WE SPOKE LAST WEEK with a retired County Mental Health staffer familiar with Mental Health services before and after Ortner.
ORTNER MANAGEMENT GROUP is a for-profit business based in Yuba City. The County "gifted" him, you might say, $7-8 million a year in public money in return for which Ortner is supposed to provide mental health services. It's in Ortner's interest to spend as little as possible on actual succor for the mentally ill, and he has not deviated a nickel from his primary goal — to rake off as much money as possible while the mentally ill continue to suffer. Coping with Mendocino County's 15 or so mentally ill of the frequent flier type used to be assumed as a responsibility of government. That this responsibility was raffled off to a private business by a “progressive” board of supervisors representing a self-advertised “progressive” population, is merely one more local gulf between theory and practice, Mendo style.
THOSE IRREMEDIABLE 15 are included in an overall population of about a hundred adult persons who require emergency mental health attention every year. One would think for $8 mil a year Mendocino County could take care of its own, but…
OUR MENTAL HEALTH informant said one of the biggest failures of Ortner — among many — is their complete failure to produce “discharge management plans” for their clients. These plans are important because they not only assess the person’s condition, but give a road map for how they could — circumstances permitting of course — maintain some basic hold on their sanity after their evaluation and release. Without such plans (medications, living situation, follow-up visits, lifestyle changes, etc.) and follow-up, which, again Ortner doesn’t do — it’s almost guaranteed that the client will be either back in Ortner’s cash registers in a short time or in an iso cell at the County Jail.
THE RETIRED WORKER also said that Ortner’s monthly “Access / Crisis Response” report is meaningless — “That’s just BS,” our informant said, looking over Ortner’s June report which we'd obtained through a Public Records Act request in August.
THE NUMBERS — even if they were accurate, which is itself a big assumption — don’t provide the kind of information that would allow the Supervisors to sensibly assess what Ortner’s so-called “access center” is doing. The “goals” appear to be fiction; the retired worker had no idea where they came from. And the reports don’t allow anyone to see how many clients were actually served or discharged, how frequently the same people are seen and for what reasons, or how many discharge plans were completed.
THE RETIRED WORKER also said that Ortner has about two-thirds of the number of people previously on the County’s payroll to provide first-line mental health services, and most of those new Ortner hires have no experience with the mentally ill of Mendocino County or Mendocino County policemen or anything else about Mendocino County needed to competently provide relief for the mentally troubled. Adding to this inexperience are what Ortner calls “Per Diem” employees who are brought in as needed on a daily rate basis (what the County used to call “extra help”). These people make their money on a high daily rate (but without the usual employee benefits or any idea how long they’ll be employed), and the arrangement encourages them to maximize payable hours, push hard to justify more hours, and minimize time with clients.
PRIVATIZATION of mental health has been a disaster for the mentally ill of the County, and a double disaster for the taxpayers.
A MONTH AGO the Supervisors approved certain benefits for employees hurt by the Lake County fires. But the Supes, or at least some of them, understood that they couldn't help these employees because 'help' is automatically defined by the employee's union as a 'benefit,' and, as a 'benefit,' it's required to be shared by all employees. There had to be, therefore, a "meet and confer" session with the employees bargaining group, although the “benefit” was designed to help two (count 'em) SEIU-represented workers who used to live in Lake County. But SEIU has been unable to agree on a meeting time for nearly a month. As a result, the two employees who lost their homes in the fires are unable to make use of the benefits the County would like to give them. What it comes down to is that the five or six people who run SEIU don't trust each other and will not agree to hold a meeting with the County unless everyone from their side is at the table. That might make sense under normal conditions, but is hard to justify when the County is trying to help people who lost their homes.
UNION REP REPLIES: "Your article about the SEIU 1021 union and the county is totally inaccurate. We requested several meetings with the county and had several written correspondence with them. The county canceled the one meeting we had agreed on due to “illness.” There have been numerous occasions that only a few of us from the union have met with the county about different issues so we obviously do trust each other. The point we could not agree to was the county’s insistence that their arbitrary determination by the CEO of who could or couldn’t benefit from this side letter could not be grievable if there was cause to do so. Under no circumstances are we ever going to relinquish our right to file a grievance if it is warranted and the benefits awarded to the 2 employees are already available through our current MOU (contract.) The CEO’s attempt to color us as the bad guys was foreseeable and not surprising. She never misses an opportunity to try to make herself look better than she really is and make us look like we are holding up benefits from those tragically effected by the Valley Fire. The county refuses to allow the grievance process to include this side letter and it is they who are withholding any benefits from our members, not us. We are standing for all employees, at all times. This administration, if given an inch will certainly take more than the proverbial mile."
THREE STUDENTS from my dear alma mater, Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, were hospitalized last week when they conked out after pounding down bottles of cough medicine. In my day, exactly one guy smoked pot and we were all in awe of how far out he was. There was weekend drinking among the trendo-groove-o's, of course, and I recall a girl with a locker next to mine spraying gin into her mouth between classes with a perfume atomizer. My pals and I, inspired by the song White Port and Lemon Juice drank a little of that stuff but, cough-cough, I don't remember anyone getting drunk.
KATHARINE L. ‘KIT’ ELLIOTT has been appointed acting County Counsel by County CEO Carmel J. Angelo and her captive Board of Supervisors. Salary was not mentioned but Ms. Elliott's predecessor, Doug Losak made about $110k per year for tossing off errant legal opinions, and Losak’s predecessor made almost $150k for even more errant opinions.
RANDOM OBSERVATIONS & OPINIONS: Driving back over the hill to Boonville on Wednesday after delivering papers to the battered Ukiah Valley, I was zoning out to a symphonic version of John Lennon songs on Mendocino County Sorta Public Radio when one of those startling Sig Alerts, replete with a cacophony of high decibel buzzes and electronic tweets broke in. "Mother of God!" I yelped, "what the hell's happened?" I gazed heavenward for a plague of locusts, maybe The Rapture, meaning I'd been left behind in ruins of mass catastrophe. But the skies were clear, the weather calm. I turned up the volume to hear a fuzzy voice say something about the possibility of high winds somewhere. I think these alerts should be saved for imminent dangers, not remote possibilities. Cry wolf too many times, etc.
WHEN THE PRIVATIZED mental health buccaneers are packed off to jail or exiled to their home base in Yuba City, maybe Mendocino County can put on its collective thinking cap to devise its own acute care mental health facility, and I would like to nominate the abandoned Redwood Valley School as the perfect site. It's ready to go, complete with neo-fascist structures and, I'm sure, several generation's worth of bad vibes. One of our local shamans can easily purge the unhappy spirit of the place, our artists can give it a proper facelift, and our many under-employed mental health professionals can staff it. The old Puff Unit (PHF-Psychiatric Hold Facility) failed for want of one thing — muscle. Hire a few big boys to put all that gym muscle to work "wrapping up" the few mental health patients who go off physically. Puff used to call the cops to suppress the fightin' mental cases as the staff locked themselves in their offices and cringed under their desks whenever one of the larger psychos went bananas. The old RV school is plenty big enough to house the homeless, too, there being a very short jump, if any, between the homeless and the mentally ill. Let's do it, Mendo!
OOPS! James Marmon points out that an ancestor of his deeded the Redwood Valley School property as a school, and not for any other purpose. OK then. Call it the Redwood Valley Center for Re-Learning.
STUFF I'm real tired of reading in obituaries. (The indigent, by the way, don't even get an obituary because newspapers, with the noble exception of Boonville's beloved weekly and, I believe, the Ukiah Daily Journal, charge so much for obits, many families can't afford them.
NO BAD PEOPLE die anymore. Notice that? Everyone's life gets "celebrated" no matter how lamentable the dead person was in life. Also, we should put to permanent rest the bogus term "closure." There's never closure for our big losses. They leave permanent holes in the human heart. Fortunately for us, our maker was kind enough to design our emotional functioning so we just go on no matter how badly wounded we are.
AND WHILE we're spiffing up the lexicon, let's toss "award-winning," including the Pulitzer, lusted after by the remaining three or four media hacks who don't have one. I understand of course that we've grown terribly needy in this country, but what's with the perpetual awards banquet? Off the top, I haven't read anything in years that I'd slap a blue ribbon on. Newspaper people are the worst offenders, although wineries are right up there in the Phony Awards department. The Press Democrat, objectively the worst newspaper in the country for its circulation size, garners a slew of formal attaboys every year, not a single one of them — ever — deserved. Back in the day they at least tried to do honest work at the Rose City daily, Mike Geniella routinely filed reputable stories, so reputable the pathetic wimps functioning as editors at the paper took him off the timber beat. Wherever you read "award-winning" applied to any media person you can be sure the recipient is government-approved.
I'VE BEEN totally duped by the 49ers. I thought they'd move on without Harbaugh at the helm despite the loss of a bunch of starters, an incompetent general manager and a stupid owner, the latter so stupid he's not smart enough to turn the team over to professionals and get out of the way. Kaepernick seems to have lost his way, uniquely. Every other game or so he looks like he's recovered his mojo only to have it flee again the next week. Thursday night, with the exception of exactly two good passes, Kap fired footballs all over the place, one of the misfires hitting a staffer on the sidelines so hard the guy had to be medically attended to. The Niner meltdown is both weird and sad to watch, not that many people did; there were empty seats all over the Santa Clara stadium. The team is going to have to do something drastic. There's been a complete breakdown. But whatever they do it will be interesting.
WORLD SERIES TICKETS on the Mets end will cost you a grand each. Come the revolution, pro franchises will be nationalized first, the banks second, and the sports franchise owners, well, we're normally opposed to summary execution, but these people really have it coming.
HILLARY AND BENGAHZI. Looked at from the international desk at the AVA, it's clear that Hil ignored pleas for beefed up security from our ambassador to collapsed Libya. With a confusing civil war having broken out, and all manner of dangerous persons and groups having fully armed themselves from Gadaffi's vast armories, of course it was Hil's responsibility to adequately protect the ambassador and his staff. Why the guy didn't stay in his Tripoli fortress isn't known, but traveling to Benghazi with just a few Seals or whatever they were wasn't a smart move, and sure enough they were hit by a full-on military assault by an organized group who knew what they were doing.
THAT SAID, the posturing windbags nipping at Hil's heels during Thursday's partisan hearing managed to both make Hillary look good and let her off the hook for her indefensible dereliction in failing to respond to urgent calls for help from a small group of Americans who knew they would die without reinforcements.
A LAYTONVILLE AREA YOUTH DIED early Sunday morning and several others may have been injured when an early morning crash ended tragically. Tim Henry, the principal of Laytonville High School, has confirmed that one of his students was in a stolen school van that crashed on Branscomb Road.
EXCELLENT COLUMN as always by Tommy Wayne Kramer in Sunday's Ukiah Daily Journal, as the fearless TWK looks back at one of the most shameful interludes in Mendocino County's often shameful history.
HE WRITES: “Scholars intrigued or fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials should turn their attention to the Satanic Abuse storm that accused many, destroyed some, and accomplished nothing except to leave the lingering stench of tyranny oozing from the politically correct. You can still savor the aroma and with it a firm resolve among American males to avoid future contact or involvement with children. Be alone with a kid? Forget it. Be a schoolteacher in a class of 30 students? Don’t even ask.
"In Mendocino County the epicenter was in Fort Bragg at a childcare facility called Jubilation Day Care. As the fabricated shock waves detailing utterly depraved news about Satanic rituals perpetrated upon pre-school children began rolling across the country it was inevitable they reached Mendocino County. Our therapists were waiting, rubbing their soft, moist hands together.
"The stories were as bizarre as they were horrifying: Children were being raped and tortured at Jubilation Day Care. The staff, wearing clown masks and forcing kids (in the beginning, as foreplay) to eat peanut butter they were told was human feces, were transported to distant horror chambers. Matters devolved from there.
"A Mendocino County Deputy DA provided me (I was working at the now defunct Mendocino Grapevine at the time) details about the allegations. Children at Jubilation Day Care were routinely boarded onto helicopters and flown to remote locations where they were defiled, tortured and raped. They were ordered to say nothing to adults or worse things would happen to them and their families.
"And who were these monsters aboard these helicopters transporting pre-schoolers to hellish horror chambers? Why, timber company executives, that’s who.
"It was the perfect scenario for the angry, hate-filled therapy women: Wealthy white men running big corporations doing filthy things to children. It was terrible. It was horrifying. It was wonderful! Fuses were lit, and Jubilation Day Care exploded, imploded, closed and awaited the lawsuits and the criminal indictments. Therapy sessions for children boomed as never before or since, as professional children advocacy groups gladly took up the cause. The Orr sisters, who ran Jubilation Day Care, were chased out of town. Staffers in the Mendocino County Victim Witness program wore buttons reading ‘I Believe the Children’ in the courthouse. Local therapists counseled kids in hopes of eliciting information they’d been molested, or at least traumatized. A favorite technique was to convince children that they had “repressed memories” and that proof of someone having been abused was to have no memory of it.
"The reigning wisdom: If you don’t remember it, it must be true. This has even less validity than trials for ‘witches’ involving river dunkings, or deciding guilt based on blisters appearing on the palm of a suspect’s burned hand. Shuffled into this dishonest nonsense was Past Lives Regression and Channeling, which provided therapeutic guidelines for events from a hundred or a thousand years ago. Trouble was, it was all untrue. None of it happened. The hot air balloon emptied. This was Mendocino County therapy at its peak. Despite their shabby, dishonest and immoral practices, I have not heard in the 30 years since of a single one of these therapists admitting to a mistake or apologizing either to the children or to those accused. How many lives were ruined by these state licensed MFCC crazies?…”
THE MIGHTY AVA, cough-cough, was on the non-existent phenomenom from its sordid beginnings in Fort Bragg where it was breathed into life by a County social worker named Pam Hudson. The Orr Sisters, who were in danger of being murdered by Fort Bragg hysterics, were not defended by Coast Lib because, you see, they were the wrong kind of women — working class Catholics who opposed abortion, the kind of women who couldn't possibly be admitted to The Sisterhood without a complete revamp of their belief systems.
TO ME, author of a very long piece on the Orrs, which we've re-posted on our website, it wasn't only the failure of Coast Lib to speak out about a latter day witch hunt in their community, it was the total abdication by the Superior Court of this County. Come on — one of the Orr sisters lost her daughter to CPS to keep the child from Beelzebub's always scheming clutches. What judge could possibly sign off on something like this?
A MENDOCINO COUNTY JUDGE with his finger to the political winds, that's who, just as a Mendocino County judge's signature was on the adoption papers of about 50 black children from the Bay Area given over to a megalomaniacal Redwood Valley speed freak called Pastor Jim Jones, all of them murdered at Jonestown. These lethal sign-offs were orchestrated by Tim Stoen of the People's Temple, who then functioned at Mendocino County Counsel and now serves as a prosecutor for the Mendocino County District Attorney's Office. Ah, Mendocino County, where history starts all over again every day and you are whatever you say are.
THE MENDOCINO COUNTY Sheriff's Department even sent an officer — then-sergeant Gary Hudson — to Devil Worship classes so local law enforcement could keep up with the purely imaginary (by evil-minded people) mass assault on Mendocino County's pre-schoolers.
ANYWAY, interested persons are invited to read the entire depressing saga posted on our muy cool website at www.theava.com
SUNDAY'S CHRON presented an interesting collection of random crazy stuff reflective of our zany times. In a column called "Connectivity, Balancing the Masculine/Feminine," I learned that I was toxic. I think. The prose got a little confusing. "Toxic masculinity. The harmful social construct that describes the masculine gender role as violent, territorial and emotionally removed while also rejecting perceived 'feminine' attributes." There are people who actually puzzle over the question?
READING RIGHT ALONG I came to a story called, "Is pot for sick pets a blissful high, or just bad medicine?" The author should have asked a dog, but I'll betcha there are plenty of two-footed stoners out there force-feeding their animals the miracle drug.
THERE WAS A LONG review of a book called Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent, "a longtime writing professor at Stanford University." Despite this ID I read on, searching for something having to do with Mendocino County, but what the log-rolling reviewer described was the usual academic creative lit about nothing of interest to this reader and nothing, apparently, having to do with Mendocino County.
SATURDAY morning I joined a long-line of day-trippers at Larkspur Landing for the ferry ride across the bay, seating myself outside so I could wave to the boys in the crowded exercise yard at San Quentin.
THERE'S always a good slug of Mendo boys at Quentin being processed for placement at the state's ever larger prison system, and there's always at least one guy waving wistfully at the passing ferry. (Mendo bad boys are also assigned to Quentin for parole violations.) I wondered if the Laytonville killer, Talen Barton, was at Q yet, and I wondered how Q will assess and assign him. Given his age and lack of criminal sophistication, Barton will probably be placed in protective custody somewhere, and we should all wonder why Public Defender Linda Thompson, the old dump truck herself, didn't plead the boy out as insane. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't, but he set a new record for being processed through Mendo's criminal justice system. Took only about three months to get him put away for 72 years.
AT THE FRISCO end of the voyage, the teeming Ferry Building, I caught the 1 California for Van Ness where I then footed it south to the tiniest theater in The City to watch a documentary film on the Black Panthers. Exactly five of us, all Seniors, attended the noon showing. I recognized a number of the non-famous people in the film, even know a few of them from my youth spent as an enemy of the state. I thought the movie was a fair and honest look back at the Panthers that didn't romanticize the movement in the least, a movement which I think, on balance, was a good thing and a necessary thing, but as someone in the film says if you keep talking up violence, as Eldridge Cleaver did constantly, people are sure to get killed.
THERE HASN'T BEEN a more tumultuous time in America's tumultuous history than the late 1960s. Everywhere one looked, there was something unprecedented going on in American society — the hippies, the Vietnam War and the mass protests it inspired, free range psychos like the Zodiac killer, J. Edgar Hoover, America's lead cop, a closeted gay and almost as crazy as Nixon, the pill popping president who finally nutted up so completely he had to resign. The Panthers were just one more headline in a daily deluge of startling events.
MOVING SOUTH ON VanNess in the late fall of 2015, The City's civic collapse is more and more evident every block, and it really kicks in about Sutter. There are terminally screwed-up people everywhere, and the streets stink and are trash-strewn. One would think that with $167 million being spent on the homeless annually, the mayor, a jolly incompetent named Ed Lee, could at least fund sufficient Port-A-Potties and public showers for the small army of Thanatoids roaming The City.
ON THE OTHER HAND, given the magnitude of the homeless problem, the ultimate solution, if there is to be one, resides with the national government. The problem is way beyond local jurisdictions. Wandering Thanatoids* are everywhere in the land, but there are a lot more of them in sunny California because you are unlikely to freeze to death out here, although a large number of chronic drunks are carried off every year during the cold months in San Francisco and the East Bay. But we're unlikely to hear anything about national homeless strategies from any of the national candidates because it will cost millions to house and help all of them and they don't have much in the way of advocates who don't make handsome livings off them.
* “Weed Atman was one of many Thanatoids — people who are victims of karmic imbalance and inhabitants of a strange state of being like death, only different.” —Thomas Pynchon, “Vineland”
THE AIG STRIKES AGAIN
Will Parrish Writes:
“I was the guest on Cal Winslow's one-hour KZYX program last week discussing regional timber politics, as part of a three-part series he is doing on forests. The pre-recorded interview aired Friday morning, and you can listen to it in the archives of the KZYX Jukebox. A few people who heard the program asked me why my only response to the question of where my work appears was that people can search for it on Google. Actually, my response was that my work regularly appears in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, as well as various alt-weekly newspapers in the Bay Area, and that people could search for it on Google if they want to learn about the full scope of my work. The part about my work appearing in the AVA and the other publications was removed from the interview in editing.”
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