PERIODIC BURSTS of gun fire and firecracker poppings began about 8:30pm New Year’s Eve in Boonville, and continued at random intervals until the first minutes of 2018. Much of explosive merriment seemed confined to South Boonville, perhaps coming from the Confederate Army headquarters off Hutsell Lane, but North Boonville (NoBo) held up its end with occasional explosions.
NEW YEAR’S MORNING the only places in Boonville to grab a pastry and a cup of coffee were Pic ’N Pay and the Redwood Drive-in. Same-same on post-Christmas Wednesday in Boonville, with Mosswood and the Boonville General Store both shuttered. When the Anderson Valley sleeps in, not a creature stirs.
A CARAVAN of Mendo cops descended on the property behind the Redwood Drive-In last Thursday morning where they spent much of the day, at the end of which one man, Ricardo Suarez Jr. was arrested. The raid team drove off with him and a dump truck load of pureed pot. Suarez, four days before legalization, was charged with possession for sale and several gun violations. The irony here is that probably one in ten Mendocino County households would have yielded modified firearms and dope of all kinds.
CHAYA MANDELBAUM OF BOONVILLE, and a graduate of Ukiah High School, is a partner in the law firm of Rudy Exelrod Zeiff and Lowe in SF. His specialty and passion is labor law. Besides his law practice for the past 5 years he has been and currently is the chair of the California Fair Employment and Housing Council, having been appointed by Governor Brown. An article from a recent SF Chronicle about the new CA legislation that has just been passed includes Chaya's and the Council’s excellent work re these new laws.
THE IMMOVABLE OBJECT at the mouth of the Navarro, reports MSP, has backed up the river for months now. “A look at the upstream USGS Navarro River gauge found the Navarro at 3.68' - still trending downward. The sandbar hasn't breached, water is just filtering through it. Thanks to the lack of rain, the "discharge rate," the amount of water flowing towards the mouth, has also decreased - it was 272 gallons per second at the gauge - 16,320 gallons per minute or 979,200 gallons per hour. King Tides are coming Monday & Tuesday with high tides of 7.1' - it may be enough to beat the sandbar into breaching - or alternately, the surf could hurl sand on it to make it higher.”
GRATITUDE to whoever is responsible for decorating the little fir about four miles up the Ukiah Road. The same Whoever did it last year, too. Always elicits a smile from this motorist and others, I'm sure.
MY LETTER to Jeffrey Parker, KZYX General Manager asked the GM:
Trying to get up to speed as a candidate for your board of directors. Want to know the number of paid station people, including contract workers, and also if John Coate and Stuart Campbell are compensated employees of one sort or another.
PARKER eventually replied:
Warmest holiday greetings. KZYX currently employs five full-time staff, two part-time staff and two part-time contractors. John Coate has not been a paid staff since leaving the station in mid-2015. John is a member and occasional volunteer, generally during pledge drives. Stuart Campbell has not been a paid staff since briefly serving as interim GM in late 2015, after John’s departure and before Lorraine’s recruitment. Stuart is a member and dedicated volunteer programmer, though he’s announced on air that he’ll stop producing "Consider This" from February. We expect he’ll continue as an active volunteer in other roles. I’ve copied this response to Ed Keller, who is coordinating this election. All the best, Jeff
ENCOURAGED by the first civilized response I’ve received from KZYX in a quarter century, and never one to let sleeping dogs snooze, I immediately wrote back:
And while I have you… A friend of mine, a retired banker, has some questions which I hope you can pass on to the station's money person for a reply. (Ed note: I have no idea who composes the budget, but it raises more questions than it answers. The Anderson Valley’s CSD Budget, by way of contrast, is hashed out in public where no expenditure goes unscrutinized. CSD’s is a model of clarity and directly applies to KZYX in that the AV CSD spends less than the $600,000 annually that KZYX spends, but CSD funds ambulance and fire protection while KZYX spends more while claiming a perfectly balanced $600,000 budget containing several unexplained categories of expenditure.)
THE FOLLOW-UP QUESTION is more than a week old without a reply. I’m not trying to harass Parker, but the reason I’m running for a seat on the station’s perennially rubber stamp board of trustees is to bring some candor, for the first time ever, to station operations. In brief, I think KZYX could be much better in every way than it presently is.
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