MIKE GENIELLA:
Why did Judge Brennan apparently give the court only five days' notice of his stepping down in the face of Judge Ann Moorman's service on the state appellate court, and the required training of two new judge appointees? Sources indicate that the local bench assumed Brennan would be retiring next year and could assist in Ukiah in the interim. His fellow judges were relying on him to help spread out Judge Moorman's caseload, according to them. Brennan refused, according to court sources, creating the current situation. As it is, retired Judges Richard Henderson and John Behnke stepped up and are helping bridge the gap. Perhaps Judge Brennan will offer his explanation?
GOOD NEWS — IF YOU THINK THAT NOT FILLING VACANCIES TO SAVE MONEY IS A GOOD WAY TO SAVE MONEY…
From the CEO Report for October 2025:
“Based on year-to-date payroll actuals through October 2025, plus utilizing the most recent payroll to annualize the remaining fiscal year payroll expenses, the County is anticipating realizing $4,645,000 or a little over 85% of the total $5,246,657. The County must remain diligent and continue to follow the Strategic Hiring processes to realize the full attrition savings for FY25/26. Additionally, the County must ensure one-time funds are utilized for one-time expenses.”
Mark Scaramella Notes:
- CEO Darcie Antle’s final sentence in the above item sounds like a routine statement of the obvious. But it comes just two weeks after last week’s big disclosure that County finance people found a $12 million (or maybe $11 million or $16 million) carryover after last year’s books were closed (as of June 30, 2025). In light of that, we conclude that Ms. Antle is emphasizing to the Supervisors and the operational departments that they better keep their grubby hands off her carryover.
- Last May CEO Antle promised to provide a monthly report on vacancies and associated finances/savings as the “strategic hiring process” played out. We have yet to see any such reporting or details about the “strategic hiring process” which is now purported to have “saved” up to almost $4.7 million by leaving vacancies unfilled. There has been no listing of where the vacancies and alleged savings are, no mention of of whether any of the newly vacated positions are scheduled for re-hire and when, nothing about the impact of the vacancies on the operational departments, nor what the vacancy rates are in the General Fund departments where the vacancies have grown so large.
FROM THE SOCIAL SERVICES DEPARTMENT’S OCTOBER REPORT:
Sometimes staff engagement means taking a moment to have a little fun. At MCDSS, our staff work hard every day to support the county’s most vulnerable community members—work that can come with a certain level of stress. That’s why finding ways to connect, laugh, and recharge is so important. This Halloween, the department embraced that spirit of fun during its staff celebration. Director Parker and Assistant Director White joined in the festivities, donning Star Wars-themed costumes alongside staff. The lighthearted event brought smiles throughout the offices and served as a reminder that building a strong, supportive workplace culture includes making space for moments of joy and connection.
JULIE BEARDSLEY WRITES:
“Esmeralda, a Bay Area-based developer founded by Devon Zuegel, wants to transform the 266-acre property on Cloverdale’s south end into a new mixed-use neighborhood with homes, public parkland, restaurants, retail space, multiple hotels, and a conference and event center. Zuegel said the plan scales back what has been approved on the site for the past two decades and adds a public park that would be gifted to the city.
The development would offer 166 detached single-family homes, from one-bedroom starter homes to four-bedroom models with accessory dwelling units. The average single-family home would be about 1,582 square feet.
Plans also call for 239 attached “village flats” — studios to three-bedroom apartments — and 200 “active living senior” units, from studios to two-bedroom apartments. Home prices would range from $600,000 to $4 million, according to Esmeralda documents, which note that pricing would shift with the housing market.
The resort component would include three separate lodging concepts: a 120-room resort hotel with two restaurants, a 64-room boutique hotel and a 16-unit apartment-style resort building.
A spa, fitness center, racquetball club, Japanese-style hot spring and more than 21,000 square feet of retail space round out the concept.”
The deep-thinkers of this huge development just south of Cloverdale need to ask themselves where is the WATER going to come from?
To say that this development would drastically change the character of Cloverdale, is a massive understatement. Everyone in Cloverdale that I’ve talked to says a resounding “NO” to this project.
I'VE LONG BEEN NOSTALGIC for the long-gone times when Mendo's public meetings were interesting, even fun, meetings where violent exchanges of opinions were common and occasionally emphasized with a few actual punches. Why even I, an idealistic citizen simply trying to do my part to ensure clean government, was physically attacked walking out of the first Boonville school board meeting I ever attended. I knew my presentation wasn't being well received when persons seated behind me began muttering, "Sit down. Shut up. Who the hell are you?" The Anderson Valley was, ah, quite insular in 1972. But it was a real community complete with men's leagues and potluck gatherings. Now? Incoherent, transient, a few affinity groups but no community in the known sense of community.
RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy’ by Vincent Bugliosi. By far the clearest and most convincing book on the subject I’ve ever read. Bugliosi, best known as prosecutor of the Manson Family, puts his prosecutorial skills to effective use here as he lays out the event in chronological order, complete with the detailed movements of Oswald and Jack Ruby with descriptions of their behavior from an impressive number of eyewitnesses. Conclusion? Oswald and Ruby acted alone. Bugliosi also offers the clearest, and it seems to me, most irrefutable account of the wounds Kennedy and Governor Connolly suffered. The so-called “magic bullet” is fully and plausibly explained. A friend lent me the book. I didn’t open it right away, but when I did I couldn’t put it down. I know I’ll hear from people wed to the conspiratorial version of Kennedy’s murder, but Bugliosi’s case will be difficult to undermine.
ANOTHER BOOK that recently captured my feeble attentions is called ‘Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West’ by Dan Schultz. The cover has a Time mag quote calling the book “riveting.” Not for me it wasn’t. But it was interesting and the title turned out to be misleading, in that the “greatest manhunt” really turned out to be a huge clown show of competing police forces who only found two of the three fugitives because the two shot and killed themselves more or less in plain view. The third fugitive should have been found but he, too, was only uncovered by accident years later. ‘Dead Run’ tells the story of three young militia-oriented guys, one influenced by an admix of Ed Abbey, who got together to kill one cop and almost killed another in a crude plot to maybe blow up the massive Glen Canyon dam in Arizona. It’s not clear what exactly they had in mind with a stolen cement truck. Apparently, they intended to pack it with explosives and blow up something big with it, but steal a big truck in broad daylight in a small town and, Whoa, Dude, your conspiracy is off to a bad start. The Cement Truck Gang had read a lot of the usual paranoid bullshit the fascisti put out on the internet about the “ZOG” (Zionist Occupation Government) and how we’ve lost all our freedoms here in Freedom Land, especially our “right” to own military assault rifles. The three dummies bought it all, and prepared for a showdown with ZOG by burying lots of rifles, ammo, explosives, and survivalist gear in remote areas of the Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Colorado deserts… it apparently not occurring to them that the feds, not to mention local police agencies, have more and bigger guns and pay people quite well to use them.
FROM THE ARCHIVE (January 2014)
GIVE DENNIS O'BRIEN high marks for doggedness. He is now in settlement negotiations with the County over a free speech matter 18 months old.
ON August 13, 2012, O’Brien, of the Mendocino Environmental Center, filed a $10,000 claim against Mendocino County “for actions of Detective Andrew Whiteaker, failure to process timely complaint by Captain Randy Johnson, failure to initiate an investigation by Sheriff Allman, violation of civil rights, infliction of emotional distress, false authority and imprisonment.”
THE INCIDENT, described fully below, occurred at the Ukiah Crossroads Shopping Center on North State Street and at the Sheriff's office on nearby Low Gap Road.
WHEN O'BRIEN brought his complaint to the Supervisors in late 2012 he and it elicited rude impatience and yawning indifference from them.
“ON APRIL 16, 2012 at approximately 3:30pm I parked in the parking lot of the Ukiah Crossroads Shopping Center at the end of North State Street. As I walked toward Raley's Supermarket I saw a woman on the sidewalk with a clipboard in her hand. She was standing near a large stone pillar on the opposite side from the entrance to Raley's. She was not in any way interfering with foot traffic. If anyone tried to enter the store using the space she was occupying, they would have run into a stone pillar. As I approached, the woman asked me if I would like to sign some ballot petitions. I said I would. She had at least three petitions to get ballot measures on the ballot. I signed two of them. Before I could get to the next one Detective Andrew Whiteaker appeared. He was wearing a shirt with a Sheriff's logo on the left breast and Sheriff's Office badge on his belt. He stated that the woman seeking signatures to the ballot measure must leave. The woman stated what she was doing and said she was just exercising her free-speech rights. Detective Whiteaker stated she was on private property and that the store manager had requested that she leave. I then stated that the Supreme Court had held that a shopping center was the equivalent of a town square and that it could be used for gathering signatures for political purposes. Detective Whiteaker replied that he was enforcing California law and that the owner had the right to ask anyone to leave the place of business. I then asked him to identify himself. He stated he was Detective Whiteaker and confirmed he was a member of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department. I asked if he was on duty and he said Yes. I asked him if he was aware of the First Amendment, and he said Yes. I asked him if he knew that the First Amendment applied to the states. He said that did not affect his enforcement of private property laws. When I stated that I believed that Sheriff Allman would disagree, Detective Whiteaker replied that Sheriff Allman could not tell him how to enforce the law. I replied that Sheriff Allman could tell him if he was making a mistake. Detective Whiteaker then stated that if we did not stop he would have to arrest us for trespassing on private property. The woman gathering signatures left immediately and I walked into the store. I was not able to review or sign the additional ballot petitions that the woman had left with. This is a sworn declaration that I have submitted to the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office as a formal complaint. The back page of what I've just passed out has my conversation with Captain Greg Van Patten who is the immediate supervisor of Detective Whiteaker. If you would like to hear more of that, one of you will have to ask me. I'm out of time.”
THEN-BOARD CHAIR John McCowen, who owns the building at 106 West Standley which houses O'Brien and his activist colleagues, said, “Thank you Mr. O'Brien. As you know, we are not allowed to consider items not on the agenda.”
O'Brien: “You are not allowed to act on them. You are allowed to discuss them.”
Mr. O’Brien is correct, according to the Brown Act and the Board’s own rules. Supervisors routinely engage members of the public in dialog on matters that citizens bring up. They just can’t vote on them.
McCowen: “Well, we are not really allowed to discuss it without having it on the agenda, so thank you for the information.”
HOWEVER, soon after Mr. O'Brien shuffled from the podium, acting County librarian Annette DeBacker and the Supervisors chirpily discussed her new job and the extra money she’s got to work with since Measure A passed last year, giving the Library a big infusion of new funds. The smiley chirp-chirp interlude was not on the agenda.
O'Brien: “You're allowed to ask questions.”
O’Brien is again correct.
McCowen, exasperated and raising his voice: “Thank you!”
O'Brien: “And you have 10 minutes to do that…”
O’Brien is again correct.
McCowen: “Well, thank you for the inform—”
O'Brien: “If any supervisor would like to hear the rest of the issue—”
McCowen: “Thank you, Mr. O'Brien. Thank you.”
NO SUPERVISORS had any questions, including Supervisor Hamburg, who won a nearly identical free speech lawsuit against Walmart a few years ago.
IT NOW APPEARS, however, that the County Counsel's office agrees that O'Brien was and is correct. We hope he gets the full ten grand in damages. One would think that the cops and mall store managers would have long ago understood that this litigated-to-smithereens issue of protests and signature gathering is legal in mall country.
THIS IS THE GUY WE WANT, NOT MCGUIRE
Santa Rosa Lawyer Mounts Congressional Bid Against Huffman, Et Al
by Austin Murphy
Kyle Wilson’s mother worked at Walmart. His father installed countertops. They weren’t affluent — not even close — but three decades ago his parents still earned enough to buy a modest home in Windsor.
“It was a simple house,” said Wilson, now a Santa Rosa-based labor lawyer. “But they owned it. They were invested in this idea of a social contract — you work hard, and you’ll be able to build a life with your kids, and make sure they have that same opportunity.”
Today, he said, that contract is in shreds, and the path for young people to save and eventually own a home has “gone completely missing.”
That erosion of the American Dream is one of the main reasons Wilson is running for Congress in California’s recently reconfigured 1st District — a vast nine-county stretch with Santa Rosa at its southern edge.
Wilson, who turns 33 on Saturday — the same day he’s holding a 1 p.m. “Coffee with Kyle” event at Brew in Santa Rose — has never run for or held elected office. But that lack of political experience, he argues, is exactly what appeals to the voters he hopes to reach.
A labor attorney who sues employers for wage theft, Wilson aligns himself with progressive, democratic-socialist candidates like Zohran Mamdani, whose Nov. 4 victory in the New York City mayor’s race over establishment Democrat Andrew Cuomo stunned political observers.
Wilson recalls seeing Mamdani last summer on TV or social media. “He’d taken the world by storm, put together a movement built on people that were tired of the establishment, tired of not being heard.”
He said he senses that same undercurrent here. “People have had enough of the broken system, and they want something different.”
He filed paperwork for his campaign, Kyle for Congress, on June 27. The bid is widely seen as a long shot — but, he notes, so was Mamdani’s run a year ago.
“I’m not naive about how difficult it’s going to be, and the uphill battle I’m facing,” Wilson said.
Such is his desire to drive change, Wilson said, that any hardships ahead would be far outweighed by the regret he’d feel if he never tried. “I just felt like I had to do it.”
Wilson’s political worldview was shaped long before law school. His great-grandfather fled the Dust Bowl, settled in Sebastopol and worked as an apple farmer. One of his nine children, Owen Wilson — Kyle’s grandfather — served as a battalion chief for the Santa Rosa Fire Department in the 1990s and later as the firefighters union president. That lineage, Wilson said, instilled an early appreciation for public service.
In 2005, his family relocated to Spanish Springs, Nevada, following construction work. During his junior year of high school, Wilson won an essay contest that sent him to Washington, D.C., for lectures and tours of historic monuments. That came in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which cost his father his job and the family its home.
The trip left a “deep impression,” he said, adding he was “watching the government bail out the banks while my family and millions of other families across America were left to fend for themselves.” It also gave him an early sense of “the power of the law, and what it can do to help people’s lives.”
The family returned to California in 2009. Wilson finished high school at Analy, studying for AP exams while the family cycled through weekly motel rooms depending on what they could afford. He excelled nonetheless, earning a Regents Scholarship to UCLA and becoming the first in his family to attend college.
Taylor Bohlen, Wilson’s UCLA roommate and a Sonoma native, recalls him as more “reserved” than he is now. Wilson, he said, had “strong convictions about what’s right and wrong” and the ability to “analytically evaluate” problems. “It does not shock me in the slightest that Kyle pursued a kind of fighting-for-the-people profession.”
After majoring in neuroscience — he seriously considered medical school — Wilson earned his Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School in New York City. He worked at Santa Rosa’s Spaulding McCullough & Tansil before joining Blackstone Law in Los Angeles last year.
Pamela Stevens, his former colleague in Santa Rosa and now a deputy line attorney in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, remembered Wilson telling her early on that he wanted to run for office.
“Here’s this young guy, great resume, Columbia Law, just killing it, working for one of the best firms in Sonoma County,” she said. “He wouldn’t have to do anything else if he didn’t want to. But he’s thinking big. He really wants to use the tools he’s been given, to be part of the change.”
Wilson’s already-steep climb grew steeper Thursday when state Sen. Mike McGuire, of Healdsburg, ended months of speculation and announced he would run for the newly drawn district. He joins Chico educator and nonprofit leader Audrey Denney, a fellow Democrat, and the incumbent, Republican Doug LaMalfa.
While McGuire — the current president pro tem of the California senate — is “really good at working within the system,” Wilson said, “my goal is to change the system. People are tired of the establishment and tired of the status quo.”
The politics of the redrawn district make that challenge evident. The further north one travels — past Ukiah, toward Red Bluff, Susanville and other conservative strongholds — the more Trump flags fly and the fewer voters embrace democratic socialism or its policy platform: universal health care, free child care, paid family leave, and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
But Wilson insists those communities aren’t out of reach. “If you look at the data and who these people vote for, there’s a very strong preference for Bernie Sanders in a lot of the voting history in our district,” he said. “I’m going to have some disagreements with people in these red areas. But I don’t think the answer is to rush to the center. The answer is to lead with an economic message that connects with everybody.”
The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) lists LaMalfa’s other opponents in the 2026 election as Democrats Rose Penelope Yee, Casey Stewart, and Kyle Wilson, as well as Erika Rhoden, who listed her party affiliation as “unknown” in her FEC filing. James Salegui of Siskiyou County – which like Shasta, will shift to District 2 and out of LaMalfa’s purview
Rsidents of Shasta and other North State counties moving into the new District 2 boundaries will be presented with fresh choices for their congressional representation in 2026. Jared Huffman, a Marin county Democrat, has been the congressional representative of District 2 since 2013, and like LaMalfa, has indicated plans to run for re-election in 2026. In the last District 2 election, Huffman won 71% of the vote against Republican Chris Coulombe.
Three additional candidates have already thrown their hat in the ring for District 2 representation, according to the FEC database.They include Democrat Kevin Eisele, a healthcare worker and former army medic, Independent Colby Smart, the superintendent of the Humboldt County Office of Education, and Cody Nikolas Polundiak, who has no campaign site and no party preference.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] The Canadian geography on the whole is not friendly to human life. Most of Canada only deglaciated 10,000 years ago, and some areas only deglaciated 5,000 years ago. This land is NOT meant for Homo sapiens. That's why nearly all Canadians live in our largest cities.
Canadians are a SERF nation, the most indoor people in the world, the most allergic people in the world, the most vitamin D deficient people in the world.
I look forward to the world re-glaciating and Canada disappearing under ice. Good riddance.
[2] The one sure way I know of to tell a person's net worth is to check the watch. Most times (no pun intended) if it's a vintage well known brand they probably have money. Might be wearing old worn out jeans, Chuck Taylors and decades old flannel shirt, but the watch is a dead giveaway. In my (affluent) area, someone recently had a watch stolen. The crime victim stated the value as somewhere between 50 and 90 thousand dollars. A friend of mine said, “Yeah whatever, it could go forty thousand dollars either way.”
[3] There are a lot of good people out there who are armed to the teeth. I am one of them. We have seen too many end of the world dystopian movies where society de-evolves into Mad Max kind of shit. I don't believe that will happen. There will be roving bands of gangs, sure, but they won't last long. If there is no law, people will take the law into their own hands and large mobs of fair minded people will put down and eliminate the roving bands of gangs. There might be a time of chaos and ugliness but it will be short.
Evil is alive and well in this world but there is still much good out there and many good people who won't put up with the bullshit for very long.
[4] If we can’t even agree on what it means to be intelligent, the entire discussion of whether some genes might increase a person’s base level of it is moot. And that’s besides the whole nature vs. nurture debate. So anyone who says that they can measure “smartness” is instantly suspect in my book. And doubly so if all their measures always seem to put the group that they belong to at the top of the heap. We’ve probably all met someone in our lives who had a limited formal education but was extremely smart. Maybe it was a Depression-era grandparent who could make anything out of anything. Maybe it was a friend who had an unerring ability to read someone’s true character. Maybe it was an autodidact with a passion for something like Victorian novels or trains or whatever. These are smart people. There are also people who can solve Wordle in two moves and calculate in hexadecimal numbers and so on. These are the people that the traditional IQ test picks up as smart. They are such a tiny sliver of what I consider smart people that to focus on them and to try to ascribe a genetic component to their skills seems to me to be ludicrous.
[5] I’ll be satisfied if Trump is hounded from office and dies in obscurity. In the entirely plausible scenario where he proves to be guilty of some kind (or many kinds) of sex crimes in concert with Epstein, it will be a bonus for him to face criminal charges for them. But his MAGA followers are so invested in the delusion that Trump is their hero and not the pillock that he actually is, it might be prudent to forgo justice. Otherwise their psychodrama at his downfall might morph into actual political violence and destabilization.
[6] Alexis de Tocqueville nailed it when he said “I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.” That is one of the reasons why governments always grow bigger and more corrupt – sociopathic types are attracted to powerful positions and the parties become intertwined in their corruption, known as the “uni-party” – serving themselves, getting rich off the taxpayers while not serving the people.
[7] EPSTEIN, an on-line comment:
I feel that this whole "Epstein" thing is hugely blown out of proportion (compare it to the Pakistani gang rapes of underage girls, 12-16 y.o., in the UK, to see the artificial hysteria), while politicians and other public figures are compromised mostly by the Me-Me-Me-Too style theatrical performance than anything really worthy of attention.
I watched a documentary about the Epstein case a few years ago. His initial prosecution in Florida was for paying high school girls $200 for doing things while he masturbated or for bringing in friends. Young women were asked to bring their younger sisters. Some women and girls were enjoying his patronage, got invited to the NM ranch, the island and getting paid for schooling. The documentary was mostly MeToo style, looking like multiple actresses reading the same script, but some women refused to be interviewed (perhaps, they've found it stupid).
While it's pretty rotten behavior from a rich man, for the most part of the world an adult having sex with a 16-17 y.o wouldn't be a crime. For many countries even younger. It's the tail wagging the dog, girls being victims because they were in Florida where the age of consent is high, 18. If Epstein were in Canada, he could've been investigated for fooling around with one girl which was 14 y.o., but the rest would've been no story. If he were in Latin America, even this would've been legal (not to be confused with human trafficking which is by force, not consent). Sure, "caught with an underage prostitute" is classic blackmail. But how many were actually caught? For now, it's just hysterical screaming about "affiliations" and the travel list, whatever the purpose of that travel was, like discussing funding and drinking coffee. Screeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaam!!!!!!!!!! But I'm pretty much sure the Deep State didn't want to expose their relationship, that's the real scandal. Campaign contributions from the Deep State, huh.
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