Rationing of COVID-19 test kits has plagued state and local governments’ response to the pandemic across the country and Mendocino County is no different. Especially on the tourism-dependent Mendocino Coast, where the economy is still reeling from the ongoing shutdown and the area’s one 24-bed hospital is a thin safety net against any kind of […]
The Fort Bragg Police Department got a moment in the spotlight on Thursday, June 23 while detaining a man who was eventually returned to Sacramento County in connection with a home invasion robbery the previous weekend that had resulted in a homicide. Jason Maldonado was arrested by the Fort Bragg police at the request of […]
In this moment of shifting historical identities — the Fort Bragg City Council has taken up the question of whether to change the town’s name on Monday — it might help to know what the original “Fort Bragg” actually was, leaving Braxton Bragg’s career out of it for a moment. Braxton Bragg never visited the […]
FORT… ??? America has once again discovered the “other” Fort Bragg — the one in California that was somehow named for a Confederate general before the Civil War even started. Braxton Bragg was in fact the losingest general of the Civil War. He was also a hero of the Mexican American War, who rode, missing […]
ONGOING DEMONSTRATIONS On Tuesday, June 2, hundreds of demonstrators — peaceful, cheering, singing, chanting, mostly young, mostly female — lined Main Street in Fort Bragg, joining in nationwide “Lockdown Tuesday” protests calling for racial justice and police accountability in America. They got steady support-by-honk from passing motorists, with just a few “all lives matter”-style complainers […]
With the nation’s major cities rocked by nearly a week of fiery protest over racism and police violence, and Sonoma County embroiled in a full-on confrontation between Sheriff Mark Essick and just about the entire political leadership of the region over COVID-19 enforcement, Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall sounded pretty calm Monday morning. “It’s been […]
FOOD BANKS across the country are groaning under unprecedented demand during the COVID-19 lockdown. The Redwood Empire Food Bank in Santa Rosa, the North Coast’s hub for emergency food distribution, made an appeal last week for help in many forms. “With unemployment on the rise, hunger in our community is no longer the exception, it […]
With about a million and a half dollars worth of spending cuts made from its $3.3 million general fund budget — mostly layoffs, furloughs, early retirement, cancelled job offers, and salary and benefit givebacks from city workers and police — the Fort Bragg City Council set about addressing the uncounted but undoubtedly severe economic toll […]
Saying tourism has taken a direct hit from COVID-19 is the understatement of the year. Starting on March 25, 2020, tourism in California, certainly on the Mendocino Coast, effectively vanished. And while motels in Ukiah and elsewhere along the US 101 corridor still bustle, a little anyway, with business travelers, the inns, motels and resorts […]
After 49 years as a publicly run enterprise, the Mendocino Coast’s only hospital and largest employer was handed over to California’s largest rural healthcare provider at a balloon- and sunshine-filled ceremony May 4. The ceremony was brief, as the hospital still has a COVID-19 pandemic to deal with, along with a top to bottom renovation […]
The Redwood Coast Inn is looking shabby these days, but it has a special place in Fort Bragg’s heart. Partly that’s because, even now, a fair number of Fort Bragg people were born there. The place opened in 1915 as the town’s first modern hospital and operated continuously until 1971, when Mendocino Coast District Hospital […]