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Letters (July 18, 2018)

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THANK YOU

Dear Editor,

I would like to convey my heartfelt thanks to the friends who have reached out to me after the loss of my companion, Kent Rogers. The many text messages, emails, phone calls, letters & cards, filled with loving messages & memories, were very healing. The hole in my life seems a little smaller. 

Thank You,

Neva Dyer

San Francisco

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MORE-OF-THE-SAME

AVA,

The ACLU produced a scorecard on how our federal reps have voted on issues in accordance with the ACLU’s positions since the Liar-in-Chief took office. Sen. Dianne Feinstein has voted with the ACLU to defend and advance civil rights and civil liberties 73% of the time; Sen. Kamala Harris, 86% of the time; and House Rep. Jared Huffman, 93% of the time. 

I know you bash Huffman regularly, even tho he seems to score similarly high with environmental, labor and other progressive organizations. I know he’s a Democrat but other than Bernie that’s all we have in Congress to fight the GOP onslaught. Yes, criticize the sclerotic corporate Democrats, but why bash the most progressive ones? 

Tom Wodetzki

Albion

ED REPLY: Surprised an old pwog like you takes this more of the same position. On the big issues, and on their best days, entrenched Democrats are soft Republicans. When there was a clear choice between Bernie and Hillary, the great civil libertarians went for Hillary. And a blank check for the multiple wars in the Middle East, and no questions asked of the Israeli fascists, and signed on to an unrestained Wall Street, and on and on and on. The Democrats should all go, Huffman included.

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MACHO-DOODS

Editor,

Haven’t heard much from Mr. T. Vulture lately. Didn’t they take his license away? I hope he has read paragraphs 3 and 4 in the July 11th Valley People. I call my favorite graduates of the Vulture Driving Academy “Machodoods.” 

Your basic Machodood has a giant truck, extra points for chrome stack. He is portly and dresses like a slob. There is usually a cigarette dangling from his fingers, hot ashes blowing off in the slipstream. He has short hair, a poor if any shave, and a sullen disposition. His most common expressions are “Get out of the fucking way, asshole!,” “Suck my dick, bitch,” and the always useful, “Fuck you!” 

I did see in a small town recently an apparent VDA graduate tailgating a tourist and colliding with him at good speed as the tourist suddenly braked hard for a left. The fused vehicles rotated like colliding galaxies spraying showers of glass and plastic over the intersection. 

Well, as R. Crumb said, It’s Really Too Bad.

Yours, 

Jay Williamson

Santa Rosa

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WHAT HAPPENED?

Editor,

What happened to all the good Democrats we used to have? Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was shot in the breast while giving a speech and he refused medical attention and spoke for 90 minutes with a bullet lodged in his spine or his breast or something. He used to go to Africa to hunt lions with an airedale dog like the one I have. These were real men. I challenge the liberal party now to compare themselves to these people. Not even close. I put myself in the same place as the people who fought and died to keep this country free. The Democrats back in those days used to do that. But now we have a bunch of Democrats who are troublemakers and anti-American wimps. Whatever you say against them fits. There are no more good Democrats.

And where are the conservative people? Are they all chicken? Why can't they stand up against these liberal, anti-Americans and make themselves felt around the country? I can't believe that the good Americans can't get behind Donald Trump and get this country back on its feet like it used to be. The socialistic takeover makes me puke. So conservatives, if you have any balls, stand up for America.

Americans need to protect law enforcement. Nobody has any idea what Sheriff Allman's deputies had to go through to keep this country safe. Nobody even cares. Jerry Brown and his pals have taken the law right out of law enforcement. We don't need more idiots like Pelosi, Feinstein, Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer running our country who insist on being anti-American opposing everything Donald Trump tries to do.

Where are the kids who used to do chores and went out and hunted and learned how to be men? Now all they do is go home and play video games or use their iPhones, ignoring everything else around them. What will happen in the next 15 or 20 years when everybody goes around with iPhones and living by computers. Sad.

What happened to people who respected the American flag, the national anthem, patriotism? Why don't the good conservatives in the silent majority stand up? They are two thirds of our population. They outnumber liberals. Why don't they vote? Conservatives need to get off their dead asses and take this country back and vote. It's the only way we will win our revolution.

God bless Donald Trump

Jerry Philbrick

Comptche

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MENDO OLD BOY WRITES HOME

Editor,

The following information may be incomplete or incorrect because I have little opportunity to fact check, this being my first prison term. I have no personal experience to draw on and so must depend on second-hand information provided to me by the more experienced convicts. But this is true to the best of my knowledge.

For many years the prison system has been divided into essentially two groups. Those who are considered acceptable company by fellow convicts on the main line and those who are not deemed acceptable due to their behavior while incarcerated or the nature of the crimes such as harming children or women or seniors, sex crimes, informing on codefendants, dirty cops, or any other former members of law enforcement found to be on the wrong side of the law. Also unwelcome and therefore unsafe on the main line are any former members of street or prison gangs who either dropped out or were forced out of whatever group they had been associated with. All members of any of these subgroups must be separated from the mainline for their own safety. They were and still are collectively known as PCs or protective custody's and their housing facilities are dubbed sensitive needs or SNY (Special Needs Yard). Over the past several decades the population of these SNY prisoners and their yards has grown from a small minority to a large minority and now as of last year these inmates who require protection for their own physical safety have grown to actually encompass the majority of inmates currently incarcerated in California. If that's not a major indication that the world is collectively going to hell in a handbasket then I truly cannot imagine what it would be.

Until fairly recently those requiring protective custody got the collective short end of the stick as far as which programs were made available to them while in custody. Priority was given to mainliners when it came to things like the Milestone program which rewarded convicts with three months off their sentence for completing educational programs such as earning their GED while in prison. This and other similar programs were not offered to many SNY institutional inmates. A class-action lawsuit was filed and eventually won by the inmates in protective custody which forced the CDCR to offer the same opportunities to PCs. Unfortunately, the response was not to increase the number of programs available to inmates to the point of including those previously excluded. Instead, they have decided it would be more cost-effective (in dollars, damn the human cost) to simply reintroduce a huge number of PC inmates back into the mainline prison population. This may not sound like a terribly big deal to anybody who is happily unaware of prison politics.

Allow me to elucidate in the simplest terms: people are going to die. Many more people will be forced into committing violence to avoid becoming a target themselves!

As a convict you are required to follow certain rules and regulations which can vary greatly depending on what race you choose to identify with or your gang affiliation upon entering the prison system. If you've never been here before and you think you're not racist, I would just keep that to myself and stay uninvolved. "Shut up and sit down, you have no idea what you're talking about, that's just the way it works in here.”

Prison is racist as hell. It sucks and I expect it is in large part engineered by the police state as a means of preventing us from ever realizing our collective power and unifying. But that's a whole different article.

As someone who was raised ultra-liberal and fortunate enough to have been blessed to travel out of the country at a formative age as well as the father of a multiracial 11-year-old, I consider myself about as non-racist as one can be having been raised in an overwhelmingly white place like the Mendocino Coast from 1978-2007. But Prison is racist and separation is mandatory and prison is set in its ways.

As a non-gang affiliated white man there are rules I am compelled to follow in order to maintain my status as a mainliner. Failure to follow rules results in disciplinary action which can range from having to do push-ups all the way to being stabbed to death or forced to PC up (requesting protective custody). 

One of the primary requirements of remaining in good standing is that without hesitation, without fail, we take any opportunity we are given to commit violence against any inmate in protective custody that we come in contact with. The corrections department knows this and couldn’t care less.

They don't care that many of us with relatively short sentences will be put in a position where we either follow the rules of our own group's leadership and risk adding years to our sentence by injuring or killing the PCs they are forcing us to live with, or we followed their rules and become targets ourselves for failure to hold the line so to speak. 

I have already seen this new policy cost one inmate two years added to his sentence for punching somebody he should never have been put in the same building with. He was 25 days short of his release when they forced him onto a yard full of PC inmates, now called 50-50 yards. The only alternative to going wherever they send you is to refuse to house and go straight to the hole which means you lose good time credits and your sentence gets longer. As a Level 1 nonviolent offender, I am entitled to one third time meaning I am eligible for parole after completing one third of my sentence. If I refuse to program with crazy people and baby rapers I will automatically be sent to a Level 3 yard and be required in serve a minimum of 50% of my sentence which in my case means eight additional months.

I have requested to be endorsed to Susanville when I transfer out of San Quentin intake to train for fire company because Susanville is dorm living as opposed to cell living which theoretically will make it one of the later institutions to be blended. But supposedly they are planning to do it everywhere.

It's a humongous mess no matter how you slice it. Even the correctional officers are pissed off about it as it virtually guarantees their jobs are going to be harder and made more dangerous for the foreseeable future.

My personal feeling about PC inmates and what programs are available to them is as follows: when even the dirtbags think you are a dirtbag, well you are probably a dirtbag! Maybe they don't deserve the same opportunities that your run-of-the-mill stickup man or dope dealer or gangbanger does. On the other hand, maybe they need rehabilitation more than others. 

The bottom line is that it's not a good time to come to prison in California particularly if you've been here before and care at all about your "prison career." Odds are it will get better, but not until it gets worse for several years. So don't come to prison.

Sincerely,

Terra Gibson

San Quentin

PS. I was very happy to learn from a short letter in a recent AVA that I am in fact not the only person around who remembers Bongo Bill. He was my friend and I remember very clearly the facts surrounding his arson case. He was paid or least promised payment by the owner or owners of at least one building in Mendocino Village for the nefarious act of setting one or more buildings on fire, more or less. The stated reason they desired that their property be deliberately ignited was to collect vast sums of fire insurance money. Then the same people who asked him to do it promptly reported him to the police. If I remember the details he was promised $2500 but never actually got paid and he received six counts of attempted murder because there had been six guests registered at the Chocolate Mousse when it caught on fire. That was the year I graduated from high school and I just turned 40 now. So he's been locked up for over 20 years. Sounds about typical of such things. Here's to you, Bill.

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REDWOOD VALLEY V. COUNTY

To the Editor:

I am a member of the Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Council (MAC), but I only represent my own opinion as a RV resident with this letter. And, as I write, the Mendocino County Planning & Building Department is issuing a building permit for the construction of a 122 unit storage facility in the heart of “downtown” Redwood Valley. Even though the department has been working closely with the Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Council and the RV community at large to create a Community Action Plan and Design Guidelines to help shape community character and promote economic development in our community, they are not required to, and apparently did not feel it necessary, to bring to our attention that the keystone property in that community pursuit has had a major building project in the works behind closed doors for several months!

The owner and the contractor of the impending storage facility have done everything by the books, and the plans submitted for grading and construction are, planning has assured us, first rate. However, what is truly incomprehensible, is that no one in the community was ever notified, much less consulted, about the plans. Neither the developer nor the planning department talked to anyone in the neighborhood about it. No one mentioned it to the RV/Calpella Fire Department, RV General Store, the Post Office, Vic’s Place, or the gas station, all businesses directly across the street from the project that have formed the core of the Redwood Valley community for many, many years! 

So, here we have a “planning department”, allegedly dedicated to supporting and guiding the community in its efforts to establish a community plan waiting till the very last minute, just prior to approval of the permit, before leaking to the RV MAC plans for a 20,000 square foot self-storage facility on a space that has been used for years for people to gather at coffee and food trucks, and for the Fire Department to park their vehicles during the 4th of July Black Bart Parade and Community BBQ. That is truly dysfunctional!

Planning will tell you that the storage facility is a “conforming” use and therefore not subject to public review—in planning speak, it’s a “ministerial” permit application, not a “discretionary” permit application. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the same thing we were told after Dollar General was approved for building in Redwood Valley two years ago, when we simultaneously learned that there would be no public review of their plans to build. Only the enormous public outcry and the fact that Dollar General was held up by a last minute lawsuit was that project delayed, and subsequently terminated when Dollar General decided to sell rather than pursue ongoing legal battles. Along the way, public sentiment and the establishment of the Redwood Valley MAC pushed the Planning department and the Board of Supervisors to approve a Community Character overlay zoning for the downtown areas of RV that requires a use permit and public review for chain stores, but not for independently owned and operated storage facilities.

Now, if you were considering ways to build Community Character and promote economic development in a community already struggling to get back on its feet after last year’s devastating fires, would you want to put up 20,000 square feet of metal sheds with a fence around it and zero—yes 0—employees and call it the center of town, the heart of the community? Once constructed—from prefab buildings employing minimal labor—and open for business, the facility will need no employees because all customers will need is a key card and an online account. They will be sending a modest amount of taxes back to the entity that allowed for its development—ah yes, the county! Forget for a moment that storage facilities present a potential fire hazard due to unknown materials stored there, but rather focus on the fact that the project will provide neither community character nor economic development. Is that planning? Personally, I think not.

The crux of the issue is the dysfunction in the planning process. Redwood Valley is an unincorporated community, and like many unincorporated communities struggling to define and develop community character and promote economic development, there is no review process for what buildings and landscaping should look like, and not even for the nature of the business , as long as it “conforms” to a few basic requirements such as size of footprint, setback from street, and a few safety requirements. In order for Redwood Valley, or any other unincorporated communities in the county (outside the purview of the Coastal Commission) such as Hopland, Laytonville, Covelo to have any voice in this type of project, there needs to be a review process written into the county zoning code. That would require drafting unincorporated community guidelines, submitting them for review to the Board of Supervisors, and then having the Planning Department write and adopt a new Design Review chapter into the County Code.

I’ve been told by County Planning that the creation of a county wide review process in the code is something they would like to see, but one which is not likely to happen anywhere in the near future as planning is already understaffed, underpaid and plagued by a high turnover rate. Apparently the county is too broke and poorly managed to be able to afford the kind of planning that its citizens deserve and would like to see. Either that, or it’s just not a priority.

So, I suggest that if you live in an unincorporated community and you would like to put the “planning” back in Planning & Building, that you all show up and be heard at BOS meetings and write letters letting them know that we need the funds and the staff that will make it possible to have a truly effective County Planning—one where developers, planners and the public actually communicate and sit down together to create the living, thriving communities we all deserve. Until then, I guess we’ll just have to be content with a mere “Building Department,” and much like the Third World, the laws of the Wild West! Yahoo!

Alex de Grassi

Redwood Valley

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PG&E’S PLIGHT

Editor,

Regarding the need to head off PG&E’s “return to bankruptcy,” I remember that it did quite well in its previous bankruptcy by transferring hundreds of millions of dollars to one of its entities back East and granting hundreds of thousands of dollars to the top executives — and then rising from the ashes like a phoenix. 

Louis Bryan

San Francisco

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WAS IT A MARTIN?

Editor,

2011 Humboldt Martin Sighting?

Was I perhaps the lucky recipient of the last known sighting of the Mendocino ‘Fishing’ Martin?

It was around spring of 2011, at the Long Valley Creek Tributary, south of Laytonville. I took an extremely early morning fishing trip to a stretch of water I swam in hundreds of times on summer afternoons to beat the heat. It was still quite dark and I was alerted by barking noises of the loud variety that may have been somewhere in the neighborhood of a “chattering” type of sound. Upon further inspection I came upon a culvert like cave in the hillside with an opening of light to the other side.

When I looked in I saw three beaver like animals dancing in a stream that diverted through the gaping cave. One was about two feet long the other two (presumably the babies) were about 1.5 feet long. They were too long to be beavers. They immediately noticed me and bolted off making their noises into the dawn light waiting on the other side. I never ended up catching my fish, by the way.

If anyone’s got any idea what I encountered, please feel free to share.

Jewel Dyer

Mendocino County Jail

Ukiah.

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