He is writing a book about the last 25 years in the Klamath basin. Jordan Gale is a photographer based in Portland, Oregon.)

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION CUTS WILL IMPACT NORCAL SCHOOLS

by Jill Tucker

Everyone saw it coming. President Trump promised he would dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.

Yet the slashing of half the department’s staff this week nonetheless shook school officials from California to Connecticut as their new reality started to sink in: The decades of rock-steady federal support for classrooms and vulnerable kids was no longer a given.

More than 1,300 workers were fired Tuesday while another 572 accepted buyouts in recent weeks, bringing the department’s staff down to just over 2,100 workers.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon described the action as a “significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system,” explaining that the savings would direct more resources to students, parents and teachers.

Critics across the country lambasted the move, describing it as a reckless, dangerous assault on public education.

“Gutting the Department of Education’s workforce will have a devastating impact on our most vulnerable students,” said Jeff Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers, in a statement Wednesday. “Their futures are being cut short by this reckless and illegal action by the Trump Administration. The American people did not vote for chaotic and vicious attacks on our children and public schools.”

The staffing cuts are phase one in Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education to the maximum extent “permitted by law,” with an executive order calling for McMahon to do just that, which could happen as early as Thursday.

The impact on public education overall and specifically local school districts is still unclear, but here’s some basic information to understand what’s happening:

What Does The Federal Department Of Education Do Actually?

In general, the department administers federal laws relating to education as well as the $268 billion education budget, which includes about $119 billion for K-12 schools across the country, much of it dedicated to special education services and support for students from low-income families. The staff also oversees funding for education research as well as student loans and grants.

How Much Does California Get?

The state gets about $15.5 billion, which is just over 13% of total education funding. About $8 billion of that is for K-12 schools, or about 6% of all spending in that category.

Are Our Schools Going To Lose Federal Funding?

Yes — and no. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), helmed by Elon Musk, has e already made cuts at the Department of Education, specifically in grants for education research. Local nonprofits like West Ed were among the organizations that lost funding. In some cases, research projects included work at school sites, including studies on the effectiveness of specific math instruction, for example.

But funding that funnels into schools, including special education and school meals money, as well as resources for low-income students, is allocated by law and therefore not subject to administrative or executive order cuts.

The same goes for federal student loans and grants, which are also protected.

But Wait. Hasn’t Trump Threatened To Withhold Federal Funding?

Yes. Separate from the cuts, the federal government at times has argued it can withhold funding from districts that don’t abide by federal policies, which in the past has included threats related to standardized testing and other topics. Trump, in his first term, threatened to hold back money from districts that didn’t fully reopen amid the pandemic in the fall of 2020.

He is again making similar threats — with San Francisco and other local districts in his sights — over transgender issues as well as diversity, equity and inclusion curriculum or hiring initiatives.

A legal battle is already brewing over whether the president has the authority to withhold funds given that the Constitution gives Congress decision-making power over money.

So What Happens If Trump Dismantles The Entire Education Department?

Technically, the president can’t do that either. The department was created by congressional legislation in 1979. The executive branch cannot unilaterally overturn laws. But cutting the staff in half will likely result in significant chaos, officials said.

Staff at regional Department of Education offices for civil rights enforcement, for example, were locked out Wednesday, including the one in San Francisco, with reports that those sites would be shuttered. That would likely mean investigations into discrimination could be curtailed.

At the San Francisco office, two-thirds of the 120 staff members were terminated, said one employee.

McMahon said all divisions at the department were affected by the reduction in force, but details were not made available.

What Does That Mean At A Local Level?

It’s not entirely clear so far, but the department’s responsibilities include processing the Federal Application for Free Student Aid, which went through a rocky rollout of a new process last year.

In addition, it appears the department’s Office of Civil Rights potentially took a big hit, meaning discrimination complaints made by students, parents, teachers or community members might not get the attention they would have in the past.

Last year, the department saw 22,687 complaints, including many out of California schools, including reports regarding sexual assault allegations, inequity in female and male athletics, and retaliation concerns.

“These blunt cuts at the Department seriously threaten the efficiency and effectiveness of federal funding,” according to America Forward, a coalition of nonprofit education-focused philanthropic organizations. “They pose alarming risks for students and our nation.”

So What Happens Now?

Local officials are bracing themselves, saying that “time will tell” what the actual implications will be. It’s not yet clear if the lack of staff creates backlogs in getting checks to districts and whether the Trump administration will punish school communities for their political opposition, for example.

In the meantime, those who survived the firings at the Department of Education this week say they don’t believe the bloodletting is over.

“My job is hanging by a threat,” said one worker, who requested anonymity.”I can see the writing on the wall.”

The person said they feel for those who lost their jobs and also worry about the school communities they supported.

“Their work was very important and critical,” the staffer said.

(SF Chronicle)

THE TRUMP DICTIONARY

To the Editor:

It’s outrageous that the federal government is banning or limiting so many essential words from documents, including the word “women,” along with “gender,” “sex,” “underserved” and “pregnant people.” The word “men” is — of course — fine, as long as it is not in the phrase “men who have sex with men.”

Women are more than half of the population! We pay a lot in taxes, and share many needs and concerns, such as health issues and a greater probability of low wages, poverty and experience of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Two people working on health care grants have told me that mentions of women, as well as “reproductive health,” have to come out of grant reports and proposals — despite the criminal neglect of women’s health by the medical profession for most of our history and continuing into the present.

Evidently, a group of unmentionable second-class citizens should stop competing with men for jobs, political office, influence in family decisions or anything else, and instead have many more children, but without informed medical care, education or outreach.

Mary King

Portland, Oregon

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The radical transgender activists and their allies made a serious mis-step by trying to force acceptance of biological men competing in girl’s and women’s sports — and they advanced their agenda largely by manipulating language — so I’m not willing to play their game by buying into made up concepts like “they/them” to describe a person — no matter how much that person wants me to.

“SOCIETY, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.

She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”

~Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis”

GONZO THEATRE PROJECT: WOODROSE CONVERSATIONS

by Paul Modic

Good morning AVA readers,

I would like to offer free dialogues for you to read aloud with your friends and family, anyone out there want to play around with theatre?

Here’s how it will work: Resize to your desire and print two copies of the dialogue below. Then during a dinner party, around the table after meals, or any old time, partner up and read this dialog aloud. (This first one is one of my best.)

If this is as fun for you as it is for me, tell me here that you actually “performed” it or email the news to hillmuffin@gmail.com (yes, Cosmic Bruce should have trademarked that one) and I will provide another dialogue for your frivolous entertainment, or I’ll continue providing new ones here if Cosmic Bruce and The Major play along with my game, a doubtful proposition in this serious rag, I suppose.

I know, you’re probably thinking, “One more whacky idea from Modic, give me a break: Cubbison is freed and we’ve got DA Eyster on the run…” and yes, you’d have a good point but, hey, this might catch on and go viral, my million dollar idea so to speak, and here it is free to you! (I am planning to offer this other places online after this pilot project, fo sho.)

If anyone wants five or more for a theatre party I’d gladly supply them, as I have many for your entertainment pleasure, most with he/she relationship themes.

If you do play my game it’s a bonus if you record it and share the audio or video. I haven’t asked Marco but I’m sure he’d play it on his endless radio show, Memo Of The Air.

So ready to play? Major and Cozmo? Ready to bring your standards down to game show frivolity? All set? Let’s DO IT, make my dreams come true!

(If you want more dialogues, choose titles from the timed table of contents, and request them in the letters section, where I may take this show if it’s too weird to make the prime cut.)

Food

He: Alright! Glad you made it to the theatre party. Here’s some salad. You can put some chicken on it or…

She: I’m a vegetarian.

He: Oh, right, okay, like I was about to say you could put tofu on it instead.

She: I can’t eat tofu, do you eat tofu? You know it will make you have breasts, GMO.

(He looks down at his chest)

He: Oh! So that’s what those are! Will it make breasts grow bigger too?

(He glances down at her chest)

He: Well, here’s some cheese.

She: I don’t eat cheese, I’m a vegan.

He: Umm, okay, how about a cucumber and tomato sandwich?

She: No, bread, I’m gluten-free.

He: Ohh, hmm, would you like a beer?

She: No, gluten I said.

He: How about a bowl of corn flakes?

She: Corn? Are you kidding? GMO.

He: A piece of cake?

She: Gluten.

He: Ice cream?

She: Vegan.

He: A Carrot?

She: Carrots have feelings too.

Woodrose Conversations

The Future (1:25)

Party Talking (1:16)

Crashing With Friends (:45)

Food (:53)

Judging (1:09)

Weed Dealing (2:10)

Eureka: A Trip to the Medical Marijuana Doctor (2:11)

Jealousy (2:03)

Power Outage (:57)

10) The Liar (1:51)

11) Relationships (:55)

12) Salsa Dancing (:56)

13) Lingerie (1:48)

14) It’s Noisy in Paradise (2:04)

15) Asses and Anger (1:36)

16) Flirting (:51)

17) Boundaries (1:25)

18) Lovers and Other Strangers (1:26)

19) The Colonoscopy (1:18)

20) Fantasies (1:20)

21) Cross-Cultural Marriage (1:28)

22) Trust Me (3:01)

23) Job Interview SoHum Style #1 (2:23)

25) Emotional Girlfriend (1:54)

27) Harvest Time (2:09)

29) Credit Union Kerfuffle (4:37)

31) Dignity (3.17)

33) Side Hustles (2:43)

35) Job Interview SoHum Style #2 (2:26)

37) Yoga Pants (2:33)

39) December Adventures (2:47)

41) Land and Life (3:18)

43) Controversy (4:29)

47) Job Interview SoHum Style #3 (2:27)

49) Valentines Day Texting (2:44)

51) Cuddling (2:20)

53) Trimmer Dreams (3:01)

55) Getting Tested (4:38)

TWO TON TONY

The charismatic and extremely tough former world title challenger who knocked down Joe Louis, ‘Two Ton’ Tony Galento was born Domenico Antonio Galento in Orange, New Jersey on this Day in 1910.

One of four children of Italian immigrants. His schooling ended after the sixth grade and he went to work, mainly as an iceman.

Galento, quoted in a thick New Jersey brogue, before his fight against the champion Louis in 1939: “I’ll moider da bum.”

The former saloon bouncer took a streak of 11 knockouts into the fight against the champion, who was making the seventh defence of the crown he won two years earlier. Louis had scored first‐round knockouts against his three previous victims.

Rolling and brawling Galento, waded in with hooks and shook up the champion in the second round, then floored him in the next round. It was his greatest moment, the title was nearly his, but he could not follow up and finish his Louis.

Louis quickly regained his feet and exacted brutal and swift retribution. With Galento bleeding profusely and reeling about the ring, Referee Arthur Donovan stopped the fight in the fourth round.

“Tony berated me something terrible before the fight,” remembered Louis. “He got to me, and I hated him for it. I never hated anybody before. I decided to punish him before I knocked him out.”

Galento’s personal physician, Dr. Joseph E. Higi, was quoted as having said: “Tony is a throwback. He is the thick‐boned, hyposensitive type which does not readily register pain. I doubt if any of the thousands of blows he has stopped really has ever hurt him. He has no nerve or brain injury because he never has been stunned.”

The nickname “Two-Ton” came not from Galento’s physique, but from his job delivering ice. As the story goes, Galento arrived late for a fight, and his manager, Harry Kinney, yelled, “Where the hell have you been? Don’t you know you’re supposed to fight tonight?” Galento replied, “Take it easy. I had two tons of ice to deliver on my way here.”

HEY DEMOCRATS, WAKE THE F—K UP

by Drew Magary

The sky is falling. The United States federal government is being illegally dissolved before your very eyes. The workers you rely on to ensure that you don’t eat ground beef tainted with paint chips are being laid off en masse. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided your office last week and asked for your papers, even though you were born in Fremont. A fire tornado is due to touch down in your backyard next Tuesday. Your parents are terrified to board an airplane. Your gay nephew is terrified to go to school. Your 401(k) is in the toilet. MEASLES. Measles have returned and want to eat your baby. Every day you look at the news, and you’re told that the president would like to bring back cockfighting. You and I need reassurance. You and I need to know that someone out there is trying to put an end to all this madness. Instead, we get this.

I hate you, Democrats. I hate you so, so much. Yes, I hate Trump and Elon and all of the s—t-for-brains voters out there who were like DURRR THESE FELLAS ARE JUST WHAT WE NEED TO CLEAN UP WASHINGTON DURRR. But I reserve a special place in my black heart for you, Democrats. You are the representational equivalent of being put on hold by customer service. All you do is let me down. It’s like being a Browns fan if every time the Browns lost, a Tesla ran over my dog. You guys make voting feel pointless.

Starting with you, Joe Biden. You still alive, old man? Well, you could’ve fooled me. Great job staying in the 2024 race juuuuust long enough to torpedo your party’s chances, and then pissing off to Cape Henlopen solely because George Clooney asked you to. Were you a good president? I have no idea, because you were too busy huffing oxygen from your bedside tank to sell your agenda to the American people. Maybe you could have gotten everyone on your side by crafting a really clever sign to hold up.

And who’s this? Why, it’s former Vice President Kamala Harris, who got voters excited for exactly one month before huddling with her advisers and deciding to campaign as a Republican, WITH Republicans. And what other brilliant tactician could tap one of the most beloved governors in America as her running mate and then Tim Kaine-ify him by 75%? Hey Kamala, maybe in your free time you can pursue a life sentence for a homeless man who stole a box of Chiclets from a local CVS. I legit thought you would win in November! Why did I think that? Someone should brain me on the head with a baseball bat.

Speaking of head injuries … John Fetterman! I’m a fellow brain injury survivor alongside John. So when this man suffered a stroke during his Senate race against Dr. Oz, I was like, “Do NOT discriminate against this man just because he had a brain injury.” Little did I know that Fetterman’s blood clot would turn him into the second coming of Joe Manchin. I just got rid of Joe Manchin, and now I have to deal with a taller, weirder one?

These are just some of the people I was foolishly hoping would put a stop to the meme-ocracy that’s currently eating the world. Democrats keep responding to our cries for help with, “Get out and vote!” Who am I even voting for? Is it you? Is it some asshole company on your donor roll? Is it shrink-wrapped skull James Carville, whose electoral acumen has aged even worse than he has? I’ve gotten more results voting on a new flavor of Lay’s potato chip.

Take Gavin Newsom, for instance. Here’s a man who managed to beat out a recall effort, and what’s he doing with all of that political capital? That’s right: He invited Charlie f—king Kirk to christen his new podcast, and then gleefully agreed with Kirk that transgender kids are a major threat to the integrity of high school girls softball. What the f—k are we even doing here? Who does this man think his constituency is, Nick Bosa? California is the first state all of us liberals want to watch secede from the union, because it’s the best state and we’d all move there if it ever shed the rest of America’s stink. So how did THIS quarter-zip end up running the joint?

Now that I think about it, how did a state that offers so much sunshine and terrific produce end up with a whole armada of s—t Democrats, including Adam Schiff, Nancy “once we all die in a rejuvenated smallpox epidemic, the House will be ours again!” Pelosi and Alex Padilla, who thought that a sternly worded letter to a Trump mole would end the administration’s desecration of our national parks. And don’t forget about Dianne Feinstein! Yes, I know that Feinstein is dead. No, that doesn’t excuse her. Stupid, dead Feinstein. I bet she’s lecturing children in hell because they dared to ask for a table fan.

And if you think that my party has more to offer on the opposite coast, may I introduce you to New York Democrats? Oh look, it’s Little Mister Punching Bag, Chuck Schumer! A Palestinian American resident of this man’s state was just kidnapped by ICE and remanded to Kafka State Prison down south without cause, and Chuck’s first instinct was to essentially say, “Now we all know this young man is brown, which means he hates the Jews.” Totally. Way to see the REAL story going on here, you empty tin of pomade. And somehow Chuck has even greater moral fortitude than Eric Adams, who probably couldn’t commit murder without accidentally leaving his Turkish passport in the victim’s hand.

I can’t believe how useless most of these Democrats have proven in the fight to preserve something, anything, functional in this backwater of a country. Oh, do you want me to give the RBG girlboss treatment to Sonia Sotomayor, who skipped out on retiring while Biden was in office because she just loves writing terse dissents? What about Hakeem “Next Pelosi” Jeffries? Will he bamboozle the opposition with his fearsome repertoire of debate club hand gestures? Judging by those signs from the other night, I’m thinking no. No as all f—k.

I don’t expect you geniuses in charge of my party to listen to my plea, but I’ve been shouting into the wind for decades now so I may as well do it one final time. Democrats need to give voters like me a reason to care. Our current president is an asshole, but he sure knows how to get people to care one way or the other. Part of that success has been from brute force political messaging. Part of it is from the voraciousness of capitalism mutating this country into a place where everyone is told they’re equal but no one WANTS to be equal. When Donald Trump runs on a platform that boils down to F—K OTHER PEOPLE, tens of millions of Americans eat it up because they’ve been conditioned to hate other people: their boss, their movie stars, that guy that cut them off on the drive to work, everyone.

I don’t know how we solve this problem, but actually WANTING to solve it is a good first step. I see little evidence right now that Democrats — especially you, Gavin — have that desire. I’ll still vote in every election out of obligation, but how many others will just stop doing it entirely now that you’ve failed them so consistently? I have a hard time trusting a bunch of people who couldn’t even think to start up an ASSHOLE chant on the House floor during Trump’s speech last week. I’m wagering that younger generations are even more disaffected. Those people will be lost forever unless you f—kers finally understand what’s happening outside your office window.

And if you don’t get your s—t together now, I’ll know it’s because you don’t want to. I’ll know that you never cared about democracy. That you never cared about fixing the Constitution that’s currently sitting at the bottom of Sam Alito’s toilet. That you never cared about women or gay and trans folk or the poor or Muslim Americans or even Jewish people. I’ll know that you only care about yourselves, same as the president does. If you careerist scum want to prove me and every other voter wrong, you’d better get started right now. The clock is ticking.

LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT

In No Hurry for Cease-Fire, Putin Demands Numerous Ukrainian Concessions

Schumer Will Clear the Way for G.O.P. Spending Bill, Breaking With His Party

Trump Administration Must Rehire Thousands of Fired Workers, Judges Rule

Trump Wants to Speed Up Deportations With Alien Enemies Act: What to Know

Stocks Tumble Into Correction as Investors Sour on Trump

SpaceX Scrubs Launch of Crew-10 Astronauts for NASA to the I.S.S.

TIMELINE: THE ARREST OF MAHMOUD KHALIL

by Matt Taibbi

The arrest and pending deportation of former Columbia University international student Mahmoud Khalil ignited a debate on free speech. Did the U.S. government target him for what he said, or is the government justified in saying Khalil is a threat to national security?

Oct. 12, 2023-April 26, 2024 Khalil emerges as a lead negotiator with Columbia University administrators during campus protests as a representative of Columbia United Apartheid Divest. The group’s mission includes “urging Columbia to divest all economic and academic stakes in Israel.”

He often spoke during press conferences, such as the video above from April 26, 2024, in which he says there’s an impasse on “our main demand, which is divestment from the Israeli occupation.” Students and non-students broke into Columbia’s Hamilton Hall building four days later and barricaded themselves inside. Khalil told the BBC that Columbia suspended him but reversed the decision after one day because “after reviewing the evidence, they don’t have any evidence to suspend.”

Khalil told CNN last year that he chose to do public speaking over participating in student encampments because he feared losing his student visa. He did participate in at least one march on Oct. 12, 2023.

Background on Khalil: He came to the U.S. from Syria in 2022 on a student visa. He received a green card in 2023, meaning he’s a legal resident, after marrying a U.S. citizen, and earned a master’s degree from Columbia in December.

January 29, 2025

President Trump signs an executive order that says, in part: It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.

January 30, 2025

The White House releases a “fact sheet” on Trump’s executive order. It characterizes the order as “going on offense to enforce law and order and to protect civil rights,” and notes that after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct 7, 2023, “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals began a campaign of intimidation, vandalism, and violence on the campuses and streets of America.”

The fact sheet also includes this quote from Trump: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

February 20, 2025

Attorney General Pam Bondi addresses antisemitism and protests on college campuses at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference. “These students who are here on visas who are threatening our American students need to be kicked out of this country,” she said.

March 8, 2025

Department of Homeland Security officers arrest Khalil at his Columbia University-owned apartment building at 8:30 p.m. He is sent to an ICE detention center in Jena, Louisiana. An attorney for Khalil, Amy Greer, tells the Wall Street Journal that an ICE agent told her by phone that Khalil’s student visa and green card had been revoked.

March 9, 2025

The Department of Homeland Security released the following statement on X: Note: Although the statement says the arrest occurred March 9, Khalil was taken into custody the previous evening, March 8.

March 10, 2025

Khalil’s attorneys file a petition (see document below) to be returned to New York. It says Kahlil “has been a mediator and negotiator” and argues that the government has violated his First Amendment rights: “Speech regarding international law, the obligations that the United States and Columbia University have under that law, the human rights of the Palestinian people, and related matters are all topics of public concern clearly protected by the First Amendment.”

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York issues an order that blocks Khali from being deported “until the Court orders otherwise.” Furman orders attorneys to appear before him on March 12 at 11:30 a.m.

Concerns begin to mount that Khalil is being targeted for his speech, a violation of the First Amendment even though he’s not a U.S. citizen. A letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression—which often sues government agencies for First Amendment violations—says: “The statements the government has released suggest its decision may be based on his constitutionally protected speech. This lack of clarity is chilling protected expression, as other permanent residents cannot know whether their lawful speech could be deemed to “align to” a terrorist organization and jeopardize their immigration status.”

March 10, 2025

President posts on Truth Social that Khalil is a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student,” and that more arrests are coming.

March 10, 2025

Supporters of Khalil hold a press conference. Khalil’s arrest “reeks of McCarthyism,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“It is beyond the pale. It’s targeted, retaliatory, and an extreme attack on the First Amendment.”

March 11, 2025

House Speaker Mike Johnson supports the arrest and pending deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, saying “this guy was apparently a mastermind” of violent protests at Columbia University.

“If you are on a student visa, and you’re in America, and you’re an aspiring young terrorist who wants to prey upon your Jewish classmates, you’re going home. We’re going to arrest your — tail, and we’re going to send you home where you belong.”

March 11, 2025

Protests break out in New York over Khalil’s arrest, demanding his release. Meanwhile, attorneys meet by video conference. Below is a letter to Furman that reports on the differences between the two sides on venue and jurisdiction.

March 12, 2025

There is no significant change in Khalil’s case after a hearing before U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in New York. Khalil remains in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Whether he remains there will be determined by Furman.

Khalil’s attorneys want him to return to New York. Justice Department attorneys want him to remain in Louisiana — Khalil was served a notice while in custody Sunday to appear before an immigration judge there on March 27 — or New Jersey, where he was held before being moved to Louisiana. Furman issued an order that gave the government until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday (March 12) to file a motion on the venue. The order sets out a schedule for both sides to file competing arguments through Monday, March 17.

Khalil’s attorneys did score one victory in Furman’s order: they can now confidentially talk to their client with two phone calls of at least one hour each through Thursday, March 13.

Furman’s order also lifted restrictions on electronic access to filings in the case. Not even Khalil’s petition filed Monday had been available on PACER, the U.S. court system’s electronic records service (see letter below from a Brooklyn attorney who objected to this).

ICE memos

In 2017, the Knight First Amendment Institute filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to get records on the first Trump administration’s “extreme vetting” program to screen immigrants, refugees, and people seeking visas. Here’s a link to access all documents in the case. Among those records are two ICE memos that Knight published in November 2023. The memos were written as that policy was being developed.

Supreme Court Court Cases

Bridges v. Wixon (1945). The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the government could not deport an Australian immigrant because he was a communist. Middle Tennessee State University’s Free Speech Center has a good overview of the 1945 case here.

Dennis v. United States (1951). The court upholds the Smith Act of 1940, which criminalized anyone who “organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons.” The ruling also upholds the conviction of 11 communists.

Yates vs. United States (I957). In a 6-1 decision, the court limits the power of the Smith Act. The decision says convictions must show people advocated illegal conduct.

TRUMP CUTS AID TO VIETNAM, THEN RESTORES SOME

by Nadya Williams

After the Trump regime’s slashing in early February of 90% of funds for USAID (the United States Agency for International Development), Viet Nam saw an abrupt halt to past assistance in such areas as health care, the environment, climate change, disaster relief, and war aftermath alleviation, according to a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pham Thu Hang. Most importantly, the war legacies alleviation included life-saving bomb and mine clearance, plus dioxin remediation – particularly at heavily-contaminated former U.S. bases and airfields in Da Nang and Bien Hoa (outside Sai Gon/Ho Chi Minh City).

Then just as abruptly, AID money was reinstated in late February, but only for explosives clearance and only at nine projects in seven countries: Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Peru, Ukraine and Palau.

Veterans For Peace Chapter 160, the Hoa Binh (Peace) chapter in Viet Nam, was especially impacted, as USAID funds were channeled from the U.S. State Department through the Norwegian government’s humanitarian organization NPA – Norwegian People’s Aid, specifically for UXO clearance. An indirect recipient was ProjectRENEW (Restoring the Environment and Neutralizing the Effects of the War), co-founded in 2001 by a Quang Tri Province official and American veteran Chuck Searcy, president of VFP 160, who lives full time in Ha Noi. Quang Tri Province, hard up against the 17th parallel DMZ, is the most heavily-bombed area of Viet Nam. RENEW also funds wheelchairs and prosthetics for victims of unexploded ordnance, as well as Agent Orange/Dioxin sufferers.

“Efforts are now being made to temporarily resume our mine clearance and other explosive ordnance and munitions handling and destruction activities on the US-funded projects in these seven countries,” Norwegian People’s Aid states. ”NPA still does not know what the final outcome of the ongoing evaluation of the United States will be.”

Mr. Hien Xuan Ngo, Communications & Development Manager for ProjectRENEW, stated after the initial halt, “The recent suspension of USAID and Department of State-funded programs globally makes support for vital initiatives like Project RENEW’s Mine Risk Education and Victim Assistance program even more crucial. This support is essential for ensuring the safety of adults and children and promoting the social and economic inclusion of persons with disabilities. Here, in the photo, Ho Van Lai, who tragically lost three limbs and an eye in a cluster bomb accident at just ten years old, educates local school children about UXO safety as part of Project RENEW’s Mine Risk Education program, funded by the Irish Government.”

Norwegian People’s Aid had previously announced the dismissal of up to 1,700 employees due to the uncertainty surrounding future support for US-funded projects. NPA, “is pleased that there has been a temporary exemption from the freeze for nine projects, but does not yet have complete clarity on how our staffing will be affected by the limited exemption from the funding freeze.”

(Nadya Williams is Director of Communications of Veterans For Peace, San Francisco Chapter 69.)

AN ENEMY TO ITS FRIENDS

by James Meek

Leon Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance was born in the 1950s out of research into what happens when there’s a doomsday cult and doomsday fails to arrive. A tiny minority of cultists have their warped worldview confronted by reality. How do they deal with it? They rationalize the unreasonable. They cherry-pick information. They deny the evidence of the data.

In the second Trump era, the cultists are running the show and it is the majority of people in Europe, including Ukraine, who are in denial. Perhaps doomsday hasn’t actually arrived. Maybe America is not now ruled by arrogant, vengeful, petty, patriarchal, racist imperialists. But where’s the evidence?

Like the United Nations and the World Health and Trade Organizations, NATO continues to exist on paper, but if it still has any meaning, the onus is on the believers to prove it. Perhaps the United States would take action to defend Estonia or Poland if Russia attacked; but as things stand, there’s no reason to suppose it would, and multiple indications that it wouldn’t.

It may be that, generally, on any given day, the US government — if such a concept can be said to be real in any sense that its own people, let alone the rest of the world, can rely on — regards Russia as a threat, an adversary. But there is no proof that this is the case, and abundant evidence that the leader of the United States regards his Russian counterpart as a friend, a hero and a wronged, misunderstood man.

Perhaps Donald Trump has some sympathy for Ukraine’s suffering at Russia’s hands, but there’s no evidence that he does. Everything Trump has said and done since before he was re-elected, right up to his comments after the first round of talks between Russian and American officials in Saudi Arabia, suggests he believes that the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, the leader of a poor, insignificant, obscure country, started a war with Russia — a rich, glamorous, important country — that Russia was forced to fight with all its strength. Many soldiers have been killed and much property has sadly been damaged. Trump must help poor Vladimir Putin out of this tragic situation, overthrow the tyrant Zelensky, and enable their two great countries to grow rich together. Details to follow.

In other words, Trump’s America adopts, wholesale, Putin’s explanation for his actions, right down to his mocking accusations against the man who, against enormous odds, led his country’s defense.

None of this is to say it’s wrong for the US and Russia to talk. There was always going to be a moment when the “West,” in some form, had to approach Putin, with or without Ukraine’s consent, to get him to spell out his terms for ending the war. Putin began it, and Putin continues it; apart from a tiny and desperate incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, Ukraine is on the defensive, and continues to lose ground to Russia’s merciless expenditure of troops. It is not lack of arms so much as lack of sons that has destroyed Ukraine’s hopes of forcing Russia to give back the land it seized. In a wiser and more competent — to say nothing of a better — world, the initial approach to Putin would have been followed by a consultation between the US, Ukraine and other European countries on their counter-proposals, and the pressure they could put on Putin if he refused to budge. Perhaps this will still happen. For the time being, Ukraine and the rest of Europe will be consulted in the way the residents of a village are consulted before it gets demolished to make way for a new airport.

Although the terms Putin is privately offering the Americans for an initial ceasefire are unknown, we have a pretty good idea what he wants: not so much peace as its evil twin, victory. The degree to which the US pushes back or endorses Putin’s demands could be the first test of how far Trump speaks for America. There are still Atlanticists in positions of power in the US, but plenty of those in Trump’s coterie share his awe of Putin and contempt for Zelensky and Ukraine.

The two supposed shocks of the opening of talks — the US declarations that Ukraine would never be allowed to join NATO and would have to give up territory — were not so remarkable. Of course it would have been smarter not to give in to these demands of Putin’s even before talks began, but ever since the bloody failures of Ukraine’s counter-offensive and its defense of Bakhmut in 2023, it has been apparent to everyone, including most Ukrainians, that Ukraine lacks the manpower and, for now, the administrative capacity to take back land by force from Russia, which is, while enfeebled, resilient in defense.

As for NATO, it is both an organizing principle and a myth; its much fretted over “expansion” was never a very serious proposition, when even with so many new members it ended up with a much smaller collective military than it had at the beginning. It was insurance from America for something Europe thought was never going to happen, which is the reason Europe was so parsimonious with its premiums. What Ukraine wants and needs is not NATO membership but the physical reassurance that NATO promises and doesn’t provide: hard security guarantees in the form of Western arms, Western troops, Western intelligence info and Western air cover.

Putin and those around him have often spoken of Russia’s war aims. Central to his version of events is the myth that Ukraine was ready to sign a Russian-drafted peace deal in Istanbul in 2022 and was talked out of it by Western warmongers, England’s Boris Johnson chief among them. In fact, Ukraine was never close to signing the draft treaty, which was a document of surrender. But Putin still harks back to it, and the text has emerged, giving us, together with other events, a way to consider how ready America is to give him what he wants.

Russia has already said that any Western peacekeeping force in Ukraine after a ceasefire is out of the question, but the Istanbul draft goes much further. It demands that Ukraine renounce any defense treaties or cooperation with other countries, allow no foreign troops on its soil, give up any missiles or drones with a range of more than 155 miles and reduce its military to less than half its pre-invasion size. The draft also proposed that Ukraine’s demobilization and disarmament be supervised by Russia. Ukraine’s Western allies were to have signed the peace deal with Russia as guarantors of Ukraine’s security, but the treaty was drafted in such a way that were Russia to attack Ukraine again, Russia would be able to veto Western intervention on Ukraine’s behalf. Will America push back on this? And will it undertake to go on providing ammunition and spare parts for the weapons it has already given Ukraine?

What will America’s response be to Russia’s demand for more territory than it already occupies? Since the Istanbul talks in 2022, Russia has declared five Ukrainian regions to be part of Russia: Donetsk and Luhansk in the east and Crimea, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south. Of these, it has complete control only of Crimea. Will America back Russia in its attempt to force Ukraine to hand over these huge, heavily populated areas of free Ukraine, including the large cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, to Putin?

Will America help Putin try to depose Zelensky? He would have been up for election last year, but he remains in power legally while the country is under martial law, and it is hard to imagine that in anything remotely resembling a fair election in a free Ukraine he would be beaten by anyone more Russia-friendly. And yet ousting Zelensky and putting a puppet in place in Kyiv has always been, an continues to be, one of Putin’s war aims. Even under present circumstances, the idea that Putin and Trump might conspire to insert a Putin nominee as Zelensky’s replacement, under the delusion that Ukrainians would accept the switch, is far-fetched, but we search in vain for a firm ground of the possible on which to stand.

Many of these questions, of course, can’t be settled between America and Russia. The obvious drawback to Trump and Putin performing a truth-free, morality-free cosplay of Reagan and Gorbachev is that unless the US president plans to intervene militarily on Russia’s behalf, and perhaps not even then, any deal requires the consent of Ukraine. It is a lot to ask of Ukraine not only to give up its hopes of getting its lost territories back, but to give up land it still holds. And what is the incentive for Ukraine to demilitarize and leave itself undefended under the supervision of the country that has just killed tens of thousands of its people and smashed its cities to smithereens?

The same bullheaded charge to peace may also damage Russian demands that might seem acceptable from the outside: its insistence on a constitutionally enshrined special status for the Russian language in Ukraine, and on banning small far-right Ukrainian organizations involved in violence against Jews and Soviet power in the mid-20th century. Again, what is the incentive for Ukraine to yield on these, when all Trump is offering in exchange is to plunder the country’s mineral resources, when it was Putin who made the Russian language unpopular, and radical nationalists popular?

Europe, too, frozen out of the Saudi talks and attacked in Munich by Trump’s vice-president for resisting the march of populism, has more power than it seems to realize to obstruct a bad deal, and will have to be reckoned with eventually. Nobody but Europe will lead the rebuilding of Ukraine; Europe, too, has a say in lifting sanctions against and returning assets to Russia. It can’t replace America’s defense industries, but it can sustain Ukraine’s war effort with arms for now.

Much has been said of the indecisiveness of Europe’s bickering leaders, and the ambivalence of its people towards Ukraine, but perhaps the hardest thing of all is overcoming the cognitive dissonance that comes with accepting quite how much of an enemy to its friends America has suddenly become.

(London Review of Books)

Mousey’s Bar on East 13th Street and Avenue C, Lower East Side, New York City in 1976. (photo by George Cohen)

13 Comments

Paul Modic March 14, 2025

ecstatic spring sleep
night raining turkey soup dreams
joyous dawn dancing

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Craig Stehr March 14, 2025

Up early at the Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter for a new intake, mandatory and necessary to clearly define the new rules and regulations, in an environment of rampant drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and chaos. Once again I expressed my appreciation to the staff, since I am able to make use of the place in order to be supportive of the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil, which is soon to return to its primary location directly across from the White House. I feel fine! Not identified with the body nor the mind, Immortal Self I am. Good luck in Mendocino County as the American experiment with freedom and democracy goes completely off the rails. And remember, the government does not owe you anything, according to local politician Mo Mulheren. If anybody wishes to set up an eco-revolutionary base in the region, please contact me.
Craig Louis Stehr (Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com)

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- Bruce McEwen March 14, 2025
  
  Heads up, Craig: the president said he wants to sweep the riff-raff under the red carpet, tidy up for foreign dignitaries, keep up appearances all that rot but hey, the BLM memorial was condemned as graffiti and whitewashed yesterday so the peace and Justice vigil across the street will most definitely be disappearing overnight… stand back and watch it fall.
  
  Reply
  - Craig Stehr March 15, 2025
    
    Anybody can show up in front of the White House and do whatever they want! It doesn’t require a permit. Secondarily, Muriel Bowser, mayor of the District of Columbia, agreed to the whitewashing of the BLM message for a number of stated reasons. First, she said that the original statement made in response to a death at the hands of the police had been adequately made. Second, there is a new mural incoming: “America 250” is the theme. Third, she agreed with Donald Trump and wished to cooperate with the tidying up of the district just in time for the Cherry Blossom Festival. Bruce, it’s complicated here. ;-))
    
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    - Mike Jamieson March 15, 2025
      
      As someone who in 1992 obtained a required permit for an educational display at zero point of the White House ellipse and in 1993 at Lafayette Park for a rally with a stage and at the WH sidewalk for a demonstration, I would suggest it’s complicated. Maybe very small scale presences don’t require a permit but looking up today’s requirements (for some young folks recently) it seems even more complicated these days. CNN and AP and the networks gave us great coverage! The Secret Service were very friendly, only one asshole national park police (who SS officials saw and approached us to apologize for that).
      
      Reply
      - Mike Jamieson March 15, 2025
        
        The AI tool Grok summarizes the history:
        From Ai called Grok:
        [One correction: the 510c3 status was ended by a vote of the Board in 2000.]
        Mike Jamieson, along with Ed Komarek, co-founded Operation Right to Know (ORTK) in 1992. This grassroots movement aimed to demand an end to what they perceived as a government cover-up regarding UFOs and extraterrestrial contact. The initiative emerged after Jamieson wrote an article on political action in Bill Moore’s Focus magazine, prompting Komarek to reach out and propose a demonstration in Washington, D.C. The two agreed to collaborate, with the first White House protest in June 1992 intended to signal to the UFO community that the issue was fundamentally political, requiring political solutions rather than purely scientific ones.
        ORTK’s mission was to push for transparency, asserting that political manipulation of UFO data hindered scientific inquiry. They organized multiple demonstrations, including a notable second White House protest in July 1993, which gained mainstream media attention, and others at the Pentagon and the General Accounting Office (GAO). These efforts even drew interest from figures like Larry King. The group sought to challenge what they saw as a decades-long government effort to suppress information and redirect the UFO community away from activism, a trend they traced back to the influence of figures like Donald Keyhoe.
        Despite organizing around 10 demonstrations across the U.S. and the U.K. between 1992 and 1995, ORTK disbanded around 1995, as Jamieson and Komarek felt they couldn’t spark the widespread public uprising they’d hoped for against what they called a “massive 60-year-old government cover-up.” However, they believed their actions made an impact, putting both the government and public on notice. Jamieson, who later identified himself as a retired psychiatric technician, remained active in discussions about extraterrestrial intelligence, as seen in his writings on platforms like Medium. Operation Right to Know was later revived by Komarek writings on platforms like Medium. Operation Right to Know was later revived by Komarek in 2017, coordinated via a Facebook group, though Jamieson’s involvement in this revival is unclear.
        
        Reply
- Call It As I See It March 14, 2025
  
  The government owes you the right to be free and pursue your happiness in the way want to live. But to do this in a law abiding manner.
  
  It doesn’t say they’ll pay for it. Although some have become very comfortable in working the system.
  
  Reply
  - Jurgen Stoll March 14, 2025
    
    Does the law abiding part apply to your fearless leader too? And how about to the richest people that don’t think they should have to pay any taxes, but think they can run the government any way they want by buying politicians or threatening them with well funded primaries. You’re living in the land of the free to die quickly if you can’t afford to pay for health insurance.
    
    Reply
Ted Stephens March 14, 2025

I read Drew Mcgary’s piece to the democrats.
This is the first I saw that the president wanted to bring back cockfighting.
This could be interesting.
Can you imagine seeing one between the president and Chuck Schumer?
Now that would be interesting, especially if they didn’t use chickens!

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Richard Weinkle March 14, 2025

Dave?

DAVE’s NOT HERE.

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Bruce McEwen March 14, 2025

Hitler gave his country Volkswagens; trump gave his country Teslas… the more things change the more they stay the same; but Aristotle was right in coining the term amelioration (based on his patient observation that the world tends to improve— Teslas being better than Volkswagens, for instance)— but like many Luddites we will keep our VW bug and see how it goes…. .

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Doug Holland March 14, 2025

I miss “peace to the cottages.”

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Matt Kendall March 15, 2025

Alright Major let me set a couple things straight from your reporting yesterday.

Overtime,
What I said was we are on track with the budgeted overtime in the jail and on patrol. We budgeted 2.3 for patrol and 1.3 for the jail and are tracking to be on budget. We may be a little over in the jail. This is because we were funded the amount we needed last year.

Inmate health is a huge issue in Mendocino County. We have many trips per week to the emergency room for inmates who suffer from a lifetime of addiction and abuse of their bodies. Many of these folks are classified as “2 deputy movement” because of assaultive nature. This causes us to call people in for coverage to meet the mandated staffing levels. This is a constant issue.

Three steps forward and 2 steps back, well that’s because many recruits don’t successfully get through training. We have also had a lot of deputies simply decide to leave the state of California, I just received the resignation of a deputy who is moving to Arizona. I have also released people over discipline and we always have those folks who train here and head to another county for big pay increases.

“it seems like the price of doing business has gone up, but the profit we get from doing business is gone down.” I was referring to county revenue sources also criminal fines which were once handed down upon conviction which are almost non existent compared to many years past.

The massive increase in budget ask this coming year is based on the fact we will need to add employees for the new wing of the jail and the contracts which were implemented for employees.

We are working hard to get the numbers down and find a budget we can live with. It’s not easy when we have big bills and small revenues, but we will get there.

Stay tuned as we work through this and hopefully we can find some kind of industry that would allow our county to thrive again.

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Mendocino County Today: Friday 3/14/2025

13 Comments

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