CHRIS SKYHAWK has officially ended his campaign for 5th District Supervisor. From Mrs. Skyhawk: “Given the severity of the stroke and the level of effort that will be necessary to heal, there is no chance Chris will re-join the race..." Skyhawk's name, however, will still be on the November ballot. The following was posted by Samantha, Chris Skyhawk’s partner, on his public page on Facebook “As many of you know, late last month Chris Skyhawk suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke. On behalf of Chris, and our whole family, we would like to thank everyone for the tremendous outpouring of support and love over the last few weeks. It has really meant a lot to us. The good news is that Chris is out of critical danger. We are, however, looking at a long recovery road. At this point, our sole priority is to come together as a family and focus on Chris’ healing. We know that there is a lot of concern, but it is still too early to tell what that might look like and what full recovery might mean…. For anyone who would like to be updated as the recovery continues, we have set up a Caring Bridge page (Updates on Chris Skyhawk) as well as a Go Fund Me campaign to help with the financial burden (Chris Skyhawk Recovery Fund). Again — thank you for the love and support. It has really meant the world to us. Samantha"
THE THIRD PLACE CANDIDATE in the Fifth District race for Mendocino County Supervisor, Dave Roderick, does not move into the November run-off, according to County Clerk Susan Ranochak. Ranochak said Saturday that her understanding of applicable state law is that only the death of one of the candidates now qualified for the ballot would give the third place candidate a spot on the ballot. Second place candidate Chris Skyhawk announced Friday that he was withdrawing from the race after suffering a serious stroke on June 26. Skyhawk was one of the two candidates to be “nominated” in the June primary to go to the November runoff in the 5th District supervisor’s race after defeating three primary opponents on June 5.
DURING THE JUNE RACE, Ted Williams finished with 2,285 votes (41.42%), and Skyhawk finished with 1,715 votes (31.09%). In third place was David Roderick of Hopland with 1,062 votes (19.25%). Ranochak said that only if Skyhawk had died could Roderick appear on the ballot and only if he died before the end of August, or 68 days before the November election. Any time after that and the ballot stands as is. She said Skyhawk’s dropping out of the race made no difference. He would still appear on the November ballot. She also said that it would do no good for voters to write in Roderick’s name on the ballot as he did not get a “nomination” in the June election and therefore those write-in votes would not be counted. That presumably leaves Williams as the only viable candidate in the race. Ranochak said, should enough people vote for Skyhawk anyway and he wins the race, then, having withdrawn from the race, the 5th District seat would be filled by the California governor by appointment, just as Georgeanne Croskey was appointed to fill the 3rd District seat vacated by Tom Woodhouse. The 5th District seat is being vacated by the retiring Dan Hamburg. The district covers the Mendocino Coast from Mendocino to Gualala, while also including inland areas like Boonville, Hopland and Yorkville.
FOR ALL the talk about Judge Kavanaugh's "brilliance," reading excepts of his opinions makes me wonder what's so brilliant about them: "Suppose you were the EPA Administrator. You have to decide whether to go forward with a proposed air quality regulation. Your only statutory direction is to decide whether it is “appropriate” to go forward with the regulation. Before making that decision, what information would you want to know? You would certainly want to understand the benefits from the regulations. And you would surely ask how much the regulations would cost. You would no doubt take both of those considerations—benefits and costs—into account in making your decision. That’s just common sense and sound government practice. So it comes as a surprise in this case that EPA excluded any consideration of costs when deciding whether it is “appropriate”—the key statutory term—to impose significant new air quality regulations on the Nation’s electric utilities. In my view, it is unreasonable for EPA to exclude consideration of costs in determining whether it is “appropriate” to impose significant new regulations on electric utilities.”
SURE THING, JUDGE, since the costs fall on the big biz entities your record shows you to be loyal to, and "The nation's electric utilities" being major contributors to the global warming your president doesn't believe in, by all means let's not make their owners bear any of the expense of killing the planet." This guy's a slippery dude who will speed up our collective death by a thousand cuts.
HERE’S KAVANAUGH on abortion: “The government has permissible interests in favoring fetal life, protecting the best interests of a minor, and refraining from facilitating abortion....” If Roe v. Wade comes before the court again, the judge is certain to go for repeal, although he's also said it's settled law depending on who he’s talking to.
STOCKTON will become the first city in the country to participate in a test of Universal Basic Income, where 100 residents will be given $500-dollars-a-month with no strings attached. UBI baby! Universal Basic Income, an idea whose time has come around. Again. Nixon was for it, for crying out loud. Nixon! His idea was to give every impoverished family of four the equivalent of $11,000 a year plus food stamps, with the basic theory being that a guaranteed floor income would obviate the grudging collection of poverty programs presently designed to what? Starve the poor into crime? An excellent piece in the July issue of the New Yorker describes the variations of UBI plans and the surprising range of support for the concept. Stockton is a trial run.
MY TAX DOLLAR AT WORK, Mendo Division: So, I get a form letter from the County's tax collector saying I owe $26.99. If I don't pay by the end of July "a lien against you will be recorded for non-payment of property taxes." The dunning letter said it was from "S. Crane, Deputy." I tried to call S. Crane, Deputy" at number on the warning letter. The number was defunct. I went to the office's website and dialed the number listed. A recording came on telling me to call some other time, that they were busy helping someone else.
I'D JUST BEEN watching Tuesday's meeting of the County leadership, none of whom I trust to prudently spend the property tax money I send them or even pour me an honest drink. Every time they meet they blow through thousands, sometimes millions, of public dollars on dubious projects, such as the $25 million they recently turned over to a private party to deliver heretofore public mental health programs. That expenditure was made via the "consent calendar,” meaning it got the 5-0 thumbs up without discussion. The person receiving the annual gift doesn't have to report back on how the money is spent or tell us how much she and her husband rake off for providing these services. Check that, kinda. We get a "data dashboard" that provides little in real info, such as who is paid what for doing what. Paying property taxes to these people feels like contributing to an ongoing criminal enterprise.
BUT THEY'VE got the power so it's simpler to just pay up to spare the aggravation of dealing with them. Natch, the letter threatening me with a lien on my mere acre of Mothership Earth, doesn't tell me exactly how they came up with this piddling figure, but I suspect the tax is on my “business,” which is Boonville's beloved community newspaper — free enterprise at its free-est, a virtual charity in fact. But that business consists entirely of a three-year-old computer and, thanks to the late Emil Rossi, County businesses owned by veterans are supposed to be tax exempt, and I'm a veteran. Years past I paid no business tax.
BUT MAYBE the County wants the 27 bucks for some other reason, maybe an espresso machine for the Supervisors to go with their $84,000 annual salaries plus thousands more in fringe benefits for them and their families. But since S. Crane, Deputy is not available by telephone, and darned if I'm going to drive all the way to Ukiah to beard these vague entities in their lair, I guess I'll just pay up. ((When I finally talked to someone at the County Clerk’s office he explained that only “disabled veterans” are exempt from the tax.)
NO SOONER had I tapped out the above than I heard Supervisor McCowen "volunteer" as part of an "ad hoc committee to further refine" the pot permit rules. I said ten quick repetitions of the Jesus Prayer. The Supervisors have been "refining" the County's cockamamie, unworkable pot rules for two years now. Anybody who thinks the County's rules are sensible, doable, is either nuts or retarded, but the Supervisors have spent hundreds of public hours "refining" them and are on their fourth pot administrator in two years, having just paid off a guy to leave, Mr. Overton, whose qualifications for the job consisted solely of "animal rights activist." Overton, if he'd somehow managed to stick around, would have been paid $90,000 a year. And I owe these people $26.99?
SHALL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN! Rummaging through a street box of giveaway books in Fairfax the other day, I picked up an old paperback copy of Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49," and whose name do I find inscribed in pencil on the very first page? None other than Ann Moorman, Judge of the Superior Court, Mendocino County. Better yet, Her Honor has informally annotated the text! I got a hoot outta her first note above Pynchon's first sentence — "Tupperware parties symbolizes meaningless."
THAT'S A PRETTY BIG surmise, your honor, off the very first sentence on page one but, yeah, I'd suppose Tupperware gatherings are on the meaningless spectrum, but for pure existential pointlessness unto dread you'd have to attend a KZYX board meeting or watch the Supervisors on YouTube. (24 of us tuned in on Tuesday.)
THAT SENTENCE Ms. Moorman construes as a condemnation of the Tupperware battalions? "One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedina Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary…"
PYNCHON'S NOVEL — his shortest but best imo — is funny as hell, and it's somehow encouraging that an officer of the court read it all the way through however many years ago, presumably emerging from the experience with an enhanced sense of the absurd. I've always appreciated Barry Vogel's concluding question of his I Am Curious interviews for KZYX when the Ukiah attorney asks his guests, "What are you reading?" By their books ye shall know them!
GOVERNOR BROWN has cut funding to fight trespass grows from the proposed fiscal year state budge. Since the Northcoast suffers more environmentally destructive grows than anywhere else in the state, Brown's move is downright mystifying, and deeply disappointing to most of us.
JERRY KARABENSH, is a retired millionaire and president of the Mendocino Coast Humane Society Board of Directors, a position he achieved via a board of directors coup back in the early 2000s. Tuesday, Karabensh appeared before the Board of Supervisors dressed as Uncle Sam to lobby them to waive development fees for some proposed improvements at the Rotary Park in the Village of Mendocino, citing a couple of early-80s Board decisions about Rotary Park as precedent. Jer the K probably has a point; the County is tardy with their review/approval of the Rotarians’ improvement plans, but millionaires suited up as Uncle Sam to beg a few public bucks?
HEALDSBURG is poised to open a massive hotel at its north end, and one has to wonder if the town's carrying capacity just swamped itself. Even on an early morning weekday the town is jammed with more visitors than downtown Santa Rosa probably gets in a week.
YOU MAY have seen the story about the young woman stranded for nearly week off Highway One in Big Sur when her car went off the road and down onto the rocks. All of the reports I saw said she "survived by drinking water from her radiator." Doubt that, but she's got herself a life time of freeze protection if that's what kept her alive. We’ve since learned the young woman only used the radiator hose as a siphon, but still that first sip must certainly have been, er, bracing.
WE'VE BEEN STEADILY CRITICAL of County CEO Carmel Angelo, but trying to look at the Board of Supervisors from her perspective, she may have sensed early on that someone had to grasp the leadership reins in the absent presence of the elected Fab Five. Dan "Wake Me When It's Over" Gjerde seems to have checked out, gazing out silently at the proceedings with a slightly stunned look on his ageless puss; Georgeanne Croskey's a temp mysteriously installed via, of all places, the Willits School Board; Carre Brown only rouses herself at perceived threats to virtually free water for her Potter Valley neighbors; John McCowen occasionally dares an independent comment but is immediately eyeballed into silence by CEO Angelo; and Hamburg, perennially odeed on the love drug, might as well be a motorized cardboard cutout sitting up there stroking his comfort dog. Trained as a nurse, Angelo probably took one look at this crew and, recognizing incapacity when she sees it, said to herself, "If I don't do it this sucker could sink."
THIS GUY ASKS, "You guys get your Pulitzer yet?" I did a quick search of his deadpan features for evidence of sarcasm, but he was serious. I said if I hang on 'til I'm a hundred I might get one out of pity, but at this point I think I’m the only guy left who hasn’t got Lots of people, including the guy who asked, seem to think there's some kind of journalo-talent scouts out there scouring the land for the good stuff, a delusion that ought to have been shattered years ago at a mere glance at the roster of who and what has gotten the "prize." If the process were disinterested Bruce McEwen would have one. He's the best courtroom reporter in the country. Of course he's the only one, but still he's a truly excellent reporter, the best this benighted county has ever seen. But in fact, the Pulitzer for this sordid line of work is by application. The big news orgs have a couple of people whose full-time job it is to fill out the forms and pack them off to the hacks and hackettes at the Columbia School of Journalism who do the selecting. Which isn't to say that some good stuff doesn't get recognized. But looking back, there are more great journalists whose work was ignored than not. Fundamentally, the Pulitzer is about as significant as coming in third on Dancing with the Stars.
DEFEND EVERY DECISION: Records show Sonoma County damage control over fire alerts: pressdemocrat.com/news/8294145-181/you-failed-us-records-show
THE MOST INTERESTING thing in the above story is the implication that all the deserved abuse the Santa Rosa-based authorities are getting for their handling of the disastrous October fires might be at least partially offset by summoning Authority's Scribes from the Press Democrat to cool out some of it. As a commenter rightly put it, ...."There you have it folks. Let's get our good boy network of friendly (journalists) in here and cut a deal to help cover our failures, incompetence and unwillingness to be straight forward and honest with our constituents."
THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT is from a particularly credulous Press Democrat story:
"Flow Kana distributes cannabis to more than 100 dispensaries throughout Northern California, but transforming the winery into a cultivating, processing, manufacturing, distribution and retail hub would be its biggest project so far. John Fetzer, former CEO of Fetzer Vineyards and cofounder of Saracina Vineyards in Hopland, says it may be hard for some people to accept, but he believes that Flow Kana has the best interests of the community in mind, and doesn’t expect the area to become overrun with cannabis companies. ‘Flow Kana fell in love with the property because it promotes agricultural,’ said Fetzer. He doesn’t see his family’s history or legacy being damaged by the transition. ‘It’s going to be a new beginning and great opportunity for a lot of new people...’.”
ALL OF WHICH contradicts prevalent rumors that Flow Kana's kash flowa is so weak it's looking for money, big money to keep afloat the apparent fantasy that Mendo and HumCo's small pot ops are going to sell product cheap to Flow Kana so Flow Kana can market it for them. We think this is yer basic flawed biz plan. Pot sharecropping? Won't go in Mendo except among the farmers desperate to offload product at any price.
UKIAH’S been cursed with recent city councils as inept as the Board of Supervisors. Scalmanini, neatly wrapped up by USJ editor KC Meadows in her Sunday editorial, was the only applicant for a Council seat vacated by the dependably fatuous Mari Rodin, who left to take a job with Monterey County as a LAFCO staffer, where she lasted about a month because Monterey County apparently requires its employees to (1) know something, (2) actually work. Scalmanini showed up from wherever he showed up from and was immediately embraced by inland "progressives" who make their rent-free headquarters in John McCowen's grungy building at 106 West Standley. One of Scalmanini's first moves was to join an anonymous cadre of obstructionists to oppose CostCo’s Ukiah store because, well, like, gosh it's a big corporation, finally settling the case with an agreement that CostCo solarize a CostCo in Modesto or somewhere. Only in Mendocino County would a dingbat like Scalmanini be possible because only in Mendo you are whatever you say you are, and history starts all over again every morning.
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE WEEK
If you can have a multiple bankrupt game-show host as president, if you can be famous for being famous, if a lawyer’s daughter can become exorbitantly wealthy for having a big derriere and zero shame, if all her family can become famous and wealthy by doing likewise, then maybe a billion dollar company based on $29 lipstick isn’t such a stretch. And if you can convince an Olympic Gold Medal winner to emasculate himself for the sake of the family business, then maybe the prospect of a President Kim K isn’t such a remote possibility. If all these things are true then all kinds of things formerly regarded as being impossible, become possible. And if all these formerly unthinkable things become not only thinkable, but part of the warp and weft of American life, then maybe “American” becomes a misnomer. Maybe “Caligulan” should be the nationality.
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