IN OUR TALK with Supe's candidate John Pinches, Pinches said that he thought Doug Losak was the best County Counsel the County has had recently. "He saved the County thousands and thousands of dollars," Pinches said. "Instead of settling everything and paying people off, Losak fought back. He challenged claims, didn't just roll over and pay them."
PINCHES also said, in reference to the Potter Valley Diversion, "There's other ways to pump that water over the hill," on his way to making the point that Mendocino County is getting majorly ripped off by Sonoma County via the deal made in the middle 1950s, whereby most of the water stored in Lake Mendocino is owned by SoCo. Pinches rightly thinks the contract ought to be revised to ensure that Mendocino County gets its fair share of the water and the money; SoCo presently re-sells our water for annual millions. Well, it’s not exactly our water, it’s HumCo’s, but that original treaty at the dawn of the 20th century, as the Chinese dug the Diversion tunnel, says that diverted water is Mendo’s.
OF COURSE the mere mention of inland water policy change brings Potter Valley's noble sons of the soil, and the rest of the downstream grape magnates, a'screaming and a'hollering for the Diversion as is. Small wonder, they're paying no more than $12.50 for an acre foot of water, and probably less but try to get the true figure. Meanwhile, residential users in, say, Redwood Valley, pay a lot more.
AN ACRE FOOT OF WATER, by the way, is estimated to provide the average family of four 240 gallons a day for four years. Bear these figures in mind when you get your next water bill. Potter Valley and downstream ag get it for about $14 an acre foot.
HERE'S the official rationale from Redwood Valley's water office: "Some of you wondered why agricultural water costs less than domestic water. The added cost for domestic water is that it has to be treated to insure that is safe for you to drink. That treatment must comply with ever stricter State water standards. The chemicals used and the upkeep of the plant are expensive. We are using solar power for plant electricity, one of the first districts to do so, but it all still adds up. Agricultural water is pumped directly from the lake without treatment."
WELL, SURE, but millions of dollars in cheap water is a very big break for wine ag.
ADDING to the obstacles of sensible Mendo water policy is the several competing water and sewer districts in the Ukiah Valley. Throw in the welfare water ranchers of Potter Valley, and the wine mogul grape growers from Potter Valley to Hopland, and Sonoma County owning the left over, and you quickly understand that reform is, at this political time, impossible. When Pinches, as a supervisor, brought it all up he couldn't get a second from any of his colleagues to even discuss water with SoCo!
GOOD NEWS! The Chehada Brothers, owners of the Redwood Valley Market, announced last week that they have just closed escrow on the purchase of the lot that had been designated for the Dollar General store. A relieved Redwood Valley resident writes: “Perhaps the loss of so many homes in the October fires, and the continued protest by dozens of Redwood Valley residents against an alcohol permit for Dollar General, became a factor in Dollar General thinking, uh, maybe they aren't welcome in Redwood Valley?! In any case, this is good news for so many of us who dreaded the big yellow sign in our little community. We can thank Alex and Anthony Chehada for pursuing legal remedies against DG, and for investing in the future of our community by buying the lot. Since Mendocino County now has a "Formula Business Ordinance" (enacted by the Board of Supervisors last year), which places additional public review and other "speed bumps" into approval of chain businesses in the rural areas of the County (including RV), we will have much more input into any future proposals for a formula store or restaurant in RV. Continue to support our local businesses like the Redwood Valley Market, local farmers, vineyards, etc. Let's keep Redwood Valley strong and independent!”
IN JUNE of 2016, a pleasant, smart, energetic, recently-hired woman named Lorraine Dechter left her job as general manager at KZYX, Mendocino County's public radio station. Prior to Ms. Dechter's sudden departure, an experienced radio guy, Raoul Van Hall, also abruptly left his new position as program director, citing a "toxic work environment." Dechter and Van Hall wouldn't elaborate, but I wouldn't have argued with their characterization of the enterprise. (We’ve all seen it before at KPFA, the wacko foothold then the final coup and on into bankruptcy court.)
LAST MONDAY the dozen or so candidates for KZYX trustee gathered at Mendo College to talk up their bona fides and explain their reasons for wanting to clamber aboard the stagnant station's board of directors. When I arrived, the candidates were already arrayed around their microphones. W Dan, an amiable Boonville guy, was host. A tall, gray man with an unhealthy, seldom-seen-the-sun pallor seemed to be in overall charge. As the candidates earnestly answered questions, this gray specter often passed W Dan notes. It became clear that the Specter was in charge of the evening.
I'D MET the present station manager, Jeffrey Parker, and the gray ghost wasn't him. Parker, incidentally, is also a phantom figure straight out of Catch-22 — he's in when he's out, out when he's in. What exactly he does to earn his approximately $60,000 annual salary isn't clear. Nothing about the station's finances is clear, and Parker and his lock-step trustees regard questions about the station's budget as impertinences. Or insults. Parker wrote me a couple of weeks ago that station's salaries are "confidential." Which they aren't because KZYX is tax supported and tax exempt.
ALL THE CANDIDATES save two struck me as honest and sincere. Candidates Bushansky and Vinyard, however, have been put up by the station's present apparatus, which, as was made clear at this event, is tightly controlled by the Specter who, I tardily deduced, must be Stuart Campbell, a person I still haven't met. Ms. Vinyard is a simple soul of the neo-hippie type common in Mendocino County. She went on about "getting along" and "unity." Bushansky, who looks like Oliver Cromwell complete with Ollie’s disapprovingly dour, pursed-lip countenance to match, seemed perplexed that anyone could possibly think that anything was awry with the station. Bushansky said the annual budget was posted on the station's website, implying that it was the very model of fiscal transparency. If, say, a peanut butter sandwich marked “KZYX BUDGET” was posted on the website, Bushansky would undoubtedly point to it and say, "There it is. The budget. Nobody's hiding anything." In obvious fact, this budget hides everything, and why when we’re talking relative chump change.
NEAR THE END of this joyless event, I asked if Campbell would identify himself and tell us his function at the station. He stared back mute. W Dan reminded me that this was a candidate's night, and Campbell was not part of it. I asked Campbell if it were true he enjoyed, in the bold words of resigned trustee, Larry Minson, "a constant tab on a line of credit that costs the station $11,000 in interest every year?" Campbell stared at me. W Dan repeated that Campbell was not involved in the evening's proceedings. I tried to make the point that Campbell's draw on station resources was way outta line, and that I hoped the new trustees would somehow restore reputability. I hoped Campbell's creepily furtive performance will give them pause.
LARRY MINSON had done a brave and good thing for Public Radio Mendocino County. He wrote a detailed public letter, linked below, explaining that Campbell et al had tried to compel him to endorse illegality. Rather than compromise himself, Minson resigned.
MINSON’S fellow trustees have never needed compelling. As generations of KZYX trustees before them, they simply say yes to whatever Campbell or any number of his predecessors hand them, including Campbell's hire of his girlfriend as a station reporter.
BUSHANSKY AND VINYARD will be elected to the board. It will be interesting to see how long the other candidates last as Campbell's surrogates. One candidate has a financial background. I'd love to see his analysis of the present budget. Like Minson, he'll be asked to sign off on the unethical and the illegal.
OVER THE LONG years that KZYX has functioned as an insider's game, it's been a bumbling, marginally competent operation, but since the advent of this Campbell character, whose resume includes a stint as trainer of EST trainers, meaning he is indeed a cult drone, KZYX has gone full-on creepy bordering on sinister. Definite cult vibe with Campbell. It occurs to me that the whole gang down there these days might be EST cult people, Who are they? Where do they come from? Except for Diane Hering, they’re from wherever. Is Diane in danger of zombification?
JOHN SAKOWICZ, a former trustee, was steadily vilified — and is still condemned — when, as not only a station trustee but the board's treasurer, he demanded to see the books. He was denied access and un-elected. The station, under a Campbell crony and personality clone called Coate, also a furtive cooker of the books like his pal Campbell, claimed that Sako cost them $16,000 in legal fees, which would not have been incurred by simply allowing the board treasurer to honor his fiduciary responsibility.
I THINK KZYX is in trouble. Membership has been flat for years. How many paid members are there under the age of 60? Salaries are inflated beyond what the station with an income of $550,000 can afford. Given the ever more intense media competition and demand on the fragged attentions of our distracted population, KZYX isn't competing. There's little enthusiasm for a radio station that shuts out most people, vilifies many, is startlingly nasty to lots more, cooks its books, puts the fear in the automatons who comprise its core people.
A READER WRITES RE KZYX CANDIDATE'S NIGHT: "That was a stunning moment, when you asked Stuart Campbell who he was and what he was doing. He shrunk into the woodwork—coward. I hope it wasn't lost on the listeners. Before the event, in the hall, I met a member of the board, some tall guy, and asked him if he read Larry's Minson's letter. He said no he didn't have to, he heard all about it. I said this was a public letter and didn't we the public deserve a response? He said no, it was beneath him to reply, even though he hadn't read it!"
AS I WAS LEAVING the event at the College on that unencouraging Monday night, I, too, was approached by a tall gray guy who'd jogged up behind me, calling with some urgency, "Mr. Anderson! Mr. Anderson!" There were mostly gray men at the mikes as candidates, some tall, some medium size, and only three women. The gray man in charge of the festivities, the ineffable Campbell, walked around looking important. The gray man who'd run up on me outside introduced himself as Jonathan Middlebrook, a station trustee. He said he wanted to come to Boonville "to talk off the record. It must be off the record." He emphasized "off the record" at least four times. I said sure, but then, the next day, I forwarded a short list of questions to him and his fellow board members, and to the station's perpetually unavailable manager, Jeffrey Parker, sparing the anxious Middlebrook the trauma of a visit to the beast’s Boonville lair.
PAT KOVNER, one of only three women running for the board, told me that she'd recently called "on air to The Discussion" (an occasional show) where "both Alice and JP said they had read Larry's [Minson] letter and it was all lies. I asked them to respond publicly, addressing each issue, that it was their duty as a public institution, but they dusted me off."
THAT'S THE WAY KZYX operates. They've now rigged another election to make sure there's not another skeptical Minson or Sakowicz trying to intrude themselves into their audio club. Ms. Kovner and I have zero chance of election. This Stuart Campbell character has a hyphenated guy running against Ms. Kovner, a sour fellow called Bushansky running against me.
MR. MIDDLEBROOK was the only trustee to respond to my short list of questions.
"I'm writing to you as one member of the KZYX Board with my answers to those of your questions I can answer. I write only for myself & for no one else.
1. Is Stuart Campbell a paid member of staff?--No.
2. Is he authorized to withdraw station money?--No.
3. Does he owe the station money?--No.
4. Does he have hiring authority?--No
5. What exactly is his function at the station?--Mr. Campbell functions as a dedicated station volunteer, one of the best.
6. I want to speak with the GM in person. What days and hours is he available at Philo?--I do not know Mr. Parker's schedule. I suggest you call the station, 895-2324
Sincerely, Jonathan Middlebrook"
I CALLED THE STATION. "Alice" answered. I don't know Alice. She's a new name to me. She was polite, which I mention only because I won't forget the female ogre who once answered the phone, "What the fuck do you want?"
THE PHANTOM GM, Parker, didn't call back, leaving me no alternative but to visit the station unannounced some time to find him and address Mr. Minson's questions to him directly.
A FRISCO PROPOSAL to commit mentally ill street people to a special unit at St. Mary's Hospital was immediately denounced by Jennifer Friedenbach, the city's lead Homeless Industrial Project person. Bay Area comment lines just as immediately lit up with denunciations of these highly paid "advocates":
(1) These are not "homeless advocates" they are homeless enablers. Not unlike the masters of old, they enslave people who cannot help themselves out of living on the street. They help them by feeding, tenting, and patting the hardcore homeless on the shoulder and saying, "let us help you." But they do literally nothing to end the pain, the sorrow, the dangers of homeless living. By helping they are sentencing these sad, unfortunate people to danger and death in unhealthful conditions. Choosing to live on the street is a bad choice. The enablers refuse to recognize this or do anything useful to truly bring people from the darkness back to the light.
(2) The cops finally showed up yesterday to clean up a 12 tent encampment near my house, and even attached several pictures of the street all nice and clean. And by 7 pm, the feral zombies were already moving back in. I've signed up for a 10 minute meeting with Supervisor Farrell to beg for barriers because I shouldn't have to deal with this bs. I was threatened by a zombie on Sunday btw, and if one so much as touches me I will sue this city for negligence and everything else I can think of.
(3) The Coalition on Homelessness should really be registered as a lobbyist for Heroin Dealers and the Oxy Industry. Their policies have greatly enriched enriched both parties - all the white the suffering on SF has grown to epic proportion. The highly paid Homeless Coalition directors have just brought nothing but more misery to the streets of the SF for everyone who lives in SF without concern for children, neighbors or small businesses - while all the Homeless directors live across the bay in their safe, clean suburbs. Hypocrisy has never had such well-versed practitioner as the Homeless Coalition directors.
JUST as the annual roadside grass greens, Caltrans, sworn enemy of natural beauty, breaks out the Round-Up, tons of it, streaking Sonoma County's highway margins a deader than dead brown, creating great collateral damage to wild things, not to mention running poison on into waterways. Mendo, to the eternal credit of the people who got it done, passed a ballot measure some years ago prohibiting the promiscuous application of herbicides by road crews, but. you still see these hideous dead zones in vineyards at this time of year, and if they don't reduce your 99.1 Pinot a point or two, what will?
SUPES CANDIATE JOHN PINCHES told us last week that one of the saddest sights he'd seen recently was a magnificent but lethargic buck at a watering hole near his ranch deep in the Eel River canyon. For several succeeding afternoons, Pinches returned to check on the buck, which each afternoon was even more lethargic, so weak it didn't run at Pinches' approach. "I knew he'd been poisoned, probably by something he ate in a marijuana garden." Pinches concluded.
“CANNA NUMBERS” is a series of charts presented periodically to the Board of Supervisors. The following charts will be presented to the Board on Tuesday afternoon: 2018 Canna Numbers-2
So, 800 permits were applied for in 2017.
62 more in January and February of 2018
Almost 550 were applied for in the first two months of the program in May and June, then, not surprisingly, permit applications dropped off dramatically. Averaging around only 30 a month for the last seven months.
LOTS OF QUESTIONS arise with this steep downward trend: What happens to all the high-paid pot permit staffers when the program is so complicated that very few people are willing to try to apply? Why don’t they report on how many permits were approved? How many were denied and for what reason? How many went on to get state licenses? How many are actually operating and paying taxes? How big is the budget deficit being created by having hired lots of pot permit staffers but not having many applications? What’s the staffing plan for the next couple of years? How long will it be before somebody says, “I think we should take a new look at this.”
PREDICTION: None of these questions will arise, much less be answered as the County’s impenetrable pot process slowly grinds on and collapses of its own weight.
SUPERVISOR DAN GJERDE told us recently that he’s getting a little irritated at the “pattern” of Department heads requesting board approval to hire recently retired top officials back as extra help under the heading of “critically needed.” The latest example is County Auditor Lloyd Weer’s request to hire his recently retired Assistant Auditor Margaret Simonson back for about 30 hours on and off for the next six months “to fulfill critical duties including training her successor and other Auditor-Controller's office staff on the property tax system and related critical processes and deadlines which occur during the 180 days following her retirement.”
GJERDE said the Board already authorized Weer to hire a new assistant weeks ago and now here he is asking pay Simonson $50 bucks an hour to train her? Weer and Simonson had weeks to do that already. Now the County has to spend a couple thou more? What gives?
SHORT ROUNDS: I was complaining to a female friend about the testosterone-deficient males dominant in Mendo's lib circles, KZYX particularly, when she said, "l always felt a lot of the hippie men, circa 1970, were basically frustrated business men in tie-dye. Guys who pretended to be groovy, but secretly treated their wives or girlfriends like they were idiots. Or espousing love and communes but being unable to hear their own neighbor's thoughts about land problems. Or pretending to be so hip and pc and un-sexist, but subscribing to playboy/penthouse, and making crude (and very stupid) asides to women." Which coincides with my blazing insight exactly.
I'LL BET that Oakland Cafe's ban on police will turn out to be as intended — a great publicity ploy for the coffee shop which, a friend tells me, doesn't exactly do a robust business. The sight of police is likely to "trigger" PTSD among patrons with unhappy police encounters? My, what a sensitive people we've become. I accidentally walked in on a meeting of the Mendocino County Democratic Central Committee one night. Scared hell outta me!
WHEN I WAS YOUNG — Wait! Please don't run! I'll be brief — cops used to scare me. Check that. Not scare me, but I was always extremely wary around groups of them, and ready to run when colleagues began throwing stuff at them. In the sixties and seventies the San Francisco and Oakland cops were no joke. Beatings, if you got caught in the act of vigorously exerting your Constitutionally-protected right to free speech, were routine. One night on Nob Hill, a guy I'd grown up with, Dick Yoell, then a member of Frisco's legendary Tac Squad, got me cornered in the courtyard of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. (Visiting Vietnamese fascists often stayed at the Fairmont across the street.) I recognized him before he recognized me, but then, "Anderson, you asshole! What are you doing with these fucks?" I said I'd just come down from the bar up top and walked straight into what seems to be some kind of riot. What the heck is going on? "Bullshit!" Yoell said. "Get your ass outta here!" I did, too.
PEOPLE with Bay Area mob demo experience may agree that the police are generally much more benign these days, much more responsibly led, much more dispassionate. I think as they've become better at policing the social implosion, not to mention history, has combined to make them the target of the terminal, often suicidal, alienation that now exists among the growing numbers of the doomed. All the good things that could be done to make US a much less violent country haven't even been seriously discussed since LBJ's Great Society.
IN 2016 MENDOCINO COUNTY voted about 58% Democratic (Clinton), 29% Republican (Trump), and 13% “Other” including Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom and American Independent candidates. Political registration (as of 2008, the latest we could find) was about 47% Democratic, 24% Republican, 20% declined to state, and 9% “other.”
IT'S THAT 29% that keeps professional officeholders of the Huffman-Thompson-Wood-McGuire type looking over their rote shoulders. The Northcoast has never been a sure thing for soft conservatives of the Demo type.
ASSEMBLYMAN WOOD. Every time I see a mailing with his blandly uncomprehending mug on it I think it's an ad for hair care products.
HEY! A reader passes along a video of the Academy Awards, and guess what was in the gift boxes the stars got? Mendo Mellow from FlowCanna, the Redwood-Valley pot marketers. "No wonder there were so many pot remarks," our informant comments.
ALDEN GLOBAL CAPITAL is the hedge fund that has siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars from Digital First Media, the far away corporate owners of the Ukiah Daily Journal, The Willits News, the Advocate/Beacon right here in Mendo. A belated lawsuit charges correctly that the Hedge boys are stripping the newspaper chain of both its physical assets and its reporters, thus further weakening America's (and Mendo’s) staggering media.
SAD SIGHT in Ukiah. The pear orchard on the east side of 101 at Ukiah has been bulldozed into burn piles.
THE SHOOTING at the Vet's Home in Yountville has inspired the predictable range of comment, at least on mainstream media. It goes from rote calls from politicians for gun control to teary-eyed laments for veterans suffering post-traumatic stress who aren't getting enough rehab. This particular vet-lunatic was not in any way a sympathetic character. Murdering three women explains your year in an Afghan combat zone?
TACTICALLY, the huge police presence at Yountville served no purpose beyond confining the shooter to the room he'd immediately occupied that awful morning, which could have been accomplished by a dozen cops. The shooter, it seems, freed several women before shooting the remaining three. The cops all stood around for the next eight hours doing what? We had every police agency in the North Bay on-site, plus a gang of FBI agents. Why? These lone shooter episodes shouldn't require more than a dozen people who know what they're doing and maybe an ambulance. There must have been five hundred cops at Yountville. The breathless television coverage was beyond lame, and endless.
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE WEEK: I’ve worked in jail mental wards. One with 2000 inmates, round the clock armies of psych staffs, deputies, and doctors with access to jail cells and all the special equip you might need to deal with the mentally ill. Hundreds of eyes on to make sure they take their meds and they’re not harming themselves or others. Millions of dollars and incredible effort by super capable staff, and it still doesn’t work well at all. It’s a fantasy to think you’ll fix the estimated 20,000 or so mentally ill people on the streets of Orange County alone. If you build more facilities, where will you put them? No one wants them anywhere close and I can’t blame them. Where will you get the money when California is currently letting thousands of criminals out of prisons because they can’t afford them? Orange County is currently trying to move all the homeless into hotels with 30 day vouchers. What hotels would be crazy enough to take them in? Imagine what these places will look like in a month. I’ve seen people smash their heads through walls, flush full blankets to stop up the plumbing, and tear stainless steel plumbing fixtures off block walls. And, what will happen when the 30 days are up?
This is a no win situation. The mentally ill have been moving to California for half a century at least. Liberal gov’t policies and good weather are a magnet. The L.A. area averages one cop on the street for every 10 to 30 thousand people. The thin blue line is REALLY thin out here. The next financial crisis and real estate market crash might just sink us into oblivion. We are completely overcrowded here, and our testosterone levels are dropping. We don’t have the will or money or places or psychiatrists, and soon we won’t have the balls :-), to do anything about this.
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