They Can’t Even Govern Ukiah

Denny’s restaurant, longtime cornerstone of Highway 101 and Ukiah’s busiest road into town, closed a couple years ago.

Nothing was done to prevent it being destroyed by various vagrants, criminals and druggies who infest the area. It’s not even clear city officials knew it had shut down; the Lords of Ukiah wouldn’t be caught alive at a Denny’s.

In March a representative from Habit Hamburger came to town to discuss purchasing Denny’s. The project manager met with the city’s Design Review Board. Among the comments from the Habit Hamburger rep were these:

1) “We would like to have outside seating, but that option is not preferred where there is a lot of transient population.”

2) “We’ve had a lot of people trying to break into the building, and have had to build a fence to keep people from parking trailers there.”

3) “People hide under the freeway overpass which leads to difficulties with our insurance company, and especially with all the fires that have happened. Our insurance company has actually been sending inspectors (to the Denny’s site) and if they see any homeless encampments around the property they send us a notice.”

4) Asked if the restaurant might be able to provide partially enclosed outside seating at the refurbished restaurant, the representative said, “Any (outside dining area built) would have to do a really good job, because people have climbed on the roof, so it would have to be almost entirely enclosed. Also, it has been noted that barriers become an attraction to certain people who climb over them.”

Lesson: a once-popular, thriving dining spot folds, leaves behind an empty but functioning restaurant, and the city shrugs its collective shoulders and spends the next two years ignoring it as it crumbles, decays, falls prey to criminals, druggies, vandals, arsonists and homeless who cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

It’s a scenario Ukiah has practiced to perfection through the decades as witnessed in the Palace Hotel, U.S. Post Office, the old train depot, North State Cafe and others. But the Perkins Street corridor is the main artery into town, and among the most vital and valuable commercial properties in the city limits.

By ignoring it, and worse, by allowing our imported criminal class to wreak havoc upon it, the city makes the Denny’s location less inviting, less desirable and less affordable.

Ukiah administrators are unwilling or unable to govern Ukiah. They ignore shops and stores closing all over town; East Perkins is a ghost street. The city is powerless in the face of ever-expanding homeless swarms, and has no answer to rampant graffiti that uglies the city from north to south.

Instead they focus on big ideas, big projects. Is there ever a time when officials aren’t boasting about new “affordable housing” projects anywhere they can be crammed into empty spaces? These monstrosities are government housing of a style and scope unprecedented in Ukiah. Our leaders love to Think Big, but ignore the little things that make life worse.

The downtown streetscape, botched from the start, will still be tormenting drivers 75 years from now. City staff grows and grows, having hired so many extra “workers” it bought the BofA building to accommodate them. What do these government workers do, other than ignore the homeless, the graffiti, the boarded-up State Street and the deteriorating Denny’s Restaurant?

Local officials, suffering no shortage of self adoration, are now launching an ill-conceived annexation plan to spread their visionary magic across another 800 acres. It will more than double the size of a modest little city that has remained oddly unique and comfortably accommodating through 150 years.

Shall we forfeit all that makes Ukiah Ukiah, so (temporary) bosses can make Ukiah Rohnert Park? Do you live here happily dreaming of the day Ukiah resembles an anonymous appendage to San Jose?

Are citizens obligated to acquire more land so administrators can carry out more foolish plans, but on a grander scale? When the bosses demand fresh targets for their glorious ambitions are we obliged to provide them?

Some fine day these fancy folks will stand on the roof of the still-empty Palace Hotel and overlook their newly acquired lands, as Caesar must have stood on a hillside looking down into Gaul, or as minor deities shake a snow globe and proudly admire their works.