ATTENTION FORT BRAGG. Mayor Dave Turner, writing to a constituent, said Monday: "We are putting the CDBG ‘Forgivable Loan’ for Old Coast Hotel under Conduct of Business so we can have a full discussion. CDBG allows us to make some loans forgivable (usually they are low interest but when paid back to the city we can use for other CDBG qualified uses) if certain conditions are met. This will be the final action required of City Council for release of the CDBG funding for this activity. This will be on the April 13th meeting".
SO "we can have a full discussion" then go ahead and buy the Old Coast Hotel with public money and convert it to dubious purpose indeed.
AS IF FORT BRAGG doesn't have enough controversies underway, here comes Chuck Bush, Fort Bragg's new superintendent of schools. The other night about a hundred angry people turned out for a meeting of the school board to complain about him on a range of issues, mostly stemming from his bull-in-a-china shop management style. Chuckie Babe is a native, too.
YES, LIB LABS, Republicans walk among us. The Mendocino County Republican Central Committee will meet Saturday, March 14, 2015, 10:00 AM. 12:00 Noon at the Moura Senior Housing Project, Community Center, 400 South St, Fort Bragg, CA 95437. For further information contact: Evelyn Hayman, (707) 948-6467 or go to www.mendocountygop.net.
WHERE'S LINDY? The popular long-time dj at KMFB and Fort Bragg City Councilman explains: "For those of you wondering why I am not on the radio any longer, station owner "Hoot" Hooten laid me off due to financial reasons. He is really struggling and could no longer afford my salary. There were no hard feelings. If things pick-up in advertising, as they should with the Giants coming on soon, I may be back on-the-air. Thanks to all the listeners who made it possible for me to get- up early every morning for the last 32 years and attempt to deliver a quality morning show. You inspired me to always try and do my best. Now I can delve in to politics a bit more and try to do the best I can to make Fort Bragg a great place to live for all of us, young and old alike. Thank you for all the kind words over the years. It means a lot to me now."
EUREKA AVERAGED A TEMPERATURE OF 52.2F over the last three months, hot enough to erase the previous warmest winter record of 52.0F tallied in 1939-40. The US National Weather Service has been collecting temperature data Eureka since 1886. During those 129 years, no winter has been warmer than this one.
"SADLY, Pacifica is no longer focused on service to the listeners but absorbed with itself and the inhabitants therein. I call it Planet Pacifica, a term I coined during my hiring process. There is an underlying culture of grievance coupled with entitlement, and its governance structure is dysfunctional. The by-laws of the organization have opened it up to tremendous abuse, creating the opportunity for cronyism, factionalism, and faux democracy, with the result of challenging all yet helping nothing. Pacifica has been made so flat, that it is concave — no leadership is possible without an enormous struggle through the inertia that committees and collectives and STV’s (no, not sexually transmitted viruses, but single transferable votes) can engender. Pacifica calls itself a movement, yet currently it is behaves like a jobs program, a cult, or a social service agency. And oftentimes, the loudest and most obstreperous have the privilege of the microphone. There are endless meetings of committees and “task forces”— mostly on the phone — where people just like to hear themselves talk. Sometimes they get lucrative contracts from their grandstanding. It’s been grueling for someone in my position, someone like me who is not a process person, much less a political gamer. I keep asking: what’s the endgame? Paralysis has set in, coupled with organizational drift. The programming isn’t attracting many listeners anymore, either. It skews towards the narrow in its editorial stance, leans towards the niche, and change to the programming can’t occur without a fight. The listening audience is small, in other words, the stations have yet to grow into their large signals."
—Nicole Sawaya, former KZYX station manager describing the prevailing situation on the Audio Left.
THE MAN BEHIND MENDOCINOSPORTSPLUS
Interesting interview with Paul McCarthy He's from NaHamsha! we could hear from his accent. (From 2013, on the Gualala Radio station, KGUA) https://soundcloud.com/kgua/mendosports-5-20-13
MIKE THOMPSON BOYCOTTED Netanyahu's preposterous speech last week, while Congressman Jared, who did attend, at least correctly observed: “This is a prime minister who’s never seen a war he didn’t want our country to fight,” Huffman said, adding that our diplomats negotiating with Iran shouldn’t be put off-task by Netanyahu’s address.
THIS is the bravest thing Thompson has done in office, and The Huff's remark is not only true it's nicely put. Huff is looking pretty good lately.
WE ENJOYED A PLEASANT INTERVIEW THURSDAY afternoon with KZYX’s new newsperson, Valerie Kim, who, in her other life, farms Burt Cohen’s property on Lambert Lane maybe a half-mile from our office high atop the Farrer Building. Ms. Kim wanted to know about our Vineyard Fan lawsuit. Anderson Valley's senior wine industry critic, Dave Severn, happened to be in the office at the time and joined the conversation. Credit to Ms. Kim for stepping up to the plate on this local controversy.
MS. KIM said she’d heard from a few locals that if we didn’t have vineyards we’d have housing development, and what did we think about that. We responded that our lawsuit had nothing to do with issues beyond the terrible upset that vineyard frost fans cause several hundred residents of the Anderson Valley.
VINE OR 'BURBS isn't the choice. It's a false flag issue. Anderson Valley does not have the infrastructure — water or sewer system — for mass housing, and County zoning would have to be completely re-done to permit the smaller parcels that development would require.
WE'RE NOT SAYING that the industry has to pull out all their fans. We’re just saying that if the fans are too loud, the County has to do something about it, not merely dismiss complaints as “accepted farming practice.” We also pointed out that back in the 90s when timber companies allowed scattered helicopter logging there were outraged neighbors who regularly filed formal complaints about the noise — and chopper logging occurred during daylight hours, not midnight to 8am.
BUT HERE we have the equivalent of hundreds of helicopters operating at night for hours & hours, day after day and we are only aware of three complaints (one of them our own) being filed.
WE ALSO HAVE a problem that County officials could easily deal with if they cared to. We’ve have “ad hoc” committees over the years on trash, on marijuana policy, on grading ordinances, on housing plans, etc. But wind fans? Nada. There are plenty of ameliorating noise reduction alternatives the industry could consider: slower speeds, newer technology, different locations, water, sound proofing, and sound barriers, a publicly noticed permit process, and so forth. Vineyard noise abatement should be manageable. But the industry, with typical arrogance, simply says, "The fans are part of our agricultural effort and it you don't like it, try and stop us."
WHAT DO WE GET from Official Mendocino County? An email from County Counsel Doug Losak saying he had no response to our request to discuss the problem. Then we got Losak and the three vineyard owners refusing to even accept mail service of the notice of the lawsuit, requiring us to hire people to find them and serve papers on them — an obvious stalling tactic to avoid dealing with the issue until after this year’s frost season is over.
THAT, plus County Ag Commissioner Morse’s dismissive general statement that vineyard fans that clearly disturb the sleep of neighbors are an “accepted practice.” Which they aren't. Almost all of the some 80 fans in Anderson Valley were installed only last year.
MS. KIM, reporting for KZYX, said she planned to try to get statements from the County or the vineyards — which will be interesting, assuming they deign to comment. We expect the County to continue stonewalling with statements like, “We can’t comment because it’s under litigation,” the standard boilerplate gutlessness we've come to expect from the local "leadership."
LOCAL GOVERNMENT should be willing to at least talk about the problem in general terms, as they did last June 3 when Supervisor Hamburg said at a meeting of the Supervisors, “We have wind machines operating all the way from the 128-253 intersection all the way to the town of Navarro along Highway 128. … My concern is that we address this somehow between now and when we are going to have a lot of frost again, which will likely be in the fall.” (Hamburg meant the spring of 2015, but who’s counting?) … There are people who are having their sleep disturbed and they are very concerned. I'm in favor of agriculture. I'm in favor of vineyards. I know how much tax revenue they bring into the county. It's not a matter of trying to put anybody out of business or trying to make it hard for people to operate. I do know though that there are farming operations in Anderson Valley that get along with a lot less of these wind machines than others. And I don't know what all the reasons are. I know there are some ways that you can prune and some ways you can protect your crop that necessitate less, less of these wind turbines. I'm not saying that they are not necessary. I know they are. But I think there are better and worse technologies connected to the wind machines in terms of the thermostats, in terms of the way the actual turbines function. This year I think we kind of got caught by surprise. I don't think anybody anticipated how bad this drought would be and how much that would necessitate the use of wind machines. … I don't think it's going away. I think we are likely to see the same kind of problems next year. So I am trying to work with both Chuck’s [Morse] office and the Planning and Building department and of course the people in Anderson Valley to try to make some progress on this issue before we get into the frost season again.”
Ag Commissioner Chuck Morse: “… I am going to continue to try to bring the growers and the community together in the next — we have about 10 months before this is going to cycle through again. … So I am looking at 9-10 months to try to figure out what we can do to help the folks out there.” Hamburg: “…Obviously there are still some very dissatisfied people over there. We need to address as many concerns as we can between now and the next frost season. And I think we can do that.” Morse: “You are absolutely right that the owners and operators of the vineyards out there are very aware of the situation and what is happening. We are just going to try our best to see if we can work on that.”
“MAKE SOME PROGRESS” … “TRYING OUR BEST”? Morse, Hamburg et al have done exactly nothing, and vineyard owners clearly understand that they're dealing with a bunch of pushovers in local government.
HERE IS what County Counsel Doug Losak wrote our attorney Rod Jones after Jones had explained the prob to Losak: “I am writing in response to your request for a copy of a letter that Mr. Morse had said I sent you in response to a letter you had sent to Mr. Morse and myself. No such response was sent. Mr. Morse had thought that I had responded to your letter when he made the statement that I had. However, I had not. I hope this clears up this issue. — Doug”
WHAT WE ALSO FIND MAJORLY ANNOYING about the wine industry's domination of Mendocino County government, is the casual assumption that it's "agriculture." If grape growing is agriculture then that concrete cattle fattening station, that grotesque high rise feed lot off I-5, is Home, Home on the Range.
OUR HARD-HITTING Planning and Building Department defined ag years ago as "food and fiber." A Point Arena parrot farm had insisted that its feathered operation was ag, and it was that insistence that prompted Mendocino County to define ag as "food and fiber," not parrots. The County's definition has changed to include booze, which isn't food or fiber. And it will probably change again when marijuana is fully legal and wooza-wowza smoke will also be defined as agriculture.
WINE PRODUCTION is an industrial process heavy on chemicals that's mostly dependent on seasonal immigrant labor, meaning exploitable labor in the 19th century sense. No immigrants, no wine industry. Wherever the wine industry touches down, most notably in Mendocino County in the Anderson Valley, it's been up to the non-wine community to provide a range of subsidies — health care, education, housing, even the finite waters of our local streams. The industry is a net negative, and, with last year's introduction of the mega-noise nuisance of frost fans, the wine industry has gone to double-neg status with lots of us. (Wine writing is an offense all by itself, but that's a separate complaint.)
THE EDITOR of Boonville's beloved community newspaper hits the road early on Wednesdays to get the week's print run check to Healdsburg Printing. No money up front, no print run. So it was a little before 6am when the editor approached the Cloverdale end of the Cloverdale-Boonville Road where a small army of cops was milling around a van that looked like it had lost its left front tire. Whenever a large number of cops and flashing blue and red lights assemble after dark something bad has happened, especially if it's after midnight when America is at its wildest and most bad things kick off.
AS THIS PARTICULAR awfulness turned out, Lars Dunaway, 25, and Kristen Sandidge, 23, both of Sutherlin, Oregon and apparently tweeked to the max, had stolen their three-month old son from the boy's paternal grandparents and headed south. They seemed to have driven down the Mendocino Coast and through Boonville, making the last leg of their flight with the tire on their van ground down to the rim. The grandparents had custody of the child because, as we all know these days, millions of grandparents everywhere in our crumbling land are raising the children of their feckless offspring.
MOM was wandering around in shorts in the frigid pre-dawn when she suddenly grabbed the baby and made a run for it. The cops had no trouble corralling her and rescuing the infant. The baby was reunited with his grandparents the same evening, his parents arrested. They're still young, and maybe they can rescue themselves from the white powder, but the prognosis doesn't look good. Young people this screwed up this early are unlikely to get less screwed up.
SUPERVISOR DAN HAMBURG writes on MCN: "Thanks to Annie Liner and a few other Mendocino folks, we have secured St. Anthony's Hall (Lansing Street) for a meeting from 2-3:30 on March 12. Mike Sweeney, manager of the Mendocino Solid Waste Authority, will attend."
TRANSLATION: Mike and Dan will give us 90 minutes of their generously compensated public time in the middle of a work day when few, if any, of the several thousand people affected can attend on the off chance they even know of the meeting. The few people who show up will get to listen to Sweeney's monologue on why the Mendocino Coast needs a $5 million trash transfer station. Supervisor Hamburg, cuddling his therapy chihuahua, will look earnestly out at the half dozen people in the audience and say, "Mike's right. We really need this thing."
"THE TERRIBLE STATE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies -- easily checkable, blatant lies -- and I'm not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11th, 2001, with nineteen men -- fifteen of them are Saudis -- and five minutes later the whole country thinks they're from Iraq? How can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors. "
— Fran Lebowitz, 2005; from a Ruminator Magazine interview
I THINK the over-hyped Manhattan wit is partly wrong here. (Intellectuals always think everyone else is stupid. Fortunately for Mendocino County, there aren't any intellectuals here.) Yes, most of us are imperfectly educated, but lots of people knew immediately that most of the hijackers were Saudis because the maligned mass media reported that fact very soon after the event. Informed Americans can even make the basic distinctions among the Arab countries. And even more millions knew in their bones that the Bush Administration was lying about Iraqi involvement. Come on, even here in Boonville we were looking at each other with raised eyebrows when Colin Powell made his weapons of mass destruction speech to the UN. The Huns are raping nuns in Belgium. The North Vietnamese attacked US in the Gulf of Tonkin. Powell's murderous whopper was that transparent. (And right here in the San Francisco Bay Area mega-criminal Condoleeza Rice gets a standing O whenever she appears in public.) The OJ jury made the correct decision based on the case they saw and heard presented in court. All but one of them has since said they now think OJ did it. The OJ didn't have the benefit of the deluge of info the rest of us had. Americans aren't any dumber or smarter than any other people. Our prob is that at this time we are powerless to do anything about anything, and the reasons for that aren't simple. For one, we don't have a left, and the few dissident intellectuals that we do have are cordoned off. Americans, for the most part, don't get the opportunities to hear coherent narratives about the whys and hows of what has happened to US.
RALLY TO SAVE the Old Coast Hotel last night (Friday) was described by MendoSportsPlus as a friendly affair "more like a block party." Good turnout, passing traffic overwhelmingly supportive of the demonstrators. The local branch of the Welfare Industrial Complex wants to convert the hotel to a combination halfway house and therapy center, complete with tai chi movement for their "clients."
WAS THURSDAY'S meeting with the Mendocino Redwood Company at the Comptche Community Center productive? An attendee says, “Well, from the anti-herbicide perspective, yes, certainly. An excellent turnout, with a majority of speakers being reasonably concise and to-the-point. So we didn’t have to suffer through a lot of long windy speeches, and, instead, we got to hear from many different people. A mosaic of opinion, all, save one, mildly to highly critical of current MRC practices. I was surprised that Mike Jani did not attend. He sent two employees, who ‘came to listen.’ So they got an earful of unrest and unhappiness from the community. What MRC will do with this information, if anything, is yet to be seen.”
THE TOTAL PROJECTED Mendocino County Mental Health deficit is $4.6 million, of which $3.9 million is state audit exceptions from 2008, 2009 and 2010 - long before privatization. The State giveth and the State taketh away. Technically, the County is not fined or compelled to write a check, but future reimbursements for money already spent by the County are not reimbursed until the audit exception amount is recovered. It is an ongoing prob that the County has never gotten a handle on for several reasons, which include (in no particular order) the ability of the state to go back seven years or more to demand reimbursements and different state managers and auditors see things differently — approved expense allocations can be disallowed years later by freshly minted bureaucrats; County employees may have provided services to people who did not qualify, or lack of paper trails, or County managers goofed in interpreting very complex regulations. In the past the County has had some success in mitigating the audit exceptions following an intensive review process, which also sucks up a lot of high dollar County staff time. The concern is that Ortner may be no better than the County at tracking the paperwork and implementing the regs.
THE PARTY LINE on the proposed $5 million trash transfer station goes like this: it will have a minimal environmental impact with about half an acre of pygmy forest destroyed and some pine and cypress cleared away. Except for the driveway, the facility will be invisible from Highway 20. All operations will be enclosed. The purpose is to allow the collection trucks (and self-haulers) an efficient dump process so that these loads can be consolidated into transport trucks for the haul to Jerry Ward's operation in Willits, which will reduce truck trips on Highway 20 and save enough in truck time and mileage towards long term rate stability and pay for the facility. The alternative, offered by Empire Waste Management, Inc., the garbage behemoth and their “paid shill and newly elected Fort Bragg City Councilmember,” as one pro-transfer station put it in an unkind reference to Lindy Peters, is to build it at Empire's Pudding Creek location, which would mean driving most of the Fort Bragg region’s trash through town to the transfer station on Pudding Creek and then all the way back through town and out Highway 20 to Willits. At the Highway 20 location, many collection trucks and self haulers will not need to drive through Fort Bragg at all. Opposition is spearheaded by a couple of neighbors (and no, I would not want a transfer station next door to me, either) but other than the closest neighbors, the impact will be virtually undetectable. And the whole new $5 mil show is a far better alternative than driving all the garbage through town twice, or continuing the status quo which means double the amount of garbage trucks making the round trip to Willits.
THE "TRIPS THROUGH TOWN" argument fails to note that Main Street Fort Bragg is already heavily travelled because it doubles as Highway One. The garbage truck traffic to and from Pudding Creek would barely be noticed because there isn't that much of it. Ditto for Highway 20 along which the trash traffic now travels.
OPPONENTS are hardly confined to “a couple of nimby neighbors.” The new facility will require increased rates to pay it off. Alleged savings via alleged enhanced environmental efficiencies are vague and unconvincing.
INSULTING FB COUNCILMAN PETERS and vilifying opponents of the proposed project is Mike Sweeney's main move against anybody critical of him or his plans. He and former Ukiah councilman and supervisor Richard Shoemaker did the same thing when they tried to foist off a new transfer at Calpella, north of Ukiah. They're allies in this FB thing, too. (Shoemaker exerts influence via his girl friend who is FB's city manager.)
OPPONENTS of the Old Coast Hotel conversion to dubious mental health purpose, and opponents of the Transfer Station, have aligned themselves with the opposition to the mall sprawl-blight planned for the west side of Highway One at the intersection with Highway 20. The Fort Bragg Planning Commission approved a negative declaration for a retail center, saying everything is hunky dory with the environmental review, but voted against the project. Both sides are appealing to the beleaguered City Council, which is under threat of a recall. (BTW, environmental reviews have an uncanny way of turning out the way the people funding them want them to turn out.)
THE TARGET of the Fort Bragg recall talk, in the opinion of Sweeney-Shoemaker and their FB City Council allies, is City Manager Linda Ruffing who has given the Council their marching orders for the last ten years. New Councilmembers Lindy Peters and Mike Cimolino have made it clear they are not willing to blindly follow the City Manager. The old guard, led by the insufferably smug Mayor Turner and the narcoleptic Doug Hammerstrom, are trying to circle the wagons around the City Manager, brush off the critics as a handful of ill-informed malcontents and keep on conducting business as usual in a way that benefits them and their friends. Former Police Chief Scott Mayberry, unceremoniously offed when he got crosswise with the City Manager, is said to be waiting in the wings, either as a recall candidate or as a candidate in the next regular election.
ONE MORE INDEPENDENT vote on the Fort Bragg City Council could mean the end of the preposterous $5 million transfer station off Highway 20 and also the crazy conversion of the Old Coast Hotel profiting only the well-paid employees of Mendocino County's Industrial Poverty Complex, plus a stake through the heart of Todd's Point as shopping mall.
OPPONENTS of the Old Coast Hotel conversion are being portrayed as meanie faces who lack compassion for the homeless, the addicted, the mentally ill. But lots of decent people are fed up at what they view as the cynicism of the people who profit off poverty, and have blithely profited off it for years now as the numbers of unaddressed wounded people increase in large numbers every year. And making the stately old Coast Hotel in the center of Fort Bragg into a half-way house is a lot crazier than any of the people likely to be housed there.
IF MENDOCINO COUNTY were serious about getting street people help and off the streets, the conversation, presently non-existent out of pure self-interest of the "helping professionals," they be aiming at approaches like the one that just kicked off in San Francisco, where a fat array of poverty pimps have feasted on the addicted, the insane, and the incompetent for 50 years. (Churches used to go it alone, but then the libs figured out that they could make good public money sitting around in meetings all day talking about the problem rather than doing something about it. Churches actually did something about it until they, too, were overwhelmed by the pure numbers of screwed up people wandering the land.)
MENDOCINO COUNTY'S Welfare Industrial Complex votes for entrenched Democrats at all levels of government. The entrenched ones don't even raise the issue of homelessness let alone lead discussions on what to do about.
AND WHO ARE THE HOMELESS? In Mendocino County, like everywhere else, they are people drinking themselves to death or whose drug habits are out of control. Among them are a large number of lost young people, many of them also crippled by drugs and drink. This population has got to be compelled into help, and there have to be places to sequester them while they get that help. Hospitality House etc. is not really helping to address the problem in a meaningful way.
SAN FRANCISCO has just opened the “Navigation Center” in an abandoned public school in the Mission District. It's “designed to move entire homeless encampments from sidewalk to permanent homes in just 10 days.” We'll see, but at least it's a practical step in the right direction. This is what Mendo needs, a place where the entire unhoused population — maybe 200 people, max — is out of the weather while their special probs are addressed. The habituals, mostly chronic drunks, would live more or less permanently at Mendo Meadows.
A GLASSY-WINGED SHARPSHOOTER has been discovered in Marin County. This newspaper's favorite insect, the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter kills grape vines. It first appeared in the grape-growing regions of the state 25 years ago when strict inspection methods against it taking hold in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties were enacted.
PG&E has been issued a Caltrans encroachment permit for utility repairs near Haehl Street, Boonville, beginning Tuesday, March 10. One-way traffic control will be in effect from 7AM to 4PM, weekdays. Motorists should anticipate 5-minute delays.
FOR THE FIRST TIME in its twenty-six year history, the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, in cooperation with Dominican University, will offer Continuing Education Units (CEUs) to teachers at its 2015 event, August 6-8, at the Mendocino College Campus at College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg.
EVERYTHING WRONG with American journalism in one easy lesson from the current edition of Pacific Sun, a Marin County free weekly: “Great journalism, community involvement, a forum for sharing ideas. That's what we do here at the Pacific Sun. We bring readers, business owners, thought leaders [sic], activists and nonprofits together to make Marin a great place to live…” And so on.
OVER THE YEARS at the Sun, as can also be said for almost every other newspaper large and small, there has been some capable journalism, which is what a newspaper is supposed to do. Congratulating yourself for doing your job is always pathetic, and journalism, more than any other job I can think of, is the most self-congratulatory enterprise there is.
COUPLA TIMES A YEAR, the Press Democrat, for a handy terminally un-excellent example, announces that it's won a bunch of awards for “excellence” when there's no evidence of simple competence at the Rose City daily, let alone excellence. The PD, day to day, simply re-writes press releases. When it isn't re-writing press releases its news writing reads like the outline of a story rather than the story itself. And the PD ignores lots of stuff, especially stuff likely to draw retaliation from its primary advertisers in the wine industry. The worse the paper gets, the more awards it wins for excellence.
BUT there's been good journalism in this country from its beginnings, and there are still thousands of competent journalists roaming the land. But most of the really good reporting gets lost in the internet deluge. And contrary to the academic hacks who put out Project Censored — the tame left loves to believe that the whole show is censored out of fear of them — that the ruling classes are so crafty they can't be resisted. The skullduggery that goes on at the higher levels of our oligarchy gets reported, buried maybe, but not unreported. Self-censorship by media and everyday citizens is more of a problem than the overt kind. Our rulers have us so hornswoggled they don't need to censor the people writing about their machinations. And now that our oligarchs have total surveillance capacity, a fact we're aware of because of the heroic Snowden and the handful of brave reporters who brought us the bad news, taking them on, when us worms finally turn, will be that much harder.
“THOUGHT LEADERS” typically translates as press releases from career officeholders and, in a narcissistic place like Marin, "thought leaders" tend to be from Therapy Land. I've read the paper for years and can't remember a single Thought Leader piece or, for that matter, anything else that made a lasting impression on me. Newspaper prose everywhere reads like term papers. The lively stuff gets edited out for fear of offending both the business community and the Thought Leaders. The Sun, like lots of weeklies, does encourage letters-to-the-editor, and these can be very good — passionate and smart. And another reminder that our crumbling country is teeming with smart, passionate people few of whom, unfortunately, write for newspapers whose electronic commenters are frequently much smarter, certainly a lot funnier, than the copy they're commenting on.
“COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT”? What community? There aren't communities anymore. There are affinity groups, but community in any true sense of the term walked out the social door years ago.
VIA AN ACCIDENT of family, I now live in San Anselmo, land of tank-size vehicles and the haughty materialists who pilot them. Nothing new there, but the few faces I see who look like someone sentient is at home in them, are few and far between. How's that line go? "Once, American faces looked beautiful to me...." Something like that. Good faces are few and far between, debauched ones all over the place, including mine, I'd have to say. I've met the neighbors across the street. I have no idea who the neighbors are on either side of me or any other place on the quietest street I've ever lived on. I open my garage door late afternoon and look out to the west. Take away the houses, it's not a bad view. People shuffle by with their dogs. There are dogs everywhere, a sure sign of mass human disconnectedness. I don't know any merchants or any other people in my "community" other than the people across the street, and I only know them to exchange friendly waves with. There are coyotes out back, though, and the other night the whole pack of them went to howling. I considered adding mine, but what would the neighbors think?
RECOMMENDED READING: No sooner had I written the usual churlish denunciation of newspapers than it occurred to me I'd just read a memorably outstanding work of journalism called “Ghettoside — A true story of murder in America” by Jill Leovy, a reporter for the LA Times. The book jacket makes a huge claim that Ms. Leovy more than backs up: “Someone is killed nearly every day in Los Angeles County, murders mostly unnoticed by the city at large — and likely to remain unsolved by the police. The killing of Bryant Tennelle seemed destined to share that fate, until the case was assigned to John Skaggs, a relentless detective of unusual gifts whose investigation reveals much about the epidemic of American homicide and how it can be stopped.”
DETECTIVE SKAGGS is truly a remarkable man who works in a context foreign to most Americans. What sets him apart is his refusal to write off ghettoized black communities as so pathologically violent that they can't be policed in a fair, just manner. Skaggs' tenacity in bringing ghetto killers to justice stems from his refusal to view black people as a race apart. Author Leovy makes the case that the present plague of violence in places like Oakland stems from America's intractable history of violently repressive racism, a writing off of black people as beyond the legal system that has always applied to non-black people. This failure to apply and enforce the law in whole communities of black people goes way back, with the result that people harboring the usual range of neighborhood beefs can bring their own vigilante-like justice to their enemies and the world outside could care less. This is way simplified. If you don't read another book this year, read this one. It really is excellent journalism.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS — the Supervisors discussing the forever pending Little River Airport logging job:
Supervisor John Pinches: “You expect the contract with the forester not to exceed $20,000. But does that include the biological surveys?”
GSA Director Kristin McMenomey: “That's everything.”
Pinches: “That's everything?”
McMenomey: “That's everything. That's all the hooting (owl calls), that's everything. He hires the sub-consultants under his limit with the county.”
Supervisor John McCowen: “Is it correct that there was a competing proposal to perform the same work not to exceed $10,000?”
McMenomey: “There was a proposal of not to exceed $10,000 [from Registered Professional Forester Tom Kisliuk of Fort Bragg to complete the work. However, the plan of action to do so, you could not do that in accordance with our NTMP because we have surveys that have to be conducted and it was CalFire's call. And you can't possibly know CalFire's call until you meet with them. And they made the call. You have to redo your studies.”
AND SO ON with no mention of the fact that Sternberg is not a working forester and his fees preparing for a log job that will never happen have now soared past $50,000. McCowen was the only supervisor to oppose tossing more money at Sternberg. "I cannot support it," McCowen said, "When does ‘not to exceed’ ever mean ‘not to exceed’?" The board voted 4-1 to give Sternberg more money.
THE COUNTY has abandoned plans to harvest the 53-acre patch of timber near the Little River Airport (which Sternberg had worked so hard on) because the value of the timber won’t cover Sternberg’s rising costs, and some Coast enviros think what's left of the stand is worth saving without logging it. Ever. So the County has been looking (they’ve been looking for over a year now) for someone or something like a coastal land trust or conservation group to buy the timber stand and not log it. But will the conservationists be able to come up with enough money to cover Sternberg’s ever greater fees? Sternberg still has his cold dead hands wrapped around the seemingly endless project, whatever it may become, meaning a land trust or the County will probably have to hire him to sort it out.
IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE CHAMBERHOOD! (Supervisor Woodhouse's reports on his work as supervisor are best decoded to background music from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood):
"I'd like to talk about the CSAC [California State Association of Counties] training I went to recently. As you all know I have a lot to learn. It's an invaluable investment that you get for your money there. It's just so timely. I feel like I'm just so totally connected and on and absorbing it. It's fascinating that they really have it dialed in. They said, Okay, you've been a supervisor for two months, you probably think this. Here is the reality and it's very humbling and very enlightening and then they tap you into your strengths and your weaknesses and it's the networking as well, it's so valuable to the other people and where they are in their process. There were people from the Senate and the Assembly that talked and they were just brilliant and the little things they say you pick up so much that I'm going to accelerate the class as I go to it and I'm sure you'll appreciate that and it's just a valuable experience. They talked just during lunch, they cram in things, and the assembly and the congressmen said how much they loved being supervisors. They felt it was much more rewarding than what they are doing now…"
AND ON AND ON AND ON Woodhouse went in his Mr. Rogers-like voice, and it was all about how much he'd learned and how doggoned wonderful he thought our elected officials are, and when Woodhouse had finally wrapped up all we could think of was baby kittens and banana splits with extra whipped cream and, and, and… WUV!
Be First to Comment