MCT: Friday, March 15, 2019

• Bob Meadows
• Paula Thanks
• Senior Center
• Immediate Care
• Warning Sirens
• Yorkville Dinner
• BOS Agenda
• Lady Mayor
• Ed Notes
• Shooting Statement
• Succulent Rush
• Neuroth Settlement
• Another Democrat
• Startled
• Upton Sinclair
• Jail Skin
• Lighthouse
• Farm Wanted
• Rocks
• Bret's Trials
• Harriet Tubman
• Roederer Housing
• Truth Music
• Yesterday's Catch
• Warhol Update
• Misinformation Vaccine
• Beatles Update
• Flyfishing
• Crumb Work
• Excessive Fines
• Spiritual Career
• Wall Pay
• Behavioral Ball

BOB MEADOWS has died after a long fight against cancer. A long-time resident of Hopland where he worked for several wineries, Bob was married for many years to KC Meadows, editor of the Ukiah Daily Journal.

THANK YOU

Editor,

The Paula family would like to thank the Anderson Valley Volunteer Ambulance and fire crews for their help during our resent time of need. We are extremely grateful for their quick response, professionalism and utmost compassion.

Again, thank you.

Buffy Paula

Philo

LONG LIVE COAST HOSPITAL

Editor,

I cannot tell you how thankful I am that Coast hospital provides an immediate care walk-in clinic. I had to use their services twice in the last three months. If you are a self-pay as I am, it is really very inexpensive. If you pay cash you get a 30% discount. Had I used the emergency room my bill would have been well over $1000, but at the immediate care clinic it was $70 and $66.

Remember, the clinic is there waiting for you and your "minor" health problems. I don't know the ultimate fate of our hospital, but I do know this clinic has exceptionally fine nurse practitioners and is a much-needed addition to the health-care options here on the coast.

They are open Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 6 PM. Long may they live and prosper.

Louise Mariana, RN

Mendocino

SHERIFF ALLMAN recently told a meeting of the County’s emergency services officials that there’s a good chance Mendo can get a grant to cover three-quarters of the cost of emergency warning sirens for most areas of the County. In Anderson Valley, that would probably mean four sirens, one each in Yorkville, Boonville, Philo and Navarro. Allman said that the local communities would have to come up with the other 25% of the cost, which Allman estimated at roughly not more than $25k each, which he conceded may be high. Local communities would be responsible for operation and maintenance. 

WHEN THE POSSIBILITY of sirens was discussed at the Anderson Valley Fire Protection Committee recently they voted 4-2 to decline, citing primarily the possibility of creating a panic and the cost. Fire Chief Andres Avila supports the siren idea but acknowledges the cost and panic problems. Allman told the emergency officials that he needs a “letter of commitment” from organizations who want to participate by the end of March. Avila said that he’s heard that the Yorkville Community Benefit Association likes the idea and will put up 25% for a Yorkville siren. The Rancho Navarro Road Association also agreed to chip in for theirs. 

CHIEF AVILA said the protocols for when and who turns them on are yet to be developed but that he understands the Anderson Valley Fire Department will be one of the authorized initiators. When asked about protocols for people who hear the siren, Avila said, “If you hear the siren that’s your cue to get more information,” adding that there’s no automatic evacuation involved.

THE ANDERSON VALLEY CSD'S budget committee looked at its budget reserves on Wednesday and said that their “emergency” reserves of almost $40k could probably cover the Boonville and Philo share of the siren cost. The question is supposed to be on Wednesday’s Community Services District Board agenda when they will have to decide if they want to participate and cover the local share of cost and then, if the grant is awarded, participate in a subsequent effort to acquire, locate, install, provide power, develop protocols, assign responsibility and finally implement what lots of people support in the abstract. But will they support the idea when they have to pay for and implement it?

THEY'D BETTER. What else is there in Anderson Valley? If Redwood Valley's siren had been activated at the first sign of its disastrous blaze some of its residents may have been saved. As it stands here in Anderson Valley, with its numerous hill populations, there is no warning system beyond reverse 911 calls, and lots of people aren't connected to those and they aren't particularly effective anyway. Anderson Valley has had a couple of near misses over the years that could have been absolutely lethal if those fires had broken out at night. The panic concern is a relatively trivial one in AV because the populations are small. Even if every resident of upper Peachland, for example, hit the road at once it is unlikely they'd be impeded. Ditto for Signal Ridge, the Holmes Ranch, Rancho Navarro and so on. Sirens now!

This Friday is the Yorkville Market’s annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration. We will be serving corned beef and cabbage, homemade soda bread and Guinness chocolate cake for dessert. There will be music by the Blarney Stones and our ever popular open mic limerick reading. 

It is sure to be a fun and memorable evening. Festivities begin at 5:30.

BOARD OF SUPERVISORS AGENDA - March 19, 2019

https://mendocino.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx

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LONG OVERDUE (Nice to have a 5th District supervisor again)

On the BOS March 19, 2019 agenda:

6b) Discussion and Possible Action Regarding Direction to Chief Executive Officer About Hiring Practices (Sponsor: Supervisor Williams)

Recommended Action:

Direct Chief Executive Officer to produce monthly hiring reports, document the necessity of every open position and prior to upcoming budget decisions, provide a realistic projection of which positions will actually be filled in the coming fiscal year.

SUMMARY OF REQUEST: With fixed revenue, head count directly competes with the ability to boost wages to parity. Low wages impact morale and our County's ability to retain talent. In order to address wages and prevent a revolving door, a balance must be found in constraining staff size while continuing to meet state mandates and avoid understaffing and overworking departments. Our priority must be to increase wages over increasing head count, ideally starting at the bottom tier. Documenting the essential basis for open positions will help to illustrate a projection of true personnel expenses and the expected trend. This is critical data for upcoming budget decisions.

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LOOKS LIKE Bill Moores’ over-large and convoluted Irish Beach Planning proposal is on next Tuesday’s Supes agenda as well. It will be interesting to see how the two newly seated Supervisors react to Moores appeal of the Planning Commission denial of most of Moores’ application.

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ALSO ON TUESDAY’S AGENDA is Jim Roberts’ and William Adkinson’s proposal to develop a parcel just southeast of downtown Philo, “The Brambles”:

“The proposed project is for a General Plan Land Use amendment and a Rezone to C-2:CR[FP] (General Commercial: Contract Rezone and Flood Plain combining districts). The applicants intend to develop a resort and recreation use on the property with 16-19 short term rental cabins, bungalows, pole houses and possibly a restaurant, an event center and small retail outlet.”

We are not aware of any opposition to the Roberts/Adkinson proposal. The Planning Commission recommends approval with a few mitigations.

ED NOTES

FRANK'S FIREWOOD, over the years, has removed literal tons of unwanted trees from MRC's vast holdings, but his many Mendo customers, and Frank himself, don't want poisoned firewood. MRC, however, wants to resume the wholesale chemical removal of non-commercial species, leaving Frank without the resource to provide for his many customers. One would think, given Frank's years of conscientious industriousness, that MRC would at least allow him access to plots of trees prior to their being hacked and squirted with chemical poisons, but MRC doesn't seem much interested in community relations given their refusal to support the Albion Volunteer Fire Department and fair tax assessment to support Coast Hospital. Unlike many of our oligarchs, MRC's owners are identifiable. They live in San Francisco in the neighborhood where power lines are buried and there are zero homeless people. Fisher, I believe their name is.

$500,000 to get your little dummy into USC? An "elite" school? Ahem. Any parent who has been through the admissions process, and I've been through it three times, knows it's bogus, having more to do with lib notions of diverse student bodies, daddy's willingness to cough up big financial donations, daddy or mommy's fame and so on, as in, for example, any kid out of a rural Mendocino County high school (except perhaps the more up market Mendo High School). A graduate of a rural high school who can read and write well has a better shot at, say, Stanford, than a real smart rich kid from one of the Bay Area's many private schools, rich people having abandoned the public system fifty years ago. And a Chinese kid from any private or public school can be the next Yo Yo Ma and still not get into the so-called elite schools because of the Tiger Mom syndrome, meaning there are now so many eminently qualified Asian students who are not only twice as prepared for higher study in our otherwise lazy ass, overly indulgent, botoxed society that the so-called elite schools are putting in a lot of overtime figuring out new ways to keep Asian kids out, much as they used to do with Jewish kids. If a Native American kid aced his or her SAT's the "elite" schools would be flying chartered luxury jets into Covelo to whisk him or her off to Palo Alto or Cambridge. Ditto for white kids raised in tweaker trailers, or Mexican kids from immigrant families. Rich kids from expensive private schools actually have a tougher time with the admissions process these days because, like ultra-qualified Asian kids, there are so many of them. Reality? It's all bullshit. Your kid, on the off chance he or she has genuine intellectual interests, can get a quality education at any of the state colleges.

DEMO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BETO O'ROURKE: "If you think 300,000 immigrants and asylum-seekers apprehended on the southern border is a problem – and I don't necessarily think that it is, the kind of migration and refugee flows that we will see when entire bands of this world are no longer habitable will be a crisis of a different magnitude altogether. We face catastrophe and crisis on this planet even if we were to stop emitting carbon today right now at this moment."

THE CURRENT IMMIGRATION FEARS of the political right remind me of that early fascist best seller called "The Camp of the Saints"  by a Frenchman called Revel, whose premise was that immigrants would destroy Western Civ, the European branch anyway, hence the subsequent re-emergence of European fascism pegged to fear of Muslim immigration. Beto, mainline lib that he is, can't just say our border "crisis" is a Trumpian hoax, because then he might have to explain his own plans for orderly immigration, which he probably doesn't have. From what I can gather from my Boonville command center it is a fact that millions of the desperate are on the move north because of environmental and social disaster, and that the number of rolling, unaddressed catastrophes is intensifying, but given the scale of them and the quality of contemporary leadership, well, stockpile rice and ammo, grandkids, you'll for sure reap all manner of whirlwinds.

AS NEWS BROKE OF A MASS SHOOTING at two New Zealand mosques, an Australian senator blamed the attack on Muslim immigration. “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?” Queensland senator Fraser Anning said in a now-deleted tweet of the attack that left 49 people dead in Christchurch, New Zealand. “As always, left-wing politicians and the media will rush to claim that the causes of today’s shootings lie with gun laws or those who hold nationalist views, but this is all cliched nonsense,” the right-wing Australian parliament member added in a written statement (which earned a “Nailed it!” from former White House official Carl Higbie). “The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.”

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AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER SCOTT MORRISON immediately denounced the lawmaker's take on the Thursday terror attack. “The remarks by Senator Fraser Anning blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting,” Morrison said.

SUCCULENT THIEVING

Editor:

I found Sunday’s article in the Press Democrat about the “Gold Rush-type phenomenon” of smugglers targeting coastal plants very interesting.

I have surfed a lot in Sonoma and Mendocino counties since the 1970s, and while I consider succulents beautiful, they are just weeds like mustard flowers. I’m surprised that they have any economic value. Apparently the authorities in charge of protecting our beautiful coastline had the same opinion until recently. I find it amusing that this only became an issue when an Asian was holding up the line at a rural Mendocino post office.

I also find it interesting and ironic that you used the term “Gold Rush-type phenomenon.” How do you think Native Americans felt when white people invaded what is now California in the 1840s and started to dig up shiny little rocks?

Mike Uttereback

Windsor

MENDOCINO COUNTY JAIL DEATH RESULTS IN $5 MILLION SETTLEMENT

The brother of a Mendocino County man who died while being restrained at the jail has settled a wrongful death lawsuit for $5 million in an agreement that requires two law enforcement agencies provide new training procedures for handling people in crisis.

pressdemocrat.com/news/9381662-181/mendocino-county-jail-death-results

STARTLED

Goldfinch or Maylark?

Christie Holliday wrote: I have on occasion been startled by the yellow black dart of a goldfinch flight across my path — since mid February! Though rarer than robins by far — up Little Lake near the school.

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Marco McClean replies: Startlement I understand. I'm prone to it. I don't remember always being so much this way, but I can be reading or thinking about something, and Juanita comes from the kitchen or parking lot to switch on her computer, and where before I was alone, somewhere else, fitting this into that and what goes after what for the next show, or doing the taxes, or wishing for money, or whatever, from my point of view she suddenly appears next to the dresser just to my right and I'll half-stand-up, spin and thump against the wall and say something like DAH! She thinks this is hilarious. She loves this. I've said, "One of these days I'm gonna swallow my tongue and you'll be sorry."

Or I'll be soldering something together or fixing plumbing or lining up a drill at work and Tim will arrive to look in on my progress, and I'll start (acceptable present tense for startle) and, again, DAH! (Or NYEH!, depending on the position of my mouth for my nonstop subvocalized internal dialog at that point.)

Or in the grocery store the man or woman next to me at the freezer case or in the lettuce department, or behind me in the checkout line, will suddenly bark something (to his or her correspondent on the phone, but how is anyone else supposed to know that?) and after I /start/ I'll just go ahead and talk to them as though we're right next to each other, which we are. Sometimes, "I'm sorry I jumped. I'm jumpy. Sometimes something like, "Wow, that was /really loud/. Did you know there are other people here? Look," and I gesture to indicate.

Small children screaming entirely out of the blue -- silence to air-raid siren in a tenth of a second -- are just about the worst, besides teenagers waiting until they're within three feet of going past you on the sidewalk and bellowing to somebody a block behind you or across the street (actually yelling /through/ you). Or even not a teenager; tourists: "DON! THEY'RE OVER HERE!" or "WE FOUND IT!" or simply "HEY!" Still, how paltry these things are, compared with the daily experience of people in so many places in the world where there are flying killer robots circling overhead and leftover buried landmines to play among, most of which are of U.S. manufacture. Where not only the machinery but the conflict itself is our doing, or rather our corporate masters' doing, just so a handful of obscenely rich people can stay obscenely rich for just a little bit longer. And they don't care who they kill, or how many, to keep it that way.

In my familiar world, crazy people who are loud and impassioned and herky-jerky and prophetic from a long way off are preferable. I have no problem with them; they are not sneaking into your space and popping up and screaming in your face; by the time you're close to them, you're ready; they're a show, up for review, something to memorize for future ridicule or maybe a right-twice-a-day stopped clock lesson. And you can go around them, or filter them out of your email or avoid their website or teevee channel if you don't like their show.

My mother had some of her old friends over for a few days last month, and I was in her open kitchen, making the salad; Sidney, the neighbor girl in high school, so she's my age but with better genes, teleported from the living room to touch my elbow and say, "Do you want a lemon?" and at the touch and "Do-" I nearly hit my head on the cupboard. Everyone was laughing their head off, as though, how clever of me to do that funny thing. Because aren't we all right here? I get that, because, yes and no. I'm often not.

Animals and birds and monsters, outside of horror movies, are generally not startling. Although I was surprised by stepping on a tiny slimy frog in the shower-bath once (YAAAGH!). And there are dogs who lie invisible in cars and explode against the window at you when you're walking past and you just wanta kill the little son-of-a-bitch or whoever locked it in the car in the first place, and the horse I told you about on the radio last week, at night in a field, next to the trail standing straight on so I couldn't tell what it was in the dark -- a man? a tree stump? /and then it moved!/ (Early 1970s.) And I remember telling you here in the listserv about when I reached up and over for something in the hanging food bag and grabbed an old squishy banana and thought it was a dead rat (!!!). So fruit can do it too, if a banana is still technically fruit. And who among us has not been startled into spitting out a bite of vile carob that he had thought was going to be chocolate?

This morning there was a part of one of the later dreams where I saw, in a mirror in a car-repair shop, that my gums had receded to the point where I could see a copper band, like they put on a bird leg to track it, around the extreme base of a lower pointy tooth, left side, and that was surprising and interesting but not at all startling. Now: Oh, of course, that explains it.

SKIN IN THE GAME

Dear Infirmary Informer,

If you have not already heard, the Low Gap prisoners are due to get the educational tablets program back. That's right. The same tablets which Sacramento and Trinity counties have been providing to their beloved jail populations for a couple of years now. We had them for a brief run but a few model inmates kept taking them apart.

So in anticipation I want to bring your attention to a very peculiar book called Youth In Revolt by CJ Payne. Payne I guess is an Oakland native originally from Ohio and upon first look over Youth In Revolt appears to be your average scholastic booktruck mindrot amongst the likes of Maze Runner, Captain Underpants and Artemis Foul. It's got a silly cover depicting a road trip through Puppies, Mardi Gras and explosions. Why is this thing over 400 pages long again?

Strain through a couple of bends and you will realize that this is an hilarious teen angst version of Dennis the Menace. It's a comedy about a coming of age boy whose promiscuous mother is moving between Lake County and Oakland and then back as she dates truckers and cops. During one of his mom's honeymoons at the KOA campground in Lake County the writer meets the girl of his dreams and later sets off a chain of events when he adopts a chocolate pug nobody wants to win her over. Before you realize it he is in Ukiah where he secretly got his office worker father a Craigslist job at a lumber mill owned by the Italian mafia.

Ukiah alumni, put down your pitchforks but the Wildcats are now the Beavers and the captain of the football team, Bruno Majalaski, takes a stint at the Mendocino County Jail for stabbling a student with a fork. Always a surprise when the book you pick up name drops the jail you are in! Mysteriously the only event that goes on in the jail is alluded to in this odd subliminal line: "Bruno came out of those jail showers extra-porous."

As a two time resident of the Mendocino County Jail spanning almost 4 years, I was shocked. How did this author from the 1990s predict that I would have two district court class-action and my Faretta motion in criminal court dropped preemptively after filing for water quality experts? The lawsuits were even supposed to entitle me to indigent (free) civil rights lawyers pursuant to precedents set by recent cases like Greeno versus Daly. Author CJ Payne was not the only one to try warning me. A year prior when Sheriff Tom Allman himself punched my cell door even he gave me the cryptic statement: "Better have a good lawyer."

It all started in 2015 during a warrantless cultivation beef. Being raised in a household where I was punished for taking showers, I immediately set up camp in the four-man thing twice a day. It seemed a little odd at first that everyone was shelling out top dollar for the anti-dandruff shampoos when we have a South American apricot edition offered free with the stay. Rumor even said that when this was smuggled into prison that it maintained high trade value.

One day after discovering cracks from forming on my hands, feet and forehead post-shower, I began a couple week diagnostic of removing the cheap soaps and shampoos from the equation and then seeing if upon toweling off that my elbow still became wrinkly and dry. (A common side effect of skin cancer by the way.) After five months of reducing my shower scheduling I ran into a long friend of my grandfather in custody. His skin was worse. His knuckles were constantly peeling long flakes, bleeding and powdery white. We realized lotion significantly combated the detrimental effects, but never completely.

After getting released from my 500 pound cultivation charge the skin damage was barely noticeable but was enough to scare me into dropping all my friends and seeing the Army recruiter. I also reapplied for college and disability. The Army recruiters did laugh me out of the office when they heard misdemeanor marijuana charges came with the package. The college and disability mailings also both got thrown away (when they both approve me) by my Prozac infused father. I managed to take a couple of unofficial science and systems administration classes using a rogue cell phone. Then the self defense charges of my current 3+ year detainment sent me packing back.

I remembered grandpa’s friend’s battery acid hands and it wasn't long until it started happening to me too. Not only does it turn your skin into wrinkled leather without oil pores but it is like the skin warps to a permanent prune. Yes, just picture the swollen effects of skin pruning that normally happens upon prolonged contact with water only permanently mummified in place into a petrified stasis. The result is something like a raw chicken skin after the feathers are plucked with an armament of armadillo scales folding and peeling and bleeding.

It wasn't a surprise then later when someone such as myself (a health nut often accused of eating like a grandmother and exercising too much) and realized that I now had permanent piles of dandruff on my bunk every morning and digestion problems all of a sudden at 25 years of age in custody. The whole time deputies and lieutenants were hitting me with names like roly-poly guy, crow’s foot, and alligator. What hat were they pulling these names from?

I noticed it happening to other inmates maybe up to 40% of them although it advances too slowly on some people to be noticed between short flashes of repeated jail terms. It mostly seems to affect pale skin Scottish/Irish types of inmates from what I can notice but I have noted it in some African-American subjects as well.

A few issues back you guys posted an article about homelessness and how Ukiah may have something like the biggest population per capita rivaling only San Francisco. Well, after re-examining my feet and how they look like hardened, chipping, bleeding, caked up and pasture animal hooves and how they appear to have artificial jungle rot, the inner paranoid delusion in me seems to think that Low Gap is nothing short of a "homeless farm" for cultivating the best leprosy on trimmigrants foot ribbon at the Ukiah Fairgrounds every year.

I may have always hated everything hippies stood for and I may be having trouble on the front lines raising awareness of the "you can shower too much" movement, but I do seem to keep a constant population of people applying post-shower lotion even though it has dropped in quality since the new canteen company came in. I have to hand it to Suave, but they make a competent moisturizer!

Three years in though I was not prepared for one skin malady that I again watched slowly happen to me. This time I took too long to towel off the shower water. What happened was a clear viscous substance lingered on my finger (the index). My cellie distracted me with a cooked Raman. If you have never been to jail before the food is so mundane during meals that when someone rips a noodle seasoning packet the scent wafts through every neighboring cell and soon you will have six unannounced visitors to shoo away. The smell of these 80¢ bags makes everyone's stomach rumble. It's like drugs. When I remembered my finger, the mystery substance was now a bloody circular chemical burn. Two weeks went by and it was then infected with staph. Why do I have staph? I'm a germaphobe. I have never had the drinking phase and I've never had enough sex to get hepatitis C. (I'm straight.)

Six months later when I'm thinking I'm all healed it bled again and got reinfected from the circular scar two more times. You may recall an inmate letter from over a year ago complaining about frequent infections. I'm thinking, man, this place must really be a homeless farm. First staph like a cardboard alley type of problem? Isn't the STD rate a little high in the area as well? This isn't normal staph though. Mine completely healed, became a scar, completely painless with no gash, but somehow started bleeding again with water contact.

It seemed very unusual that none of my fellow inmates had heard of Youth In Revolt. But then again I do live in the butthole of Mendocino County right now and very well the only jail in wine country without walkmans at the moment.

If the denial of tech and stem educations sounds familiar please carefully know the fleeting quality of cell phone service when compared to the proximity of our location in San Francisco and also the collapse of cellphone service during a fire. The tablets for inmates will have music players. What they will not have is law or medical courses.

Jewel Dyer A#20559

951 Low Gap Road

Ukiah CA 95482

PIGEON POINT LIGHTHOUSE, California!

(Photo by Ed Rader)

LOCAL FARMING FAMILY LOOKING FOR HOME/FARM. We would like to grow flowers, veggies, culinary herbs and other food crops. Rustic/off grid fine. We have pictures of previous gardens. Cabin, cottage, yurt, efficient house with garden/farm space. (Coast/Anderson Valley)  :)  Skillset includes: Planting, Harvesting, Orchard Care, bees wax candle making, Growing Plant Starts (Edible Flowers, Herbs, Veggies and Fruits), mulching, weeding, animal husbandry and more.

*References available and photos of previous gardens available.

farmingroots1@gmail.com

"ROCK GARDEN"

(Photo by Harvey Reading)

READY TO REBUILD

To the Editor:

My name is Bret Bengston. I have spent most of my life in and around Mendocino County. My life has always been very colorful and flavorful considering the extremes and range our emotions can provide. In my life I have covered nearly every side of your newspaper from adventures as a youth to arrest logs to ficticious business name listings etc. This will be the first time you hear my voice. In this instance you may refer to my voice as a voice for the mentally ill or common people. For whatever reasons I have always been difficult to diagnose. However, it could be stated that under the right circumstances and in the right conditions I may experience varying mental illness symptoms to varying degrees. It could also be said that I suffer some minor brain damage as a result of a childhood accident, perhaps remembered by some of your readers. When I was growing up here it was not uncommon to chase an ambulance to see who was hurt. I am 40 years old living with the mental illness symptoms I sometimes suffer has always been challenging to say the least. However, please do not feel sorry for me as I share with you some of my story. My story is about change and the joys and wonders of life.

Also know that I would never trade any of my troubles for the joys I have also experienced. And if my trials are responsible for God’s near obsessive love and care for me then my trials are my greatest blessings. That being said, nothing could have prepared me for what I have experienced in the last twenty four months.

We had stablized, my lifelong best friend and I. We had a three bedroom house with a white picket fence, two blocks from the ocean. We had two little kids, a boy and a girl. My art was in the Edgewater Gallery beneath Triangle Tattoo in downtown Fort Bragg. I had wonderful friends who loved to pay me generously to decorate their bodies with art which allowed my partner and I to spend nearly all of our time being the most loving and caring partners and parents we could be.

During the winter before last our children came home from school with one of those terrible coastal viruses. Before the children recovered their mother became ill. I did my best attempting to accomplish the daily tasks she had made look so easy until I myself became ill. It was bad. I did not want her to get up but she did. in the midst of collecting laundry she was struck by seizure and/or whatever else we have yet to learn. Though I was with her as she returned to a semi functional state, when l.t.c. in Willits released her to me she was in a state of personality and behavior most unrecognizable and unnavigatable to me. She was different. I was stressed. As daily functioning proved impossible I tried to simplify life by minimizing responsibilities. By the grace of God we had family willing and able to care for our young children. Because I had only found happiness and success with my partner by my side she would be the last thing I would ever turn away from. Our extreme dysfunction continued as all former support and resources were used up or exhausted. Soon poor and destitute my symptoms bloomed. As I was repeatedly arrested for self medicating and homelessness in general my partner became increasingly lost into the darkness we have unwittingly allowed to exist within our community.

Welcome to the other side of a part of society you may think cannot effect you. Imagine what horrors you may as even I was cautiously caught off guard by whatever atrocity developed next. When I could locate her our only communion was our uncommunability. In these circumstances close friends and family, out of their own suffering or inability to help eventually have to turn away to save themselves. I sought help from local crisis centers, friends, family, judges, the officers and sheriffs that arrested me, the jail, parole, the hospital etc. with very minimal results. My own functioning declined until I was incapable of even simple things like putting on a jacket before nightfall or feeding myself. During these times it was the people you see sleeping shoeless on the sidewalk who were my saving angels. Feeding me or keeping me warm. Plauged by halucinations of my partner’s suffering dispair my sole goal was to find a safe place for her. Through all of this I never purposely lied to anyone or stole. Many people tried to get me to turn from her but it was our twenty two year relationship that had fostered my very virtue.

After eighteen months of continuous effort, arrests and failure with the help of God I caught a break and together we ventured to a mountainous safe haven. Though I was thoroughly run off I felt her basic needs would be cared for for the first time I roamed. I roamed incomprehensively with no purpose, meaning of life was suspended. I ended up somewhere among people or angels who lead me toward God. God helped me neurolanguistically reprogram myself  to incorparate the universes physical charity, love and caringness into my thought function. I had found faith, physically. For the first time the halucinations of Amber’s torment ceased. God had shown me in detail exactly how it is that everyone is cared for and looked after. With my meaning of life suspended and a great weight lifted, I was in a strange limbo. With no means but the absolute knowing that I was cared for I returned to Ukiah and began helping people as a purpose. Twenty four hours a day. Many people on discovering my change in direction prodded me to “go save her” but as I said, I had seen how cared for we are. In fact I was and am now a knowing part of that care. My other symptoms slowly faded a little at a time. After three or four weeks of this some local women contacted me and requested that I travel to Amber’s location so that I could give my opinion on a medical issue.

Understand that during this time I was requested many missions as I learned more and more about helping people more and more effectively and efficiently. The mechanics of this are hard to describe without words like miraculous or mystic. However the mission to look in on the mother of my children seemed blocked until one day I was taken to and stranded at my parent’s home out of town. In the night I awoke freezing, still no one home. I found refuge in a vehicle, keys mysteriously provided. I awoke not knowing why, but assuming this was designed to be a mission I had to do alone. I headed off on my solo mission. I did not like it. It was not fun. It was an all day trip of thoughtful introspection.

When I reached my destination I was told she could not see me or was not there. I slept in the car and in the morning began the return trip. I had done all I could. On the way back I stopped at a religious temple for guidance and was directed within. I went to a house where a friend of the family lived and ran out of gas. There was no one home there either. I walked away. That mission complete. I reported my findings and went about my business helping people in our community. I continued to get better gradually. I had heard my parents were upset so did not hear from them. Four months later I was arrested and arraigned for auto theft. I have only gotten saner and more clear thinking since. I am more eager and equipped to rebuild my life than ever but our system is considering sending me to prison for years. Many times I have kept quiet and let people assume I was a common criminal but I am tired of falling through cracks that do not get fixed. I have decided that I will fix them myself if I have to. The other day I glanced at a copy of the paper and saw references to city talks regarding mental health and homelessness. I want more than anything to help with this cause so that I may prevent even one person from suffering what I have suffered. I know that I have a lot to offer in regards to redesigning how we deal with such problems. Please help me people. Speak among each other. Help me help others. I can be reached by all at: 951 Low Gap Road, Ukiah, Ca 95482

Bret Bengston

Ukiah

HARRIET TUBMAN died on this day, a hundred and one years ago. Known as Moses to the more than 300 slaves she helped find freedom, Tubman was a fighter for abolition and women’s suffrage.

Frederick Douglass often worked with her and admired her, writing, “The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. … The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism.”

(Rob Hicks)

NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN THAT the Mendocino County Zoning Administrator at its regular meeting on Thursday, April 11, 2019 at 10:00 a.m., to be held in the Planning and Building Services Public Conference Room, 860 N. Bush St., Ukiah, California, will conduct a public hearing on the following project at the time listed or as soon thereafter as the item(s) may be heard.

CASE#: U_2018-0016

DATE FILED: 7/20/2018

OWNER: ANDERSON VINEYARDS INC [aka: Roederer Estate]

APPLICANT: ROBERT GIBSON

AGENT: JIM BARRETT

REQUEST: Use Permit to allow for the construction of 3 duplexes to be used as Farm Labor Housing.

LOCATION: 4.4± miles north of Philo town center, on the east side of State Route 128 (SR 128), 1.6± miles north of its intersection with Philo Greenwood Road (CR 132), located at 4501 Hwy. 128, Philo (APN: 026-330-45).

ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINATION: Negative Declaration

STAFF PLANNER: MIO MENDEZ

Your comments regarding the above project(s) are invited. Written comments should be submitted to the Department of Planning and Building Services Commission Staff, at 860 North Bush Street, Ukiah, California, 95482, no later than April 10, 2019. Oral comments may be presented to the Zoning Administrator during the public hearing.

The Zoning Administrator's action regarding this item shall be final unless appealed to the Board of Supervisors. The last day to file an appeal of the Zoning Administrator's decision is the 10th day after the hearing. To file an appeal, a written statement must be filed with the Clerk of the Board with a filing fee prior to the expiration of the above noted appeal period. If you challenge the project in court, you may be limited to raising only those issues you or someone else raised at the public hearing described in this notice, or in written correspondence delivered to the Department of Planning and Building Services at, or prior to, the public hearing. All persons are invited to appear and present testimony in this matter.

Additional information regarding the above noted item(s) may be obtained by calling the Department of Planning and Building Services at 234-6650, Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. through 5:00 p.m. Should you desire notification of the Zoning Administrator's decision you may do so by requesting notification in writing and providing a self-addressed stamped envelope to the Department of Planning and Building Services.

BRENT SCHULTZ,

Director of Planning and Building Services

Caitlin Schafer, Staff Assistant III

Mendocino County Planning & Building Services

860 North Bush Street, Ukiah, CA 95482

707-234-6650

March 20, 2019

CATCH OF THE DAY, March 14, 2019

BRITTON AZBILL JR., Covelo. Stolen property, community supervision violation.

KEVIN BETTS, Willits. Probation revocation.

LILLIAN CHANEY, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

NINA EDDY, Laytonville. Disobeying court order.

CASEY FALLIS, Covelo. Harboring wanted felon, failure to appear.

HAZEL FILLION, Lakeport/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

JOSEPH HOAGLEN, Covelo. Escaping (from felony charge), failure to appear.

LATOYA HOAGLEN, Laytonville. Failure to appear.

RHANDA JACK, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

BARRY KIRKPATRICK, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

VERNON KNAPP SR., Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

JONATHAN MUNAT, Ukiah. Disobeying court order.

TONY PAUL, Ukiah. Trespassing, probation revocation.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON, Upper Lake/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, controlled substance, paraphernalia, no license.

BRANDON WEILERT, Lakeport/Ukiah. Felon/addict with firearm, failure to appear.

FIFTEEN MINUTES OF NON-FAME

ANTI-VAXXERS’ WAR ON TRUTH

by Frank Bruni

How many studies do you have to throw at the vaccine hysterics before they quit? How much of a scientific consensus, how many unimpeachable experts and how exquisitely rational an argument must you present?

That’s a trick question, of course. There’s no magic number. There’s no number, period. And that’s because the anti-vaccine crowd (or anti-vaxxers) aren’t trafficking in anything as concrete, mundane and quaint as facts. They’re not really engaged in a debate about medicine. They’re immersed in a world of conspiracies, in the dark shadows where no data can be trusted, nothing is what it seems and those who buy the party line are pitiable sheep.

And, boy, are they living at the right time, when so much information and misinformation swirl by so quickly that it’s easy to confuse the two and even easier to grab hold and convince yourself of whatever it is you prefer to believe. With Google searches, you find the ostensible proof you seek. On social media, you bask in all the affirmation you could possibly want.

The parents who are worried or sure about grave risks from vaccines reflect a broader horror that has flickered or flared in everything from the birther movement to “Pizzagate,” that nonsense about children as Democratic sex slaves in the imagined basement of a Washington pizza joint. Their recklessness and the attendant re-emergence of measles aren’t just a public health crisis. They’re a public sanity one, emblematic of too many people’s willful disregard of evidence, proud suspicion of expertise and estrangement from reason.

Again and again, until blue in the face, medical authorities have debunked the renegade assertion that there’s a link between the M.M.R. vaccine, so named because it inoculates against measles, mumps and rubella, and autism. On Tuesday, a group of Danish researchers who looked at more than 650,000 children over 10 years announced that they had found no such association.

Again and again, until out of breath, those same medical authorities have also explained why making sure that all or nearly all children are vaccinated is so crucial: It creates a critical mass of resistance, known as herd immunity, that doesn’t give a disease the chance to spread.

Nonetheless, enough parents plug their ears that the World Health Organization lists “vaccine hesitancy” — a euphemism if ever I heard one — among 10 global health threats in 2019.

They choose their own alternative facts. Take Darla Shine, the wife of Bill Shine, who just announced his resignation as the White House communications director. Last month, amid alarms about new cases of measles, she took to Twitter with the cockamamie claim that not being vaccinated and coming down with measles or mumps was a big-picture plus, a hardiness builder that could help a person fight cancer down the line.

“I had the #Measles #Mumps #Chickenpox as a child and so did every kid I knew,” she tweeted, adding that her own kids were, regrettably, vaccinated. “They will never have the lifelong natural immunity I have. Come breathe on me!” Thanks but no thanks. I suspect my breath is better spent elsewhere.

A week and a half ago, a Republican state representative in Arizona said on her Facebook page that pressure on parents to vaccinate children “is not based on American values but, rather, Communist.” Bet you didn’t know that the original symbol of the Russian Revolution wasn’t a hammer and sickle. It was a syringe.

I shouldn’t joke, and I should add that anti-vaxxers run the political gamut. They’re on the left, their professed concern for social welfare proven hollow by the risk that their unvaccinated children pose to newborns and others who haven’t yet been — or can’t be — vaccinated. They’re on the right, among people who see the government and its edicts as oppressive forces. Paranoia has no partisan affiliation.

I should also add that alternative facts had currency long before Kellyanne Conway christened them such and that junk science, nutty hypotheses and showy apostasies have been around forever. Humans aren’t rationalists. We’re romantics, and the world is wondrous when you believe that you belong to some brave and special tribe and have experienced enlightenment — about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, about the existence of extraterrestrials, about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, about vaccines — that all the less perceptive, more gullible conformists out there simply can’t comprehend.

But there are differences now that make the cranks that much more baffling, numerous and pernicious. For starters, they fly ever more stubbornly in the face of sophisticated research and hard-earned knowledge. Beneficiaries of wisdom that prior generations lacked, they toss it away, wasting and mocking progress itself.

At the same time, in many educational circles, there’s as much talk of students’ individual truths as of the truth. Joan Donovan, the director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, said that social science and history courses increasingly emphasize that truth is situational and that “very few things are always true all the time.” That healthy skepticism can turn unhealthy when it leads to the rejection of incontestable realities. There’s “a crisis of authority, a crisis of expertise,” Donovan told me.

There’s also a man in the White House, at the Resolute Desk, who makes grand pronouncements based on random conversations; implores Americans to distrust traditional institutions and conventional sources of information; and promotes conspiracy theories (millions of illegal votes, a celebration among Muslims in Jersey City on 9/11, and on and on). He has specifically echoed and validated the apprehensions of anti-vaxxers. Whether he’s symptom or cause doesn’t matter. He’s dangerous either way.

Then there’s the internet, which turbocharges everything. “I don’t want to say it’s the only force, because there was Holocaust denialism before the internet — there was even AIDS denialism before the internet — but it’s an enormous, enormous force: the most effective echo chamber in the history of mankind,” said Michael Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker who is the author of the 2009 book “Denialism,” about irrational thinking. He added, “It’s very difficult for people, no matter how well educated they are, to parse what’s the wheat and what’s the chaff on the internet.”

For example, anti-vaccine propaganda — some of which was spread by Russian trolls and bots as part of their sowing of discord before the 2016 election — can look as official and trustworthy as legitimate information. “And as websites get better and Twitter becomes something that people not only look at but rely on, it’s very difficult to get away from falsehoods and conspiracies,” Specter told me. “We’re living in a world where facts are just another element of your decision-making process.” 

One of the best explanations of that came in a 2016 essay in The Times Magazine by Jonathan Mahler, who noted “a radical new relationship between citizen and truth.” He wrote that millions of people “are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the institutional media, in favor of a D.I.Y. approach to fact-finding.”

They turn to the internet, which is both a hall of mirrors and an overstuffed bazaar. It lets them customize their input and thus tailor their reality, which is reinforced by the like-minded company they keep online. They become surer that climate change is a hoax, that the deep state plots against the bold warriors who threaten it, that a fake Melania Trump is sometimes used as a substitute for the actual one. And they open the floodgates to so much fiction that fact is swept away.

Where’s the vaccine against that?

THIS MAGICAL PLACE

Medical drama. Family drama. Political drama. Personal. And all the festering rest of it. But along the two lane that runs from Roseburg to Crater Lake, the Umpqua River. One of this world's most stunningly beautiful drives. Fly fishing. Photography with an outmoded, relatively huge SLR. Coffee and chocolate.

Fifty years back I fished with dry and wet flies some of which I tied myself. Right up there with gardening as calming meditation. And there is surely much to meditate about. Flyfisherpeople generally sneer at those who impale chunks of baitfish on hooks. To fish with a fly you must know the river. You must think like a fish, and beneath the surface they put ignorant anglers to shame. We are, most of us, far less smart and knowledgeable than we suppose. Read the water. Read the temperature of air and water. Know the different habits of different species of fish. Know what's hatching. Be here now. In this exact place.

Any activity which brings one into this level of intimacy with the earth we inhabit is a sign of grace, a kiss (perhaps even a warm hug) from God, the Great Spirit. Wild River. Tomorrow's doc visit. Drama. Calm. Inhaling. Perhaps even the smile. Thank you. With love. My son. With love.

(Bruce Brady)

THE REASON the Mueller Report is delayed is that R. Crumb hasn't finished the illustrations yet. Below: early Crumb

THE SUPREME COURT RESUSCITATES THE EIGHTH AMENDMENT

The justices strike a blow against policing for profit.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/unanimous-supreme-court-decision-policing-profit/584506/

CHOICES, CHOICES

Have a few days left at the travel hostel in Washington, D.C. I wish to go in the direction of a spiritual career, and am praying for this, which feels good. Uncertain who to talk to or where. It is possible that I will return to California. I only want to do that which is pleasing to God.

PS. Message from Washington, D.C.

This is a somewhat different message from me. I am still in Washington, D.C. in the midst of a life transition. I wish to go in a more fully spiritual direction at this point. I will speak with vocational directors here. There is also the possibility that I will return to California. I am asking that prayers be said for me. I understand that this is NOT the usual message, but it does reflect what is happening. Thank you very much. I could use some love at the moment.

Craig Louis Stehr

Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

FOLLOW THE BEHAVIORAL BALL

by Mark Scaramella

A HUGE AMOUNT OF TIME was wasted on “mental health” at Tuesday’s Board meeting. First they went through a more or less generic fact-free “powerpoint” presentation about the subject — no actual data about clients served or outcomes or recidivism — during which everyone praised everyone else, especially for what Health and Human Services Agency honcho Tammy Moss Chandler described as Mendo’s expertise at “maximizing the draw down of federal [mental health] funds.” Their “powerpoint” presentation (available for seriously idle interested parties on the County’s website) was so info free that Supervisor Dan Gjerde, after joining in with all the self-praise, added that it would be nice if in the future the presentation includes some “measures of success.” Trouble is that in Mendo the “measure of success” is how many friends and relatives can be hired to maximize the mental health funding draw down, so anything like recidivism rates, successful post-treatment plan outcomes, persons with more than a year without future contact, etc. will never be included in Mendo’s skewed “measures of success.”

THE MOST AMUSING/DEPRESSING (sic) part of the mental health discussion was when they discussed the Behavioral Health Advisory Board’s (BHAB) one-sentence “recommendation” to implement “all” of recommendations of last year’s Kemper report which, of course, everybody of course loves. After some initial avoidance of the subject which was obviously going nowhere, newly elected Supervisor Ted Williams naively asked that they not finish the discussion without some tangible direction of some kind. Everybody — especially CEO Carmel Angelo — laughed at the poor newbie supe as if his simple request stemmed from a childish ignorance of how Mendo works. The entire discussion could have been avoided if the BHAB — a more ineffectual bunch of apparently well-meaning people would be hard to find, even in Mendo — had at least tried to review and prioritize the Kemper recommendations.

WE WON’T BORE YOU with a full transcription of what followed, but here’s a still-long summary version of the remarks from the various officials, paraphrasing or quoting them for the sake of brevity. Remember, there are at least, what? eight separate entities each with many individual members, with their hands in the mental health funding cookie jar: The Supervisors, The Behavioral Health Advisory Board, the County’s mental health staff, the Measure B Advisory Committee, the County Counsel’s office, The CEO and her top staff, the Mental Health Services Contractor Redwood Quality Management Company and their private and totally unaccountable service outfit Redwood Community Services… etc.

SO HOW should the Kemper Recommendations be handled?

Here we go:

---

Williams: What’s the best way for us to begin to execute the recommendations?

Behavioral Health Board Chair Jan McGourty: You just adopt the Kemper recommendations.

Williams: That's all you need? 

CEO Carmel Angelo: You accepted the Kemper report. Are you saying to implement all recommendations?

Williams: That's what they're recommending. I want to make sure we walk away with some specific action plan.

Board Chair Carre Brown: It does not give us that ability on our agenda.

Williams: We can discuss next steps.

Brown: And give direction, but not take action. Not today.

Angelo: You would look at the cost-benefit analysis. They have to go through the Measure B committee first.

Williams: Have we adopted these recommendations or is there more work to do? Do you need board action?

McGourty: We recommend all the recommendations be implemented.

Supervisor John Haschak: We accepted the report, then sent it off to Measure B and they should be coming back to us.

McGourty: Measure B has not studied it.

Brown: We can accept the report, we just can't take action. Maybe we need some legislative platform action.

McGourty: I thought you were talking about the Kemper report.

McCowen: We could direct staff to investigate and perhaps draft a policy.

Angelo: The wording in the policy needs to be well-defined.

McCowen: We could refer it to the general government committee.

Angelo: That would be great! (Laughs).

Brown: I have heard complaints that citizens are not being listened to. We have to be careful because the public has the perception that county staff is driving County business.

Williams: I would like to hear from the CEO.

Angelo: It really depends on the department heads. I request that you ask Human Eesources to look at this.

Human Resources Director Heidi Dunham: We want to meet with the department heads and the unions and meet and confer.

Brown: We will have direction shortly.

McCowen: I suggest the chair direct Human Resources to get us the information we need.

County Counsel Katherine Elliott: There are some restrictions on who can be on what committee.

McCowen: That's not applicable in this situation.

Brown: The devil is in the details.

Supervisor Dan Gjerde: I think staff should look at a variety of options. It’s likely to be limited.

Brown: There are state statutes that address appointments to committees. It’s a mixed bag.

Board Clerk: To clarify the directive…

Brown: Human Resources will work on a policy.

McCowen: We don't have enough information to implement the Kemper report. We need another agenda item. There's an overlap with the Measure B committee. Maybe we need a joint board and Measure B committee meeting.

(Everybody laughs.)

Brown: Maybe a workshop with our Behavioral Health Advisory Board. I don't know about Measure B.

---

(At this point, the Board clerk cringed at the thought of a Joint Behavioral Health/Board of Supervisors meeting and looked over at her boss, CEO Angelo in hopes that Angelo would surely put the kibosh on that horror.)

---

McCowen: We want recommendations from them on how to spend Measure B money.

Brown: We want those, yes. And we received the first one.

Angelo: The Measure B committee recommended crisis residential, crisis treatment and the PHF unit. There’s overlap and duplication between the Measure B committee and the Behavioral Health Advisory Board. If we could delineate who does what we could have more people delivering services and then giving recommendations to the board. The behavioral health advisory Board has authority to make recommendations. Measure B has a narrow focus.

Health and Human Services Agency Head Tammy Moss Chandler: (Reads from Advisory Board state statute.) We will work with those boards and the CEO’s office.

Brown: I think it takes a workshop to sift and discuss this.

McCowen: A workshop would be appropriate. Does the board support the Kemper recommendations? Is Measure B funding to be used? We need recommendations from Measure B. 

Haschak: It has to go through the Measure B. Then we do what we do.

Brown: But we were talking about some recommendations not in the scope of Measure B.

McGourty: That would potentially be provided by Measure B funding. But the Measure B committee has not looked at the Kemper report. Maybe they need direction from the board to do that.

Brown: I think we should create common definitions for wellness. Not all the recommendations are in the scope of Measure B.

McGourty: That’s true. We color-coded our recommendations for each of our admin, services, and facilities recommendations. Some of them would not require funding.

Williams: Are we asking the Behavioral Health Advisory Board to get buy-in from Measure B and bring it back to us? Or are we going to ask to Measure B committee to approve these recommendations? There's a bit of a logjam, I do not want to leave without understanding what the next steps are.

Brown: I'm trying to get us through this.

McGourty: I have submitted the outline to the Measure B board two or three times and it is continually overlooked.

Brown: It was on our agenda two weeks ago. The Kemper report.

Angelo: Not too long ago. Measure B is a very narrow focus. Measure B has not looked at these recommendations in depth. Staff could look at these recommendations. There is a lot of confusion about who does what. Referring this to Measure B just creates more confusion as to what their role is.

McCowen: We have a bit of a disconnect. BHAB can review all mental health activities. The Kemper report was specifically for the Measure B money. If they table this, they’re not doing their job. We need recommendations from the Measure B committee.

The Measure B committee doesn't say who spends what, you are in charge, the board. This board cannot start allocating Measure B funding without a recommendation from the Measure B committee.

McGourty: You could ask for their approval on decisions you make.

Elliott: Measure B is an advisory committee. They could criticize this board if they didn't like the spending.

McCowen: Aren't they first charged with making the recommendations in Kemper?

Elliott: Yes, recommendations.

McCowen: So we'd be in violation if we initiated the spending.

Hashack: Seems like the Measure B money will not cover all the recommendations of the camper report. They need to prioritize.

Brown: The ad hoc committee (of the BHAB) put hours of time on the Kemper report.

Williams: I would like to ask the Measure B committee to review the BHAB recommendations and prioritize and make recommendations to begin to spend the funds. I agree we cannot proceed without oversight from Measure B.

Brown: They can identify the ones that are not part of their scope. So that might work.

Angelo: This was on the Measure B committee agenda before and they twice chose not to go through these systematically or in-depth. You need to be very clear because there are 11 people on this committee and they will say they've already done this. We will put your direction on the Measure B committee agenda for this month.

Williams: What do you see as our shortest path to action?

(Laughter, more laughter, followed by laughter in reaction to the laughter.)

Williams: What I really want to do is bring the Sheriff back in and ask him to go to work on this. …

(More laughter. More nervous laughter.)

…We need a recommendation for spending Measure B funds to make progress in mental health. And I feel like it's in a cluster now and I don't want to leave the day feeling like I don't understand that we've made progress.

Angelo: We have already directed by the recommendation of the Measure B committee to look at crisis stabilization, crisis residential and the PHF unit. And the mobile outreach program. And much more. I think we are spending so much money but we don't think we have it all right now but I don't know about looking at anything more than the top three services. Those are going to be expensive services. What you are doing is appropriate but please be very specific and directive in this direction to Measure B that you want them to look at these recommendations in light of the Measure B funding and what is appropriate and what do they recommend back to the board as to how Measure B dollars are spent. We are taking action. It's not true that we are sitting around not taking any action. The fact that we are looking at these three services and doing what we can do come back with a recommendation to this board and move forward with one or three services is huge. You are not seeing another county out of 58 that is doing this. You are taking action and you are moving this along. This will create additional work for the committee and for staff.

Brown: And the committee does not need this right now because their main focus needs to be on the three main facilities. Should we go through this to have more time to talk about it with the Behavioral Advisory board?

Angelo: If the board wants to make that directive to Measure B you have every right, I just want you to be very very clear because they will come back and say they have already reviewed the recommendations.

Moss-Chandler: This report was developed three months ago and the Measure B committee took action recently. So the Behavioral Health Advisory Board can develop some updates to this report. And it will be clearer and not need to come to the Measure B committee when we have more information about financial impact in the next few months.

McCowen: Some of the Measure B committee people seem to think they are responsible not to make recommendations on how to spend the Measure B money and which facilities should be built. They seem to think they are in charge of implementation down to picking the colors for the waiting room. So they have taken action on three major items. And they are done with those three items. It's time to move on to the other Kemper recommendations. That's why we commissioned it. It's laid out in detail. There is a concern about how far the money will go and do we have enough to build all the facilities in provide all the services. 25% of the funds are reserved for services, the minimum. It's not too early to start looking at recommendations for what services can be appropriately be provided and how. I have said to them in the past that they should review the Kemper recommendations and if there's a flaw with them say so and if there's not let's move forward. They were very well thought out.

Brown: I see some disagreement in a path forward.

McCowen: I think I'm agreeing with Supervisor Williams. We encourage the Measure B committee to take up the Kemper recommendations and the related suggestions from the Behavioral Health Advisory Board.

Hashack: Their recommendations need to be prioritized.

McCowen: Yes, review and prioritize.

Gjerde: I think they have their hands full with the first three items on that list.

McGourty: I think you should use the word “study.” It has been reviewed many times but it has not been studied by the group in consultation.

Angelo: You're not going to direct the Measure B committee? You're going to encourage?

McCowen: I don't think we can direct.

McGourty: But they're your committee.

McCowen: But they are independently charged from the voters.

Angelo: This has been tried twice. For you to encourage them…

Brown: The majority of the board is saying they want to encourage them that hopefully the third time is a charm?

Williams: I suggest we tell the Measure B committee that 25% was for services and we have not yet utilized those funds for services. And we want a prioritized list. We would rather they prioritize and we act on that, but in the absence of that we are going to start acting because otherwise it will be held up forever in the process.

Brown: We have a recommendation to study, not encourage. 

McCowen: I like the original direction.

Brown: So three people want to keep “encouraged.” As the original.

(Public comment, skipped)

McGourty: We should be very proud of ourselves and our accomplishments. The jail addition. Mobile outreach. Willow Terrace us coming on line. And Measure B itself.

---

WE DON’T RECALL any specific discussion of the individual Kemper Recommendations per se at any of the previous Measure B Committee meetings. But CEO Angelo, Ms. McGourty and Mental Health Director Jenine Miller (who was also on hand during the above bouncing ball discussion but cagily avoided participating in it) are themselves on the Measure B committee, so it will be interesting to see how they handle the Kemper Report recommendations at their upcoming March 27 meeting. Will Ms. Angelo or Ms. McGourty be bold enough to accuse their fellow Measure B committee members of refusing to deal with the Kemper recommendations as they did with the Supes? We doubt it.