If you retain sentimental notions of local government being responsive to local citizens, and if you believe your voice and opinions are taken seriously by Ukiah’s leaders, I want to smile and pat you on your little head.
So darned cute! Bless your pea-pickin’ heart!
Naive and incomprehensible of course, but still awful darn cute.
Because while city officials cut ribbons, break ground and plant cornerstones down on East Perkins Street they do it in spite of what the average Ukiahan wants for downtown.
Your choice? Shut up.
Your other choice? 1) a new courthouse you never voted for. 2) no opportunity to analyze its merits. 3) no chance to discuss it.
This ugly mess is California muscling ghastly new courthouses into every county, replacing the old, stately classic building erected 100 or more years ago.
The State cares a great deal about your opinion, of course, and someone with a questionnaire will be knocking on your door within the next 72 hours. Have you any thoughts on the color(s) to paint the hallways, or whether the judges’ restrooms should have toilet seats covered in chinchilla, mink or baby seal skins? Thank you for your input.
It’s been a stealth development from the start, ramrodded into existence with zero local input. Despite newspaper stories and opinion pieces requesting local politicians, judges and/or city administrators to make public comments on the project, it remained shrouded in secrecy.
Where were County supervisors? What were their thoughts? And, given the project is the biggest in the city’s near 200-year history, didn’t city council members feel a need to speak to the peasants who pay the bills?
Why didn’t our local mob of judges issue statements voicing either support or misgivings about the project, if only to dispel rampant rumors it’s the only group, tiny as it is, that stands to benefit from the new courthouse? How? Judges will gain everything from names engraved on impressive brass private parking plaques to private elevators to their suites of chambers, offices, massage parlors and dining salons.
And from the 13th floor of the new courthouse, Oh such fabulous views of the little people down below.
Did anyone pretend to care what those laboring in the building think of the plans? The DA for instance, or the Public Defender or local bar association? None have so much as a bookshelf in the new 81,000 square foot behemoth, nor a rack to hang an umbrella. All but judges shall walk to work.
And given the well-known shortage of architectural firms in Ukiah, Mendocino County and the entire state of California, it was reluctantly decided to hire a Colorado outfit to design the new building. Have you seen the “artist renditions”?
They depict a big blank vertical box with stripes; perhaps it’s the package with the real courthouse tucked inside. So ugly. So generic. So little concern for how it will mingle with Ukiah’s admittedly quirky cityscape.
We wonder how Ukiah could ever get any uglier, and then the City’s ever-chirpy Shannon Riley chases after rumors the city will demolish the old courthouse and install a park. Or maybe not.
Seriously, Ukiah might tear down one of the two or three most impressive buildings in the city?
For a park?!?
We need another park like we need another Mexican restaurant or another bicycle lane or another big box store or another scandal to ooze out of the Ukiah Police Department. Trees, dirt and empty spaces is what Mendocino County is made of. Setting aside a half-acre of grass and benches for a park in the middle of Ukiah is a bad idea; tearing down the existing courthouse is worse.
Put our next park in the big dirt patch along South State Street between Thomas and Talmage Road, up against the Burning Bridges Homeless Training Facility. Or bulldoze the parched, grim “natural” moonscape around the Grace Hudson Museum and replace it with a nice lawn with benches and tables for picnics and lunch breaks. (Like it was 20 years ago.)
Between the courthouse project and the annexation plans, Ukiah is teetering, in danger of losing its old oddball charms in exchange for a bleak, blank, nondescript nowhere with almost all the charm of an office complex in Novato.
Ukiah, California, suddenly a place full of multi-story affordable housing projects, a courthouse that looks like a mistake, a new downtown park with a plaque marking the spot as the site of all the old courthouses that once stood there, a city payroll with hundreds of overpaid civil servants.
Tom Hine says “Welcome to the Future.” TWK says “Lemme out of here.”
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