Off the Record (Jan 6, 2016)

TOMMY WAYNE KRAMER, the Ukiah Daily Journal's brilliant columnist and irreplaceable mote in the eye of the smug and the self-righteous, inland division, got himself a New Year's Day helicopter ride to Santa Rosa. Heart trouble of the major type. He writes, "Yesterday, Jan 1, this happened, then that happened and pretty soon I checked in to UVMC but only for a couple hours, after which they helicoptered me to Santa Rosa with another of those heart attack thingies I keep catching. I’m at Memorial Hospital.  They might work their magic on me Monday and let me out (in a car or a pine box) Tuesday.  It’s real neat and I’m having a fabulous time. Thinking of you all.  If I don’t make it, carry on my work.  For the children. Tom."

'FOR THE CHILDREN.' I love that. Tom has the hypocrisy of 'progressive' Mendo nailed, which is why the stuffier inland pwoggies are always whining to the Journal's editor, KC Meadows to fire him. (Depend on the pwogs to censor anybody and anything they don't like.) 'For the children' is a kind of Mendo mantra unironically invoked by the local educational establishment and helping professionals generally, and always a sure sign that the "the kids" are being thrown over the side or are about to be converted to cash. Tom has the phonies cold, and here's hoping he and his pen are soon home where he's needed most — Ukiah.

CALTRANS AT SCOTTY CREEK — WILL PARRISH sends along this note from a friend in Sonoma County: "Oh you're going to appreciate this. Last Thursday CalTrans decided that prior to the predicted heavy rainstorm over the weekend, and a two-week construction shutdown — it would be a good time to begin construction on a grossly oversized Scotty Creek bridge on Hwy 1 between Bodega Bay and Jenner on the Sonoma County coast. Ya gotta wonder who needs a bridge of that size on a road that narrow over little Scotty Creek. I got in touch with the North Coast Water Quality Control Board and Senator McGuire to show them the photos and ask who could do something?

"THE SENATOR'S OFFICE called CalTrans, and the NCWQCB issued a stop work order. CalTrans promised to get some soil stabilization materials out on the ground (this consisted of plastic sheeting and some boards around 5pm on Friday night, although their described mitigation was more substantial. By Sunday at noon it was a wreck. The plastic was blowing off and the water was running downhill into the wetlands and near the archeological area. I contacted both offices again — and was promised they would again contact CalTrans. CalTrans, it turns out — is off for two weeks! What in the world were they thinking to begin setting drill equipment on the Thursday? I hope the Water Board has the authority to levy fines — although it means we'll pay them. I don't expect the Senator or the Water Board are cheered by this, and hope they do a smack down."

THE MENDOCINO COUNTY Continuum of Care for the Homeless has announced "operating guidelines" for the Extreme Weather Shelter, Fort Bragg division. It's "coordinated and operated" by the Hospitality House, natch, and, natch, the hostess with the mostess, Ms. Anna Shaw, also the vertex of a much discussed fog belt love triangle, deciding who gets in and who doesn't. Think of it this way: A grizzled veteran of the streets approaches the coolly appraising Brit barring the door of the extreme weather shelter. "May I come in, Ms. Shaw?" Ms. Shaw. "Wait until we see if you're reimbursable, old sod."

THE WARM WONDERFULS at Hospitality House define extreme weather as 36 degrees or below, "and/or wet." If it's 39 and dry, well, tough it out, buddy.

LIKE ALL REGISTERED DEMOCRATS, I get daily appeals for money from Hillary Clinton. I haven't gotten a single pitch from The Bern, whom I feel.

WHEN HIS CAMPAIGN complains that Sanders is being sabbed by the Democrat's national committee, I believe them and assumed Sanders would be sabbed by the Clintons every which way anyway.

BUT EVEN BY CLINTON standards of perfect pitch phoniness, Hillary's casting herself as an abuela to drag Latinos onto her One Percent express and changing her Twitter logo to a Kwanzaa graphic takes phony into a whole new dimension of bogus.

SO, THIS FRIEND of mine sez, "If you don't vote for Hillary over whoever the Republicans nominate I'll never talk to you again."

COMMENCE SILENCE, PLEASE. My life's path is strewn with lost friends. But I haughtily replied, and with positively aristocratic disdain, "I find it impossible to seriously consider Hil either intellectually or emotionally. If it's Hillary or death, give me death."

FRIEND, instantly breaking her vow of silence, comes back with, "I know you were one of those morons who voted for Nader over Gore to give us four more years of Bush. So you're going to help us get Trump?"

YES, I WAS one of those morons who voted for Ralphie, and I did it twice. And the difference between Trump and Hillary is that Trump will get us into full chaos mode faster than Hillary, but either one is a sure road to national collapse. And by the way, Gore and the Democrats lost to Bush. Nader didn't beat him.

LIB LOGIC amazes me. We're all supposed to vote for their repellent candidates because the other guy is worse. Not me. Drum roll… trumpets… I'm voting for truth!

CAPITALISM, the gift that just keeps on giving. Tens of thousands of minimum-wage workers in California will be making an extra dollar an hour as of New Year's Day when California's minimum wage jumps from a munificent nine dollars to ten dollars an hour. Labor wants at least $15 an hour, considering rent, even in the dumps of South Ukiah, will run you $1500 a month, $4000 a month in San Francisco if you can find a place. An annual wage of $21,000 is one big reason a lot of people are sleeping in their cars or outside.

A. CHOTEAU WRITES: "After the urchin roe is harvested, the leavings can be fermented with water added to create a highly effective gopher repellent. A local lady gardener made and sold this product during the urchin boom, and it was powerful stuff. Injected into gopher holes with a turkey baster, one could see exit tunnels the next day. Yes, the stench was horrendous, but only for a short time. A cottage industry for someone lacking olfactory sense?"

THE MILITANTS AT SEIU (and to think there were once real labor leaders in this country) are promoting separate ballot measures next November. One would raise the hourly wage to $15 by 2020 and mandate six paid days off for illness. The other would raise the wage by the same amount by 2021. In the mean time, starve. San Francisco and Los Angeles, two cities run by those great friends of the working person, have already passed $15 minimum hourly wages that go into effect in 2018 and 2020. The national minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Congressman Jared Huffman of San Rafael and Brad Sherman of Sherman Oaks have added their fearsome signatures to a Congressional letter to the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of the Treasury to see if certain of their constituents who get water conservation rebates have to pay taxes on the rebates. Right now the IRS considers water rebates taxable income but Huff and Puff say the IRS should reconsider the rebates as a reduction on the purchase price of a home improvement.

GOVERNOR BROWN has signed three bills into law called the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act. It kicks in Friday. There will be a new state agency to regulate, suspend, and even take away licenses from dispensaries beginning in 2018. The law will also mean that the Medical Board of California can investigate doctors who do nothing but write pot prescriptions. The law also tightens the screws on marijuana farmers who pollute streams and rivers.

RESPONDING to a story in Wednesday's Chron about the 700 men on San Quentin's Death Row, a reader wrote, "The easiest, most effective and least cruel and unusual punishment is still the firing squad. Condemned is strapped to a chair bolted to the floor. Six modified M1 Garand rifles with electrical relay-firing triggers are bolted to bench rests and pre-positioned to fire at the chest cavity and head from a distance of not more than five can't-miss yards. The relays are attached to a randomizer that electrically actuates the triggers of five rifles loaded with 30.06 caliber expanding rounds and one rifle loaded with a blank. Six execution-trained prison guards or maybe 3 guards and 3 street cop volunteers located in a different room press firing buttons at the same time, shooting the condemned in the head and left chest area multiple times. The blank is also fired with the live rounds in accordance with the longstanding tradition of letting each executioner think that maybe the other Five killed the killer but this time he fired the gun with the blank round and didn't actually kill anyone. Six surplus Garand rifles are about $5000 or free from DCM program sources, the cost of the other materials are pretty cheap at Home Depot. Forty-two-hundred 30.06 caliber rifle rounds (700 condemned x 6 bullets per execution) might cost 30-50 cents each, about $2000 total, but would last for months catching up on all the backlogged executions."

AT LAST! Tomorrow, California becomes the second state in the nation with a statewide recycling program for used mattresses and box springs. The program, known as Bye Bye Mattress, allows California residents to drop-off used mattresses at participating collection sites and recycling facilities for free. California residents can find their nearest participating collection site or recycling facility at www.byebyemattress.com.

THE UKIAH CITY COUNCIL gave final approval to Costco nearly two years ago, but it is still being held up by the lawsuit filed by Mr. William Kopper on behalf of a group that was made up for the lawsuit. The four people publicly associated with "Ukiah Citizens for Safety First", all of whom worked for Lucky or Food Maxx, have withdrawn their names from the lawsuit. A couple of them disowned the action as soon as they were publicly identified with it, and the last two withdrew their names from it several months ago. Kopper refuses to name anyone else associated with the phony group or the lawsuit.

KOPPER is the go-to guy in the state for CEQA lawsuits to stop or slow down any new Costco or Walmart. Speculation is that the local Costco lawsuit is being bankrolled by either the Retail Clerk's Union or Luckys. The union stands to lose dues paying members and Lucky is likely to be the first grocery store to close as a result of Costco coming to town. Meanwhile, the local economy is being drained of many millions of dollars, local workers are denied a chance at better paying jobs and the City of Ukiah is losing out on a half million or more in sales tax every year. Even Phil Baldwin, the only socialist in public office north of San Francisco, supported Costco coming to Ukiah.

WORD OUT OF UKIAH Thursday was that retired Mendocino Transit Authority honcho/GM Bruce Richard was out of retirement and back at the wheel of Mendo’s underutilized and heavily subsidized bus operation.

WE CONTACTED Supervisor Dan Gjerde who’s also on the MTA Board for comment: “Dan Baxter is no longer the General Manager,” replied Gjerde, as always, responsive to such inquiries. “MTA will conduct an open search for a General Manager. Right now, the General Manager is one of three (or four) management positions that is currently vacant, so the MTA board asked retired General Manager Bruce Richard to step in on a short term basis. One of the first things the MTA board intends to do with a new General Manager is to re-evaluate the job descriptions for MTA's top positions with an eye to possibly curtailing the number of top paid management positions.”

THAT would be long overdue. Let’s hope Mr. Richard, a long-time featherbedder for the famously underused and ill-scheduled transportation service who put his friends in do-little jobs there for years, is part of the “curtailing.”

WE ALSO ASKED Gjerde about one of the stats in one of the charts in the MTA Board’s Dec. 10, 2015 agenda packet: “It appears that the long routes are averaging around 4 people per hour. Is that right?”

GJERDE REPLIED: “The long routes are a mixed bag. While it's true the routes as a group reported four passengers per hour, at least one of the long routes is typically full. The CC Rider connects passengers in Fort Bragg, Willits, Ukiah and Santa Rosa and is so popular that in 2016 it is doubling its service from one to two vehicles a day. Throughout California, transit operations are subsidized by a statewide half-cent sales tax. Ridership fees must produce a minimum of 17 cents for every dollar of operating costs.”

YOU READ THAT RIGHT: 83% of the cost of the MTA is underwritten by grants and sales tax revenues.

ALSO, we’re glad to hear that at least one of the MTA’s long routes is popular, but the corollary to that means that the rest of the long routes are well below the four riders per hour average. A review of routes and timetables with an eye toward coordinating the rides’ arrivals and departures more in line with the schedules of working people (i.e., earlier starts and later ends) is also overdue.

GJERDE CONCLUDED: “Here in Mendocino County, the half-cent sales tax largely goes to MTA. Smaller allocations also go to senior centers which provide curb-to-curb service for senior citizens, to the Mendocino Council of Governments for transportation planning and to the cities and county for the construction of bicycle and pedestrian facilities.”

THE FLAGRANTLY bogus case against Fort Bragg painting contractor Jack Parke Daily has been tossed by the feds, but not before putting the guy through more than 18 months of the tortures of the damned. The search warrant used as the pretext for Daily's arrest in May of 2014 was found invalid and Daily’s federal case, where local authorities bounced it in the hope of getting the warrant rubberstamped, was tossed last week by a federal district court judge.

BACKGROUND from AVA Feb. 2015: JACK P. DAILY, 64, of Fort Bragg, was arrested at 2pm on May 31 on suspicion of possessing marijuana for sale, cultivating marijuana, possessing a controlled substance for sale and possessing methamphetamine, and booked at the county jail under $100,000 bail. The MMCTF arrested him. (— Mendocino Major Crimes Task Force)

THE ARREST by Peter Hoyle, Bruce Smith and Co. of Mr. Jack Parke Daily has taken some odd twists. Represented initially by Coast attorney Mark Kalina, Daily, convinced that the warrant was faulty, expected to have it tossed when he got to court in Ukiah. Instead he was arrested by federal agents.

WAS THE ORIGINAL WARRANT FAULTY? Mendo judges do indeed robo-sign whatever the cops put in front of them, and any challenge to the lazy procedures of the local justice system, top to bottom, is likely to be slam-dunked in the challenger's face. This entrenched sloth is what Daily was up against.

THE FEDS had apparently been notified by the County's Major Crimes Task Force, aka the Hoyle Gang, that the local boys just might see their robo-warrant for the raid on Daily's home declared illegal and, in a pre-emptive and vengeful attack on Daily, got their federal pals to make Daily a federal case. The feds arrested Daily on the steps of the County Courthouse, Ukiah, as he was on his way to getting the original Hoyle  Gang warrant tossed.

THERE is precedent. The Matt Graves case out of Laytonville saw federal involvement from the first raids on Graves' properties in the far north sector of the County, especially after Mendocino County couldn't convict Graves before Mendocino County juries. Graves, like Daily, wound up in the Bay Area as a federal case.

A FEW YEARS AGO, when a local task force raided the home of present Fifth District Supervisor Dan Hamburg, Judge James Luther tossed the Hamburg warrant because it had failed to include Hamburg's Prop 215 (medicinal marijuana) claim. A life scofflaw, Hamburg has been growing marijuana for years. The flawed Hamburg warrant was signed by Judge Richard Henderson who'd once run for Supervisor against Hamburg and for years had been affiliated with Ukiah-area enemies of Hamburg. Judge Luther threw it out, saying that the cops’ failure to include the Prop 215 claim was an “intentional omission.”

DEFENDANT DAILY, who has owned and operated a house painting business in Fort Bragg for nearly twenty years, says that Special Agent Hoyle's original visit to his home in Noyo Harbor was hardly the beginning of a mere Prop 215 inquiry: “It's not like they knocked on the door and asked if I had a legal grow — they kicked the door in with their guns drawn and had me kneel on the floor with guns pointed at me and the house got ransacked. Do the judges know that that's what's going to happen when they sign the search warrant? That's a hard way to find out if I have a medical prescription. Which I did.”

HAULED OUT OF UKIAH by the federal agents, Daily spent a weekend in the Sonoma County Jail before appearing in District Court in San Francisco. "A public defender shook my hand and told me she was going to be my attorney. It seems like I'm just being railroaded into these things. All they do is plea bargain. My attorney is very nice but she's very young and idealistic. When she heard what the investigators said she was very despondent — just like me. She said, ‘I guess it doesn't matter if you have a 25 foot wall around your property, maybe they had a drone, maybe they use Google Earth, maybe they had a ladder and binoculars.’ But that's not what it said on the warrant; it said they looked over my fence, they did not mention those other things. But I'm going to court. I'm fighting it.”

LATEST hustle by Hospitality House. Despite a vote next June that may make this site "illegal" under the proposed zoning of the Central Business District, the Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center is pressing on in its remodeling of the Old Coast Hotel.

SUPES BRIEFS. Supervisor Dan Gjerde (Fort Bragg area) is expected to be Board Chair in 2016, becoming the youngest board chair in Mendo history; dental insurance for County employees costs $825,000 per year; auditor Lee Kemper's recommendations concerning Mendocino’s Mental Health system problems, and q and a, is scheduled for the Supe's January 12 meeting, most likely at 1:30pm. So far no one knows what it will say. Hopefully, Ortner’s many critics — including most of the inland medical professionals and Sheriff Allman — will get a look at it before the Supes consider it.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING (and reading) The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. The book is by Michael Lewis, an excellent explainer. The movie is based on the book but it's by Hollywood. Which makes the movie surprising for lots of reasons, not the least of which is its ability to take high level financial criminality and make it interesting and understandable to a mass audience. Another reason it's surprising is because it's a deeply subversive film whose message, a familiar one to AVA readers and the left generally, but one seldom heard in mass venues, is that our financial system and every other major American institution, at this point in our devolution, runs on fraud. The financial system is owned by criminals fully supported by the national government. Yes, this is the theme of the movie!

HOW OFTEN do you get this message in a mass movie? Not often, but anymore it's not a message that surprises many people as, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and many lesser lights put it, "Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come."

UNREGULATED CAPITALISM hastens the end, and the hustlers of Wall Street, if we're lucky, hasten the end of unregulated capitalism. But given the drift of things, the multiplicity of unaddressed catastrophes, the looming fiscal crack-up is just one more disaster.

BUT WHEN PONZI-ONE went boing-blooey in 2008 Wall Street got bailed out by Washington, i.e., us, and went right out and doubled down on crooked practices, thus making another round of crashes inevitable.

THE BIG SHORT does an excellent job of making it clear, or at least less fuzzy, exactly how a handful of hustlers made millions betting against the continued viability of the old Ponzo Ronzo. They bet against, as one of them put it, "America."

WHEN WE ALL started getting unsolicited credit cards in the mail and, as hilariously depicted in this wonderful movie, a pole dancer buys "five houses and a condo" with no money down and not a clue how variable interest would inevitably bankrupt her, you didn't have to be a commie radical to understand a huge crash was just down the road.

THE ONLY CAVEAT I have about the Big Short as movie is that the putative good guys are only a little less bad than the bad guys, and not nearly as naively, innocently good as they're depicted. The only good guy in real life who pointed out that criminals were in charge of our financial institutions himself wound up being sued and hounded by the FBI. He only gets a mention in the film, as does the sole low-level swindler who actually got some jail time.

"EVERYBODY on Wall Street," author Lewis says, "was working with the same set of facts about subprime mortgage lending — about how subprime mortgage loans were turned into bonds and repackaged and turned into CDOs and so on and so forth. And the vast majority of the people in the markets took those facts and painted one kind of picture with it; it was a very pleasant picture. And a very small handful of people took the same facts and painted a completely different kind of picture with it. I wanted to find out, 'What is it that enables the people who bet against the market to paint that picture?' and 'Why do these people look at the world differently?' ”

WAY BACK, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized that unregulated capitalism inevitably crashed, causing huge misery in the land. Bill Clinton deregulated Wall Street, his wife Hillary continues to claim deregulation is a great thing for America, and as we go to press this week the world's financial systems, including ours, are in free fall.

THE MOST ENCOURAGING rumor we've heard in a long time is that Sheriff Allman is going to propose a sales tax measure to finance a psychiatric holding facility apart from the County Jail and as an end around entropic County government.

AS IT IS, the cops do ALL the heavy mental health lifting in Mendocino County. As it also is the Supervisors have obligated us all to a disastrous and disastrously failed, privatized mental health non-system from which they haven't the sense much less the political will to extract us.

RE THE SHERIFF'S mental health facility. It's still mostly in the rumor stage of development, and I'm excited about it, as the liberals like to say. To be successful it would have to be developed and funded outside the Supervisors and the present mental health system, which now spends about $20 million annually for either killing the mentally ill outright or more or less benignly ignoring them. Anything created to help the mentally ill inside the existing system would be screwed up by it. Whatever the specifics of the plan turn out to be, I think the Sheriff gets major attaboys for fully understanding the problem and trying to do something about it.

FROM DA EYSTER'S OFFICE, the 4th Quarter 2015 Non-medicinal Marijuana Prosecution stats: The final criminal case called in the Mendocino County Superior Court for 2015 this afternoon was the case of The People of the State of California v. Richard Lamonte Ezell, a case involving allegations of illegal marijuana cultivation and possession for sale. To resolve his case, Ezell, age 43, of Eureka, accepted a plea and sentence bargain that resulted in his being convicted of a misdemeanor on this the last day of the year. Including Thursday’s final matter, forty-nine (49) individuals charged in Mendocino County with illegal marijuana-related primary offenses had their cases resolved during the 4th and final quarter of calendar year 2015. The resulting conviction rate for the quarter was 82%. Of those 49 defendants, eight (8) individuals had all charges dismissed against them. One individual was acquitted by jury. [Sara Fraker — ed] Thirty-two (32) individuals were convicted at the misdemeanor level. Eight (8) individuals were convicted at the felony level. One of the eight felons received a local prison sentence. The 32 misdemeanants and 7 of the 8 felons are now on either supervised (formal) or court (summary) probation. All 39 are subject to warrantless search of their person and property on demand of any peace officer, as well as other terms and conditions of probation. As one term of their probation, 30 of the probationers must perform a collective 5,045 hours of community service, with monitoring of their enrollment and completion of hours by the staff of Mendo-Lake Alternative Service, Inc. (MLAS).

MENDO STONEHENGE? A local comments: "I recently saw a very interesting and somewhat astounding boulder installation on the south side of Mitchell Creek Drive. This is a link to a photo of a part of the rock garden: www.pygmy-forest.com/pygmy-355.jpg Does anybody know who created it, when, and if there is a message that goes along with it? The extent of the rock walls and pillars and blocks was to large to photograph in its entirety with one picture."

THE DROUGHT has imperiled 58 million big trees in the state. A study released by the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. used high-tech imagery gathered by an airplane flying over California earlier this year that showed up to 888 million large trees had “measurable losses of canopy water” since the drought began, and of those 58 million lost so much water they were determined as “extremely threatening to long-term forest health.” Scientists say the risk is still high even with the massive rain that’s been forecast this winter due to El Niño.

TOTAL MENDO AG PRODUCTION dropped about 4% in 2014 compared to 2013 according to the latest Mendocino County Crop Report. Timber production and sales value was up somewhat in 2014 over 2013 in the 1.3 million acres zoned for timber production, 2013 stumpage/value was 112 million board feet and $27 million in value; 2014 stumpage/value was $115 million board feet and almost $35 million in value.

AFTER DISCOUNTING the marginal increase in timber production and value, other agricultural production was off 11% mainly because total grape tonnage dropped significantly from about 78,000 tons to about 62,000 tons — perhaps a reflection of the drought or lower temperatures during the growing season.

ROUGHLY 600 bottles of wine are produced by one ton of grapes. So if the average retail price of a bottle is $20-$30 (frequently much more) for the 62,000 tons, that’s well over $700 million in retail value — a lot more than the $94 million in raw grape crop value reported in the 2014 crop report. The crop report does not provide the relationship between the grape crop and county revenues; it’s very indirect since grapes contribute some percentage of sales tax and property taxes, but certainly not a reflection of the total crop value.

BACK OF THE ENVELOPE calculations for grapes show why there’s so much acreage planted in grapes. If a small ten-acre vineyard can generate 6,000 bottles a year and sell them for $40 at retail, that’s a gross of $240,000. Factor in that field and bottling labor is mostly seasonal and low-paid, ag water is cheap, and a good chunk of your revenue is direct sales via on-line sales or a tasting room — and probably at least half of your gross is pure profit. Then add more zeroes for the bigger vineyards… Why, wine grapes are probably more profitable than marijuana!

PINOT GRAPES sold for over $2700 per ton in 2014, much more than the other varieties which sold for between $1,000 and $1800 per ton.

MOST OF THE CONVENTIONAL AG SECTORS were up in 2014 — vegetables, livestock, nursery, etc. — even though there was lower overall production, also probably drought related. Vegetable production, livestock production, and livestock and poultry products all were up in gross value and livestock was reported to have seen “very favorable market prices.”

ACCORDING TO WILLITS NEWS REPORTER Kate Maxwell in a recent article about the 2014 crop report, “Under new state regulations that go into effect January 1, cannabis will be considered an agricultural commodity and regulated by the state and local agricultural departments,” adding, “In 1979, agricultural commissioners from Mendocino, Del Norte, and Trinity counties included estimates of cannabis cultivation in their annual crop reports, but after pushback from agricultural agencies estimates have not been included since that year.”

WE DON’T THINK the crop report will include marijuana anytime soon. There are new regulations concerning medical marijuana cultivation going into effect in 2016 and there are references to County Agriculture Commissioners having an as-yet undefined role in those new regulations, but we could not find any specific reference to marijuana production, medical or not, being included in future crop reports. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to include a summary of whatever limited medical marijuana grow permits were issued, but that would hardly be representative of overall marijuana cultivation, not to mention that such data would be very dependent on who even applies for the burdensome and expensive permits, the accuracy of the permit claims, and at least minimal compliance of the growers.

ASSEMBLYMAN JIM WOOD seems to have noticed that deaths from prescription opiates are up. The Healdsburg solon had introduced a failed bill, Assembly Bill 623, that would have made the most popular downers virtually uncrushable, uncuttable or undissolvable for snorting and injecting. The bill odeed, but Wood says he'll touch it up and re-introduce it this year.  A sledgehammer won't crush that oxycodone!

THE GAS TAX may be going up. The State Senate says 68% of California’s roads need repair. Fixing them, which is so far unfunded, could cost as much as $135 billion over ten years. Legislators are looking to fund repairs with billions for the most urgent repairs, possibly with a higher gas tax. The state transportation department, Caltrans, says each dollar spent on preventive maintenance could save as much as $10 in repairs later.

FACEBOOK QUESTION to District Attorney Eyster: Just curious, how many convictions are first-time offenders and how many are repeat offenders? What is Mendocino County's rate of recidivism? And are these counting only local sentences or is it including the state prisoners who have been transferred in? — Paul Reed

DA EYSTER REPLIES: Please speak with the PIO Mike Geniella next week and he can sort out your queries. Until then, while some commit so serious a crime their first time out that they get sent to prison, that is not the norm. Prison is normally reserved for slow learners who don't learn the lesson from prior punishment imposed. This bar graph combines both RCP (local prison) and CDCR (state prison) (the breakdowns between the two are available online at our webpage), though remember there was no Realignment in 2010. Realignment came into existence on 10/1/2011. Finally, there are no state prisoners who have been transferred in due to Realignment; instead, there are prison commitments that stay local and never get transferred out to a state facility.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING. For some people, that is. I found it pretty funny, if my dubious taste is any recommendation. But the, ah, politically squeamish, the NPR types and candy asses generally, will find much to object to in Quentin Tarrantino's latest, The Hateful Eight. I wondered at a lot of the lovingly romanticized violence in the movie myself, but then this guy's films are always heavy on the ultra-vi so you know going in that there'll be catsup all over the place. Academics might describe Hateful Eight as Tarrantino's illustrated rumination on race relations. The female star, Jennifer Jason Leigh, steals the show from the great Samuel L. Jackson, and he's as wonderful in this thing as he is in everything. Some of you will remember Ms. Leigh as the tweeker in Orange is the New Black. All the women in Hateful Eight get shot, and until she's hanged Leigh is punched, elbowed in the nose, shot and otherwise abused. Misogynists will get double kicks out of this baby.

THE UNDERGROUNDING of power lines along East Perkins Street in Ukiah is being postponed because so much utility repair work is being done next door in Lake County in the wake of the summer’s huge fires.