Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published by “Mark Scaramella”

Major Contributor

Blackbird Postponed Again

Last Wednesday night the Community Services District reviewed a draft of a letter to the Planning Department concerning Blackbird Farm’s proposal to increase their allowed occupancy from 36 to a preposterous 292. The CSD’s draft…

More Edu-Bucks Down The E-Drain

We stopped complaining about computers in the classroom decades ago because the train left the station and the educrats drank the Kool-Aid (pardon the double cliché) and no rational arguments were allowed. According to the…

Nerve Gas Bosco: The Reload

BOSCO, the eternal curse. Frankly, we enjoyed the guy when he was an automatic Congressional vote for nerve gas, always waffled on offshore oil drilling, functioned as a total slave of corporate timber, and otherwise…

Crazy Talk About Mental Health

On November 14 the Board of Supervisors received a mental health a report on the mental-health services transition from Yuba-City-based Ortner Management Group to Ukiah-based Redwood Quality Management. As usual whenever the subject is mental…

Blackbird Under Fire

It would be incorrect to describe last Thursday night’s Blackbird Farm meeting at the Boonville firehouse as "hostile." But most of the 40 or 50 locals who attended the meeting certainly expressed skepticism about Blackbird…

After A Courtship Of 75 Years…

Although the process seems to be dragging out for much longer than anyone expected, the merger of the nonprofit Anderson Valley Ambulance Service with the Anderson Valley Fire Department is close to being a done…

Feds Indict Napa Wine Scammer

A young Napa Valley winemaker named Jeffry James Hill was indicted, arrested and charged with fraud on Thursday by federal authorities. The fraud involved mislabeling cheap grapes and wine as pricey Napa Valley wine. Hill…

My First Paying Job

I was 13. It was 1958. We lived at what was then the outskirts of suburban Fresno. Down the street about half a mile was a large boysenberry farm. (Boysenberries are an early 20th Century…

-