KZYX News

March 17,2021 — A former motel in Ukiah is getting closer to housing more than 60 people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Last week, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve a contract with Rural Community Housing and Development Corporation to manage Live Oak Apartments, which the county purchased in September with state funds under Project Homekey, a program to house the most vulnerable. Megan van Sant, a senior program manager working on housing and homelessness with Health and Human Services, reported that fifteen families have been selected to live in the apartments so far, consisting of twenty children and twenty adults, three of them pregnant. Another 22 applicants who have been accepted are senior citizens, some of them veterans. RCHDC, a non-profit developer and housing management company, will be paid $675,000 a year to provide a resident manager, maintenance, clerical, and bookkeeping staff to keep track of rent, taxes, and upkeep of the property. There’s an additional $1.3 million operational grant, and tenants will pay 30% of the income they get from various social services programs and housing vouchers to pay rent. People could be moving in by the middle of next month. Right now, construction workers are remodeling the lobby and putting kitchenettes in the living units. Van Sant says that while some tenants may be short term, there’s no timeframe on how long they’ll be able to stay at the apartments. Homelessness is often generational. Van Sant relayed what she learned from colleagues who have been working in local homeless services for many years: “They recognized the names on our list from children they knew who had been homeless years ago, who are now adults parenting their own children, in some cases pregnant, and my thought was, this is an opportunity to break a cycle of homelessness.”

March 16, 2021 — The Board of Supervisors is facing the question of how to spend the $22.6 million of settlement money from PG&E for damage caused by the fires of 2017. Last week’s list of proposed projects, copied and pasted from the list of capital improvement projects in the mid-year budget review, did not include any projects that were specific to Redwood Valley or Potter Valley, where the wind-driven fires raged for days. Don Dale, who’s been the Redwood Valley/Calpella fire chief for about seven years, was expecting a grant for a siren, but the fire district ended up raising $64,000 to buy a solar powered siren that can be set up in different areas and activated from a distance. He’s expecting to receive the siren in about 60 days, and is considering setting it up in four different zones. If he got money from the settlement, he’d like to buy more equipment for that siren. He’d also like ongoing funding to keep the roadsides clear, and pay for fire breaks. And, with an aging fleet, he has his eye on buying some used engines from CalFire. Grants are theoretically available, but highly competitive, and often require a professional to apply for them, which is another expense small volunteer fire departments aren’t always prepared for. Bill Pauli has been the chief of the volunteer fire department in Potter Valley, where the fire started, since 1997. He wa s the first incident commander on the night of October 8, 2017. He thinks the county should have a portion of the settlement, but he’d also like the affected communities to have their fair share. That includes the fire department, but also the irrigation and the schools, which provided some meals and counseling and other services to fire survivors. He says the fire department has never been reimbursed for hosting the agencies that came to help, providing meals, lights, bathrooms, and drinking water, much of it during a time when the power was out in the valley. “That’s what we do,” he acknowledged; “but that was certainly above and beyond what we normally would be doing. And certainly we would think that now that the county has received these funds, that there would be some funding set aside for Potter Valley fire, related to the impact on the fire department for the fires and the services that we provided.” Water is always an essential service, especially during a fire. Jared Walker, the operations manager at the Redwood Valley County Water District, said a major rate study is coming up soon, and he expects significant increases in the water bill to pay for the upkeep of aging infrastructure. Insurance and FEMA paid for the lost booster station on Tomki Road, but the water treatment plant on Road D needs some upgrades. And the drive shafts on the motors for the pumps that pump water to the plant from Lake Mendocino, which is four and a half miles away, also need some repairs. The drive controls on one of the motors have already been repaired, which Walker says cost just under $100,000. Walker would also like to see some fire hydrants in Redwood Valley. The community relies mostly on surplus water from Lake Mendocino, and Walker says the district has spent about a million dollars already trying to find alternate sources. Studies to look for more water will cost more money, but Redwood Valley is $7.6 million in debt to the Bureau of Reclamation, and is not eligible for grants. And the problem with drilling more wells, says Walker, is that the State Department of Drinking Water requires proof that well water is groundwater. Chief Dale thinks that, with this windfall, a lot more fiscal responsibility is in order at the county level. He was nonplussed by the seven county departments projected to exceed their budgets by at least $150,000 each. And he offered a blunt analysis of a preliminary suggestion to spend $2.8 million of settlement funds to repair the roof on the property at Whitmore Lane, which was known to be damaged at the time of the purchase. He was nonplussed by the seven county departments projected to exceed their budgets by at least $150,000: “They need to clean up their act, is what I think, as far as the county goes.”

March 15, 2021 — Cannabis is in the spotlight this week. With the Planning Commission scheduled to hear about major changes to the Phase IIII cannabis ordinance this Friday, informational events about various aspects of cannabis have been highly visible. The Cannabis Business Association of Mendocino County is hosting an event this afternoon at 4pm on the MendoVoice facebook page, about a proposal to align the county’s regulations more closely with the state’s by introducing a discretionary land use model requiring use permits. Environmental arguments against the proposed ordinance concern the already existing water shortage and the desire to preserve open lands for wildlife. Most public policy regarding cannabis is not based on science, according to Phoebe Parker Shames, a PhD candidate at the Brashares Lab at UC Berkeley who has devised an experiment to test the impact of noise and light from cannabis grows on wildlife. Last week, the Hopland Research and Extension Center hosted her virtual presentation to a crowd that included local county and tribal government leaders, ecologists, and small cannabis farmers. Parker Shames expects to conduct her wildlife monitoring research over the next two years, involving three sites each at the Hopland Research and Extension Center and Angelo Reserve. She’s gathered some observational data, like a stunning game cam shot of a mountain lion in front of a cannabis grow, but says that’s not enough. What’s needed, she believes, are experiments. Parker Shames, whose work is funded by the Bureau of Cannabis Control, plans to set up the light and noise conditions of a cannabis farm at her six sites and monitor the reactions of a wide range of animals at various distances from the sites, including some collared deer at Hopland. Game cameras are set up to capture the activity of larger mammals. There will be acoustic monitors for birds and bats, and traps for insects. There’s also an ingenious device involving a bucket and a short fence to capture the reactions of small land-based animals. She’s not expecting a full set of data until a couple of years after she completes the experiment. Until then, she has some advice for policy makers seeking to craft ordinances: “Start with the farmers. Look to existing research, and make informed guesses.”

Teresa Sholars has lived on the Mendocino Coast for 50 years, studying the diverse ecosystems that make up our small corner of the planet. Yesterday, Sholars took me out to the headlands, the flat bluffs that overlook the pacific, to look at the wildflowers which are just starting to appear, marking the beginning of spring.

March 11, 2021 — A property on Whitmore Lane, just outside Ukiah city limits, is out of commission even as its potential uses multiply. Last March, CEO Carmel Angelo commandeered a former skilled nursing facility to use as an alternate care site for people who did not have another safe place to isolate or quarantine during the pandemic. According to a CEO report from April of last year, “the monthly lease rate of $31,550 is approximately $415 per bed, per month.” That comes out to 76 beds, but no one has been in the building since February 11. The county bought the building in August with $2.2 million of CARES Act funding. Now repairs are estimated at $2.8 million, after two rainstorms that damaged the roof and the HVAC system on the roof of the 27,000 square foot building. Doug Anderson, the assistant facilities manager with the county, briefed the board of supervisors during the mid year budget review this week. He said the building had known leaks when the county bought it, and that the capacity is 100 beds. It has 33 rooms, a commercial kitchen, nursing stations, and a laundry facility. And fixing the currently flat roof, which is not up to code, will be complicated, after what Supervisor Glenn McGourty described as a spectacular failure. With Old Howard Hospital off the table as a psychiatric health facility, some are eyeing Whitmore Lane’s potential as a puff. But Dr. Mimi Doohan, who still serves as a deputy public health officer, is also interested in using it as an addiction clinic, funded with a combination of philanthropy, grants and government money. By fall of last year, she was interviewing stakeholders and raising money in Mendocino County for a Safe Haven clinic, which would include drug rehabilitation, street medicine, medical respite with hospice detox and a pharmacy, according to documents at the Healthforce Center at UCSF. Safe Haven is an initiative of the Arlene and Michael Rosen Foundation, which specializes in medical philanthropy and has also funded the Ukiah Valley Street Medicine Program and the Mendonoma Health Alliance. Doohan spearheaded the Street Medicine Program and the family medicine residency program at Adventist Health Ukiah Valley hospital. Angelo did not commit to any one use of the building, but offered to bring forward an agenda item about it later this month, during a discussion about Measure B.

Jim Culp talks to longtime members of the county-wide, unmoderated community forum, the MCN list.

March 10, 2021 — Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren reported to the Board of Supervisors yesterday that, if current covid case metrics hold for another week, the county can look forward to transitioning out of the purple tier and into the much less restrictive red tier next week. The county received its first shipment of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine yesterday, and is considering using it for people who are transient and homebound. Vaccine coordinator Darcie Antle noted that the county is working with Redwood Community Services and other agencies to hold a Johnson & Johnson clinic for the transient population this week or early next week. Following yesterday’s mid-year budget review, the Board made its first foray into talking about what to do with the one time monies from a PG&E settlement for the 2017 Redwood Complex fires, a little more than twenty two and a half million dollars. None of the money was committed yesterday, and that was not the intent of the item. But ripples of alarm spread on local social media sites, and about two dozen letters came into the board. One set of letter writers supported Sheriff Matt Kendall’s request to fund efficiencies like creating a courtroom next to the jail and using satellite imaging to enforce cannabis ordinances. These, he and his supporters argued, would free up deputies’ time. Kendall pointed out that the Redwood Complex fire was originally discovered by a patrol sergeant in Potter Valley, who initiated the response. Another set of letters expressed dismay at some of the suggestions for using the money, which were lifted directly out of the list of mid-year capital improvement project recommendations in the mid-year budget report. While both lists of options included microwave facilities improvements and hardening the building where 911 equipment is located, a couple of items drew particular ire. Community members were aghast at the suggestion to use $55,000 to remove the amphitheater in Ukiah’s Low Gap Park, and to use over $200,000 to remove dead and dying trees and repair the spillway in Gualala’s Bower Park. Redwood Valley community members wrote that they believe some of the funds should be used to shore up the local fire department and water system. They also complained that the fire departments and the Municipal Advisory Council or MAC in the areas that were ravaged in 2017 had not been asked to weigh in on how they thought the money should be spent. Supervisors Maureen Mulheren and Glenn McGourty expressed their willingness to hold town halls and attend MAC meetings to gather community input.

At the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection’s eight-hour-long meeting Wednesday, Cal Fire directors discussed the upcoming 2021 fire season, timber harvest plan sales, fire safe regulations, and carbon sequestration.

Mach 8, 2021 — About half the Caucasian population in Mendocino County has been vaccinated, compared to 16% of the Hispanic population. Still, with case rates dropping, Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren says the county could enter the red tier by the middle of this month. The county Planning Commission unanimously approved a subdivision of parcels on Feliz Creek in Hopland for more winemaking, with the possibility of publicly available walking trails on a 40-acre parcel in the floodplain. And the county has likely missed its opportunity to purchase Old Howard Hospital, with another potential buyer taking steps to secure the property. The topic of possibly using Measure B money to buy Old Howard Hospital for a psychiatric health facility surfaced at the January meeting of the Measure B citizens oversight commission, which decided to leave the matter to ad hoc committees of the Board of Supervisors and the Willits City Council. In 2018, when the site was first being considered for a puff, the City Council passed an ordinance noting that the county had failed to provide the city any information about the project; that the Council believed the building does not conform to seismic and safety standards; and that the proposed use of the site does not comply with the city’s zoning requirements. The upshot of the ordinance was essentially a public records act request to the county, enfolded in a declaration of the city’s desire to be involved in the decision-making process about the use of the property. Just a week and a half ago, county representatives were gearing up to do just that. The Willits Rotarians received a presentation about the implications of having a puff in their community, and a town hall with the city and county ad hoc committees was planned for yesterday afternoon. But as of late last week, the Frank R. Howard Foundation had signed a letter of intent with an undisclosed buyer. The purchase agreement had not been signed, but once it is, a minimum of sixty days’ escrow will begin. Arnie Mello, the Executive Director of the Howard Foundation, said the potential buyer had expressed an interest in renovating the property and converting it to a healthcare facility of some sort, but there is still lots of due diligence to be done. And on Thursday Gary Breen, the CEO of Campovida winery in Hopland, made a case to the Planning Commission to subdivide 54 acres into four small parcels and a 40-ACRE remainder. Last year, he built a $12 million 60,000 square foot building to store a million gallons of wine from local vineyards. He argued that he’s made significant financial contributions to the local economy and public safety. The planning Commission agreed unanimously to grant Breen’s request.

LITTLE RIVER - The largest coast redwood forest left in private family hands is now protected from subdivision and development permanently. This morning, Save the Redwoods League announced three conservation easements that will protect an extensive redwood forest, including a 300 acre section of true old growth, on the Mailliard Ranch, a 14,838 acre property in the Anderson Valley. Photography by John Birchard, Save the Redwoods League

On February 16, the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians requested a government-to-government consultation with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire, to discuss the Tribes concern over the cumulative impact of around nine timber harvest projects lined up to take place in Jackson Demonstration State Forest over the next half decade. Jackson Demonstration, a 50,000 acre parcel of land, is the ancestral territory of the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo, along with other tribes.

March 4, 2021 — Former Ukiah Police Sergeant Kevin Murray is scheduled to appear in Mendocino County Superior Court today, to be arraigned on information. On January 26, District Attorney David Eyster filed a complaint against Murray, charging him with four felonies for crimes alleged to have occurred on November 25 of last year. The complaint says he entered an occupied motel room on South Orchard Avenue in Ukiah and violated the civil rights of a woman by intimidating her “under color of law.” Murray is also facing two charges of burglary for entering the room twice, and one of sexual battery for forcing the woman to touch his genitals. The DA’s complaint also includes a misdemeanor charge of possession of methamphetamine on December 1. Murray posted $200,000 bail on the conditions that he wear an ankle monitor, surrender all firearms, and be subject to search and seizure of firearms and drug testing. Murray, who lives in Lakeport, surrendered four handguns and a rifle with a scope to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office on February 3. Later that month, Eyster filed another complaint against Murray, saying that in June or July of 2014, Murray raped someone identified only as Jane Doe, while armed with a gun. Murray faces a second count of forcible oral copulation against Jane Doe a few months later, in April. Murray was arrested again last week on those charges, and is being held on $500,000 bail. Eyster requested that his previous bail be recalled and increased because he had hidden an assault rifle at his father-in-law’s house. According to the complaint, Murray had carried the rifle as a duty weapon while he was a police officer, and it is illegal for non-peace officers to possess this particular kind of weapon. The DA believes that Murray committed contempt of court and fraud on the court by submitting a false firearm statement. Ukiah Police Chief Justin Wyatt released a statement in a Facebook video on January 29, saying the internal investigation of Murray had concluded and that he was no longer employed with the Ukiah Police Department. He said the UPD is cooperating with the DA’s office in its investigation, which is ongoing. Murray and the City of Ukiah are being sued on separate claims in the United States District Court of California in San Francisco by a man named Christopher Rasku, who says that on October 13 of 2018, Murray broke into his home and brutalized him. Rasku was later charged with the felony of resisting arrest. According to a complaint signed in May of last year, Rasku was in his home behind a partly closed doorway when Murray responded to a call by a neighbor about an argument between two other neighbors. Rasku claims Murray charged his door, knocking him unconscious, and proceeded to beat him so severely that one of his lungs collapsed. The statement says Murray had not turned on his body camera, but that a neighbor filmed Murray’s forcible entrance, which allegedly contradicted Murray’s account. The Willits Police Department has also had some personnel changes in the last few months. Alexis Blaylock, the city’s first Black female police chief, arrived on August 26 of last year and departed abruptly on October 8. In December, a Southern California law firm sent the Willits City Council a letter, saying it was representing Blaylock. It said Blaylock would sign a release of claims agains the city, or agree not to sue, for a payment of $500,000 from “the City and applicable individuals...and a commitment on behalf of the City to provide workplace discrimination and retaliation training to certain City employees and officials for the purpose of making the City and Police Department more tolerant, effective and honest institutions.” The letter then goes on to detail the hostility that Blaylock allegedly encountered from a subordinate and the City Manager at the time, Stephanie Garrabrant-Sierra. The claims range from difficulties securing keys to the evidence room to being undermined when she fact-checked a workers’ compensation claim based on an undocumented use of force. The letter claims that “The City undermined Chief Blaylock’s authority and credited baseless allegations against her while ignoring her own credible claims of misconduct. Yet non-black male employees committed serious misconduct that was ignored.” The letter claims that the City Manager told Blaylock she could not write anyone up for any reason or take disciplinary actions without her permission, and that Blaylock was told to meet with her and a white male subordinate three times a week to assess her performance. The letter claims that Blaylock has lost income and suffered mental and emotional distress, humiliation and reputational harm and that she is prepared to sue the City if her demands for compensation and training are not met. Brian Bender was hired as the new Willits City Manager on January fourth of this year. Fabian Lizzarago, who retired as the Fort Bragg police chief last year, has b...

March 2, 2021 — Spanish-language outreach about covid has fallen almost entirely to community groups and volunteers. In the Ukiah valley, UVA, or Ukiah Vecinos en Accion, has collaborated with Adventist Health to get Spanish speakers to vaccination events. Jackie Orozco, a member of UVA who runs the Spanish-language publication Periodico Al Punto, says the collaboration got off to a strong start, with UVA recruiting over 300 people in the Spanish-speaking community in the first two weeks. Juan Orozco, the mayor of Ukiah and the co-chair of UVA, says the couple has the ability to reach a lot of people in a matter of hours.

March 1, 2021 — The wild pony herds of Robinson Creek are part of the lore of Ukiah. They’re the descendants of Shetland mares and a Welsh stallion that escaped captivity in the middle of the last century. Over the decades, a few other breeds may have gotten involved, including some pintos and appaloosas. Now the vigorous little creatures are dots in the distance, a magical visitation, or a nuisance, damaging property and just waiting to cause a car crash on the 253. Even so, they are beloved, by those who treasure their wild bonds to one another and those who want to bring them in from the cold.

From Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, this is the KZYX news for Friday, February 26th. I’m Lana Cohen. “Well first if I can just tell you about the sunflower sea star and just how cool of a species it is in and of itself.” That’s Walter Heady, he’s a coastal marine ecologist for the California Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, an international national non profit. “Sunflower sea stars are one of the largest sea stars in the world. They can grow to be over three feet in diameter. They have about 20 arms, with thousands of little tube feet under them which help them to sense the world as well as to move along the seafloor as one of the fastest sea stars in the world. They can move about six feet a minute. Which is not terribly fast compared to a cheetah, but it’s actually a very fast moving sea star to the point where you can see them move across the floor. So they are a charismatic invertebrate in the marine world.”These giant sea stars are in trouble. A study published by the Nature Conservancy, Oregon State University, and other partners found that 5.75 billion sunflower sea stars, which is 90% of the species previous population, have perished since 2013.What happened to the sunflower sea stars is not a pretty story. Basically, climate change led to warmer ocean temperatures, which gave way to an unprecedented virus called sea star wasting syndrome. Heady, one of the authors of the study, said it was early last decade that he first started noticing the struggling sea stars. “We started noticing disease outbreaks where these individual sea stars would grow lesions and get sick and literally waste away. Some other folks have described that they turn into goop. They literally dissolve in the either intertidal or sea floor area. And we started noticing that that was happening widespread in a high number of stars and a number of different species and it really started to impact the sunflower sea stars in their range from Mexico up into Alaska.” Sea star wasting is a heartbreaking, graphic, and kind of a gory disease. Honestly, it seems more like something that would happen in a sci-fi movie or on an alien planet rather than here on planet earth. The first time local biologist Tristin McHugh saw a wasting sea star was in 2013 near Monterey. “I remember seeing a sea star with a physical lesion, like a cut, on its arm. There are many different forms that you can see a sea star wasting in like the cut, the loss of an arm, it detaching and the most severe is it physically melting and in between that you also would see twisting arms and them physically rejecting their body, like contorting their arms into pulling them off.”The loss of the sunflower sea star has decimated ecosystems all across the species range and a local marine biologist, Tristin McHugh, said that holds true here in Mendocino. “The loss of sunflower stars in Mendocino and the North Coast has been very impactful on the balance of the kelp forest ecosystem and ultimately to our community.” McHugh is the Nature Conservancy’s North Coast kelp project director. “You know everyone in the community is keenly aware of what’s going on with kelp forests and everything we’ve been talking about when it comes to kelp loss, the boom in purple urchin, the loss of the abalone fishery, the federal disaster to the red urchin fishery and the cultural and aesthetic loss of these forests, but it’s all tied to the disappearance of the star.” The disappearance of the sea star in tandem with warmer water temperatures triggered a chain of events which ultimately resulted in the collapse of multiple local fisheries. Fisheries that have historically played important cultural and economic roles in Mendocino. This includes the red urchin and abalone fisheries, which, before they collapsed, could bring in up to 3 million and 44 million dollars in annual revenue to the county’s economy, respectively.So Here’s what happened: the sea star was the last remaining predator of purple urchin. And purple urchin, they eat kelp, which are big brown algae that grow in groups and create dense underwater forests, providing food and shelter to nearshore marine life. When the sea star numbers plummeted, the purple urchin population exploded. And the urchin ate so much kelp that the forest disappeared. So then, all the species that relied on the forest for shelter and food, such as red urchin, abalone and a variety of fish species were left empty handed. Noticing the rapid decline of sunflower sea stars, scientists from the Nature Conservancy, Oregon State University and other partners decided to find out just how many sea stars were left. When they realized that over 90% of the population was gone they came to the conclusion that the sunflower star was critically endangered. They submitted their findings to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature,IUCN, for short, which is a nonprofit dedicated to conservation and sustainable development across the planet. The IUCN agreed wi

February 25, 2021 — A day after CEO Carmel Angelo critiqued the Measure B Citizens Oversight Commission as having no common mission, the committee voted to hire a consultant to work out a long term strategic plan based on the Kemper Report.Commissioning that report was the first thing the committee did after electing Tom Allman as its first chair three years ago. The commission also formed an ad hoc committee to work with county supervisors to change its function. As Commissioner Shannon Riley put it, the goal would be for the eleven-member body to spend its time overseeing work that was being done according to the strategic plan and reconciling independent financial audits, rather than debating landscaping and lighting contracts. The item was on the agenda days before Angelo made her remarks to the Board of Supervisors, but according to Riley, who brought the item forward, it was long overdue.

February 24, 2021 — The Board of Supervisors approved a $200,000 increase to a contract with an armed guard service to monitor people in quarantine at hotels or Whitmore Lane, the county-owned quarantine facility just outside Ukiah city limits. The outbreak at Mountain View, a long-term care home in Ukiah, is up to 23 cases, with two people now deceased. Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren said the outbreak grew rapidly during the full week it took for a positive staff member’s test result to get back from a lab in Texas. The eligible age for people to get the vaccine in the county has been lowered to 65, and starting in mid-March, people 16 and older with certain health conditions or disabilities will also be eligible. And, in what CEO Carmel Angelo called the county’s last shot at trying to purchase Old Howard Hospital, the county submitted a three-month Memorandum of Understanding to the Howard Hospital Foundation, asking it to hold off on selling the property to another buyer for that length of time. When the question of whether to use the property as a psychiatric health facility came before the Measure B Citizens Oversight Commission last month, the commission decided to turn the matter over to ad hoc committees from the Board of Supervisors and the Willits City Council. There will be a virtual town hall on the subject at 4pm on Sunday, March 7. Angelo also asked the board to create a five-year strategic plan by the end of the year, in preparation for her planned retirement in the fall of 2022. Her priorities are enhancing planning and building services, strategically investing the $22 million settlement from PG&E, and an organizational review, including whether the county should go back to a CAO model, or continue with the CEO model.

February 23, 2021 — As the pandemic drags on, the public demand for outdoor recreation has surged. At a town hall last week, Senator Mike McGuire invited panelists to talk about how they believe the Great Redwood Trail from Marin County to the Humboldt Bay will enhance outdoor recreation in the coming years. Some segments are already built, and some are underway. Some, like the one in Ukiah, will be built next to the abandoned railroad, while others will be built on top, if applications for a technique called railbanking, to preserve and recycle the railbed, are approved. The nuts and bolts of building the trail and funding it will come out in a master plan, which itself will need to be funded. McGuire’s newly introduced Senate Bill 69 would require that SMART, Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit district, create and manage the trail from the Mendocino-Sonoma county line to its southern end. If the bill is written into law, the bankrupt North Coast Railroad Authority, or NCRA, will become the Great Redwood Trail Agency, responsible for the northern portion of the trail. NCRA just put in a federal application on Thursday morning for railbanking from Willits to Samoa in Humboldt county.

February 22, 2021 — Adventist Health in Mendocino County has administered 10,875 doses of the covid-19 vaccine, four thousand of them second doses. Vaccine shipments did not come in last week due to storms across the country. The hospital, which receives its own allocation of the vaccine, has been focusing on administering it to people over the age of 70. According to data from the California Dept of Public Health, 22,091 people in Mendocino County have been vaccinated. Healthy Mendocino puts the total population at 86,801. Dr. Bessant Parker, the Chief Medical Officer for Adventist Health in Mendocino County, said that in a sample of 660 doses given by the hospital, 18% were administered to Latino people. On Friday, Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren said 13.6% of the vaccines in the county have been administered to Latino people. Healthy Mendocino reports that the Hispanic/Latino population is 27.18% of the overall population in the county. Dr. Parker is expecting a supply of vaccines this week, but like all the other entities giving vaccinations, the hospital is having a hard time making appointments without information about exactly how many doses will arrive or when. He expects distribution to be streamlined once Blue Shield takes over the distribution of the vaccine. Six thousand people are in the Adventist Health database waiting to be contacted for an appointment to be vaccinated. You can sign up here. Learn more in our interview with Dr. Parker.

February 19, 2021 — Redwood Coast Medical Services in Gualala has administered about 3000 doses of the covid-19 vaccine on the Mendonoma coast, about ⅔ of them to residents of Mendocino county and ⅓ to Sonoma county residents in its coverage area. At a quarterly town hall meeting last night, RCMS CEO Ara Chakrabarti said the clinic had 500 doses of the Moderna vaccine from Sonoma county public health and the rest from Mendocino County Public health. About a thousand of the doses have gone to people seventy five and older, and the rest have gone to people who qualify because they are in eligible professions. About 1200 people have received their second doses. The numbers are rounded to the nearest hundred. Chakrabarti reported on the various places where vaccines are being administered on the south coast through RCMS, the financial situation, big changes coming up in the vaccine rollout and why he thinks RCMS should come up with a long term strategic plan.

February 17, 2021 — There are so many different ways to get a vaccine, but the supply is still scarce. Adventist hospital, which gets its own allocation of doses from the state, is holding age-based mass vaccine events. CVS pharmacy in Ukiah is taking appointments for people 65 and older. The county public health department is administering vaccines to people who are at risk because of their occupations. And the federally qualified health centers, which get all their supplies from the county, are vaccinating people in both categories. There’s a catch as catch can quality to getting a vaccine now, with people patrolling the right sites, showing up at the right time, and answering the phone when it’s an unknown number that turns out to be a health center offering a shot. Lucresha Renteria, who runs the Mendocino Coast Clinics in Fort Bragg, says her health center has administered 1,879 vaccines, including 620 second doses. She’s relying heavily on vaccinatemendo.com, local employers, and her own patient rolls going back to 2009. She said it can take two days to get enough appointments to give out 300 shots. Wiith just a few days’ lead time, old phone numbers, and the modern reluctance to pick up the phone if you don’t know who it is, the clinic often calls employers at the end of the day and asks them to send people over on the spur of the moment. And the county has administered more Moderna doses that it’s received, because some of the vials have more than ten doses in them. So if you’re on a standby list, you’d better really be standing by. Big changes are coming at every level. Today, the county is rolling out MyTurn, a state signup system. And possibly as early as March, the state will start to prioritize vaccine for people with disabilities. Soon Blue Shield will take over the distribution of the coveted supply. And the Biden administration is working on a new plan for the federal government to send vaccines directly to the federally qualified health centers. For now, Renteria says she’s carefully maintaining those standby lists. You can hear more in this interview with Renteria.

February 16, 2021 — The Ukiah Unified School District is opening up to a hybrid model of some in-person instruction for pre-kindergarten through sixth grade today. Pre-Kindergartners through second graders, fifth graders at Eagle Peak Middle School, and sixth graders at Pomolita Middle School, as well as some special day classes throughout the district. will be back in the classroom two mornings a week.There are no fifth graders at Pomolita, and the sixth grade at Eagle Peak will start the hybrid model next week. Older students can go back to in-person instruction once the county returns to the red tier. We’ll hear from a union rep and a family who are looking forward to getting back to class.

From Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, this is the KZYX news for Monday, February 15th. I’m Lana Cohen. “So we are standing in a section of Jackson State Forest that basically is vegetated by Mendocino Cyprus and another name for that is the Pygmy Cyprus and what people have kind of called this area is the Pygmy Forest, what we botanists call it is the …” Only 2,000 acres of Pygmy ecosystem remains on the planet, and all of it lies along the Mendocino and northern Sonoma Coasts. The Pygmy Forest is made up of grey scraggly trees that look no older than 10 to 15 years are no thicker than the handle of a broomstick, and no taller than the average adult. But the trees in the Pygmy Forest are not young, some are more than one hundred years old. So why are they so small? Decades ago, rare plants botanist Teresa Sholars moved to the Mendocino Coast and set out to answer that question. “It’s kind of an anachronism for someone to live and work and retire in the same spot. I’m 68 I moved here when I was 22. Raised three kids here, but I’ve always felt that certainly as a botanist or ecologist the best thing in the world for me is to, if you stay in one place you get to really know it. And each decade I would kind of pick a new group of organisms and try to figure them out. I never took mushroom or lichen classes. I just studied them and started teaching these different groups, natural history, insects, mammals, amphibians. So that has really created a challenge and wonder of all of the different ecosystems here, being able to be here for so many years, because it takes a long time to learn this stuff and appreciate it and understand all the diversity that’s in one locality.” Sholars is a leading expert on a range of Mendocino Coast ecosystems. Not only has she researched them, she’s spent almost fifty years walking through the sunny Pygmy Forest, foraging for mushrooms under the dark, cool cover of Redwoods, admiring wildflowers on the bluffs that overlook the Pacific. “And that’s what’s so fantastic about California. If you go back east you have often the same rock, the same topography, the same rainfall, the same climate for miles. Here you go from 50 degrees at the ocean in July to 100 degrees just 10 miles inland or 8 miles inland. You have hotspots of different soils and different rocks so we have an enormous amount of diversity here of vegetation and plants and animals and fungi that have evolved in those diverse habitats. So the magic really started because of the diversity of rock types, topography and climate that we have here in California.” Although Sholars has explored many of the County's microclimates, the Pygmy forest is the ecosystem she knows best and the one she is most attached to. It’s the one that first called her to this corner of the world. When Sholars was in her early 20s, she decided to study Mendocino’s Pygmy forest for her masters degree.“Well I think in reality a lot of us decide what to study because we want to go to a place that’s really nice and there I am living in Davis and you know this was a very unusual vegetation and everybody who studied it only studied the soils and not the plants so my late husband and I both chose the Pygmy forest as a place we could drive to from Davis in three or four hours, come here camping and study why the plants were so short because nobody knew. Anything that’s unstudied and unknown is fun for people to try to figure things out.”To discover why the Pygmy’s trees were so short, Teresa decided to dig deep. Literally, she dug thousands of holes in the soil in order to find out what was going on in there and how it might be impacting the trees. The thing was, she couldn’t get very far. Again and again, about a foot and a half down, she hit something solid. She found that the soil under the pygmy forest is hardpan, which means that you can’t get through it. Hardpan is created when the ground is flat, so rather than soil moving and flowing over years with storms and wind, it stays put and consolidates, becoming concrete-like. Ultimately, Sholars found that the soil’s tough, rock-like nature is not the main reason the Pygmy trees are stunted, but it is related to why the trees in the pygmy are minutature“If you ever hike around the Mendocino Coast or in Northern California, most areas are basically steep and upland, you go up and down. Well in this small area that’s really just a few miles long between Northern Sonoma county at Salt Point there’s a few areas where when the land was uplifted it was uplifted flat .” Uplift is when the surface of the earth is slowly pushed upwards. The flat uplift in this area is also why the Mendocino Coast has cliff-like bluffs that lead to the ocean rather than mountains that slope into the Pacific. “So you can walk in these Pygmy Forests for really miles and it’s flat land.” The floor of the Pygmy Forest, which was uplifted by tectonic forces an estimated 500,000 years ago, has never been tipped one way or another or d

February 9, 2021 — The Promotores de Salud, a Spanish-speaking community health workers program that’s funded by the county with supplemental money from the Community Foundation to buy groceries for families in isolation or quarantine, is heading into its third month. The promotores focus on getting information out to people who need it, often in person, by handing out fliers or calling people at home. Promotore Sergio Perez said people who need information about how to stay safe or get tested or vaccinated also come to the office of Nuestra Alianza, the Willits-based nonprofit that’s taken on the program . He hasn’t encountered a lot of vaccine hesitancy, but it’s hard for Latino essential workers to get vaccinated, partly because the population skews young, and partly due to breakdowns in communication about which documents people need to get their shots.

In the past, there has been no groundwater regulation in Ukiah. Municipalities, agricultural users, and individuals could use their wells to pump as much water out of underground aquifers as they wanted. But That is about to change. Groundwater regulation in the Ukiah Valley is on its way. Yesterday, the Ukiah Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency, which is in charge of figuring out how to manage the groundwater, had their first meeting of 2021 where they discussed how things are moving along.

February 11, 2021 — The Board of Supervisors approved a social media services contract with Liz Barney this week, with Supervisors Dan Gjerde and Ted Williams dissenting. The board also unanimously approved an ordinance providing for the abatement of hazardous vegetation and combustible material to reduce fire hazards. Another unanimous vote updated Measure H, the 2004 voter-approved initiative to ban GMOs in Mendocino County.

February 10, 2021 — A covid-19 outbreak at a Ukiah nursing home has infected eighteen people, according to Bekkie Emery, of the county’s Department Operations Center. The outbreak was identified at Mountain View Assisted Living and Memory Care on Saturday. Twelve residents and six staff have tested positive, and another staff member is considered a close contact and is in quarantine. Alyson Bailey, the program manager for the Measure B Citizens Oversight Committee, is no longer working in that position. Dr Jenine Miller, who heads the county’s Behavioral Health department, said in a statement that her department will be taking over Measure B clerical tasks, monitoring fiscal activities related to Measure B, and continuing the development of the training center and the crisis residential treatment facility. Supervisor John Haschak, who is on the Measure B ad hoc committee, said he does not believe it was a rash decision, and that, “With the variety of tasks that were being done by people in either behavioral health or facilities, it seems that streamlining and cost efficiencies were appropriate.” The three year anniversary of Khadijah Britton’s disappearance was Sunday. Witnesses say Britton was abducted at gunpoint by Negie Fallis on February 7, 2018. On Friday, Scott Shelby, the special agent in charge of the San Francisco division of the FBI, said the bureau is still working with the county to find Khadijah Britton. The FBI is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for her disappearance. “Somebody knows,” he declared. Anyone with that information is urged to call the sheriff’s office or WeTip, the anonymous crime reporting hotline, at (800) 782-7463. You can also email the fbi at tips.fbi.gov. At yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Dr. Coren reported that the county only has enough vaccines for second doses this week. He said the county had to give out extra doses on January 13, 14, and 15 to meet the governor’s call to vaccinate a million people in a week. Those people are now due for their second shots. The county health department and the rural health centers are vaccinating people who are now eligible due to their occupational risk of exposure, while the hospital and its clinics are focusing on those 75 and older. Things could change, if the state decides to prioritize people with co-morbidities and disabilities. Meanwhile, testing and vaccines are hard to come by for people who live outside of Ukiah or Fort Bragg. Supervisor John Haschak asked if the traveling OptumServ testing team would be coming to Willits anytime soon. Deputy CEO Darcie Antle, who is now overseeing the vaccine program, said it had to do with the now-familiar urban rural divide at the state level. But Anna Stockel, who called in during public comment, said she thought the county and the state have something in common. “The Board of Supervisors complained endlessly about the state not disclosing data,” she said; “but, quite frankly, Mendocino County isn’t doing much better.” Supervisor Ted Williams asked if more data could be made available to the public, saying the item at the top of his wish list for more information is vaccine numbers. Emery said that is a goal, but her focus has been on satisfying state reporting requirements, which involve nine different systems. The board supported giving direction to staff to publish how many vaccines are distributed daily, by which provider. Four of the local skilled nursing facilities have received vaccines from a contract with CVS and Walgreens pharmacies, which are not required to report to the county. Williams offered to collect the data himself, rather than wait a week or two. And Supervisor Maureen Mulheren revisited the issue of what kind of paperwork is necessary for essential workers who are eligible for the vaccine but don’t have pay stubs. “I think it’s important that the county public health gets out to all the vaccine clinic locations that we will accept a letter as proof of employment, instead of a pay stub for some essential workers,” she said. “That has been a question that has been coming up, and I think clear direction to the vaccine clinics would be helpful.”

2/9/21 — The Dungeness crab season is off to a pitiful start this year. Some crabbers pulled their gear out and threw the towel in just one day into the season.However, scientists, seasoned crabbers, and even those new to the business all say that is to be expected — the crab fishery has a very cyclical nature. Some years bring in plentiful crabs and subsequently, money. Others, not so much. This year is definitely a ‘not so much’ year. The decade leading up to this year brought a pretty steady and bountiful harvest of Dungeness crabs, so fisherpeople knew they were in for a bust year. But no one expected it to be as bad as it is and the slim pickings for Dungeness this season have left a lot of people hurting. Down at Noyo Harbor Last Thursday, the weather was perfect. It was so warm and people were walking around in dresses and shorts, and there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. But the mood of the crabbers was grim.

February 8, 2021 — The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to revisit an agreement with a social media contractor whose activity on the right-wing website Parler caused a stir in December. Late last year, the sheriff’s request to approve a three year contract with Liz Barney for social media, web design and training, appeared on the board’s agenda. It came out on facebook that Barney had a Parler account, where she had shared or echoed material stating that masks are a symbol of Antifa, that Donald Trump won the election, and an article about Rashida Tlaib, with a comment attached to it that said, “Where is Mossad when you need them?” Barney did not write the article or the comment, but this was shortly after the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, whom the New York Times reported was a primary target of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, widely believed to be responsible for the assassinations of other scientists. A dozen letters came in to the board expressing dismay about a county social media professional being active on a site where white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys flourished. The item was pulled, but it’s coming before the board again tomorrow, as a one-year agreement for two-thirds of the total possible compensation in the original contract. Sierra Wooten, of the Mendocino Coast BIPOC, Black Indigenous People of Color group, was one of the people who wrote a letter in December. We caught up on Saturday, for an update on her concerns since the insurrection at the Capitol and Parler being deplatformed.

February 4, 2021 — School districts in Mendocino County have the option to start the reopening process, though a lot of uncertainty remains. We’ll hear from a teachers union representatives and school superintendents, for a look at the planning regionally and locally.

February 3, 2021 — Mari Rodin will be sworn into the Ukiah City Council at tonight’s meeting, where she’ll start serving out the remaining two years of Maureen Mulheren’s term. Mulheren was elected to the second district supervisor seat, which Rodin also wanted, and started that position early last month. At an hour and a half special meeting last week, the city council heard from Rodin and seven other applicants, including Joel Soinila, who ran against her for supervisor, Cameron Ramos and Steve Scalmanini, who ran for city council last year, an urban planner, and a neighborhood activist. The vote to appoint Rodin was unanimous.

2/2/2021 — As we all know, it’s not unusual for the rainy season to start out relatively, well, un-rainy, and then for the state to get hit with a big storm — though not quite like this one. “This storm definitely has more water in it because of climate change,” explained Michael Wehner, a senior scientist who studies extreme weather events and their relationship to climate change at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. According to research from Wehner, climate change is driving processes that make winter storms drop more precipitation than has historically been the case in NorCal.

February 1, 2021 — An inmate of the Mendocino County jail died yesterday morning at the Ukiah Valley Medical Center. And a new health order will allow schools to begin the process of re-opening to in-person instruction for students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

Jan 29, 2021 — A renewed interest in using the old Howard Hospital in Willits as a psychiatric health facility revived community outcry and intimations of NIMBYism. The half-cent mental health sales tax enacted by Measure B has been in effect for about three of its five years. So far, a little over twenty one and a half million dollars have been collected. Some of the money has been used to purchase a training center in Redwood Valley and hire a contractor to remodel it. The architect Nacht and Lewis, which is also designing a new jail for the county, is almost finished with architectural plans for a Crisis Residential Treatment facility in Ukiah. The sheriff and the Ukiah Police Department are recruiting mental health workers to accompany law enforcement on calls involving psychiatric crises. But specialists to run the facilities that were the original goal of the measure have not been identified. Negotiations with a potential operator for the Ukiah facility are underway, and there’s a request for proposals from contractors to run a puff. When Old Howard Hospital was first considered as a site for the puff, the city was not enthusiastic about the idea. The Willits City Council passed an ordinance with recitals noting that the county had failed to provide the city any information about the project; that the Council believed the building does not conform to seismic and safety standards; and that the proposed use of the site does not comply with the city’s zoning requirements. The upshot of the ordinance was essentially a public records act request to the county, enfolded in a declaration of the city’s desire to be involved and informed in the decision-making process about the use of the property. But at this week’s meeting of the Measure B Citizens Oversight Committee, a sub-committee tasked with taking up the recommendations of a $30,000 report on how it should proceed brought up the issue again. The Kemper report, which was commissioned early in the committee’s tenure, calls for a variety of wellness and support services, but does not comment specifically on the hospital site. Dr. Jenine Miller, who runs the county’s behavioral health department and represents it on the Measure B committee, explained why she was bringing the topic forward again, urging the committee to consider the site as one of the most viable in the county, and pointing out that every community wants a puff, but “not in my backyard.” But Commissioner Shannon Riley blasted the item on multiple grounds, calling it “government at its worst.” She cited a lack of documentation, and the sub-committee’s failure to work on items it had been explicitly charged with, including bringing forth an update on a the status of the request for proposals from would-be contractors for the puff, an update on the strategic plan, or word about the doings of a financial consultant who was hired to help with the strategic plan. Commissioner Mark Mertle reminded the committee that the original estimate for remodeling the hospital was $17 million, but that this estimate is now out of date. Commissioner Ace Barrash said that psychiatric hospitals do not require the same level of seismic readiness that acute hospitals do. Dr. Mills Matheson of Willits worried that patients of the hospital would be released without housing and might swell the city’s homeless population. Both he and Sherrie Ebyam, a community member, returned to Riley’s point of not having any information about who would run the facility. “Why consider a particular site if you don’t know what the costs are, and if you don’t know what the available budget is for that site?” Ebyam asked. In the end, the committee did not even vote on the item. Chair Donna Moschetti paraphrased Commissioner Tom Allman’s suggestion to turn the matter over to the Board of Supervisors and the Willits City Council. “It’s been brought forth to the Measure B Committee,” she noted; “and if the supervisors want to run with it, run with it,” she concluded.

January 28, 2021 — People all over the county are still feeling the effects of Tuesday’s storm, which took out trees and crushed structures and cars. As of this afternoon, customers in almost every community are still without power, with Willits the hardest hit at 3,434 customers in the dark. Redwood Valley is next, with 1,728, then Laytonville and Covelo, with 1,321 and 1,256 respectively. Most of the county roads are now open, but there are still piles of brush on the road, including branches dangling from trees and power and telecommunication lines. A Greenfield resident reported that roads had been partially cleared, but that some houses and vehicles had been damaged. A lot of decks and outbuildings around the county have been splintered, in addition to hundreds of trees, especially madrones and oak trees that still have enough leaves to hold onto piles of snow. Kent Standley with the Department of Transportation reported that Bell Springs Road and Spy Rock roads are still closed. Sherwood Road and the main roads in Brooktrails are open, and crews are working to clear the smaller roads in the Brooktrails subdivision. The northern end of Tomki road is still closed, with PG&E working on downed power lines. At the bottom of the hill near the convergence of West and East Roads, there is still a slushy drift of snow and a power line draped across the right side of the road. I watched a big red pickup truck drive underneath it earlier this afternoon and continue on its way up the hill. Nancy Jameson, in downtown Redwood Valley, lost a historic barn full of hay when trees weighted with snow came down on the structure. As we walked through her property after I drove around the valley , she pointed out piles of branches and full-grown live oak trees that had simply been uprooted, their root balls six or eight feet across. By this afternoon, the horses seemed more or less adjusted to their pasture full of fallen trees. An Arab Tennessee Walker named Paintbrush was nibbling moss from the branches, while two other mares stood shoulder to haunch, napping on their feet. They’re not young horses, which Jameson says is lucky, or they would have done something stupid. Jameson and her family were able to save most of the hay, except for the bales that are still mashed directly under the tree that flattened the old barn. Two days after the storm, her huge flock of peacocks, which expanded after the 2017 fire, took shelter in another outbuilding or pecked around in the yard with a few of the chickens that ventured outside in the rain. A little blond cat and a rooster napped in another barn, and a shaggy pony, smaller than the two Pyrenees dogs, watched us calmly from the far side of his pen. “No lost animals or injured people,” Jameson reported. “We just have a lot of work. And a lot of firewood. But we all have stoves, so it works out.”

January 28, 2021 — Neighbors of an apartment building that will soon be dedicated to housing homeless people or those at risk of homelessness chimed in with ideas and concerns at a virtual town hall last night. The former Best Western Inn on Orchard Street in Ukiah is now part of Project Homekey, a state-funded program to renovate former motel rooms into small studio apartments. Megan van Sant, a senior program manager with the county’s HHSA department, told the more than forty attendees that the project would start taking referrals as early as next week, and that she hopes the complex, now called Live Oak Apartments, will open at the end of March. Not all the details have been worked out yet, but she said she’s planning to have a social worker and a social worker assistant on site during the day, and a security guard in the evening hours. She expects most of the residents to be referred to the apartments by other agencies, which will provide case management. The tenants will pay rent through programs like SSI or retirement, housing vouchers, or CalWorks...

January 27, 2021 — The Board of Supervisors agreed unanimously to move ahead with soil testing for a $35 million state-funded water and sewer project in Boonville yesterday, over objections from the Fair Board. And Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren reported that 11,000 people in Mendocino County have been vaccinated, including 70% of school staff. Four nursing homes have been vaccinated by pharmacies under the contract with the federal government, and the state is considering moving away from the equity-based method of vaccinations toward a system prioritizing the elderly. In Mendocino County, 308 of the 3293 known cases have occurred in people over 65, though most of the 36 deaths are among senior citizens. Fully a third of the known cases are in people between the ages of 19 and 34, and a little over fourteen hundred of the cases have been in people between the ages of 35 and 64. Board members also expressed dissatisfaction with the quality and the amount of information provided by Measure B project manager Alyson Bailey, unanimously approving a motion that read like a checklist of the update they expected...

January 26, 2021 — The Board of Supervisors took a significant step in rejiggering the cannabis codes yesterday, voting 4-1 to send a proposal more closely aligned with the state’s land use laws along to the Planning Commission. The board also voted unanimously to direct the Department of Transportation to continue working on a pilot program to create a benefit zone in Brooktrails, allowing the neighborhood to figure out how to collect a tax to maintain properties for fire safety. And last week, the superintendent of the Fort Bragg Unified School District gave a report to the board of trustees, telling them it is not feasible for schools in Mendocino County to reopen at this time, due to the high rate of positive covid tests. Mendocino has descended from the purple tier to the newly created deep purple tier, for counties with more than 14 positive test results per day per 100,000 residents. The county Board of Supervisors, which is meeting again today, held a special meeting yesterday afternoon to hash out the proposed cannabis code amendments, a document which will come before the Planning Commission, then return to the supervisors, then undergo a first and second reading before it replaces much of the original ordinance. Chief Planner Julia Krog ran through the general idea of the draft proposal, before the public weighed in for approximately two hours. The agenda item also generated more than a hundred written comments by individuals and organizations from across the spectrum of love and loathing for the plant. “The goal of this discretionary permit model is to really bring us into conformance with state regulations,” Krog explained. The reason it’s important to be more closely aligned with the state is that most local farmers can’t meet the state’s environmental requirements, which means that by the end of the year, they will not have state licenses and will therefore be unable to grow legally. The discretionary permit means that each site will be subject to environmental review, thus sparing the county the trouble and expense of generating an environmental impact report for the entire project of a cannabis ordinance, which is what happened the first time around. One of the highlights of the new proposal is that growers who applied during Phase I but were never able to make it through, will be allowed to reapply under Phase III, unless they are in sunset or opt-out zones. There are about 1,100 of these applicants, though some of them seem to have dropped off the map, not responding to attempts by county staff to make contact. The board also gave direction that cannabis farms should not be allowed to use generators or truck in water except in cases of emergency. This was in keeping with the Mendocino County Climate Action Advisory Committee’s concerns. That body also urged the board to give the nod only to cannabis cultivation in areas that are already developed, including agland, as long as it doesn’t degrade other forms of agricultural production.The board also included direction about preserving native soil and keeping the size of hoop houses under 10,000 square feet. The lingering question of whether or not grows should be allowed on rangeland came up, but this was shunted to the Planning Commission to sort out in the conditions for the use permits. Krog pointed out that the review process for each permit, which does allow some flexibility, is also supremely detailed, involving an analysis based on consultations with state maps of prime farmland and soils. An appendix attached to the agenda states that parcels in ag or rangeland zoning districts larger than ten acres may cultivate up to ten percent of the parcel area. This was the sticking point for Supervisor John Haschak, who voted against the proposal. The motion, which passed with his lone dissent, includes a request to the Planning Commission to return its report and recommendations to the Board of Supervisors within forty days. Another thing that is unlikely to see any movement until March is school reopenings, according to Fort Bragg Unified School District superintendent Rebecca Walker. Counties can’t even consider reopening schools until community-wide positive covid test results drop to 25 a day per 100,000 residents. And then, Walker calculates that the required weekly covid testing would cost the school district $110,000 a week, far more than the grants the state is offering to incentivize reopening. Schools can only reopen to in-person instruction for students in grades 7-12 if positive covid tests drop to seven per day. As of yesterday, the seven-day average was 23.57, for a population of a little under 90,000. Walker is not sure her district would be able to satisfy the covid testing requirements, even if testing capacity were available. The vaccinations are a bright spot. Three hundred teachers and staff from schools and preschools all along the coast got their first vaccines on the fifteenth of this month, and are...

The Noyo River, Pudding Creek, the Navarro. These are just some of the rivers that flow through Mendocino County. Starting from their headwaters in the chaparral hills, they wind down valleys of redwoods and pour out into the Pacific ocean. The rivers running through our county are some of the last left that still host wild California Central Coast Coho. Central Coast Coho, also referred to as CCC coho, are a genetically distinct subset of Coho Salmon that once flourished from Aptos Creek near Santa Cruz all the way up to the Eel. Old stories tell of rivers filled so thick with salmon that one could cross the river on their backs. But now, the species is on the brink of extinction. They are both federally and state endangered. “In the 1940s there were probably estimates of 400,000 coho that used to return to california. The most recent population data from 2018 had about 4,000 coho. CCC coho specifically. So we’re looking at returns that range between 1-6 percent of what historical population estimates were.” That’s Anna Halligan, North Coast Coho Project Manager of Trout Unlimited, which is a national conservation nonprofit with a Fort Bragg branch. They nonprofit works to protect cold water fish species and the places they need. You’ll hear from Halligan throughout this story. Coho have been present in this region since far before humans arrived and took it over, and Each year, conservationists, fisheries scientists, and fishermen alike hold their breath, waiting to see if the species will make it through another season.Late this fall, Trout unlimited completed three projects intended to support the Central Coast Coho fishery. They replaced old infrastructure along the Skunk Train’s path that was obstructing fish passage. So last week, I went with Halligan down to the location of one of the three project sites to check out the work they had done. The project opened up one mile of previously inaccessible coho habitat that Trout Unlimited claims is critical to the species reproductive success, and so ultimately, their survival. “Most people call this the noyo flats. We’re in kind of the upper headwaters of the noyo river. I’m actually standing on what will be a railroad track. I'm on the bed and looking down at what will be on that track.”The project I went to is located far down in a valley off of the north side of California State Route 20, where, running underneath the Skunk Train’s railroad tracks, the upper headwaters of the Noyo River flow slowly through a landscape of redwoods, alders, and willows. Crouching down on the bank of the newly restored stream bed, I put my hand in the water. It was clear and cold as it moved over a bed of gravel. I didn’t see any fish that day, but Halligan said that endangered central coast coho travel this tributary, downstream to the noyo and out to the ocean to grow big and strong or upstream back to their birthplace to spawn. The project was centered around replacing an old culvert that was blocking fish from reaching a mile of spawning habitat on a small tributary which is unceremoniously named Gulch C. “What was here was a pretty small culvert for the size of the channel that we have. We had an undersized culvert that was underneath the railroad bed. Usually when culverts are undersized what will happen is they act like a fire hydrant nozzle. It constricts the amount of water that comes through during storm events and then shoots it out like a fire hose and that causes all this erosion on the downstream end of the culvert. As it erodes the bottom of the culvert becomes what we called perched where it's sitting above the bed of the channel and above the surface of the water so that creates a big jump. Generally when we’re doing this we don’t want to engineer anything that has more than 6 inches of a jump height for juveniles and a foot for adults.”So basically, the old culvert was creating a cliff that salmon couldn’t get past in order to reach their spawning grounds. The project to reopen the habitat cost around one million dollars and included installing a new corrugated steel 30 foot wide culvert, building and installing a bridge and restoring a section of damaged stream bed. “I mean this project will open up a mile of habitat, and I guess you could say that’s not a lot. But that’s a mile that they don't have right now. And I do think that one of the best things we can do to help them as a species is provide them with the most and highest quality habitat.”Central Coast Coho, which are a metallic looking silver and blue-green fish are a keystone species. That means that other species that share its ecosystem depend on them for their survival and that without them, the ecosystem would dramatically change, likely to the detriment of other flora and fauna that live in it. So basically, they are very important. The downfall of coho salmon has had harmful impacts beyond the species and its ecosystem. The loss of the fish left Native communities which once relied on the

1/22/21 -- In the final days of a presidency with a propensity for environmental deregulation, the Trump administration tucked some final rollbacks under its belt. The administration opened conservation lands in California and Utah to development, loosened standards on home heating equipment and, most notably to the North Coast, reduced protected habitat for the infamous northern spotted owl by one-third. The owl, which is threatened under the state and federal endangered species acts, is native to northern California, Washington, and Oregon. The species has been the subject of heated debate for years, as it’s protection resulted in millions of acres of forests being closed to timber harvesting

January 22, 2021 — The progress of the vaccine rollout has been one of confusion, changing directives, vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy theories, and a mad rush for available shots, followed by resentment on the part of those who thought they might have had a chance, if they’d been looking at the right Facebook page at the right moment, or if they were on the right mailing list or if they worked for a large well-orgainzed employer like a school district. This was compounded last week, just as Mendocino County was moving into phase 1B, which includes workers in emergency services, education, and food and ag. It also includes older adults. On Wednesday, 1200 people, including hundreds of senior citizens, lined up in the rain at the fairgrounds in Ukiah to get their first shot. The same day, Governor Gavin Newsom dropped the high-priority age from 75 to 65, and said the elderly would be moved to the head of the line. The first allocations that counties received, to vaccinate healthcare workers, were based on an estimate of how many healthcare workers there were. According to last year’s demographic data from Healthy Mendocino, there are 19,656 people in the county over the age of 65. Another 38,608 people are under 18. That leaves just over 49,000 adults who will need to be vaccinated, plus people 16 and older with health conditions who will get their shot in phase 1C. I asked Assemblymember Jim Wood if he could clarify a few things from his perspective at the state level.

Jim Culp talks to a frustrated elder, as well as Supervisor Ted Williams, Mendocino Coast Clinic Executive Director Lucresha Renteria, and Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren, about why the vaccine isn't readily available.

Private landowner David Hull handed off 188 acres of land in the western hills above Ukiah to the city to use for conservation, recreation, and fire management.

January 19, 2021 — The Ukiah Unified School District, the largest in the county, met last week for an update on distance learning and the governor’s not-yet finalized proposal to partially reopen schools by mid-February. The California Safe Schools for All plan is an incentive program that would give schools grants to bring kids back into the classroom. And a letter signed by sixteen local doctors to Mendocino County leaders and representatives laid out in stark terms how detrimental distance learning has been for children, citing widening disparities in academic success and “more and more kids suffering from isolation, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, obesity and diabetes,” as well as an addiction to screens, social media and gaming. The letters’ signers include Dr. Drew Colfax of the regular KZYX Coronavirus Update, and Dr. Mark Luato, the county’s EMS medical director. It closes with the unambiguous exhortation that “Getting children back to in-person school now is essential!” Enrollment in the district is down slightly, and could go down further if Sanel Valley Academy, a charter school in Hopland, opens next year. The majority of students in the district have seen a decline in their academic assessments, with only about a third of them meeting proficiency levels in most areas. Most of the district’s 800 employees received their first round of the covid vaccine during events at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center on January 12 and 15. Assemblymember Jim Wood, who is also a forensic dentist, participated in giving some of the shots. In other vaccination news, the county reports that public health has vaccinated 5,970 people over the age of 18. That’s not counting those who have been immunized through hospitals, pharmacies, or the Indian health centers, which get their supplies through other channels in the state and federal government. According to a county press release, the approximately 1,200 people who came to the vaccination event at the Redwood Empire fairgrounds on January 13, many of them senior citizens who waited in a light rain for hours, have been vaccinated or scheduled for their first shot. Those who received their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on December 30 or 31 can receive their second shot on Thursday, January 21, between 9am and 4pm, at the Redwood Empire Fairgrounds in Ukiah. You’ll need your ID and the vaccine card you got with your first shot. Vaccines don’t play into the safety plan that schools must have if the governor’s proposal to reopen passes, but they could make it safer.

January 14, 2021 — Vaccination efforts on the coast are ramping up, with two clinics for firefighters and EMS workers plus a clinic tomorrow at the Fort Bragg high school for all the educators who want it. The hospital is putting together a list of patients who are eligible for a vaccine and will be the first to hear about it as soon as it arrives. The Mendocino Coast Clinics will be using 300 doses of Moderna it received from the county for tomorrow’s school clinic, and have received an approval email to get more directly from the state.

January 15, 2021 — Local community clinics have started vaccinations this week, and are reaching out to the elderly and people whose jobs put them at greater risk of exposure. Lucresha Renteria, the director of the Mendocino Coast Clinics, worked to get vaccines for today’s vaccination at Fort Bragg high school. Next week, she plans to put together lists of veterinarians, dental workers, and food and ag workers. And she’s weighing the possibility of doing a mass vaccination off-site, especially since there are about 800 elderly patients who have been to the clinic since January of 2018. For now, she’s reaching out to employers and going over the patient rolls. Leah Collins, a doctor at Anderson Valley Health Center, is asking anyone in the valley who want a vaccine to fill out a survey at the Anderson Valley Health Center’s facebook page or website, so the clinic can contact people when they become eligible. You can also call the clinic at 895-3477.

January 14, 2021 — The governor is seeking early action from the legislature that would provide grants to incentivize local school districts to start reopening for in-person instruction as early as February 15, starting with kids in pre-K through second grade. Students from third to sixth grade would start a month later. Schools would need an agreement with the unions and a strategy for complying with safety criteria from the state, which is set to come out this week. Parents could still keep their children at home if they don’t feel safe about sending them to class. Schools in purple-tier counties like Mendocino would be able to reopen, as long as the average daily rate of infections does not exceed 28 per 100,000 residents. But local educators worry about the source of the funding, and whether it will even be enough to cover the costs of the required testing.

January 13, 2021 — Hundreds of people lined up at the Redwood Empire Fairgrounds in Ukiah this morning, in hopes of getting one of the 400 covid vaccines that were available. The line started at the gates and wound around the parking lot past the RV park. The crowd consisted of workers in the food and ag sectors, caregivers, first responders, and dozens of elderly people who had been waiting in a light rain, some of them with wheelchairs or walkers, for hours, We’ll hear from some of the hopefuls, and Dr. William Miller, the Chief of Staff at Adventist Health Mendocino Coast.

1/11/2021 - Last water year was the third driest on record in the upper Russian River watershed. In downtown San Francisco, the 2020 calendar year was the second driest since record keeping began in 1850, and forecasts are showing a dry January on the horizon. Needless to say, we may be barreling towards drought in 2021, which could lead to curtailments in water use like we saw in 2014. That year, entire municipalities lost their access to water. In anticipation of this, prominent leaders and water managers of the Mendocino County Farm Bureau, Russian River Flood Control, and the City of Ukiah have banded together to advocate for local interests in the case of a water shortage.

January 11, 2021 — Last Monday, Public Health, Adventist Health Ukiah Valley, and the City of Ukiah administered 830 doses of the Moderna vaccine that were at risk of losing viability after a freezer failure at the hospital. They did it in about two hours, and had to turn people away. Not everybody who wanted one got it, but sometimes it helps to make a little bit of noise, as Anthony Adams, a lawyer in the public defenders office found after he called in to the board of supervisors meeting the following day to complain about being overlooked. We followed up with Adams on Friday. He wanted to be clear that he’s only representing his own personal perspective in the following interview. He’s been vaccinated since Monday, but he’s still concerned about how courthouse working conditions make it hard to keep socially distant. For example, it’s impossible to have a confidential conversation with clients during an open court proceeding without leaning in close to whisper advice. Under ordinary circumstances, Adams also confers with incarcerated clients, which is much more difficult now with covid and the outbreak at the jail. He thinks the jail is doing everything it can to reasonably accommodate the need for legal representation, with a video conferencing system and a couple of rooms in the lobby, where he can meet with clients in person through plexiglass. Still, the public health emergency is making it really hard to make sure untried people can enjoy their constitutional rights and the presumption of innocence.