Off the Record (June 27, 2018)

IGNORING LAKE SONOMA

Just to revive the feasibility study will cost $400,000 and completing it will cost $5.5 million … it would be “a stretch” coming up with the local share of nearly $3 million. … The cost of raising Lake Mendocino’s 160-foot earthen dam by 36 feet was last estimated in 2015 at more than $320 million … the feasibility study will take four to five years … Asked if Sonoma County might become one of the financial partners, Davis said that would require a decision by the Board of Supervisors, who also are the Water Agency’s directors. … Phase Two was 319-foot Warm Springs Dam, which was completed by the Corps in 1983, creating Lake Sonoma northwest of Healdsburg with a capacity of 381,000 acre-feet, more than three times larger than Lake Mendocino’s 116,500 acre-feet… (The Press Democrat, June 17, 2018)

MENDO is banking on a wildly improbable time frame and a ridiculous cost to increase the capacity of Lake Mendocino while the much, much larger Lake Sonoma goes virtually untapped. By simply rebalancing the amount of water drawn from Lake Mendocino — as once suggested by former Supervisor John Pinches — and drawing a compensating amount from Lake Sonoma you’d have a large short term gain for Mendo without any infrastructure cost or delay. But that would require Sonoma County to revise their sweetheart arrangement where they get lots of free water from Mendo which they then sell to their own County’s water agencies and Marin at a major markup (which they could continue to do with Lake Sonoma water). Congressman Huffman and the PD know this of course, but nobody in the entire region except Pinches is willing to even bring up the subject of equitable water distribution. They prefer to pretend they care by claiming to “boost” Lake Mendo’s still remote chances of minor capacity increases. (—ms)

RE THE BANNING of Trump officials from “liberal” restaurants, wouldn’t it simplify things if the libs just went for it all at once and set up Liberals Only restaurants, and maybe safe spaces in every red state too where the poor dears wouldn’t be burdened by opinions they disapproved of? Heck, we’ve already got snowflake set asides right here in Mendocino County, in Albion, Mendocino and whole neighborhoods of Fort Bragg and Willits.

POT CZAR DISAPPEARS (If you can hear this, Kelly, please call home. You’re among friends here.) Last week’s Board of Supervisors Meeting opened with a question from Willits Weekly reporter Mike A’Dair; “I don't really have a comment, but I have a question. I am very interested to know the status of Kelly Overton. {Overton is Mendo’s recently hired, high-profile “pot czar,” aka Cannabis Program Manager working directly under CEO Carmel Angelo.] I have made many calls to county staff and also to you Mr. Hamburg and I have not heard an answer. So I would appreciate an answer. I would like to know what his status is. Is he still with the county? Or not?” Board Chair Dan Hamburg’s response was: "Thank you."

MIKE A’DAIR is a long-time reporter on local affairs, and a very good reporter at that. We’re insulted on his behalf that he’s treated so rudely by the crew of this particular Ship of Fools. A’Dair asks a legit question, gets the silent stare back as his answer. Angelo, known to have a short fuse, probably flipped out on Overton, as she famously did with the similarly non-personed Flora, and he, like Flora, was gone. I wonder Overton also got the armed march from the premises ala Diane Curry? The forced march outtathere is also a new wrinkle in local public management.

LATER IN THE MEETING, CEO Carmel Angelo briefly mentioned that there was some information about the pot permit program in her CEO report but, she said, no staff was available discuss it, although there were pot program reps from County Counsel’s office, the Tax Collector's office, and the Planning Department.

USUALLY when a County employee disappears, we at least get, "It's a personnel matter,” but over the past coupla years we see a new local government strategy — the Mendo Stare Back. The spiritual Stalinists dominant in Mendocino County’s public agencies and oversight boards don’t reply, they just stare at the person asking the question, silently saying to him or her, “We’d love to kill you where you stand but our insurance doesn’t cover murder, so sit down and STFU.”

A READER WRITES: “Confidential: From what I heard, Kelly Overton resigned/was fired because he was unable to work with anyone. The dysfunction he was creating was threatening to further dismantle the Ag Commissioners office. So, good riddance. The real question is why did he get hired in the first place? There is nothing in his resume that hints of him being qualified to manage anything. The new Ag Commissioner appears to be a good hire.”

A READER WRITES: "By the way, you couldn't be more right than when stating that additional column inches covering the trials and tribulations of the marijuana legalization process would be exceedingly boring to some of your readers. When you were in Oregon and Severn was running the paper, I almost had to let my subscription lapse. Personally, even though I've been against the continuing senseless waste of time and resources that prohibition has represented, I voted NO on our own Colorado Proposition 64 a few years ago just because I refuse to get behind any marijuana legislation that opens the door for well financed profiteers without addressing the release of prisoners currently doing time for marijuana related convictions. It's typical of the self-absorption of most potheads that I've yet to see any legalization proposal in any state that carries language addressing this issue."

CARL PURDY, the 19th century early 20th century Ukiah sage is, a reader notes, “now a botanical saint, but those in the know decades ago blamed him for driving certain species to near extinction. Digging bulbs of mariposa lilies, selling them to locales where they would die... etc”

AH, WILDERNESS! Lake County, “a bona fide rural area” is indeed a world apart — above but not beyond the reach of urban escapees, although its desperate retail marketeers and tourism floggers fail to understand and encourage the real attractions that make Lake County a great place to live. Perhaps not such a great place to visit, for hype-seeking recreational ruminants — but for those who bring their families to enjoy the easy outdoor fun and unsophisticated entertainments Lake County is a year-round trip down a nostalgic path to small schools, inter-familial competitive sports, local agriculture and farmers markets, homespun symphony and theater productions, original (if not extraordinary) arts and crafts, and good-old-fashioned Gibbsville politics. Resistant to 21st Century modernization, like “broadband” and “smart meters,” museums and parks remain the central features of community education, and local “newspapers” seldom report more than the usual auto wrecks, domestic crimes, and pre-digested public health announcements. Oh, yeah, with the oldest natural lake in the western hemisphere, polluted and poisoned but pretty — and highly flammable/fragile hillsides descending from mountainous watersheds to gutterless ghettos of parolees and welfare babies, plagued with nail salons and massage parlors, cannabis cures and psychic readers to pass the time between doctors appointments and listening for sirens. (Betsy Cawn)

THE FINAL MENDO VOTE COUNT was right on schedule as the very last in the state to be announced. We were pretty sure our math would hold, and that Anderson Valley's Michelle Hutchins preliminary plurality over her phantom Ukiah opponent, Brian Barrett, would be too great for Barrett to overcome. (Barrett didn't show up for an important debate, dispatching his non-verbal pal, former County Superintendent, Paul Tichinin, to do his talking for him. He was pretty much invisible in the run-up to the election.)

FOR US here at the mighty AVA Ms. Hutchins' victory is particularly gratifying because it means she overcame a truly vicious campaign of secret slander that her detractors spread throughout the County's teaching faculties never, on their most lucid days, what you'd call centers of critical thinking. For instance, an Albion lady I've known for years said to me, "But my friend in Boonville says…" Says what? I asked. "Well my friend is against Hutchins and I trust my friend."

WE WERE HOPING that Roderick voters would somehow show up in enough force for him to squeeze into a runoff with the 5th District's lead vote getter, Ted Williams. The Roderick forces remained no-shows, and now we'll have an uninteresting run-off between Williams and Skyhawk, although they're not political twins despite their same-same political-social demographic of Coastal Mendo. Roderick has an attractive edge to him, and would have been much more likely to take on the ever more dysfunctional County leadership of the Queeg-like CEO Carmel Angelo and her partly lame duck, wholly rubber stamp Board of Supervisors. Supervisor McCowen, as we reported yesterday, got the full Queeg at Tuesday's meeting when he attempted to suggest that the buck stops with the Supervisors, not the CEO. His fellow Supervisors disappeared on him while the rest of us got an object lesson of who's running the County show. Which wouldn't be all that bad if local government weren't in the disarray it is — the Juvenile Hall fiasco; the hopelessly screwed-up marijuana policy; Mental Health services wherein upwards of $25 annual millions allegedly benefits this or that dependent population with no reports on who's providing what to whom; elimination of the Sheriff''s overtime budget, which obviously will have to be made up somehow; and so on. The primary diff between Skyhawk and Williams is that Williams is much more likely to see The Prob more clearly than Skyhawk who has made his way for years as an apparatchik in The Prob. (The Prob defined: Mendo's non-profit, public agency nexus heavy on believer-type Billery Democrats.)

IN THE WILDS of the County's northeast, up there at ground zero Emerald Triangle, we've got a runoff between Cowboy John Pinches, a former Supervisor returning for another go at it, and a much less vivid Willits school teacher named Haschak. These two ran neck-and-neck in the June election and will meet in a November run-off. The question is, Who will the also-rans in that crowded race now support? Haschak has the backing of the Warm Fuzzies and, presumably, much of the public employee juggernaut as fired up by Joe Wildman, the Willy Loman of local rightwing Democrats, the people who have gifted us with Donald Trump. Are there enough of Fuzzy Warms to elect Haschak? Will the formidable Mrs. Haschak get hubbykins off the rote drone of the Local Lib Lab Catechism? (No offshore drilling, low cost housing, nice things for the kids, support for the pot industry, etc. Generalities pleasing to the Church of the PC, but empty of specifics.)

CATCH AND RELEASE. Why? There isn't room in the jail. Which can be read 'jails,' plural, because county jails everywhere in the state are operating on a catch and release basis, and not only because of Prop 64 decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs, but because the rising tide of miscreants at all levels of seriousness means only people looking at serious felonies are locked up.

TAKE THE CASE of the old boy pictured below. Mr. Tucker, age 70, no fixed address and adrift on the Mendocino Coast. Arrested often which, I guess, is more exciting than Bingo at the Senior Center. Earlier in the week Tucker was arrested at the Mobil station just south of Fort Bragg. The charge was theft and assault. Apparently, Mr. T walked out of the station without paying for something and either hit or threatened to hit the clerk who confronted him. Tucker's bail was set at the felony level of $75,000. He was in jail overnight and soon made his way back to Fort Bragg.

TUCKER had previously been arrested in Fort Bragg for trespassing, which usually means he was squatting on private property until the owner and other people in the neighborhood complained. Apparently a drinking man, Tucker, also hadn't been discrete about where he relieved himself. And he’d recently been involved in a disturbance outside the Fort Bragg Senior Center involving another homeless guy. Mr. T. is popping up often enough in public view to almost get himself frequent flier status. He's plenty old enough to collect social security which, of course, wouldn't be enough to cover rent and his cost of living even if he weren't given to drink and unruly behavior. Whether or not Tucker has relatives in Fort Bragg or has an association with the town, isn't known, at least by us. Tucker, then, is a kind of roving, low intensity nuisance, a periodic responsibility of law enforcement, the kind of homeless guy who, 80 years ago, would have been court-ordered into the County Farm at Bush and Low Gap, Ukiah, and the kind of guy 80 years later serves as a funding unit for one or more public agencies and non-profits but remains out of doors deep into his golden years.

HALF-BAKED OPINIONS. Sure, I've got 'em, and by the bushel, too. You asked for it...

(1) The border with Mexico. Since the Monroe Doctrine, early 19th century, we've had our way with the Southern Hemisphere, installing and supporting murdering, thieving governments who've ransacked their countries and their peoples. And we wonder after nearly two centuries of these kleptocracies why their victims are massing at our border?

(2) The cover story in the current Atlantic Monthly: "Your Child Says She's Trans. She Wants Hormone Therapy. She's 13." I'd say, Her Parents Are Sex-Obsessed Neurotics Who Should Lose Custody Of Her. Leave Her Alone To Figure Out Her Preferences And Whatever You Do Keep Her Away From San Francisco

(3) The two races for Mendo supervisor boil down, for me, to which candidates realize that our local government isn't functioning as it should be functioning.

(4) I often see a large woman kinda jogging past the ava's Boonville bunker. I don't know her, and I'm hardly qualified to comment, but I want to tell her that exercise is something you have to look forward to, and that she can get the same training effect if she simply walked at a brisk pace and enjoy herself while she keeps herself healthy.

WE RECEIVED an angry letter re the Trans item above. “How would you like to have your gender arbitrarily assigned, in a community with rigid gender roles…” Etc. Seems from here, fashionable arguments aside, you’re stuck with the repro organs you’re born with, and that a kid on the adolescent side of puberty’s rosy cusp isn’t old enough to choose a sexual identity. The alleged parents of potential changelings I’ve seen discussing it on tv are suspiciously eager on the subject. I think a lot of nutball mommies (especially) out there enjoy the attention they get as they apply subtle but relentless pressure on their kid to lop it off or paste it on, as the case may be. Of course no kid with homosexual interests should be persecuted for having them.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE WEEK

Political Correctness is basically being polite, rather than being violent or foul mouthed.

The extreme end of a void of political correctness is the Jerry Springer Show. The modern vernacular of political correctness is just a term for any criticism that does not agree with you, such as when Donald Trump would interject “that’s just political correct”. He has since replaced this with “fake news”. It’s basically just a dog whistle. The problem with PC is Ideological Correctness. Which is usually squabbling over gender/sexuality and occasionally ethnic issues that largely don’t impact most peoples day to day lives most of the time. To be fair, our nation must have very few problems if these issues take up so much time and attention from people.