Letter to the Editor

ONE HAND CLAPPING

Editor,

I'm curious about your position on the upcoming supervisorial election. Your disdain for Shoemaker is clear, but why do you speak favorably about Wattenburger and ignore the surging candidacy of Phil Baldwin? Both men have the distinct advantage of not being Shoemaker, but Baldwin's current on the major issues confronting the county. Is there an ulterior motive? Where's the "attaboy, Phil!" we've been waiting for?

David Lilker
Potter Valley

Ed reply:

The present board of supervisors is dominated by spendthrift self-servers who've made themselves Mendocino County's first public priority by giving themselves and their department heads, some of them elected, large annual raises they didn't deserve and we couldn't afford. Now we learn that the County is looking at a deficit for fiscal year 04-05 of some $7 million dollars, not that the Supervisors have made any effort to cut unnecessary spending this fiscal year or any fiscal year prior. (Prudent public spending was formerly known as "leadership.") For instance, Supervisor Colfax enjoys an office in downtown Boonville he seldom visits paid for by the County. There is free public space all over town. A mediator was recently brought in from Oregon to help resolve a dispute involving the two attorneys — Susan Massini and James Griffiths — from the troubled Deadbeat Dad office. County Counsel pursues cases that should be settled before they get to court. And on and on. Everywhere one looks, somebody holding a high level public job in Mendocino County is gratuitously, indefensibly running up the public's tab. And now that the County is officially broke, the Supervisors blame the state and even the national business climate! Not that they did it alone, obviously, but they set a poor example, to say the least.

Opportunists of the Shoemaker-Colfax-Campbell type see public office as an opportunity to (1) enrich themselves (2) stuff the County's bureaucracies with their political soulmates (3) pursue their private agendas with public money (4) generally spend public money as if there isn't a looming deficit. Couple an irresponsible and ethically corrupt Board of Supervisors to our over-large and equivalently Me First Superior Court, and local fiscal disaster is inevitable. Whether or not The Terminator's proposed bond (another fraud on the public) fails, we'll soon see the full impact of the local, state and national profligacy in layoffs of many low-level County employees.

Which is all a way of saying if Joe Louis Wildman (largely responsible for inflicting the priapic and terrible-tempered Ralph Freedman on Mendocino County), is elected over Delbar we'll have another version, albeit a more entertaining version, of Shoemaker sitting as supervisor. Irma Turner is Wildman in a dress. She, like Wildman and Shoemaker, arises from the fetid Ukiah public job swamp variously called Northcoast Opportunities, The Helping Professions, Education, and, less formally, Up From Hippie, in which a small group of constantly morphing incompetents compete with each other for public sinecures. It works like this: Mr. Nice Person does a tour as capo di tutti capi at Community Development while Mrs. Nice Person catches on with the Foster Grandad program. Then they switch chairs, or dive into the cigarette tax money, or catch on as a "consultant" with the County Office of Education, or Alison Glassey hires them at the Welfare Department to help her screw the poor. If their lip gloss lasts, Mr. and Mrs. Nice Person, whose lives in Mendocino County typically began in a big, naked pile at a full moon "boogie" the summer of '71, can rotate endlessly among the County's public sector jobs until they get their own tub at Orr Hot Springs.

Delbar, auto-vote for Free Water Forever For Potter Valley Farmers, is a better supervisor than his faux-lib colleagues only because he has some regard for thrifty public policy. In the 4th District where Patti Campbell has run errands for Fort Bragg-based developers like Affinito for 16 total years and has never, ever represented anybody but herself and the forces of greed and destruction, Congressman Mike Thompson's rep, Kendall Smith, is being put forward by the lib-labs as Campbell's successor. Ms. Smith has never said a public word on any issue affecting the district she's been magically anointed to supervise! (The Caspar libs also gave us four extra years of the disastrous Campbell. Look for them to be all the way behind Smith.) Smith is running against a fellow named Steve Cardullo, a County road worker who also functions as a union rep. Cardullo versus Smith comes down to this: If you think Congressman Thompson, Assembly-cipher Patti Berg, our porcine State Senator, Wes Chesbro, and the Shoemaker-Colfax Lib-Lab Axis represent your interests, go with Ms. Smith. If you're a working person unaffiliated with flab-glab lib-lab-ism, go with Cardullo.

I'm pleased Phil Baldwin is running for 2nd District Supervisor because he'll reduce the libs by enough labs to finish Shoemaker off — permanently, I hope. Wattenburger? A genuinely nice man, which all by itself puts him ahead of the five sitting supervisors, but I'm a Baldwin guy only because he mostly represents me on the big-think stuff. (I still think his high-handed destruction of Potter Valley's playoff football team was indefensible.) But this is an election in Lilliput, not Washington, DC. I think either Baldwin or Wattenburger would be a huge improvement over Shoemaker, while Wildman, Turner, and Smith are Shoemaker Lite, and Shoemaker's a featherweight to begin with.

Measure H, like the stoners who devised it, is dumb and unenforceable, but I'll vote Yes on H because I think corporations are literally killing this country. But if H passes, our "liberal" representatives can be counted on to undo it, as Willie-Dan Cheshauser did 30 years ago when, at the behest of Corporate Ag, Willie-Wes-Dan, acting on behalf of corporate ag, undid our locally-passed ban on the aerial application of herbicides.

The AVA is also against the Terminator's $15 billion bond, which merely rolls over current state indebtedness while accumulating more debt. The solution to the state deficit is (1) re-make the state legislature into a single, part-time body (2) wipe out the 1,100 or so bipartisan sinecures our career officeholders have created for their major donors, their loyal supporters, their girl friends, their more presentable drug dealers, and themselves, and (3) tax the rich as per the suggestions of professors O'Lague and Bachar in this week's paper.