A NEIGHBORHOOD ASPHALT PLANT
Editor,
Coming to a Location Near You: an Asphalt Plant.
Citizens of Mendocino County should be aware that the County Board of Supervisors is contemplating a zoning change that would allow the installation of industrial asphalt plants in locations in the county currently zoned as rangeland. If this action takes place, any current owner of a quarry operation that is in an area zoned as rangeland could apply for a permit for operating an asphalt plant. There are four locations in the county that would be immediately affected by this zoning change:
1. Poonkinney Ridge Quarry located of Poonkinney Road west of Covelo
2. Perry Ridge Quarry located north of Covelo
3. Blue Ridge Rock Quarry located east of Highway 101 south of Hopland
4. Harris Quarry located on Highway 101 South of Willits
There are also several other locations that can qualify for asphalt plant permits after they have cancelled their contracts under the Williamson Act:
5. Johnson Quarry located at the junction of Highways 128 and 253 south of Boonville
6. Tunzi Quarry located north of the Comptche-Ukiah Road northwest of Comptche.
7. Coal Mine Quarry located south of Highway 162 south of Covelo.
8. Mackenzie Bar located on the Middle Fork of the Eel River at Dos Rios
9. Pieta Quarry located north of Covelo
Also, any future quarry site in any area in the county that is presently zoned as rangeland could apply for a permit to install an asphalt plant if the Board votes for this change.
The proposed zoning change is clearly inconsistent with the County General Plan that states: “New nonagricultural classifications shall not be assigned to prime agricultural or prime rangelands..” This language is in the General Plan for good reason, it looks to protect the future of the county and to give guidance to the Supervisors when they are confronted with demands by private developer interests.
In the past, the Board of Supervisors has consistently affirmed that industrial use of land is incompatible with land used for farming, rangeland and rural residences, so why change now? Is this really the best thing for Mendocino County? Is putting our greatest natural resources at risk the right thing to do? Let your Supervisor or Supervisor candidate know asphalt plants should remain in industrial areas and not be allowed to invade our rangelands.
Larry Jenson
Willits
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WHERE’S THE BEEF?
Dear Editor:
I recently made a complaint to the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) regarding a solicitation I received from Dan Hamburg's finance chairman, and a resident of Greenfield Ranch. It came together in an email thread.
In the thread, a resident at Greenfield Ranch, Meca Wawona, is soliciting for anonymous gifts. Her email includes John Schaeffer's email offering to work out money details later. John Schaeffer is Hamburg's finance chairman.
The emails are in context. Context is key to understanding this solicitation.
Taken together — which is how I received the solicitation — it is an egregious FPPC viloation. The message is: “We know you are pot growers. You can make an anonymous gift to our friend, Dan Hamburg, who is also a pot grower. We'll figure it all out. John Schaeffer, Hamburg's money guy, will fudge the details now. He'll even front you the money.”
As for background on the solicitation, Mr. Schaeffer recently made a pitch for Hamburg at a party to members of the Greenfield Ranch community. Many, if not most, were pot growers.
These growers owe their success to Dan Hamburg, who, as a member of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors 30 years ago, worked hard to get Greenfield Ranch zoned as Class K — the least restrictive zoning that kept county inspectors and code enforcement officers out of Greenfield Ranch. Pot growers couldn't have been happier.
This email thread, and the solicitation it makes, is the smoking gun of a serious fundraising violation. While making no endorsement in this campaign, I hope the FPPC throws the book at whoever is responsible for this violation on Hamburg's team.
It's truly dispicable how pot money has corrupted local politics.
John Sakowicz
Ukiah
Ed note: Class K is an alternative building code for new construction. Hamburg, to his credit, initiated the legislation, which has been win-win ever since for owner-builders and Mendo County, the latter benefitting from increased property taxes. As I recall, it passed the board unanimously, a board that included Jim Eddie, a man hardly synonymous with the hippie bolshevism implied here. Greenfield Ranch was brought into local legal land by Norm deVall's comparably beneficial Clean Slate program. Mr. Schaeffer's solicitation of campaign donations? Like, dude, so what? All campaigns do that.
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POINT ARENA PLAYERS
Editor,
Transparency in Point Arena? Not!
I want to give readers a better perspective on a few of the players on the Point Arena City Council (at least those I know) and how intertwined they are with the Point Arena School District.
Mr. Joseph Riboli (See letters in last week’s AVA) is a local contractor in Point Arena. His wife, Lisa, is employed in the Point Arena School District as district secretary. Mr. Riboli, who I believe is a straight shooter, actually came to a Point Arena School Board Meeting requesting the board consider giving some of the contracting jobs to local contractors instead of going outside the local area/district. Did the board even consider this request? Why would they? AT Construction (another player) out of Fort Bragg, owned by Alan Taeger did the “local” contracting work in Point Arena that could be done. In 2009, using Measure E bond funds (voted on in 2003 and passed by over 70% of the voters to build a K-5 elementary school in Gualala) earned $24,744.55 to help in the project to build new buildings at the elementary school in Point Arena. So what, you might ask? Arlene Taeger (Wife of AT Construction’s Alan Taeger) actually works as the “facilities consultant” at the Point Arena School District. I have been told that Iacuaniello actually brought Ms. Taeger with him from another district but this is hearsay and I have no proof of it.
Eloisa Oropeza sits on Point Arena City Council. She also works for the school district in Point Arena as Human Resources Director. I also I consider her to be a no nonsense type of person with great integrity. She was one council members who voted against the recent firing of City Manager Claudia Hillary.
Then you have the infamous William “Bill” Meyers who wrote an egregiously ridiculous letter in the ICO last week regarding “Transparency.” He truly was joking, right? Where do you know this name from?
Mr. Meyers was one of the board members involved in firing Point Arena Elementary School principal Matt Murray. Principal Murray asked (demanded, actually) that all allegations against him be dealt with in public because there were “specific charges against him.” According to the Brown Act, Mr. Murray was entitled to an open hearing.
In his recent ICO letter, however, ex-school board member Meyers states, “Public transparency would help PROTECT those employees who are being dismissed despite doing a good job.” I know that Mr. Meyers is an intelligent man, but with all respect, this statement seems backward. I cannot visualize how Mr. Meyers' reasoning proceeds on this topic.
Mr. Murray did not only “a good job,” as Mr. Meyers states an employee should do, but an excellent job. Nevertheless, Mr. Murray was not rewarded, but instead fired — after pulling the elementary school out of State Program Improvement, and decreasing truancy and discipline problems at the school.
As I see it, this was done without any type of “transparency” such as Mr. Meyers now calls for. In fact (1) Murray's firing wasn't even agendized, (2) Mr. Murray wasn't given the legally required notification prior to the day of the firing, and (3) he was denied adequate time to contact his attorney (only given until 3pm on the day of his firing) — another violation of the law.
On that day, it appears to me, Mr. Meyers did not stand for “transparency” as required by the law. Instead he participated with all but one of the other Board members in the secret board session that fired Murray.
Currently, where is our elementary school? As you know, it is right back to where it was before Mr. Murray —in State Program Improvement.
Mr. Meyers's letter goes on: “In at least some cases, most popular outrage would dissolve if the public knew the details available to those stuck with doing the firing for the public good.” I am part of the public he mentions, and again I am unable to imagine what details he could possibly have in mind.
Was Principal Murray a child-molester? A wife-beater? An embezzler? An abrasive personality? Of course not?
Or did he simply stand up (as a strong principal should) to teachers who didn't like being told what to do?
I am entirely open to learning what Mr. Meyers' vote to fire Mr. Murray did for our community or for the “public good” — and, most importantly, what it did for the elementary school students who are back in State Program Improvement. I would sincerely appreciate knowing that.
On the surface it seems to me that maybe Mr. Meyers simply made an understandable mistake, whose consequences were not only illegal but irresponsible — to the community and its children — and perhaps he is just very embarrassed about that mistake. I'd appreciate knowing about this possibility, too. If that’s the case, Mr. Meyers should accept responsibility, not write pompous letters to the Independent Coast Observer calling for the very thing he himself denied Mr. Murray.
I am very distressed that he wrote such a letter in the ICO; however, I was also very distressed that he did what he did to Mr. Murray.
It appears to me that there is great confusion between what the School Board is permitted to do and what it is required to do. Specifically I think the Board is allowed, but not required, to hold certain kinds of meetings in secret.
Part of the trouble may be that the Board's attorney has a conflict of interest — he wants to avoid being sued by the Board, or by any of its individual members, for exposing them to liability. Therefore he adopts and follows the most personally safe (for himself) course, namely to aggressively counsel the Board to elect secrecy.
I believe that Board members should be held accountable and, when the Brown Act is violated, personally fined. Perhaps, then and only then, would Board members, according to law, do what they are called to do: “exist to aid in the conduct of the people's business.” The law also says, “It is the intent of this law that their actions be taken openly and their deliberations be conducted openly.”
If Mr. Meyers truly and fully knew what the Brown Act required, maybe he would not have written his recent letter. Again, according to that law, “The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.” Perhaps we should make a law that anyone wanting a seat on a board that is under the Brown Act take a test about its specific provisions. I very respectfully question whether our present School Board members would pass such a test.
Respectfully,
Susan Rush
Manchester
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MISUNDERSTANDINGS
Dear Steve Sparks,
When you asked me for an interview, my response was “Can’t see how it could hurt me,” seeing how Heyday has just released my new book and all. Besides, I’d read virtually all of your previous interviews, I knew the formula and figured it’d be a cinch and a bit of fun to boot. (It was). Yet, given the way my wicked mind works, your apparent haste to get it done raised a little one of those proverbial red flags inside my head. Like, you need to meet a deadline? Then when you showed up late and in a hurry, up went another little red flag. Whenever I find myself in a hurry, I kick myself for not having started sooner, for one thing. “Haste makes waste,” as old Ben wrote, for another. Or, as they say in the building trades, “Measure twice, cut once.”
But when you told me you didn’t bring a tape recorder, a big old red flag went flying up my flagpole and my instinct was to call it off. If my words are to appear within quotation marks, then, naturally, I want them to be my words exactly (edited for brevity, of course). Yet, not wanting to be a hard ass, and after expressing my skepticism, I went along and, instead of stifling myself and pondering before giving answers like I was on a TV game show, I answered spontaneously and, as is my wont, often with whole paragraphs that, no doubt, complicated your task immensely.
So we did the thing, I just read it and, as they say in the music biz, it’s good enough for Blue Grass. Any harm done? Naw. There are some factual errors, and my thinking isn’t as muddled as I sometimes sound, and most of the stuff is you remembering what I said and trying to reconstruct it and so it lost something in translation.
Yet I would have worn it easy enough if it wasn’t for one single sentence you attributed to me: “I had the privilege to kill enemy soldiers…”
I don’t know where you got that, but I think it was when you asked me why, after the war, I never went back to my childhood buddies in my old neighborhood. I answered that they’d “want to know how many scalps I’d taken — or not taken — and I didn’t want to talk about it.” And that was a polite way of saying that I no longer glorified violence and war the way they, and most people today, do. Partly I was too ashamed to show my face. Pacifists are cowards and traitors, right? But mostly I couldn’t see any use in it. The boy they grew up with was dead. He got wasted way over yonder along with millions of others.
American combat veterans traditionally and, as a point of fraternal honor, don’t talk about the killing they did or didn’t do; rarely with each other, and never with civilians unless it’s their father, brother or lover (nobody ever tells their mother anything). That I’ve religiously held to that tradition for 42 years makes me absolutely typical. In fact, after all those years and wars, I can count on one hand the number of times somebody has asked me that question, and you weren’t one of them. Had you asked me, I would have politely answered, “I’d rather not talk about it.”
Chin up,
Pat Patterson
Boonville
Dear Pat: Since reading your letter, you and I have spoken somewhat amicably by phone and you said that I actually had no need to respond, although you did suggest, with a raucous laugh, that perhaps I just write "I was misinformed." You added that the comments in the letter were for your fellow veterans.
All I wish to say is that, as always, following my usual methods, I tried very hard to conduct a courteous and respectful interview and, like you, I also had 'fun.' I then did my best to write it up as accurately as I could. In this case a misunderstanding occurred, which was unfortunate and I regret it, but you have now done your best to explain what you meant.
No hurt feelings either way, I assume. Regards, Steve.
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THE PEOPLE’S PERCEPTION
Dear Editor,
It seems that the gap between “the people’s” perception of what is happening, and what is actually happening, is now so wide that it may not be bridgeable. The mass have a view of what is happening dictated by the media, mainly television. It would be a monumental effort to change that, because it can only be changed via the media, and those who own and control the media do not want that to happen. Not at all. In fact, it is a life and death issue to them.
In the utopia that most of us have in our minds this would not happen. It could not happen. In our utopia what is happening and what people perceive to be happening are synonymous. It has always been and remains a class issue. The ruling class (and that term is not to be spoken aloud) will war upon any and all who propose to destroy the gap. That is the root of all revolutions. Revolutions are made to close the gap.
The Tea Party people are the prime example of the gap. Their heads are back in the 1950’S and what is happening is happening now. They are dragging the culture further into the gap. Anything in motion gathers momentum, and the momentum itself pays no attention to where the motion is leading. It has a life of its own. Anyone who points to the gap is thus a heretic and needs to be punished.
The gap exists not only in people’s minds but also in institutions. The church, the jails, the schools, the big box stores, all of these foster the gap. The church preaches morals while the priests diddle the altar boys. The jails preach rehabilitation while the gangs control the place with violence. The schools preach teaching students to think while they stick to facts that will get the students past the SOLs. The big box stores preach buying, buying, buying, while the people’s discretionary income disappears.
When an individuals gap gets too large, he or she is institutionalized for schizophrenia. When an entire culture lets its gap get too large, it has a breakdown. That’s what is happening now.
Lee Simon
Far ‘n Away Farm in Virginia
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FAIR PLAY FOR POST OFFICE
Dear Editor:
Since you indicated you occasionally have a problem with the post office I wanted to let you know there is no trouble at this end. I generally get the AVA paper on Saturday and occasionally on Monday In the last three or four years I only missed one paper. A neighbor probably got it. the pony express from Boonville to Sacramento works very well.
Best,
Jim Updegraff
Sacramento
Ed note: It arrives at comparably distant places by Thursday, but we content ourselves that it arrives at all.
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LOCAL YOKELS AT THE HOP
Editor,
You missed a groovy Halloween party at the Hop Kiln, organized by the upright citizens brigade and their contra lifestyle guru, Neato Keeno, who used the event to showcase local cinema talent and scenery via a "Fright Night Film Fest" with proceeds going to community hop heads for their campaign to bring the hops back to Hopland.
The brigadistas liberated a pair of cult classic DVDs from the clearance bargain bin at Ukiah Blockbusters: "Pig Hunt" (2008) filmed in and around Boonville, and "Gold: Before Woodstock, Beyond Reality" (1968) filmed on a Northern California ranch in the Sierra foothills. It's considered a local film since the Sierra Nevada foothills have migrated west to Boonville along with the annual world music Festival.
The Fright Fest opened with a clothing optional 50s style masquerade sock hop featuring Rockabilly legends Danny and the Juniors followed by a midnight horror movie double bill starting with "Pig Hunt," directed by Jim Isaac and produced by Boonville homeboy Robert Mailer Anderson who also co-scripted the movie with cousin Zack Anderson.
"Pig Hunt" is a twisted fable about Booty and the Beast featuring a Frisco soldier who takes his buddies north to his uncle's remote ranch in Anderson Valley for a weekend pig hunt where they encounter deranged, pissed off hillbillies, vast fields of pot, a 3000-pound man eating wild boar, and a Mendo-style hippie cult of nut sickling lesbians who worship a male chauvinist killer hog.
The film stars legendary Sonoma County blues harpist Charlie Musselwhite and a talented, diverse ensemble of mostly local newcomers including Porky the Ripper.
"Pig Hunt" has a compelling storyline and the suspense gradually builds as the characters interact and move toward their ultimate doom. But just as the story approaches a spine tingling climax, the movie virtually explodes into an ultra-vi, Road Warrior, blood and guts splatorama that blows the whole shebang, losing its way as Big Train loses his head. The socio-political subtext about our lust for violence and perpetual war is obscured in an over-the-top splatter of red mist. The climactic encounter with Ripper, the monster hog, is a cartoon ending to what could have been a very scary movie.
Too bad. The film has stunning cinematography and special effects, particularly the eerie, creepy scenes -- reminiscent of "Apocalypse Now" -- in the forest, the house, the hippie compound, and around the campfire.
Unfortunately, action films today can't get adequate funding unless they appeal to the "target demographic" of 12-year old to 20-something adolescent boys who've been so jaded and numbed by megadoses of computer/video ultra vi splatter, guts and gore that they require increasing levels to maintain interest.
"Pig Hunt" is not my kind of flick since I've seen enough real splatter and gore to last several lifetimes. It would have been a much better movie if they had used a genuine hog instead of a muppet. My 600-pound razorback boar, Sharpie, could have been a credible Ripper and he works cheap -- all the bagels he can eat and a small percentage of the take, plus residuals. And my wrangler fees are reasonable.
Call me retro, but I liked the old fart horror flicks that leave something to the imagination through creative imagery, light, shadow, sound and suggestion.
Like the 1954 horror classic "Creature from the Black Lagoon," an aquatic spin on "Beauty and the Beast," featuring a real live large, horny dude in a rubber gillman suit who lusts after bullet bra bathing beauty Julia Adams and eventually gets subdued by rotenone and dispatched by two 30 caliber rifle slugs -- no blood, no gore. He just slowly sinks into the depths of the lagoon -- to return again.
The second feature film, "Gold," is an underground stoner cult classic filmed in 1968 starring Manhattan, Kansas native, Del Close, the father of improv comedy, improv ace Gary Goodrow, Sam Ridge, Orville Schell, and Carolyn Parr, Carol Doda's understudy.
"Gold," which was directed and "organized" by the Dome Film team, Bob Levis and Bill Desloge, also has a large and impressive supporting cast of 200 including musicians Dan Hicks and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, poet Richard Brautigan in a brief crowd scene cameo and introducing the "notorious Dorothy Schmidt" in her clothing optional film debut. Ms. Schmidt later emerged as a luminous Mendo political gadfly using a different surname. Double D was quite a beauty in the 60s and still is for that matter since she hasn't let herself go to pot like some of our other fading beauty queens.
The DVD promo touts "Gold" as "an indulgent, energetic blast of counterculture craziness, a turned on tale of the new American dream. In 1968, filmmaker Rob Levis led a ragtag band of dreamers, dropouts, and drug happy darlings into the wilderness to make a movie and emerged one month later with 'Gold,' a bizarre and beautiful journey into the mind and madness of the late 1960s -- one overflowing with fantasies of revolution, recreation and raunchy free love. At once a Western, a comedy, a nudie, a drama and a musical -- "Gold" is a profound potpourri made in the spirit of shaking down square society while systematically shattering every movie rule in the process."
Fer sure, fer sure. In sober reality, the movie "Gold," like Grateful Dead music, can only be "appreciated" if you're stoned out of your mind as was the entire cast and crew during the filming.
Needless to say, the local hopheads loved "Gold" and gave it a prolonged one-hand clapping, standing ovation.
Due to its excesses and graphic nudity, "Gold" couldn't find a major distributor in the USA in 1968 so the film opened in Britain to enthusiastic audiences, then gradually petered out to be forgotten and apparently lost until 2008 when a 40th anniversary DVD was produced by Wild Eye/MVD Visual.
"Gold" was also sabotaged by opposition from doctrinaire lefties because the Del Close trickster character in the movie spoofs Che Guevara.
Actually, I think the nudity, particularly the idyllic skinny-dipping and mud groping, is the movie's only redeeming feature.
The AVA once called Alan Block Cotler's Willits-filmed movie "Heartwood" the "worst movie ever made," until you saw "Pig Hime" which you now think is the worst. After you've seen "Gold," you'll change your mind. "Gold" makes "Pig Hunt" look platinum.
"Heartwood" is a silly, sweet, woo woo fairy tale but it launched the career of Academy Award winner Hillary Swank who was chosen for "Heartwood" on the basis of breast appeal not acting talent.
"Pig hunt" is a good story well acted and sabotaged by ultra-vi special effects gone postal. But the cinematography and artistic special effects save it from oblivion. And as a bonus the all too brief appearance by Charlie Musselwhite is a major treat. He's now known as "the mapmaker." More significantly, though, "Pig Hunt" brilliantly portrays the genial ambience of our local scene.
"Gold" is leaden to all but those on acid, crank and shrooms, but it's saved from the dunk tank by the beautifully filmed nude scenes which can best be appreciated by those who are stone cold sober.
Quite frankly none of these three movies can be considered "the worst movie ever made." That honor goes to Ed Wood's 1956 horror film "Plan 9 from Outer Space" which was crowned "the worst film ever made" at New York's Worst Film Festival in 1980. The film is so hilariously bad that it has achieved cult status.
And "Gold" starting with its DVD release in 2008 has become the hippie "Rocky Horror Picture Show" with screenings every midnight at New York City's Pioneer Theater.
Maybe "Gold" can be a headliner at next year's Anderson Valley Film Festival with a pot theme "Mendopiaa Gold."
Bottoms Up Over The Top
Joe Don Mooney
Hopland
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SCHOOL REFORM NOW
Letter to the Editor:
As a retired schoolteacher in this state, I was appalled at what has happened to our school district. How could this happen?
I wish to praise Mark Scaramella for his excellent article in the October 20 edition about the serious situation at our high school.
Having taught for 25 years I have seen many changes, but I think it is time for all of this Valley to stand up and be counted.
I have a few comments and questions:
Where was the contingency fund? Most school districts have one. Now it is dumped on the Valley residents through taxes (bonds).
How are school board members "appointed"? I have never seen notification in the AVA as to potential members and their qualifications. (Yes, the Daily Journal, but what about here?)
When I taught (for 25 years in a small district) we had at least one board member in our classrooms at least once a month to see what was happening in the school and classrooms. Have any of our board members been in the school/classrooms? I think not. Maybe one.
I understand that JR Collins retired. Why is he still here? And at what salary?
I think it is about time that Ms. Marti "The Way We've Always Done It" Bradford retired and let someone else rejuvenate the board.
Who is Mr. Pinoli? What does he do? And at what salary?
Geez, this little to school district could do so much better than the fiasco it is!
Rosemary Wells
Boonville
PS. I challenge the AVA to publish this!
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STAR DATE 2010
Editor,
NASA astronomy trivia --
The moon spends as much time --
a. Under, as well as over stars.
b. In the day as in night.
c. As necessary to do its job.
d. Thinking about Jupiter as Uranus.
e. All of the above.
Answer: e. (Information from NASA's Star Date program.
Charles Cox
Freedom
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ONE TOO MANY
Editor,
"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."
Today the world is bleeding to death as the person goes about his or her business oblivious to it. Where's the tourniquet? Ecologists live in a "world of wounds." The population of the United States has doubled in six decades from 120 million in 1928 to 250 million in 1990. This huge population expansion within two generations accounts for great changes in social and economic institutions. Our own species, homo sapiens, has expanded from 500 million people on Earth in 1650, to a population of more than 5 billion in 2010. Global warming, acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer and exhaustion of soils and groundwater are related to population size. Let's clear the desk, and clear the air. And have a cup of tea beneath the trees.
Farina bangs her Too Many People dish in Mendocino.
The island of Java in Indonesia now has the world's densest population of 2400 people per square mile.
Diana Vance
Mendocino
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PRISON POET
Letter to the Editor!
Peace from Within!
As a lion growl a Tiger will prowl in search of his needed foe.
As a wino cringes from the cans he bends just to find his grave in the snow.
It's never too late to escalate the muscles of the mind.
It won't hurt in your mind to lurk, you'll be surprised the power you will find.
If you can begin to search deep within and just follow your heart.
You just might find someone that's kind, now that my friend is a start.
If your heart is kind then you will find a peace within.
Just let the real you forever shine through then let a peaceful life begin.
Larry Wilson
Soledad
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TELL THE TRUTH
Editor,
Perusing your letters to the editor, which I have always found interesting, I read letters from Lee Edmundson, Barbara Reed, Don Roberts and candidate Wendy Roberts with amusement. Having observed all four in many public and private venues I understand their various positions, but to assert that Lee Edmundson prevaricates is absurd. Rereading Lee Edmundson's letter about Dan Hamburg, it apparently was either an omission of a few words or a typographical error on his part, as I know Lee to be that rare individual who always tells the truth and if he is wrong he admits it.
Mary Dougherty
Mendocino
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DAN TO JARED
Editor:
The Headwaters Forest Act which I authored in 1993 made saving the ancient redwood forests of Humboldt County a national issue. While former Pacific Lumber vice-president Jared Carter claims that the bill "went nowhere", it received 288 votes in the House and failed in the Senate by a single vote (Malcolm Wallop-WY).
My plan was for the management of the most significant groves to be put under government management (BLM or Forest Service) with Hurwitz being "repaid" by being forgiven the $1.5 billion that he owed the taxpayers for the failure of his Houston-based S&L.
Of course, the 1994 national electoral debacle, in which I lost my seat, made this impossible. In 1996, needing some way to mollify a very disenchanted environmental community, Bill Clinton assigned assistant Secretary of the Interior John Garamendi to craft a plan to save the groves. $480 million later it was done.
I did not support the Garamendi/Feinstein/Riggs plan. It did save some trees for a period of time, but not the company which soon after went bankrupt, throwing hundreds of workers out of their jobs and homes.
Dan Hamburg
Ukiah
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BLESSED GIANTS
Editor,
And lo, the Final Out was recorded in The Book, and the Final Trumpet sounded the Advent of Jeebus, and the Heavens split open, and Jeebus and His Mighty Host descended from Heaven unto the City of Saint Francis, and Jeebus sanctified the very brick and stone of Phoneco Park, and the multitude raised the loudest Hosannahs of Praise to Jeebus! And the fearful malingerers, and the naysayers, and the doubters, were shamed and dispersed, and their faithlessness would be a mark upon them unto death, but for the Magnanimous Power and Divine Forgiveness of Jeebus, that they would now go their way, and sin no more! And the thunderous True Voice of Jeebus shook the Earth, and Jeebus, who IS Lord, proclaimed unto All the Worlds, “Verily, I say unto you: THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS HAVE WON THE WORLD SERIES!”
Praise Jeebus!
J. Biro
Santa Rosa
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