Off the Record (Sep. 26, 2018)

THE 9th U.S. CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS has ruled that it's unconstitutional to ban homeless people from sleeping on the streets. “Just as the state may not criminalize the state of being ‘homeless in public places,’ the state may not ‘criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying, or sleeping on the streets,’” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote for a three-judge panel. The ruling is a major setback for local municipalities trying to devise their own methods to keep the homeless on the move.

HERE IN “PROGRESSIVE” Mendocino County, despite annual millions shoveled to our helping professionals, who are roughly equivalent in their numbers to the County's total homeless population itself, homelessness, especially the grislier alcohol and drug-addicted casualties that people conflate with homelessness, there are no proposals, and less leadership on the issue to do something about it. (I wonder how many homeless people are sleeping on the streets in Judge Berzon’s neighborhood?)

THE MARBUT REPORT on local homelessness commissioned, paid for and ignored by the Supervisors, basically suggested ramped-up local care for local casualties, a meal or two for the transient sectors of the homeless population before they're refused further assistance and encouraged to move on. Marbut also pointed out that there is no reliable count of the homeless in Mendocino County, which makes it impossible to enact sensible programs to help those with roots in this place.

THE MOST RECENT "point in time" homeless count by self-interested local agencies whose state and federal reimbursements depend on  inflated counts of the homeless, found 1179 persons living rough in Mendocino County. Marbut said a more realistic, less self-interested count would have revealed about 200 homeless in Ukiah, 100 in Fort Bragg, 20 in Willits, in other words, a relatively small number of people, many of them irremediably screwed-up, but a manageably small enough number that effective local government could effectively house and maybe even help them to regain themselves. As it stands, the County of Mendocino does nothing for the homeless but ensure they remain unhoused and their pathologies unaddressed.

FROM MIKE JAMISON: The Editor mistakenly characterized Mr. McCowen’s night time activities as a cleaning up the river operation. In fact, the Supervisor does that, often with help, during daylight hours, as documented in UDJ reports over the years. That is fine and legal. At night time he is telling people, at a minimum, that their presence down by the river is illegal per local ordinance. This includes non-homeless folks out walking, who are told they are trespassing (even though his ordinances identify only camping as prohibited behavior). Bruce McEwen’s idea just has too much plain common sense to it for many our local leaders to take up…but elsewhere: The eviction of the clean, pristine encampment at the EDD parking lot has been nixed. Safe ground sites like this are the way to go as we prepare to build and assure shelter for every damn sapien choosing to not sleep “rough”. The courts also ruled that Orange County can NOT restrict night time access to a portion of the river where there is an encampment. And, in Redding, police are pushing back against anti homeless vigilantes who have gone into encampments to aggressively confront the homeless. This can be tested when I get back to town by me resuming walking along the river, which is claimed to be trespassing. I have now read enough news accounts of court actions to know that is a bunch of bull. (Mike Jamison)

“CARBON IDEOLOGIES” is a two-volume job by the prolific William Vollman. I find the guy unreadable myself, but I enjoyed a review of Vollman's latest project in the current Atlantic, a magazine containing exactly one other article of interest this month — an account by an Alabama woman, Elaina Plott, raised in the state's rural gun culture, who got shot herself by some random lunatic, the bullet so deep in her arm she now lives with it. Anyway, Vollman takes what you might call an holistic look at our global prospects, concluding that we're doomed, an opinion widely shared judging from comment lines, and an opinion I, a happy kinda dude on a daily basis away from Big Think, share. In fact, I don’t know a single person who believes that any of the rolling catastrophes we now face are likely to be intelligently, effectively addressed, if they’re addressed at all. Vollman concludes, that given these many accumulated, unaddressed catastrophes there's nothing to be done. We're over. Myself, I predict we’ll get authoritarianism in the form of a more or less benign general before we get to roving bands of the desperate and warlords simply because too much disorder, too many natural catastrophes are bad for big business.

OF COURSE despairing conclusions seem to vanish the higher up the economic ladder we climb as, for instance, the dentist I saw Thursday. While he peered at what's left of my teeth, I read a series of infuriating bromides on an overhead screen placed to distract and instruct patients, I guess, in the art of the platitude. "In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you." That kind of thing. I felt a sudden urge to scream. I asked molar man if he'd ever considered upgrading the quality of his uplift. He seemed startled. "You're the first patient I've ever had who asked about them. You don't like 'em?” Even an implication of intellectual dysfunction can be very insulting, and I didn't want to insult the guy, so I did the old oblique weenie: "I've never had the experience in a dentist’s chair, doctor. They're, ah, interesting. Thought provoking," I said, dying a little for such a terrible lie. I wanted to suggest passages from Vollman, but in the dentist's income bracket I doubt he despairs much, although there is a high incidence of mental illness among the profession, right up there with harpists.

IN OTHER RECENT elderly travails, I was shuffling inattentively through a food line at a Senior event when an elderly woman serving up some kind of pasta asked, "Would you like some nookie?" I beg your pardon? I blurted. "Nooshkey," she said. "Can you spell that for me?" G-n-o-c-c-i, she pronounced with special ed clarity. And glancing at MCN’s fervent comment postings, I saw one that said, “Looking for a killing.” Whoa, I thought. They’re getting kinda violent out there in Mendocino, until my double take told me that the poster was looking for kindling, not mayhem.

THE BOSCO BAILOUT BILL (SB1029 McGuire) is still awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown's signature. The bill is the work of McGuire's puppeteer, former Congressman Doug Bosco, a major investor and part owner in the Northwestern Pacific Company (NWP). Bosco and Co. have the lease to operate on the nearly defunct NCRA (North Coast Railroad Authority) right of way. NCRA has been a decades-long funding unit and employer of last resort for Northcoast Democratic Party loyalists. NCRA owes several million dollars to Bosco's train operations company with no way to pay it. Hence the Bosco bailout bill carried by McGuire, the latest in a long line of rightwing Democrats that pass for progressives on the Northcoast.

SB1029 WAS HEAVILY AMENDED before final passage late last month. Stricken from the bill was any mention of the grandiose "Great Redwood Trail Agency," which McGuire claimed would build a public hiking and biking trail from the Golden Gate Bridge to Eureka. The original bill had no estimates of the cost or feasibility of building a 300+ mile trail which would have to traverse the geologically unstable and presently impassable Eel River canyon. Inability to keep the rail line open through the canyon (where no trains have run since 1998) doomed the NCRA. Estimates to re-open the rail line through the canyon start at $600 million, which means the real cost will be at least a billion. Large sections of the right of way have fallen into the river or been buried under hundreds of tons of debris from annually massive landslides.

THE FOCUS OF SB1029 has now shifted to dissolving the NCRA and transferring the southern end of the right of way to SMART (Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit District). The bill appropriates $4 million "for rail improvements" but the fine print explains that the $4 mil is exclusively "for the acquisition of freight rights and equipment" from Bosco's company. The $4 million is only phase one of the Bosco Bailout. Phase two will come later when the legislature must come up with another $4 million or so to repay the debt that NWP claims it is owed by NCRA. In the palsy walsy world of Democratic Party politics don't expect any real accounting of the monies allegedly owed.

THE BOSCO BAILOUT also triggers hundreds of thousands of unfunded state mandates. The Transportation and Natural Resources Agencies are required to carry out detailed assessments of NCRA's assets, debts, the feasibility of a trail and so forth, but the only appropriation in the bill is for phase one of the Bosco Bailout. The Assembly’s Appropriations Committee estimates State costs of "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to do the assessments called for in the bill. The cost to NCRA is estimated at "tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars" but NCRA has no funds to pay these costs. And of course not one dime is being appropriated to build any portion of a trail.

WILL GOV. BROWN sign the bailout that makes a $4 million gift of public funds to his close friend Bosco? Probably. Will McGuire be back at the public trough asking for Phase Two of the Bosco Bailout next year? Yes. Will a trail ever be built from San Francisco to Eureka? No. Will Dem Party operatives continue to treat the railroad right of way as a jobs and cash cow? Yes — only instead of defrauding the public for a train that will never run, the new scam will be for a trail that will never be built.

WE WERE SADDENED to learn that Charlie Rappleye, only 62, died at his home in Los Angeles last week. Services will be held on Friday, September 28 at Echo Park in Los Angeles. Lots of people will remember Rappleye from his days at the Ukiah Daily Journal, one of several really good writers to have written for Ukiah's faded daily back in the pre-chain newspaper days. Having escaped the county seat with his wits about him, Rappleye went on to the LA Weekly and life as an author of lively, carefully researched books on such disparate characters as Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution and Johnny Rosselli in All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story.

JANE FUTCHER'S letter for candidate Haschak over candidate Pinches for Third District supervisor surprised us. As a marijuana advocate second only to Pebs Trippet in her seeming monomania, Ms. Futcher's radio shows and journalism have often complained about Mendocino County’s burdensome pot licensing processes, a regulatory burden much more likely to be relieved by Pinches than Haschak. Ms. Futcher ignores Pinches' long advocacy for sensible and simple marijuana strategies, and Pinches was an advocate for legalization when legalization was still a pipe dream, pun intended.

THE ROBOTIC Haschak is a fast man with platitudes, but Pinches talks specifics, take 'em or leave 'em, on a range of local issues, a candor that often riles Mendo's lockstep brigades on both sides of this or that issue. Ever see a local candidate walk around with a fully annotated County budget, each indefensible item of spending carefully earmarked? That’s Pinches, and that’s the guy you want guarding the public purse.

BUT WHAT'S DEVELOPING in the Third District race is the fuzzy-warms lining up with Haschak mostly because his cliched, rote political opinions are similar to theirs, not because he's likely to be an effective supervisor. Pinches, a back country rancher, still evokes in the more genteel old hippies and conservative libs of the 4th, the dread redneck specter so many libs still seem to fear, although Pinches is a genuinely democratic kind of dude, open to the gamut of arguments before he arrives at his final opinion. And no matter who you are, whether or not you support him, Pinches takes seriously his vow to represent everyone.

HASCHAK, prior to his running for this office, was invisible in County politics, although we can't really fault him for that: County politics is also invisible in Mendocino County. Only when this or that issue rouses a sliver of our fine, fat population from its pastoral slumber does the Supe's audience swell to maybe a hundred people, including the usual average of 25 lonely souls who monitor the Supes via YouTube. We congratulate Haschak on his sudden interest, but the issues facing the County need fixing, not Mr. Rogers straight outta a Willits third grade classroom.

THE MENDO COMPLEX FIRES are out so, like, how about releasing the causes, or presumed causes, not that there isn't a Red Flag month just ahead, but we hear the Ranch Fire had an identifiable, accidental cause while the River Fire appeared to have been deliberately set.

I MENTIONED to a friend following the Bari Bombing saga that I'd written to various poobahs at the Pulitzer prize-winning Santa Rosa Press Democrat to ask them why they haven't pursued resolution of the who dunnit via the dna on the confession known as the Lord's Avenger Letter. I'd heard that the paper was telling various writers that they'd "lost" it after it was returned to the Rose City daily from the FBI. I find the "We lost it" explanation unfathomable, a minor league version of, say, losing the Lindberg kidnapper's ransom demand letters. Exactly one person from the paper acknowledged receipt of my inquiry, the kindly columnist, Chris Smith.

MY FRIEND replied: "Here's yet another story that underscores the importance of the Lord's Avenger letter, and how similar steps might have led to the identity of the author, and Bari bomber if the Press Democrat hadn’t lost it. My friend attached this quote from SF Gate: "From there, investigators narrowed the pool using social media posts and other public information to create a family tree. Officials ultimately zeroed in on DeAngelo, a former police officer who was living in Citrus Heights (Sacramento County), and tied him to the crimes with a DNA sample from the handle of his car." Yep. And now we have that mega-creep of a rapist identified as an environmental safety expert employed at UC Berkeley and living in Benecia who'd been preying on women, including a woman in Rohnert Park, for years. DNA and heritage sites nailed him. But the Press Democrat has "lost" the dna that would tell us Who Bombed Judi Bari. What's the next step down from disgraceful?

SPEAKING of the alleged Bari mystery, not a peep out of the cash and carry Bari Cult on the case's latest developments, namely the Press Democrat's claim that they've "lost" the confession letter from the man (presumably) who placed the car bomb in Bari's car that nearly killed her — did kill her seven years later in slow, suffering motion. That letter provides the dna link to the bomber, the link that a Benecia policeman rightly described as "the silent witness to the truth." But then the small group of people who've lived off the "mystery" of the Bari bombing psychically and fiscally, have gone out of their way to conceal the truth and, natch, they don't dare debate it in any public forum. The great speakers of truth to power stick to their echo chambers at places like KPFA and KZYX. And the Press Democrat. Where the great “mystery” cannot even be mentioned, let along discussed.

OF COURSE Jerry Brown's going to bail out PG&E, and has signed a measure allowing utilities to bill their customers to pay for future legal settlements stemming from the 2017 wild fires. In the crunch, Brown has always gone for the money and the people who have it.

TENNESSEE saw it coming: "The sweetness of reason died out of our public life with FDR. There doesn't even seem to be a normal intelligence at work in the affairs of the nation. Aren't you frightened by it?" (Tennessee Williams, 1947)

HAS MIKE SWEENEY REALLY LEFT? Former Mendocino County Solid Waste Management Director (and presumed wife-bomber) Mike Sweeney’s highly contorted approach to solid waste systems seems to have infected his young replacement, Mr. Robert Carlson.

CARLSON has proposed garbage rate increases based on a formula that is so convoluted, so beyond comprehension, that it is undecipherable. Rates apparently would go up to a variable degree depending on how much recycle value the waste stream has (which isn’t all that much lately, hence the new higher garbage rates — but hey! with Trump’s tariffs maybe American waste value will go up!). So your guess is better than mine about what it will mean for the average ratepayer.

TRY THIS, garbage rate payers: “The gross market commodity value of Discarded Recyclable Materials collected by Grantee pursuant to this Agreement as mixed Recyclables shall be determined by the current average composite market value per ton for each category multiplied by the market value price including any California Redemption Value, FOB at the Designated Recycling Processing Facility. An increase in rates or a decrease in rates is determined by applying the current Composite Market Value to the Fee/Credit Schedule/Market Value Grid. With tons reported for Discarded Recyclable Materials (single-stream) collected from each area, a fee/credit per ton will be applied against the number of tons divided by revenue to calculate a percentage change in the rate. See Fee/Credit Schedule/Market Value Grid. Two to four months before the end of the Rate Period, beginning with the Rate Period ending December 31, 2017, Grantee shall calculate the average Composite Market Value per ton over the previous 12 months, and apply it to the Fee/Credit Schedule/Market Value Grid to determine a fee or credit. Rates will be adjusted by a fee or credit times the number of tons collected divided by revenue.” Got that?

THERE’S YET ANOTHER RETROACTIVE ITEM on Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors Consent Calendar. And, again, as is all too common, no explanation for why the County couldn’t have put this $58k-plus item on the regular agenda in advance for possible discussion or approval. How much more of this are the Supes going to tolerate? “Item 4g) Approval of Retroactive Agreement with North Coast Opportunities in the Amount of $58,433 to Provide Child Care Navigation and Trauma-Informed Care Training for the Period of July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019 Recommended Action: Approve retroactive Agreement with North Coast Opportunities in the amount of $58,433 to provide child care navigation and trauma-informed care training for the period of July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019; authorize the Health and Human Services Agency Director or designee to sign any future amendments to the Agreement, due to the State increased allocation, that do not cause the Agreement amount to exceed $88,433; and authorize Chair to sign same.”

IF IT WERE POSSIBLE to follow the money, you would find that it goes to the usual suspects for doing what they do best — shoving public money at each other for nebulous purposes. And talking about equally nebulous subjects, on the clock, at endless donut meetings. Any human being, most human beings, know instinctively how to comfort their fellow beings, including distraught and/or traumatized children. If you need $58,000 worth of instruction on how to do it….

A READER sends along a screed from the black conservative, Shelby Steele, from which I excerpted this: "For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left—Rep. Maxine Waters comes to mind—are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself."

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT Maxine Waters except that she's at the top of the Trumpian's hit list for reasons I’m unaware of but probably have to do with her gender and her race. Speaking for myself as a leftist all my days the only people who have ever tried to shout me down and otherwise interfere with my speech have been self-identified leftists, progressives, liberals, whatever the jive-o's are calling themselves these days. And they've done it a lot over the years for one bogus reason or another, and the males of this craven species have always hidden behind the most awful women in all the goddess's creation, at least that’s been my experience in the Bay Area north through Humboldt County. (There are six self-alleged “progressive” males — two at KPFA, the rest here in Mendo, who I dream of catching alone some place.) Overall, though, I’d rather be locked in a closet with a hundred starving raccoons than spend another minute with the likes of…. well, I’ll take the high road here, but locals can surely guess. But the left generally isn't any more hateful than any other political group of bereft consumers trapped in a doomed country on a dying planet. Steele himself has become a multi-millionaire as a rightwing black man fronting for our all-white ruling circles.

THE SOUTHCOAST will take a big hit with the closing of the Sea Ranch Lodge the morning of November 4th when 65 people employed there will be out of work. According to the ICO, the business is owned by an anon something called Fillmore Capital Partners which, in an unsigned letter, wrote: "Our plan, which is subject to change based on conditions, is to re-open for business on Friday, March 15, 2019." Doubtless with fewer employees doing the same amount of  work.

IN OTHER NEWS from the fog belt, hysterics seated on the perennially wobbly Point Arena School Board broached the idea of fencing in the high school, complete with security cameras, the idea being to prevent a school shooting. The larger community shot down (sic) the cockamamie proposal.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE WEEK

As generations passed here in affluent America, things got “easier” for each successive generation and the people became unable to deal with any information or turn of events that might require that they work harder, do with less, or make any kind of sacrifices whatsoever. They turned deaf ears to anything that did not sound happy or entertaining and became addicted to any lies or deceit that would allow them to go on dreaming. Marketing works. Lie to them and they will love you, tell them the truth and you will be scorned. Unfortunately, in the end, there is no victory in “I told you so”.