APOLOGIES to Larry Blackshear of Fort Bragg whose name was mistakenly placed at the top of page 1 of the October 14 edition. He is not dead. We regret the pain the error may have caused him and his family.
A CALLER REMINDS US that it's been eleven years since the murders of Charles ‘Buzzy’ Mitchell, 66, and his son Noland Mitchell, 34. Mitchell Sr. was bludgeoned to death outside his home on Orr Springs Road (Ukiah). Noland Mitchell was apparently unaware that his father was being beaten to death only a few yards from where slept, and he was shot to death in his sleep minutes after his father was killed outside the trailer they shared. The elder Mitchell had been a candidate for a seat on the Coyote Valley Tribal Council. There was talk at the time that his 2004 murder was related to the intense tribal political infighting prevalent at the time. There is "a person of interest" in the two murders police say, but that person has never been publicly identified. Both Mitchells were well known and highly thought of in the Ukiah Valley where Noland Mitchell had been a high school and Mendocino College football player and, from all accounts, a wonderful guy.
WE HADN'T HEARD from our favorite South Coast writer for more than a year, but here Lisa Walters is in the current Independent Coast Observer (ICO): "Editor: I would like to thank Lois Falk of RCMS for calling in the helicopter a few weeks ago when she realized I might find out if there was baseball in heaven within the next half hour. When I was released from the hospital Sunday, Community Resources Connection volunteer driver Jerome Brooks bought my believed husband Greg Girard down to the hospital in Santa Rosa so we both could return home to our favorite place, Gualala. This is certainly a wonderful community. Lisa Walters, Gualala."
FROM THE SUPERVISORS MEETING, October 26 regarding the State’s medical marijuana regulatory scheme signed into law last month by Governor Brown: "To Tax Pot Or not Tax Pot, that is the question." To tax or be sued, is also the question.
PAUL SMITH, a Sacramento guy who interprets state policy for the rubes in the outback counties, appeared at a recent Supe's meeting to explain the Governor's new reg as .... "whatever tax measure you would pursue, you would most likely, if enacted, get sued." The upshot? Mendo won't even try to tax dope.
A FORT BRAGGER WRITES: "Hello, I had the misfortune of finding a body while on my way to catch the VA shuttle Fort Bragg to Fort Miley SF back on August 20th This is not the first murder victim I have discovered but lack of coverage by local news is even more disturbing to me. Bogus story said Matthew was found on sidewalk but he was face down in the road and body was in advanced (Rigor). Lying near a light pole with no cars around on a poorly lit street in a very unnatural pose that suggested he had been dumped there. Word on streets locally is poison heroin has been going around but paper did not post cause of death. I was told you are looking into this and other unexplained deaths. Would like any info and any help I can offer. Police told me to piss off in town here."
MATHEW HUMECKY, 55, was found dead in the 500 block of South Harrison Street that day. According to the Sheriff's Department, Humecky's "death was classified as being an Accidental Overdose with the cause of death being Methamphetamine Intoxication."
DOROTHEA DORMAN snagged me this morning as I delivered papers to the Ukiah Co-op. Some people would be tempted to substitute a livelier verb for “snagged,” maybe accosted or ambushed. Me? I'm fond of the old girl, a pioneer hippie and long-time resident of the deep hills of West Redwood Valley at Greenfield Ranch. But she can be tedious, as can we all. When I encountered her, Dorothea immediately waved a handful of crank diet lit at me and declared by way of greeting, “Your diet is totally wrong!” (If I had a nickel for every diet lecture I've gotten from fagged out old hippies who can barely drag themselves across the room...) "Nothing wrong with red meat, whiskey and chocolate," I replied. "It will kill you," Dorothea said. "Life kills us all," I said, going deep. The grande dame of organic is not a great one for irony. Behind us a tweeker was striding up and down Gobbi yelling at no one in particular. People walked past him as if he weren't there. He needed diet advice a lot more than I did. Dorothea rambled on. She said she'd found a new diet that had turned three of her gray hairs black. "Congratulations," I said. "And you're totally wrong about vaccination," she said. "I've been totally wrong about a lot of things, Dorothea, but I'll tell you, and only you, the secret of my longevity. Ready?” "You really should try this diet," she said, again brandishing the latest in diet advice. "Booze and meat will kill you." "Dorothea," I said, "If you keep a song in your heart, and a good word for everyone ready on your lips, no matter what you eat you'll go straight to gluten-free heaven.”
WHAT ARE WE GOING to do about all those little slackers out there? Math scores for fourth and eighth graders are worse than they were two years ago, and reading grades were not much better, flat for fourth graders and lower for eighth graders, according to the 2015 Nation's Report Card. The results of the test, officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, were released Wednesday. In Mendo, Our Nation's Future generally tests a little below what's considered par.
I DON'T WATCH much television, but even I must have seen the clip of the campus cop flipping the female high school student over in her chair a hundred times. And I laughed when the students at the South Carolina school where it happened soon walked out to protest the firing of the cop who did it!
NOBODY, though, ever makes the point that if schools need on -campus cops and gun detectors it's wayyyyyyy past time to re-think and re-organize the educational project.
THE MENDOCINO COUNTY MUSEUM will host the unveiling and dedication ceremony of the Mendocino County Fallen Vietnam War Veterans memorial at 2 p.m. on Veterans Day, Wednesday, November 11. The schedule of activities includes the reading of names and hometowns of the 22 Mendocino County servicemen who lost their lives during that war and will be the first time these 22 residents have been honored as a group. This memorial was initiated by Willits resident Dennis Miner, who served for 20 years in the military and retired as a Major. (Roberta Werdinger)
ON VERY SHORT NOTICE, the Fort Bragg City Council last week considered and slam dunk rejected a walking and biking trail that would loop around east Fort Bragg through the Noyo and Pudding Creek watersheds. When the subject of the trail came up at a previous public hearing, there was so much opposition from residents that City Clerk Marie Jones dramatically ripped up the plans at the meeting. But as we know, once grant money is acquired and a consultant hired…
LOTS OF FORT BRAGGERS were opposed to that trail, and their reasons ranged from the environmental disruption a trail through forested areas would cause and the fear that the trail would become convenient habitat for the Lurk and Perv communities which, as we know, have become prominent in Fort Bragg.
FORT BRAGG has an existing trail that is unmatched for convenience and beauty. It's called the Haul Road and runs right along the Pacific and will soon be linked to Noyo Harbor. Maybe the idea is to completely encircle the town for the riding pleasure of a relative handful of bicyclists, but it seems from here, and speaking as a person who foots it along the Haul Road whenever I'm in Fort Bragg, the town is fine with its existing embarrassment of trail riches.
FROM AN INTERVIEW with Albion-Little River Fire Chief Ted Williams in the Autumn edition of Beth Bosk's New Settler Interview. (Background note: The controversy over Mendocino Redwood Company's practice of killing millions of tanoaks by lethal injection then leave them standing until they fall, enhances fuel for forest fires and is widely assumed to subject firefighters to toxic smoke. Mendocino Redwood and its supporters claim that there is no proof that smoke from chemicalized trees is toxic. Williams points out that there is another threat to firefighters if a fire were to break out in the dead standing timber areas treated by hack-and-squirt:
WILLIAMS: "We have to decide when there is a small fire: do we send our volunteers out? They are unpaid. They are doing this to look out for their neighbors. Do we send them out there to work below snags? [The standing trees killed by MRC's hack and squirt practice.] These trees are lethal. The branches are called "widowmakers" because they are lethal. And the firefighters in the heat of the moment, maybe at night in an area they don't know in a lot of noise, diesel engines, chainsaws, hoses being pulled, water strikes… They aren't going to hear those branches snapping. It's not like they are out on a bird walk where they are quiet with binoculars and they can hear the danger. There wouldn't be a lot of warning. So it is a justified risk. The position it puts us in is either way we say "no, were not going to fight that fire" — a fire in a forest with alternating stands of standing dead trees — and the community watches as the firefighters gaze over the fire growing in size and becoming a serious threat. Or we send the firefighters out into an area where we know there are many manufactured hazards. Imagine having to call a family to say: "I'm sorry. But your loved one will not come home tonight because a tree fell." We had that happen on the Diablo fire in Tahoe just this last month. A 21-year-old was dead from a tree falling. That might have been from natural causes. But I'm suggesting we don't need another million of these intentionally killed and left standing snags added to the forest."
FORMER POINT ARENA MAYOR (and before that Fifth District Supervisor for 20 years in the 50s and 60s) Joe Scaramella in a 1983 interview discussed the reasons the tiny town of Point Arena was incorporated:
“There were more than a dozen saloons in Point Arena in 1906 and different saloons had their own special customers. Russian and Finnish immigrants frequented places like the Eagle Hotel, while the Italians and Native Americans had their own watering holes. Those differences were put aside when the saloon owners banded together for city incorporation to fend off the ‘prohis’ [booze prohibitionists] and allow liquor to be sold under the state’s local option law. The saloon owners had to get people from nearby ranches outside the city limits to sign to get enough petition signatures so they paid for ranch-hands to stay in crowded Point Arena hotel rooms to meet the minimum 30-day residency requirements for voting, and they voted to incorporate by a narrow margin in 1908. My father’s saloon business was short lived. In 1906, a hill saturated with rain slid onto the building, wiping out the saloon and the small winery and brewery. The family was forced to spend the night in Gilmore’s livery stable. … The problem of serving on a City council in such a small town is the personal sacrifice of having to tell — sometimes former — friends and neighbors that they must do something or that they cannot do something. It is far more difficult to act as a representative sitting on a city council in a small town than as a senator of the US Senate. People in this community seem to expect that the council will let them do far more than reason permits or the law will allow. I don’t think Point Arena as a city will survive as a city for another 75 years. Cities are born, they mature, they develop, and they die. Point Arena is in its ripe old age.”
WHEN CAMPAIGNING for Sheriff back in 2006, Sheriff Allman made some remarks that are very interesting in retrospect: “If the Sheriff’s department didn’t have to spend so much time on medical marijuana, they might not need more deputies. I truly believe that if we can have our 48 deputies, and be able to ‘hand-off’ the medical marijuana compliance checks to Public Health, we will have adequate deputies,” And, “The fact that we do not have a jail honor Farm where non-violent inmates can grow food supplies for the jail, is of great concern.” Allman added that an honor farm would lower price of SWAP (where inmates have to pay for their own work release program during the day, then come to jail at night) would help reduce overcrowding. “All they do now is stay in jail and watch MTV,” said Allman. “If you can lower the jail population by 25% that means you can hold off on new jail for a few years at least. We need to work with the judges. And we need to start now.”
THE SHERIFF does have a garden going on the Jail grounds, and he's instituted an excellent baking program that not only gives inmates a marketable skill but supplies the Jail with a daily supply of healthy bread.
LISTEN UP, FORT BRAGG. Isn't it about time the City annexed the Koch Brothers. Not them personally. Hell, what would we do with them after we annexed them? I mean the mill site. Eminent domain that sucker. Are we going to wait forever while those two characters hold hostage the town's spectacular 420 oceanside acres? Go for it, FB!
JOHN KENNAUGH passes along this headline over a story in the San Francisco Examiner: "Death Penalty Likely On Table For Chow." Which can be interpreted at least three ways: Chow may choose to eat a meal called death penalty; Chow can take it or leave it; a criminal named Chow may be tried for murder.
THE SUPERVISORS, at this week's meeting, are expected to turn down a Dollar General Store for Redwood Valley, overturning the County's Planning Commission vote to allow the destructive retail chain market to touch down in an otherwise rural area of inland Mendocino County.
THE COUNTY'S Planning Commission voted to approve Dollar General because the County's zoning, as is, allows a chain to set down in Redwood Valley, a mostly rural area just north of Ukiah. The Planning Commission saw their vote for the chain store as inevitable, not because they wanted to plunk down a chain store dedicated to undercutting existing markets, but because County code permits it.
BY VOTING to delay Dollar General's building permit the Supervisors, i.e., the County, is certain to be sued by Dollar General and will almost certainly lose, although there's some weasel room at the end of the Supes’ resolution that will allow them to nobly vote for the resolution but only because Dollar General will have to jump through one more hoop prior to a delayed construction. “Because the issuance of Building Permit #BU 2015-0104 is the only point at which the environmental impact of the project may be publically considered, the Board of Supervisors hereby reverses the decision of the Planning Commission and grants Administrative Appeal AA 2015-0002. Building Permit #BU 2015-0104 is hereby suspended until such time as the proposed development has undergone review pursuant to CEQA.”
FORT BRAGG WATER. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife sent the letter linked below to the Fort Bragg City Council last week saying that their water conservation plans don’t go far enough to protect endangered fish, and that the City lacks a long-term water conservation plan. The letter “recommends” that the City take steps to resolve their water problems. But the “recommendations” appear to be a veiled threat to intervene or interfere with the City’s plans to divert more water into their present and future reservoirs.
https://www.theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Fort-Bragg-City-Council_water_10_28_2015.pdf
DAYLIGHT SAVING, The Movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EUTMPuvHo
THE SMART TRAIN, which much public opinion says is Dumb, but smart or dumb it's now supposed to roll between San Rafael and the Sonoma County Airport just north of Santa Rosa by "late 2016." SMART (Sonoma-Marin Area Rapid Transit) will eventually run to Healdsburg and on to Cloverdale, where a brand new train station has been waiting for a train to arrive for 25 years. But Smart is out of money to connect to Healdsburg and Cloverdale along existing but un-rehabbed track and, of course, "late in 2016" for the train from San Rafael to Santa Rosa loosely translates for Cloverdale and Healdsburg as "the twelfth of never."
SMART is called a "commuter line," but lacks capacity to carry much of the north-south commuter horde. It's inconvenient for most commuters because it bypasses population centers. Day trippers will like it, however, for a leisurely train ride through suburban backyards.
A HALF-CENTURY AGO, the train ran to Eureka. Farther back, two trains a day ran between Eureka and Sausalito where Frisco bound passengers caught a ferry to and from the bright lights. In 1950, you could board a train in Fort Bragg and transfer at Willits to south and northbound trains.
MENDOCINO COUNTY, always a political stepchild, is unlikely to ever see a train anywhere in the County other than the Skunk line.
TOMMY WAYNE KRAMER, writing in Sunday’s Ukiah Daily Journal, seems to blame local “progressives” and their propensity for opposing things for the dangerous one-lane stretch of Highway 101 between Hopland and Ukiah. There are plenty of things to blame local progressives for, but the main reason this particular segment Highway 101 remains dangerous is that Caltrans and their local enablers at the Mendocino Council of Governments funneled all the local share of highway improvement (STIP) money into the Willits Bypass. The Bypass, while desirable in the abstract, has nowhere near the level of traffic as the Hopland-Ukiah route, and it could have been accomplished for much less money via former Supervisor John Pinches’ idea to build a truck route along the unused railroad right of way, routing through-traffic big rigs out of town traffic. Instead we got a dubious Bypass project at well over $300 million for a few miles of an alternate route around Willits, a third of it on costly piers and no Fort Bragg on-off ramp). The Caltrans/MCOG decision to allocate all the local money to the Bypass left no money to widen the Hopland-Ukiah portion of Highway 101 where — as Kramer correctly points out — it really needs it. We doubt local “progressives” would have opposed widening that stretch; most of our pwogs are north of Ukiah or on the Coast these days.
SHERIFF ALLMAN says his department is working to restore the booking photos to the Sheriff's website. He expects it to be fixed today (Monday). The photos are being taken, but there was a glitch in the on-line software, apparently. The Sheriff also says he's not opposed to allocating some fraction of Proposition 172 money to fire departments. He doesn't know how Chief Tunzi came to believe he was against it a few years ago. Allman says that the allocation of Prop 172 money is entirely a Board of Supervisors/Auditor decision and he'll live with whatever they decide without complaint.
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