FOX NEWS and related rightwing blowhards aside, during WWII the national debt was more than 100% of Gross Domestic Product, which it will probably be again soon. To beat back crippling debt, FDR, a member of the One Percent in the days the One Percent believed in at least a modicum of noblesse oblige, raised taxes on the big incomes to 90% where it stayed for 21 years. Capital gains were taxed at the same 90% rates as ordinary income. Did the ruling class disappear? Nope, they still made a lot of money and the general prosperity lifted all those boats the bullet heads are always claiming to want to lift. It's simply not true that fair rates of taxation applied to the rich stifle free enterprise.
WE DEFY ANYONE to follow the babbling brook of supervisor Kendall Smith's rhetoric, but here she is, verbatim, justifying even more money for supervisor's salaries in a county where the average person earns $24,000 a year: “I think that these specifics on the motion are premature and I will go into that little bit. I believe that we need to look at elected official salaries collectively. We did that with the other electeds. We made a rather arbitrary stab by just taking a point in time to roll back those salaries. The reason we did that is that over time they had collectively received either five or six salary raises, meaning that the salaries were on an upward slope because they were tied to the department head bargaining units. Not so with the Board of Supervisors. So in effect setting our salary, or keeping our salary at $68,000 would be in sync with the timeframe that we hold the other elected supervisors to, other elected official salaries are, and that being the case…” and blah blah blah blah blah blah for another 10 minutes! As the unhinged solon from Fort Bragg rattled on and on, she waved a chart that she seemed to think justified more than the Supes' $68,000 plus the usual array of fringes government people give themselves. The chart illustrated the supes’ salaries of nearby counties. Average them out and what do you get? You get that Smith isn't making enough money screwing up County government.
SUPERVISOR HAMBURG isn't quite as fuzzy-thinking as Smith but he's close, and his reasoning with its arrogant class assumptions, is much more offensive: “My thinking about this is quite a bit simpler than Supervisor Smith’s,” he began, probably intending no irony. “For one thing, I feel like we just talked about this. I guess it was back last April. January? So it was January? A year ago. Okay. It really came up fast, I'll tell you. Because I remember the arguments at that time was that we didn't want this to be a job for only independently wealthy people. We didn't want this to be a job that people did part-time because they couldn't afford to live on the salary and perhaps even have a family, and I think even if at the $68,000 level that's somewhat of a challenge. [!] The other thing though that concerns me about trying to knock this salary down further is that currently we are paid between, if you look at our MCLEMA [the Mendocino County Law Enforcement Management Association] chart that was in our packets, we are paid between the Administrative Services Manager I and a Substance Abuse Program Services Manager, according to the management tables. So currently we are paid between an admin service manager and a substance abuse program manager. And if we go down another $7,000 we will be paid between a staff Services Manager I and the Assistant Registrar of Voters. No matter how you slice it to some degree your worth to the organization is related to your pay scale, and I'm not saying that our salaries should be up at the levels of some of these comparatively high paid elected officials. But I think if we are paid like middle managers, that's sort of where we are putting our value, that we have the value to the organization, to pick another department — a Sergeant, right around the salary of a Sergeant (in the Sheriff's Department). How many sergeants do we have? I don't know. So we are about there with the 13 or so sergeants. I don't think we are middle management. Even though we get paid like middle management. We are in charge of a large operation here. I know that everybody on this board puts in a tremendous amount of hours. I know we just imposed this 10% cut around the county but we are somewhat different than all the other positions in the county. The Board of Supervisors has — I think that we are one of those of types of employees that don't, when we leave the office, we don't really leave the job. It's the kind of thing that at least for me and I'm sure for the rest of you, it is something that is pretty much on your mind all the time.”
WE GET A LOT of this implicit class warfare from Mendocino County liberals, that their dubious abilities are worth more money because their tasks are somehow worth more than other kinds of work. The arrogant assumption that the cool people should be paid more than, say, WalMart shoppers, comes up all the time on a range of issues. For instance, class privilege assumptions are woven throughout the WalMart discussion now raging, and lots of libs, especially the ones holding down the well-paying public jobs in Mendocino County, think like Hamburg, who really believes he should make more money than a cop or a plumber or a logger or an anybody who hasn't enjoyed his advantages. Getting back to WalMart, of course it's twice as bad as its critics say it is, but lots of Americans, especially here in Mendocino County, don't have shopping options. A mega-food market at WalMart prices greatly appeals to people making the average Mendocino County wage of $24,000 because WalMart is what they can afford.
BY A 3-2 VOTE, Hamburg and Smith dissenting, Supes pay was whacked a permanent 10%. They'll now make about $61,000.
FOOTNOTE to the County’s elimination of the permit and fee portions of the 9.31 program under threats from US attorney’s office to County Counsel Jeanine Nadel. When members of the public asked what the rush was to scrap 9.31, County Counsel Nadel confirmed that the California Supreme Court had decided to review the “Pack” decision. The Pack decision says that local jurisdictions can't “permit” a federally illegal substance. Although Ms. Nadel has refused to describe exactly what kind of threat the feds made the threat was made in person by a person from the US Attorney's office in San Francisco it was clear by her answer that whatever the feds said, the County had to remove the permit and fee portions of the Mendo ordinance in a hurry or suffer some kind of serious action by the feds. We think the big hurry-up occurred because the feds either threatened to arrest the Sheriff and the Supervisors or threatened to sue Mendocino County to get the more than half a million dollars the County made selling pot permits last year.
DAVID COBB of MoveToAmend.org will be joined on stage by Congressional candidate Norman Solomon this Friday, 7pm, at the Caspar Community Center. They will talk about “Creating Democracy and Challenging Corporate Rule,” nationally and locally, and especially how it relates to militarism and the health care debacle. Come hear how corporations stole our government, how people across the country are responding, and Mendocino County's part in the national effort to end corporate personhood. More information at 937-1113 and tw@mcn.org.
QUOTE OF THE DAY from Jim Kunstler: “Well, Obama had to get up there and say something. In this particular winter of our discontent, the wispiest nostrums and baldest lies will do. America is not interested in reality. America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes before the front-end-loader bashes through the wall to haul him to intensive care. America just wants to hear another story about its own wonderfulness before that happens. America's soul is so lost that it has disappeared into the same cosmic wilderness that MF Global's client accounts were last seen entering."
MAN BEATER of the Week, is an obviously triumphant Melanie Brandy Ilar, 25, of Ukiah. According to the police report, “On arrival deputies learned Joshua Charles Pollard and Melanie Brandy Ilar, a cohabiting couple, had been involved in a physical assault where traumatic injuries were received by both parties.” Really? Ol' Josh looks a lot more traumatized than Melanie, and we bet they're still cohabiting.
THE USUALLY INVISIBLE State Senator, Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa, politically a kind of female Wes Chesbro, does have her moments. (In office going on four decades, Chesbro has yet to have a single moment and, of course, has ducked this particular issue.) Evans' alarmed letter over the looming privatization of state parks, a bunch of them here in Mendocino County, is right on the mark: “It's like they're offering our state parks up for sale to the highest bidder,” the Senator says, which the state is indeed doing. In state-think, the deal goes like this: a private concessionaire gets whatever he can make from the park, but if a community group runs a park it would get a measly five percent of the take! Evans has introduced SB 974, which would require the Parks Department to conduct a formal review of park closures, and we shall see what we shall see.
VETERAN conservationist and nationally known bear expert Gary Alt presents a one-hour slide show and talk on Sunday, February 5 at the Grace Hudson Museum. A popular and riveting speaker, Dr. Alt will educate us on the natural history and general ecology of all three of North America's bear species--polar bears, brown bears, and black bears. The presentation is free and starts at 2 pm, with refreshments, including, perhaps, bear claws, to follow. Visitors can also view the Museum’s current exhibit, “Bear in Mind: The Story of the California Grizzly,” which closes on February 12. The Grace Hudson Museum and Sun House, as you absolutely must know by now but in case you don't, is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah. General admission to the Museum is $4, $10 per family, $3 for students and seniors, and free to members or on the first Friday of the month. For more information please call 467-2836.
THERE’S A CERTAIN karmic justice in Air Quality District Manager Chris Brown’s imposition of a $123,000 fine on Mendocino County for “failure to conduct (an) asbestos survey prior to renovation of a commercial building” and “failure to properly notify [the Air Quality Management] District” before beginning the November renovation of its former Mental Health building at 860 N. Bush in Ukiah. Because...
BECAUSE MR. BROWN has gained a local reputation for imposing unreasonable requirements and fines on private companies for purely bureaucratic violations unrelated to actual air quality. Now he's suing the County, which not only amounts to one branch of County government suing another, and here's where the karma comes in, the Board of Supervisors also sits as the Air Quality Management District’s Board of Directors and has routinely signed off on Brown's fines on everyone else. Air Quality is a state agency working under the auspices of the County, meaning the County signs off on its pass-through funding. Or doesn't sign off on its pass-through funding, so Brown better watch it. Supervisor Pinches, bless him all his days, recently questioned Brown’s need for a brand new hybrid SUV, but most of the time Brown goes unchallenged. With Brown's whacking the County to the tune of $123k over nothing at all, really, a lot of contractors fined by Brown are celebrating that the County is getting a taste of Brown's arbitrary lash.
WE CONTINUE to be amazed whenever anyone expects marijuana laws to be “clarified” by state or federal officials. Late last year, pundits were saying that the State Supreme Court was expected to “clarify” pot laws by agreeing to hear the “Pack” case out of Long Beach where a lower court ruled that local jurisdictions couldn’t “permit” the growing of a federally illegal substance.
THEN last week we saw a headline that read, “Attorney General asks Legislature to clarify pot issues.” Attorney General Kamala Harris has sent letters to the state legislature asking it to “clarify” medical marijuana laws associated with cultivation and distribution, declaring that she has no intention of issuing “nonbinding guidelines.” Good luck in getting the legislature to clarify anything, and look for the pot laws to remain like the old joke about the baseball umpire: “I'll show you the rule as soon as the ink is dry. “
THREE WEEKS AGO, the US Attorney's Office based in San Francisco sent one of their attorneys all the way to Ukiah to personally inform the Mendocino County Supervisors that Mendocino County officials better stop selling 99-plant licenses to medical marijuana growers or individually face arrest. The County had sold the permits through last pot season, garnering $663,230. The feds nevertheless busted a fully-permitted fellow named Matt Cohen, who described the task force raid on his Redwood Valley business as “a smash and grab.” Mendocino County is now back to the hazy limit of 25 plants per parcel prevalent throughout the state, although the feds remain zero tolerance. Most California counties do not pursue small-scale gardeners. Mendocino County, it seems, went a little too big time, became a little too over-reaching. It remains to be seen if Mendo will have to refund the permit money or turn it over to the federales.
JOHN SAKOWICZ and incumbent Bob Mirata have been appointed to the two vacant seats on the Mendocino County Employees Retirement Association board of directors. Mirata was reappointed, having already served for six years. He was unanimously voted on to the Board, but Sakowicz was opposed by Supervisors Hamburg and Smith. Sakowicz, selected over the more conventional former mayor of Willits, Bruce Alfano, has been highly critical of retirement management, at one point suggesting criminal malfeasance and calling for a forensics audit. Sako kind of assured the Supervisors, “I think I'm over that now,” and that such an audit would be “counter productive.”
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT is soliciting slogans for a proposed welcoming billboard south of Cloverdale: We suggest, “Marijuana to Merlot! Welcome To America’s Intoxicant Capitol!”
MR. WILLIAM DOW-DELL is a Fort Bragg street personality of the type who often comes to the attention of the Fort Bragg Police Department. In the long gone days when California enjoyed a viable state hospital system Dowdell, and others like him, would have been sequestered at the state hospital at Talmage. These days, Mendocino County's floating cadre of Dowdells, about a hundred of them, are briefly held at the County Jail in Ukiah and sent back out to their preferred streets. Last week, Dowdell, pulling his trademark suitcase, and having already been ejected from a downtown business, walked east to the Paul Bunyan Thrift Store where he unleashed a second blast of obscenity-ridden denunciations, non-specific type, at everyone on the premises. It was offensive enough, and appeared to be unending, that Dowdell was taken into custody. Also last week, Dowdell parked his suitcase on the bike path near the Noyo Bridge. Along came the custodian at the Fort Bragg Middle School hustling to work on his bike. In the early morning murk the custodian didn't see Dowdell's suitcase, and hit it full speed. He was thrown from his bicycle and injured severely enough to warrant emergency treatment at Coast Hospital, but not before limping off to get the school ready for the day's classes, THEN he went for treatment. Dowdell may now be facing more serious charges than “using offensive words in a public place,” and somebody needs to recognize the custodian's devotion to his duties at Fort Bragg Middle School.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “This will be routine training conducted by military personnel, designed to ensure the military’s ability to operate in urban environments, prepare forces for upcoming overseas deployments, and meet mandatory training certification.” — LA Police Department. Yeah, I'd agree that it's likely to be a long and very hot summer.
JAMAL ANDREWS, 30, was found shot to death late Tuesday night in front of his Road B Redwood Valley home. Billy Norbury, 33, has been arrested for shooting Andrews, who was hit twice, fatally in the head, and once in the shoulder. Sheriff's Department investigators estimate that the murder weapon, a rifle, was discharged several times from a distance of 50 feet. Norbury was taken into custody at his home a short distance away. Andrews was a well-known reggae musician with a large following. Norbury is from a well-known family that owns and operates Norbury Construction. Both men are the fathers of young children. The internet is humming with wild accusations of racism because Andrews is black, Norbury white, but the reason for the shooting has not been revealed. Norbury has a minor criminal record and was on probation when he was arrested as the sole suspect in the murder of Andrews. Andrews' band is called the High Grade All Stars whose best-known recordings are “Smoke Weed Every Day” and “Trimmers' Blues.” The band has appeared at Reggae Rising, the annual reggae concert in Southern Humboldt County.
NORBURY'S estranged wife told the Press Democrat that Norbury's behavior had lately become more and more irrational. “He threw a cell phone in the creek because he thought it was bugged, “ she said, “and he spent time under the house checking for bugging devices and refused to wear a shirt I washed and ironed for him to wear to a birthday party because he thought I was in on a conspiracy to track him.” This kind of behavior is indicative of amphetamine abuse, not alcoholism, but Norbury probably won't remember why he shot Andrews.
THAT DISPUTE last Friday between famous winemaker Paul Dolan and his Texas partners at the Mendocino Wine Company, formerly Parducci, required the soothing mediation of Sheriff's deputies. The Texans, Tim and Thomas Thornhill, are in ongoing disputes with Dolan stemming from the break-up of their partnership. As Dolan left the company's Parducci Road, Ukiah, premises Friday afternoon with some his office equipment, an argument broke out between him and the Thornhills. Dolan said the stuff was his, the Thornhills said it was theirs. The dispute became heated and deputies were called to the scene by alarmed office workers who feared the men might come to blows. The deputies soon had things calmed down. They determined that the beef was a civil dispute, not one for the police. Dolan made his bones at Fetzer Vineyards, Hopland, where he founded America's largest organic wine operation.
MENDO V. MENDO. Mendo Air Quality has fined Mendocino County $123,000 with the EPA lurking in the on-deck circle. Air Quality says the County's “failure to conduct an asbestos survey prior to renovation of a commercial building” and its “failure to properly notify the Air Quality Management District” before the County began work on its former Mental Health building at 860 N. Bush Street in November made the fine necessary. Of course the matter couldn't simply be addressed and remedied in-house, the Air Quality guy, Chris Brown, had to make a literal federal case out of it.
PRESERVATION RANCH, the ghastly 1,769-acre forest-to-vineyard conversion proposed for Sonoma County in the Gualala-Annapolis area, has been put on hold, probably permanent hold. The California Public Employees' Retirement System (Calpers) has withdrawn its backing for the ill-conceived project. The Napa-based vineyard company promoting the project is led by William Hill who has gotten money for other vineyard projects, two in the Anderson Valley, from Calpers. The Preservation Ranch proposal galvanized a national opposition because, among other likely destructive environmental effects, it would have harmed the battered Gualala River's struggling salmon and steelhead populations. Hill bought the seriously overlogged 19,652-acre Preservation Ranch property in 2004 for $28.5 million from Willits-based Rich Padula.
HAVE A GLASS OF CHAINSAW! Friends of the Gualala River is nevertheless organizing an event at the February 7th meeting of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors the 4'x18' petition banner featuring 20,000 signatures from people opposed to a massive clearcut on the Southcoast to install vineyards and high-end homes. 70,000 more signatures in opposition were collected but couldn't fit on the banner. The SoCo supervisors will see that this conversion project is universally opposed.
JIM HARBAUGH caught some flack last week because Bay Area sports writers didn't like his replies to their dumb questions. A Chron writer named Eric Branch asked Harbaugh what he did after the 49ers’ overtime loss to the Giants. Harbaugh answered, “Is it just California that everybody just wants to know how you feel? Care about what you thought, what you did, how you felt, how your pinky feels. Is that just a California thing? Back where I come from, nobody really cares. In my opinion, it is a California thing.” No, coach, it's an idiot thing, not specific to the Golden State. A couple of weeks ago I heard a radio sports guy tell Harbaugh that the coach needed to spend more time with his family! Worse, the radio jock phrased this preposterously intrusive statement with, “Dude, you need…”
FUN WITH SPAM. The on-line invite was to a UFO Congress. We wrote back, “Tinfoil hats optional?” The UFO people promptly replied, “We prefer no tinfoil hats.” We asked, “Propeller beanies?” No answer.
ANGELA PINCHES, the daughter of 3rd District supervisor Johnny Pinches has been charged with “possessing marijuana for sale and maintaining a place for cultivation.” Ms. Pinches’ bust occurred in September when first the Sheriff's Department, then the Drug Task Force raided her Redwood Valley home. She was not arrested on either occasion. The two raids got gleeful attention on the front pages of the two area dailies out of Santa Rosa and Ukiah, as has the announcement that the DA will now play Let's Make A Deal with Ms. Pinches, meaning he will settle her case in a plea deal for “eradication fees.” Under this approach to pot cases the defendant gets the charges reduced to a misdemeanor and the DA gets the fine. Under the previous DA, lots of these cases were going before juries and the DA was losing them and, in the process, the DA was losing large amounts of public money pursuing them. DA Eyster's strategy of keeping pot cases out of court as he settles for fines is a win-win all round, although the bustee probably grumbles at the amount of cash he or she is out. But he or she would grumble even more if he or she got state prison time, not that many have out of Mendocino County lately. Supervisor Pinches is for marijuana legalization. His public stance for legalization, and law enforcement's long-time suspicion that Pinches himself grows the love drug at his Laytonville ranch, has gotten him and his family extraordinary attention from law enforcement. The supervisor told the AVA recently that he has also been subjected to numerous IRS audits which found nothing of suspicion but cost the supervisor a large amount of money in accountant and legal fees. The county's cultivation ordinance at the time of Ms. Pinches' two visits from the forces of law and order, permitted marijuana collectives and cooperatives to buy permits from the Sheriff's Office to grow up to 99 plants per parcel. Angela Pinches told the police she'd intended to join a collective but hadn't gotten around to it. She's due in court the 22nd of February, but don't expect to see her there; she'll pay the restitution pay and take a misdemeanor.
WE WERE STARTLED to hear that “the following cases were heard in Ten Mile Court. Monday, Jan. 23 Presiding: Visiting Judge, The Honorable Galen Hathaway.” Hathaway's 80 if he's a day and goes back to the Little Lake Judicial District, Willits, not that age should disqualify him. But Mendocino County has eight superior court judges and a magistrate. Six of the superior court judges are active while two seats remain vacant. Yet here's Hathaway picking up a fat supplement to an already fat retirement check by sitting in as a “visiting judge” in Fort Bragg. And over in Ukiah we've got Leonard LaCasse sitting as a visiting judge. So where are our six judges at a time where there are fewer court cases being filed because Eyster is setting a lot of pot cases before they get to court? Mendocino County has a small army of retired judges serving as visiting judges all over the state, working as they choose for the big bucks.
A PRESS RELEASE from the Green Party says Joe Louis Hoffman, lately known as Joe Louis Wildman, “is hosting a training for all activists who want to help us register 100,000 new Green Party members in California in 24 months. Green Party leaders from across Northern Ca plan to attend. We hope you will join us.”
ANYBODY WHO THINKS Hoffman-Wildman is working for the Green Party either suffers from amnesia or doesn't know his first allegiance is to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. This guy lives in Potter Valley. A few years ago, he sabbed John Lewallen's run for Governor as a Green just as David Cobb was selling out Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader via the “safe state” strategy promoted by Democrats who wanted to keep any challenge from the left out of states where Kerry could be harmed in his run against Bush. Hoffman-Wildman wants 100,000 dupes to register to vote as Greens or whatevers so they can vote to re-elect the disastrous Obama. The Greens are pathetic anyway and might as well simply rejoin the Democrats, but Hoffman-Wildman is no Green. He also got us the two worst supervisors in Mendocino County history by working overtime to twice elect David Colfax and Kendall Smith to the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors. Anybody who signs up for this so-called registration training is a SAP.
THE MENDOCINO County Republican Central Committee will meet February 8, 2012, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM at the Yum Yum Tree Restaurant, 383 S. Main Street, Willits. No guns, please. For further information contact: Stan Anderson, 707-321-2592.
THE UKIAH Police Department wants to buy a $30,000 robot, one of those things you send in to an armed tweeker's lair, say, in lieu of an automaton, er, police officer. Some of the money for the robot would come from the Mendocino Public Safety Foundation, some from the Willits and the Fort Bragg police departments. The Ukiah City Council will discuss purchase of Robby the Robot at its Tuesday meeting. These things are widely used in urban areas in high risk situations.
WALMART got another five hours last Wednesday from the Ukiah Planning Commission. Long and short of it is that Ukiah officialdom is down to discussing the landscaping. Translation: The big expansion is a go. There'll be more meetings and more denunciations of the Arkansas octopus, but expansion was built into the original approval and can't really even by modified much. The monster that ate America marches on.
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