KZYX News

January 7, 2020 — The sheriff’s presentation before the board of supervisors this week elicited critiques of his data, a request for a resident deputy in Covelo, and demands for him to issue a formal apology for including an image of a hog-tied Black man on a PowerPoint slide. Sheriff Matt Kendall was asking the board to give him the go-ahead to request funding from the state to hire, train and equip ten more deputies to combat organized crime and cartel grows, which he says have proliferated in the Third District, especially Covelo. The total three-year estimate for the deputies, their training and their gear, including vehicles, came out to a little over $4 million. To justify the request, the sheriff included seventeen SWAT activations, two of them out-of-county assists, an increase in coroner’s cases, and a list of major crimes per year, going back to 2014. Homicides in 2020 were up to 13 from 8 the previous year, though they climbed to 18 the year before that. Assaults, including sexual assault and assault with a deadly weapon, public intoxication, and child abuse are down, but Kendall fears reporting is down, too. And some of the violent crimes have involved multiple perpetrators, which presents time-consuming complications. But written and oral comments called out the incomplete data. Chloe Reed wrote that the cumulative statistics on another slide are “essentially meaningless in the context of this proposal,” because they provided no comparison data. Other commenters asked for resources to be allocated to out-of-work families or social workers to address the underlying causes of crime. The slide that troubled everyone had two pictures and a caption but no explanation. The image under the words Imminent Threat portrayed a shadowy figure with an assault rifle, carrying a large bundle on its back, presumably a game camera still from a robbery at a cannabis garden. The next image, beneath the words Appropriate Response, is of a Black man lying in the dirt, covered with dust, his hands tied behind his back and his legs bent behind him. Kendall says that the picture is an instance of vigilante violence from a garden robbery in Laytonville last year, and that it’s the kind of thing that could be prevented if there was enough law enforcement in the area. But Ron Edwards, a licensed nursery owner in Willits who has been a long time advocate in the regulation process, wanted more information. He’s also a Black man, and he was livid about the image. No apology for the image was forthcoming, but the board appeared to agree that the item needed more data, voting unanimously to have Supervisors Ted Williams and John Haschak work with the sheriff to document crime related to illegal pot and come back to the board with a more comprehensive presentation before sending it along to the state.

Jan 6, 2021 — Yesterday was the first board of supervisors meeting of the new year, and the first one ever for First District Supervisor Glenn McGourty and Second District Supervisor Maureen Mulheren, who were sworn in on Monday. Judson Howe, the new CEO for the local Adventist hospitals, was also on hand for a bit of an after-action review of a malfunctioning hospital freezer that set off a mad dash to vaccinate hundreds of people in two hours. There were 830 Moderna vaccines in that hospital’s freezer, which exceeded eight degrees centigrade at 2am on Monday morning after the compressor and the malfunction alarm failed. The vaccine is not viable after more than twelve hours at room temperature. Because the malfunction was not discovered until 11:35 on Monday morning, hospital and public health staff reasoned that they had until 2pm to make sure none of the vaccines were wasted. Howe doesn’t know how much warmer than eight degrees the freezer got, but does not believe it was more than room temperature. Yesterday morning, we reported that the freezer contained 340 vaccines that were part of the county’s 400-dose allotment of the Moderna drug, and that the rest was part of the hospital’s allotment. Another sixty, we said, had been set aside for a planned vaccine clinic at the fairgrounds in Ukiah. But in a brief interview after yesterday’s meeting, Howe said all 400 of the county’s doses were in the hospital’s freezer. The hospital gave 200 of those doses to public health, which then passed them along to the city of Ukiah and the jail, which set up emergency clinics to distribute the vaccines. The hospital gave the county an additional sixty doses from an additional cache of its own vaccines, which were being stored in a different freezer at the hospital in Willits. 101 northbound from Ukiah to Willits was closed due a jackknifed big rig, but the southbound road from Willits to Ukiah was open. We’ll hear details from hospital and county staff about the mass vaccination and the rollout of the vaccine program.

January 5, 2021 — Two new county supervisors were sworn in yesterday morning, shortly before the compressor went out in a freezer containing 830 doses of the Moderna vaccine at the Ukiah Valley Adventist Hospital. Adventist Health and the county’s public health department get separate allocations of vaccines from the state. So far, the county has received one batch of 975 doses from Pfizer and one batch of 400 from Moderna. Most of the county’s allocation of 400 doses was in the malfunctioning freezer, minus sixty that were used at a clinic at the fairgrounds in the afternoon. CEO Carmel Angelo said that the scheduled clinic did proceed as planned. As for the unexpectedly defrosted medicine, Public Health Officer Dr. Andrew Coren said “every one of those vaccines found a person’s arm,” after the city of Ukiah, three nursing homes and a church were among the entities that put together emergency clinics to administer all the vaccines before they were presumed to expire at 2pm. A hospital spokeswoman confirmed that after the freezer’s compressor failed, an alarm that would have alerted staff also failed. She said a manual log indicated the exact time of the power failure, which is how administrators knew, at around 11:30 in the morning, that they only had a few hours to find the arms they needed. Tami Bartolomei, the emergency management coordinator for the city of Ukiah, reported that her team took about fifteen minutes to put together a clinic at the conference center. City EMTs gave the vaccine to over a hundred people, including seven floor staff from Building Bridges, the homeless shelter. Sheriff Matt Kendall said NaphCare nurses from the jail inoculated 94 sheriff’ s department and other county personnel, including himself, in the Donovan Room, near the Emergency Operations Center. An eyewitness to the scene at the hospital, where vaccines were also being given out, described people running from all directions and lines snaking into the hospital and a nearby doctor’s office. The tier structure was not strictly observed during the rush to dispose of the vaccine. Changed plans were the order of the day. Before everyone in Ukiah who was qualified to give a vaccine suddenly found themselves doing just that, another long-anticipated event took place in the hallway at the county administrative building. A full rainbow arched across the sky over Low Gap, but intermittent rain scotched the plans for an outdoor ceremony. Inside, air filters blared and masked family members stood at a distance as First District Supervisor Glenn McGourty and Second District Supervisor Maureen Mulheren were sworn in to their new offices. The agenda for the new supervisors’ first meeting is packed, with first of the year administrative matters as well as attempts to address homelessness, cannabis, and law enforcement. Supervisors will discuss the installation of kitchenettes at the former Best Wester Inn in Ukiah, to turn hotel rooms into living units for homeless people. The cannabis ad hoc committee will bring forward a proposal it hopes will nudge more phase 1 growers toward a state license. And the sheriff will present a plan to try to get the state to pay for more deputies to fight organized crime and illegal grows. There’s also an item on the consent calendar recommending a retroactive agreement with former Public Health Officer Dr. Noemi Doohan for $100,000 effective for the entire year of 2021.

January 4, 2021 — The covid outbreak at the jail continues and has spread to the women’s facility. A total of 90 people have tested positive at the jail since the outbreak began on December 19th, including 77 inmates and 13 staff. As of Sunday night, there are 59 active cases among inmates and seven active among deputies and other staff. Eighteen inmates have recovered or been released, and six staff have completed their isolation. The population at the jail fluctuates, but it’s around 250 people. When kzyx spoke with Sheriff Matt Kendall last night, he said a second inmate had just been hospitalized because of low oxygen levels. One of the hospitalized inmates is in the ICU, but is not on a ventilator. Kendall himself was in quarantine due to a close contact, but has tested negative twice. We’ll hear details from the sheriff.

January 1, 2021 — The coronavirus vaccine has arrived during a surge in covid-19 cases and an outbreak at the jail that has tripled over the course of the week. There are currently 47 inmates in the jail who have tested positive. Nine employees have tested positive since the outbreak started on December 19, and four of them have made it through their isolation period. Another twelve inmates who tested positive have been released, for a total of 68 people so far who are known to have the virus. Sheriff Matt Kendall said cases have ranged from asymptomatic to mild flu-like symptoms. The outbreak is still confined to the men’s jail. Some test results are still pending. As the jail works to monitor its staff and inmates, the vaccination effort is rolling out at Carl Purdy Hall at the fairgrounds in Ukiah. Nash Gonzalez and Adrienne Thompson, of Planning and Building Services, are in charge of making sure everything goes according to plan. Thompson says there’s a reason for that.

People on the streets of Mendocino Village talk about how to say goodbye to 2020 and hello to 2021.

December 30, 2020 — The Ukiah City Council will be short one member as soon as Second District Supervisor-elect Maureen Mulheren leaves the council to take her seat on the Board of Supervisors next week. Earlier this month, the Council voted to fill her seat by appointment rather than special election. The council has replaced departing members by appointment at least since 1947, according to a document put together by City Clerk Kristine Lawler. In 2013, when Mari Rodin left, the council did call for a special election, but Steve Scalmanini was the only candidate, so the election was canceled and he was appointed instead. A special election would cost the city $30,000, since there are no other jurisdictions to share the check. The application for the current open position is due at noon on January 21st. It’s pretty extensive, asking would-be council members about the top three to five most important issues facing the city, how they would resolve a situation where their personal philosophy is at odds with what’s best for the city, and requesting that they weigh in on public safety, infrastructure, economic development, and quality of life, among other issues. The council meets on the first and third Wednesday of every month, and the meeting on the sixth has been cancelled, so it will be down one member for only one session. There is a special meeting on Thursday the 28th, where the council will review the applications, but no decision is required until 60 days after the official date of resignation, which is Monday, January 4. Of the seven candidates who ran in November, Doug Crane and Josefina Duenas won the two seats in contention. Jenny Kimbler, who came in third place, created a social media furor when she used her candidate Facebook page to call for extra-judicial shootings of protesters. A screenshot of the post, which was filled with obscenities, misspellings, and unconventional punctuation choices, appeared on MendoFever a month before the election. In a letter to the editor that ran in the MendoVoice last week, Kimbler thanked her supporters, who knew what was truly in her heart. “If we all agreed with one another all the time, no new solutions would emerge,” she wrote. She went on to say that the past few months have made her realize that she does not need to be on the City Council to make a difference for her community. Earlier this week, we reached out to Scalmanini and Brian Erickson, who were also on the ballot, but both of them were undecided as to whether or not they would apply for the open seat. Ed Donovan said he was not planning to apply. Ahead of the December 16 meeting where the council chose to appoint a fifth member, he and another community member wrote to the council recommending that they choose the remaining candidate, Cameron Ramos. In arguments to dissuade the council from choosing the third-place runner-up, Donovan quoted a few of the more pungent excerpts from Kimbler’s now infamous post, and another letter-writer said she trusts that anyone advocating violence will not be considered for the position. Ramos had not submitted an application when we checked last night, but earlier this week, he said he was planning to.

December 29, 2020 — Food banks are a lifeline for people living on the financial edge: seniors, families, and those with little job security. We’ll hear from volunteers at three food banks from three very different communities in Mendocino County: Gualala, Anderson Valley, and Ukiah.

Listen to the many contributions of area churches as they present a virtual Christmas concert on youtube.

December 24, 2020 — The synthetic opioid fentanyl is a huge problem in the US right now, according to Sheriff Matt Kendall, who sees some of the social effects first-hand. “It is the biggest problem,” he says, because fentanyl is so much cheaper than methamphetamine or heroin to make. “I believe there’s more fentanyl on the streets right now than heroin,” he added. “This is going to be the new epidemic.” It’s a scary substance. In 2018, the CDC, in partnership with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, put out a video from police body cams that purported to show police officers in Virginia being accidentally exposed to fentanyl. Closer to home, the sheriff reported earlier this month that a deputy at the jail had accidentally been exposed to the drug while cleaning a cell where an inmate had suffered a severe overdose from fentanyl that had somehow been smuggled in. The deputy started feeling woozy, received a dose of Narcan, and was taken to the hospital for observation. He was wearing PPE, including a mask, gloves, and long sleeves. He was also wearing eyeglasses, but not protective goggles. Kendall says it’s impossible to be exposed to fentanyl through the skin, but he thinks the deputy may have been affected by powder that got into a cut on his skin, into his eyes, or by inhaling it. But Dr. Rachel Winograd, a clinical psychologist who works as an associate research professor at the University of Missouri St. Louis, the Missouri Institute of Mental Health, says that sounds impossible. Her work revolves around the role of opioids in what she and others in the field call “the worsening poisoning crisis.” She’s especially concerned with effective, equitable treatments for addiction. In August of this year, she led a team that researched and published an article on misinformation about the risks of accidental fentanyl contact. ”I suppose if you walked into a cloud of fentanyl dust in the air, then technically when you breathe it in, it would get into your system,” she conceded. But typically, getting affected by the drug requires something much more intentional. Users inject it, snort it, insert it rectally, or apply a fentanyl patch, which last is the most common legal use. Kendall says the substance that was found in the inmate’s cell, including on the bed sheets, had preliminary tests done on it before it was shipped off to the California Department of Justice for a full analysis, which has not come back yet. Any toxicology tests that may have been performed on the deputy would be privileged medical information. “You’ll notice that in all the anecdotal reports and accounts of first responders falling ill to overdose from incidental fentanyl exposure, there are zero reports of toxicology that match the anecdote,” Winograd says. “It’s not what’s happening. Something else might be happening, maybe more related to some panic, or nerves, fear, anxiety...but it’s not an overdose.” In a 2017 position paper on incidental fentanyl exposure to first responders, the American College of Medical Toxicology and the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology agree that “the risk of clinically significant exposure to emergency responders is extremely low.” The paper goes on to say that, while terrorists in Russia killed 125 people with a weaponized aerosolized carfentanil mixture, an unprotected individual exposed to “the highest airborne concentration encountered by workers” would require 200 minutes of such exposure to reach a dangerous dose. Absorption of liquid fentanyl does increase with broken skin. The paper cites a veterinarian who was quickly affected after being splashed in the eyes and mouth with a dart containing a mixture of carfentanil and xylazine, but says that facial contact with liquid or powder opioids is unlikely. Winograd’s team has started incorporating accurate information about the hazards of incidental exposure, or lack thereof, into a law enforcement training program. She says lives could be on the line. “By the end of our training, we had pretty overwhelming results that we were able to bust this myth in the minds of those who attended our trainings,” she reported. “And the idea there, why that matters, is that if first responders are really scared that they are going to overdose themselves, or put themselves in harm’s way when they go to save someone’s life from an overdose, then that’s going to deter them from doing it...or it will at least slow them down if they feel like they need to put on a bunch of protective equipment...if you take an extra two minutes to don a bunch of PPE, that could cost someone their life.”

MENDOCINO, 12/23/2020 - Cal Fire has six timber harvest plans lined up for Jackson Demonstration State Forest. The first plan is slated to begin this spring. Jackson is California's largest state forest and is home to a significant amount of the states redwood trees. Local conservation group, the Mendocino Trail Stewards, doesn't want the logging to happen. They think that, considering climate change, the forest should be left alone, only used for carbon sequestration and non motorized recreation. Cal Fire says that's not going to happen. On Sunday, I met up with some members of the trail stewards, to find out a little more about their concerns and desires for the state forest they love. This audio piece dives into what I discovered.

As a health care professional, Miranda Ramos has a heightened awareness of limiting exposure to the virus. Nevertheless, she contracted the disease, and chose to share her experience online, and with the KZYX audience.

December 21, 2020 — The legal cannabis industry in Mendocino County is more uncertain than ever, with a local ordinance that does not set up local growers for success in getting their annual licenses from the state. Those will be required by the first of the year in 2022. The local program started out in the ag department, which is on its fifth ag commissioner since the regulatory process started, then moved over to planning and building, where Megan Dukett is now the second cannabis program manager to try to sort things out. She’s the third, if you count Kelly Overton, who fled into the desert after a few months on the job amid purported clashes with Harinder Grewal, the ag commissioner whose legal troubles with the county have surfaced in closed sessions of the board of supervisors. More than a thousand growers are in the queue to get their permits from the county, which does not require site-specific environmental reviews but does call for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to conduct sensitive species reviews on potential grow sites. However, there’s no funding to pay the agency to do that work, and CDFW has not indicated that it’s willing to do the job for free. Meanwhile, growers have gotten tired of resubmitting minutiae-laden paperwork and paying to bring their properties up to a standard that’s acceptable for growing weed. A huge problem for Dukett is that many of the applications are incomplete. She reported that the response rate to letters from her office requesting more information has been less than stellar. At a cannabis town hall last week, led by Supervisors John Haschak and Ted Williams, Haschak said that, in light of the fast-approaching deadline for annual licences, the focus of conversations with state leadership has been about the California requirement for site-specific CEQA reviews.

December 18, 2020 — The covid-19 vaccine is here, but leading medical experts urge continuing safety measures, like mask-wearing and staying home for the holidays. The list of who can be vaccinated in phase 1b, the next round of shots, is still being developed, but Lori Nezhura, co-chair of the vaccine task force at the California Office of Emergency Services, says food and ag workers, emergency workers, and people in the field of education are likely to be on it. We’re in phase 1a now, with healthcare workers getting the first doses. There are about three million people in that phase. Still, help has arrived during the state’s worst surge, which healthcare workers fear will lead to a rising death toll. But it also means more people than ever will have recovered from the virus by the time it’s their turn to get the shot. Dr. Matt Willis, the public health officer for Marin County, says the vaccine is safe for covid survivors like himself. He and Nezhura were panelists, along with UCLA infectious disease expert Dr. Timothy Brewer, at a coronavirus town hall moderated by Senator Mike McGuire last night. Dr. Brewer said there’s been a 740% increase in cases since Halloween, which was a tipping point for the virus. There’s been a 400% increase in hospitalizations, and a 350% increase in deaths since a day that is generally seen as the kickoff to the holiday season.

December 18, 2020 — Uyen Thai, a pharmacist resident at Adventist Health Ukiah Valley, says she felt honored to be chosen for the historic role she played yesterday afternoon, when the first recipients of the first doses of the covid 19 Pfizer vaccine to hit the county rolled up their sleeves for her and her colleague Jenny Nyugen so they could be immunized in front of their friends, colleagues, and most of the English-speaking press corps of inland Mendocino County. Dr. Mark Luato, who serves as the EMS director, was the very first person in the county to be vaccinated. As promised earlier this week on the coronavirus update, he took it very well.

Globally, wildfires are getting more frequent and more extreme, and in Mendocino County it’s no different. Actually, wildfire is part of the natural ecosystem process in Mendocino, so it’s an inevitable part of life in this region of the north coast. And climate change, a failure to manage forests properly, and building in wildland-urban-interfaces has only made the situation worse. Earlier this month, In response to this issue, the Mendocino Fire Safe Council rolled out a video series to help residents prepare for this inescapable part of life in the County. The videos guide residents through the steps of protecting their property from fire.

December 16, 2020 — Supervisors Carre Brown and John McCowen were honored at their last Board of Supervisors meeting yesterday, with Senator Mike McGuire and Assemblyman Jim Wood sharing a retrospective of their accomplishments. Public Health Officer Dr. Andrew Coren disclosed new school guidance loosening restrictions on cohorts, which Ukiah Unified School District Superintendent Deb Kubin said will allow schools to open to in-person instruction for one period per day. That guidance can be acted upon four weeks after the county re-enters the red tier, as per regulations put out by the state. Right now, Mendocino County is firmly in the purple tier, surpassing 2,000 known cases earlier this week. All the residents of Building Bridges, the homeless shelter in Ukiah, are in hotel rooms as Redwood Community Services cleans the premises after an outbreak that led to a quarantine. Covid vaccines are likely to arrive in Mendocino County this week, but Coren advised the Board to look into establishing a mass casualty plan, because he expects the next few months to be the worst yet. Nash Gonzalez, who is heading up the vaccine distribution, reported that the county expects to receive 975 doses of the Pfizer vaccine this week, though next week’s distribution has come into question.

December 15, 2020 — The cannabis ordinance has been a puzzle for years: how to move culltivators through the county permit process and on to a state license, which will be required as of January first, 2022? The state requires site-specific CEQA review for every grow, which the county does not. State agencies and the county are short on staff, and there are over a thousand cultivators waiting in the queue to get their county permits. The Board of Supervisors formed an ad hoc committee, consisting of Supervisors Ted Williams and John Haschak, to figure out how to fit the state and county pieces together. They’re hosting a virtual town hall tomorrow afternoon at 4:00, to try and catch everyone up on the latest information.

December 14, 2020 — December 12 is an important day for local Catholics, who celebrated the birthday of the Vigin of Guadalupe this Saturday in their cars, with no singing, no live music, and lots of social distance. It was unlike any of the previous celebrations, which were sometimes lavish, with parades to the Redwood Empire Fairgrounds and mariachi bands and lights and food and a Mass before dawn. Carlos Jacinto, a local playwright who helps organize church events and theatrical productions, talks about this year’s celebration: what was special about it, and what he’s looking forward to next year.

December 11, 2020 — A narrow section of land long claimed by the historic cemetery in Redwood Valley is under dispute, with a neighboring property owner saying the land is his and he wants it back. Now the district wants to find the descendants of people it believes are buried in unmarked graves in the fifteen by hundred foot strip.

The year 2040 may seem like the distant future. But the Ukiah is already making decisions about what the city will look like in 20 years. Currently, the city of Ukiah is working on it’s 2040 general plan. A general plan is a document that outlines the goals for the cities or towns creating them. The State of California requires local jurisdictions to update or re-write their general plans periodically. The 2040 general plan has the potential to define Ukiah’s future. It will lay out how land and resources are used for the next two decades and how projects the city takes on will be prioritized. It will create a long term plan that guides decisions about zoning, housing development, infrastructure, and more. Additionally, the general plan is an important way to plan, long term, for a green future. The plan is required to consider environmental equity and sustainability. It’s supposed to be written considering California’s goals of reaching carbon neutrality by 2045The city started working on its 2040 general plan over a year ago, in May 2019. On Monday and Tuesday Nights, the general plan committee held two identical meetings, where they consulted ukiah residents about land use. Between the two meetings, around 60 people attended. This was their third round of community meetings since may of 2019. The meeting was led by Rick Rust, a consultant from the Sacramento based planning and development group Mintier Harnish, which was hired by the city for around 350,000 to write the city’s general plan. The meeting was informative and filled with passionate Ukiah Residents or people who are otherwise invested in the city's future. Just some of the topics discussed last night were creating evacuation routes, building parks, investing in more low-income housing, incentivizing developers to make their way to Ukiah, and creating a green and sustainable city.Although the meeting was packed full of information, I wanted to find out more about when the plan will actually be written and implemented and how the city of Ukiah General Plan committee will make sure that community member input is considered when writing and implementing the plan. To hear from Craig Schlatter, director of community development, listen to the full story.

December 9, 2020 — The Board of Supervisors spent the whole morning yesterday on the novel coronavirus update, with reports from Dr. Coren and Dr. Doohan, high-level hospital staff, and the CEO of Redwood Community Services, who reported on the outbreak at Building Bridges, the homeless shelter and day program in Ukiah. Yesterday, 37 new cases were reported countywide, and the day before, another covid patient died on the South Coast, bringing the death count up to 24. Jason Wells, the president of Adventist Health in Mendocino County, assured the board that, with cross-trained staff and ventilators, the hospital could bring its current sixteen ICU beds up to 45. The state is only counting sixteen beds in its calculations of the county’s contribution to regional ICU capacity. Currently, 10% of the hospital’s workforce is out on medical leave, but Wells is confident that the 23-hospital system could rely on highly trained National Guard personnel if the surge demanded it. The best case scenario is that vaccines will arrive in the county in a week or two. Adventist Health Medical Officer Dr. Bessant Parker told the board that healthcare personnel caring for covid patients in the emergency department would be first in line for the new vaccine, followed by ICU staff, then those on the regular medical and surgical wards. Coren said the county has purchased one deep freezer that will be suitable for storing the Pfizer vaccine, but that there may be a delay in the delivery. In the meantime, he said the hospital is willing to share its refrigeration capacity with the county. Victoria Kelly, the CEO of Redwood Community Services, reported that staff and clients of Building Bridges are in quarantine or isolation. Eight clients who tested positive are isolating hotel rooms. Everyone else who was on the premises when the outbreak started has been determined to be a close contact, and has been quarantining on site since Thursday. Public health conducted PCR tests yesterday, and testing is being carried out twice a week until everyone tests negative. RCS and the Adventist Health Street Medicine team are still offering services, and Plowshares has been providing some of the meals. None of the staff has tested positive at this time. In an off-agenda item, Supervisor John McCowen and Supervisor Ted Williams brought forward a resolution to prioritize available county resources to assure effective enforcement of local health orders. Williams cited Facebook complaints about large gatherings, and McCowen relayed reports of people working out inside gyms. John Martire, the head of the Special Investigations Unit, said his office had gotten 23 calls for service in the month of November. He added that he regularly hears about violations days after the fact, and insisted that his office does prioritize complaints about large gatherings. The board also adopted a hazard mitigation plan for other disasters, which must be updated and approved every five years in order to receive FEMA hazard mitigation grants. The county, the four cities, and the Mendocino Office of Education participated in the plan, which identified the top hazards facing the area, and pointed the way to a variety of grant programs to preemptively reduce damage, largely by investing in infrastructure. Wildfire ranked highest on the risk matrix, squarely in the middle of the highly likely probability with catastrophic impact, followed closely by earthquake. The plan lays out mitigation actions, priorities, which agency is responsible, and whether the actions can be covered by the existing budget or if other sources of revenue should be sought out. The board also agreed unanimously to adopt an urgency ordinance to clean up fire debris and remove hazard trees from private properties that were damaged during the August Complex and Oak fires. Thirteen owners of damaged properties have signed right of entry agreements with a state-funded debris removal program, three have made private arrangements, and 14 have taken no action. The ordinance allows the county to declare those properties a nuisance and a health hazard and to abate the nuisance. The ordinance will appear on the consent calendar to be formally adopted next week, after county counsel fine tunes some language about the definition of hazard trees on private property.

12/8/2020 - If you’re a PG&E customer, you should start preparing yourself for an increase in your electricity bill. On March 1st, a rate hike of 8 percent will take effect. The boost was approved by the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday, December 3rd. And According to reporting done by the Associated Press, it will result in an average increase of $13.44 per month, or 161 dollars and 28 cents per year for residential customers across Northern California. Rate increases over the next few years, including this one, will add up to 1.15 billion additional dollars in revenue for PG&E. The utility company says they plan to use their funds to update their outdated equipment, equipment which has been blamed for igniting catastrophic wildfires over the past few years. But this will come at a cost to consumers, as it will further tighten the budgets of Californians struggling to make ends meet during the pandemic. The approval didn’t come lightly. Rather, it came after a two year battle between PG&E and a variety of consumer advocacy groups that rejected the idea that customers should have to pay for updates that, as one source said, PG&E neglected for years. In the full story, you'll hear from Mindy Spatt, representative of consumer advocacy group The Utilities Reform Network, who believes that in light of the pandemic and subsequent economic hardship, the rate hike should be frozen. You'll also hear from Paul Doherty, communications representative at PG&E, who says that the rate hike is necessary in order for PG&E to continue to safely and reliably provide electricity.

12/8/2020 - Lead Park Ranger at Lake Mendocino, Poppy Lozzoff, admitted that the water level at the lake looks terrifyingly low. “As a visitor, it is a dramatic site to see so much exposed ground,” she wrote in an email.Lake Mendocino currently sits at 712 ft above sea level. That’s very low. But despite years of dry conditions and the fact that California water year 2019 to 2020 was the third driest in the Upper Russian River watershed in recorded history, it’s not the lowest the lake has ever been. Which is thanks to FIRO, or Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations (pronounced FEE-roh) — a satellite weather forecasting tool to manage water availability and increase water reliability. Without FIRO, there may have been a water shortage this year.Lake Mendocino is the location of the first ever FIRO trial. For over six years, government agencies and academic institutions have been testing FIRO out at Lake Mendocino. They’re trying to find out, in light of years of droughts and floods, if the new management tool will be feasible to use across the west to more efficiently manage water.Lake Mendocino is a man-made reservoir that was created when the Coyote Valley dam was constructed in 1958. Because the lake is artificial, water managers can control how much water is released or stored and when.Before the arrival of FIRO, the lake was being managed based on a manual from the 1950s that had last been updated in the 1980s. FIRO’s forecasting tools allow water manager to better dial in how much water to keep in the lake at any given time.Without FIRO, the lake would have sunk to its lowest elevation of all time and have 18% less water than it does now, according to Lozzoff and other officials familiar with the project. Army Corps Engineer Nick Malasavage, who has been with the project since its inception, said that if not for the use of FIRO, there likely would have been a water shortage and therefore limits placed on businesses and people that rely on Lake Mendocino water.However, even with FIRO and the technology it brings to the table, the Russian River water system, which includes the lake, is still being stretched thin by climate change and subsequent drought. This year, the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the lake, had to reduce flows going into the Russian in order to keep sufficient water storage in the reservoir.During water year 2019 to 2020, which came to a close on September 30, the region around the lake received 34.8% of normal precipitation, compared to historical averages from the last 127 years. That number comes from measurements at the Ukiah rain gage. As climate change continues to bring more extreme weather conditions — fewer, more intense storms during the rainy season and hotter, longer dry spells during the summer months, data and forecast based water management will become increasingly important. However, it’s not a silver bullet to providing reliable water in the west. FIRO is complicated, and each reservoir is impacted by a variety of factors including climate and users. Applying FIRO principles to other bodies of water around the west and the country will not be an easy feat.

December 7, 2020 — On Wednesday night, Ukiah City Councilman Juan Orozco became the city’s first Latino mayor. He took over from newly re-elected Councilman Douglas Crane, and will serve in the role for one year. Orozco has been on the council since 2018. Josefina Duenas, who was newly elected on November third, was seated on the Council for a four-year term. Orozco was born in Mexico and came to Mendocino County with his sister as a young man. He worked in the vineyards and orchards of Anderson Valley and started learning English and taking classes at Mendocino College. He went on to Sonoma State, where he minored in Chicano and Latino studies. Then he got an emergency teaching credential at Dominican University, which allowed him to work as a substitute teacher. We’ll hear from the new mayor and Roseanne Ibarra, who is the co-founder of the Mendocino Latinx Alliance and part of the recently created Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force, which succeeded in getting the county to publish covid information in Spanish and provide simultaneous translation of the press conferences with the county health officer. She’s also the director of community well-being for the county’s three Adventist hospitals. All these roles make her acutely aware of various disparities, especially now, that 65% of the known covid infections are among the county’s Latino population. It’s been a tough year. But there’s also been a groundswell of organization in the Latino community, with the formation of the task force and a new promotores de salud program, which trains Spanish-speaking community health workers to educate people about how to stay healthy and safe. Both initiatives are likely to remain relevant, even after the pandemic subsides. With Orozco working to hire more bilingual staff and working to get city communications out in Spanish, both community leaders are hopeful that more of the population will feel adequately represented.

December 3, 2020 — More than 90% of the electorate turned out to vote in the race for board members in the Mendocino City Community Services District, which oversees sewer, water, and streetlights in the town of Mendocino. Given the famous saying about whiskey and water, it’s not hard to see why.

December 2, 2020 — For years, the Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center has worked with local faith groups to run a winter homeless shelter, which houses 15-24 people in addition to the year-round shelter and the transitional housing programs. This year, with pandemic safety measures in place, the year-round shelter has reduced its beds from 24 to 17, and the center is scrambling to find staff to operate the winter shelter at a new site. The Board of Supervisors recently passed an urgency ordinance to allow properties in the coastal zone to operate as shelters without a use permit, and there are three potential properties where the shelter could open in the new year, as long as there are enough people to run it. Hospitality Center interim Director Paul Davis talked about efforts to bring people in out of the cold. Applications to work at the winer shelter are available at the Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center’s webpage.

December 1, 2020 — Last week, retired sheriff Tom Allman announced on Facebook that he would start serving as a peace officer in Humboldt County, where he was born and raised. The Humboldt County sheriff, William Honsal, wrote in his own statement that Allman would end a nearly decade-long vacancy in the Lost Coast Resident Deputy position, which includes the Shelter Cove, Whitethorn and Mattole Valley communities. Honsal added that Allman will spend about four days a week on the Lost Coast, with deputies from the Garberville substation providing coverage on the days that he is not assigned. The resident deputy position is funded through the county’s Measure Z public safety sales tax. Allman was sworn in today at 11am at the fire station in Shelter Cove. Because of the pandemic, the public was not invited to participate in person. The event was livestreamed on the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Facebook page. Lauren Schmitt, of KMUD news, interviewed Justin Robbins, the general manager of Shelter Cove’s resort improvement district number one about his thoughts on the new resident deputy.

For church choirs, vocal ensembles and professional musicians, one of the hardest sacrifices of the pandemic is not being able to sing together. Jim Culp explores how one local church choir has implemented unfamiliar technologies to create an even better choir, virtually.

November 30, 2020 — Earlier this month, the Board of Supervisors approved a six-month contact for a Promotores de Salud, or Spanish-speaking community health worker program with Nuestra Alianza, a non-profit organization in Willits. The contract, for up to $158,700, includes one lead community health worker and five part time promotores, who will provide Spanish-language education about covid-19 to the community that’s been hardest hit by the virus. A team of professional public health trainers will lead the workers through various scenarios and the complexities of communicating about often fraught subjects. The promotores are focusing especially on educating people about safe gatherings and staying safe at work, so they don’t bring the virus home to their families. You can call Nuestra Alianza about this program at (707) 456-9418.

November 26, 2020 — Assessor Clerk-Recorder Katrina Bartolomie has something to be thankful for this week, with all the votes tallied as of late Tuesday afternoon. Glenn McGourty and Maureen Mulheren won their supervisorial races decisively, with McGourty claiming 57.7% of the vote in the first district and Mulheren winning in the second with 60.64%. But Steve Scalmanini, who was the second-highest vote getter in the Ukiah City Council race on election night, dropped to fourth place, losing his bid for another term. In Willits, Measure K, a ten-year 75 cent sales tax initiative to fund city services, passed comfortably, with 65.11% of the vote. And Measure I, which will allow the Willits Unified School District to issue up to $17 million in bonds, also passed with 60.04% KZYX caught up with Bartolomie Wednesday afternoon.

When Ed Keller opened a letter from his home insurance company announcing that his policy had been cancelled and that purchasing a new one would cost four times what he had paid in the past, he was sure there had been a mistake. Bewildered, he picked up the phone and called his provider, Mark Davis Insurance, to clear things up, only to hear from a company representative that it was not an error at all. Keller’s insurance premium had been hiked up by around 400%, from around $1,000 to just over $4,000 per year. His story is by no means unique. Across California, almost one million homeowners have received notices of non renewal since 2015. Short of serious intervention, insurance experts, consumer advocates, and state agencies only expect this to continue.

November 24, 2020 — Mendocino County is solidly in the purple tier, which means that most schools are closed, with narrow exceptions for extracurricular activities and students facing certain hardships. But some small schools got their waivers in over the summer and received the nod from the state to provide in-person instruction. We’ll hear from Sandy Peters, the administrator at Deep Valley Christian School in Redwood Valley, about what it takes to deliver all in-person instruction; and Chloe Reed, the Executive Director and one of the teachers at Montessori Del Mar Community School in Fort Bragg, about adventures in outdoor education during hybrid learning.

A long contested plan to remove four hydro-electric dams on the Klamath River is moving forward, creating a path for restoring the river's decimated salmon fisheries and cleaning up a waterway that has long been central to local Native American tribes. The process of physically removing the four dams, which are owned by energy company PacifiCorp, is set to begin in three years. The agreement was announced at a Zoom meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

November 23, 2020 — Between August 19 and August 23, as the August Complex fire was working towards becoming the state’s largest wildfire, almost fifty earthquakes were measured eleven miles east southeast of Willits. The first one was a magnitude 4.2, and most of the aftershocks were tiny, with just four of them above a magnitude 3. Cynthia Pridmore is a senior engineering geologist at the California Geological Survey. She says Willits, like most of California, is really close to an active fault. Specifically the Maacamas, which is part of the Hayward Fault subsystem of the San Andreas. We’ll hear from Pridmore and Amanda Moyer, the Earthquake Early Warning program manager at CalOES, which has worked with the US Geological Survey and private industry to roll out three ways to give people a few seconds between the first and second waves of a quake to drop, cover and hold on.

November 19, 2020 — Current local election results have not been completely tallied yet, but a new batch of ballots has been freshly counted, bringing the percentage of counted votes up to just over 68%. Maureen Mulheren and Glenn McGourty’s leads in the supervisorial races have grown over their opponents, Mari Rodin and Jon Kennedy, but in the Ukiah City Council race, Steve Scalmanini and Josefina Duenas have switched places. Duenas is now the second-highest vote getter, with 17.90%, while Scalmanini is third, with 16.99% Douglas Crane is still in the lead with 18.94%, but with two seats in the race, the top two contenders will win a seat on the council. 65.59% of In a previous election, the Measure B mental health sales tax measure passed three years ago this month. At yesterday’s Measure B Citizens’ Oversight Committee meeting, Commissioner Lloyd Weer reported that, at almost halfway to the five-year mark, the tax initiative’s revenues are close to projections.

November 18, 2020 — Surveillance testing programs in Mendocino County have come and gone, as the global pandemic has lasted much longer than anyone expected. The contract with UCSF to process tests from the clinics expired on the fifteenth of this month, and yesterday, Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren reported that the state had approved the county’s application for a mobile Optum Serv site, in addition to the site at the fairgrounds in Ukiah. Wineries have been testing employees through a private company called Healthy Spaces, and now there’s an effort to get more businesses to use the service to test employees on the job. The Chambers of Commerce in Mendocino County have been working with local business and trade groups, city and county officials, Coren, and the West Business Development Center to put together a program they hope will catch on at local workplaces.

November 17, 2020 — With most of California back in the purple tier, public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren has updated the county’s health order to limit outdoor gatherings to 12 people instead of 20 from three different households. He told the board of supervisors today that he does not expect the county to get out of the purple tier for the next six to eight weeks. On the consent calendar, the board approved $158,700 for a six-month Promotores de Salud program with Nuestra Alianza to train at least six Spanish-speaking health ambassadors who will work in the community to prevent the spread of covid-19. The board also approved an urgency ordinance to establish temporary group care facilities in the coastal zone for winter homeless shelter.

November 16, 2020 — Last week, when the county was still in the red tier, school boards met to discuss plans to reopen schools for in-person instruction. We caught up with Michelle Hutchins, the Superintendent of the Mendocino County Office of Education, about an hour after the governor’s address on Monday afternoon.

November 16, 2020 — Coronavirus infections are rising again in Mendocino County, but for the moment, schools are still eligible to reopen for in-person instruction. The Ukiah Unified School District board met Thursday night to discuss the plan. The board voted last July to authorize Superintendent Deb Kubin to decide which option to implement. If the county is still in the red tier on December 1, the plan is to bring transitional kindergarten and first grade back to school on December seventh for two half days a week on a staggered schedule, and distance learning for the rest of the week. Older students through the eighth grade would phase into the hybrid model later in December, and high schoolers would come back in January, also on the hybrid plan. Parents can opt out of the hybrid model and stick with all distance learning if they still don’t feel safe. The teachers union advocated for waiting until after the winter break to bring any students back. Thirty-five people signed up for public comment during the meeting, and most of them made it through, in spite of the YouTube lag. The stakes in the matter could not be higher, and opinions broke into roughly three groups: those who are watching infections and deaths climb and want to hold off on in-person instruction; those whose children are breaking down mentally from isolation and desperately want to go back to school; and those who believe the hybrid model is not a good enough alternative to take the risk and do the work to roll out.

Yesterday, the Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency had their second public meeting, where they discussed how their mammoth project of sustainably managing the groundwater in the Ukiah Valley Basin is coming along. The Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) is in charge of creating a plan to regulate all groundwater (well water) in the Ukiah Valley Basin for decades to come. Basically, the GSA will decide how much water gets pumped and how much water stays in the ground in order to avoid chronic groundwater lowering. Although the Groundwater Sustainability Agency is making progress on their management plans, there is still a lot that is up in the air. Precisely how the agency chooses to manage groundwater will dictate how residents who rely on it are impacted.

November 12, 2020 — The county has been in the red tier, for substantial rather than widespread presence of covid-19 for just over two weeks. The percentage of positive test cases, over a seven-day average with a seven-day lag, is low enough to qualify the county for the orange tier, but the numbers, at an average of 6.57 per day, just barely come in below the average of seven per day that qualifies us for the red. An additional death was also reported earlier this week, bringing the total deaths in the county to 22. MendoFever reported that the most recent person to lose his life to the illness was an 80-year-old Asian man in the Ukiah Valley. That hasn’t kept city playgrounds in Ukiah from reopening, with strict protocols including face masks, social distancing, daily cleaning of playground equipment, no eating or drinking on the playground, and a limitation of half-hour visits with other people are there. And yesterday was Veterans Day, though the usual gatherings and displays of appreciation for service members were virtual affairs. The Mendocino County Museum hosted a Facebook tribute, where local people recorded messages in front of the memorial in honor of the 22 veterans who lost their lives or went missing in action in Vietnam. Supervisor John Haschak recorded his message, noting the many veterans in his own family. Homelessness is a persistent problem for many veterans, who make up one demographic targeted for the most recent plan to house homeless people in Ukiah. On Monday, November 16, at 6:30 pm, Senator Mike McGuire will host a virtual town hall on the project, which has unfolded more quickly than is typical. You can register for Monday’s webinar in advance at: https://mendocinocounty.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_56BGCnjfTmO9qwGeX41FnQ or watch it on the county’s YouTube channel. You can email questions prior to the meeting to: [email protected]

November 10, 2020 — Not quite half the ballots from the recent election have been counted, assuming all of Mendocino County’s 53,651 voters participated. Both courthouses in Ukiah and Fort Bragg will be closed all week, due to two unrelated covid exposures last week. And if you see smoke in Anderson Valley tomorrow, chances are it’s the Anderson Valley Fire Department conducting a training burn at Gowan’s Orchard in Philo, starting at 8am. The site is ten acres of fallow field bordered by Hendy Woods State Park and the Navarro River. Mendocino County has now been in the red tier for fourteen consecutive days, after which schools will have the option of reopening to in-person instruction. And as the year winds down, the Board of Supervisors is asking for detailed financial information and priorities from the Measure B Citizens Oversight Committee.

10/9/2020 -- For years, the Willits Unified School District has struggled to keep their aging facilities in good repair. There are eight school buildings in the district. The newest one is from the late ‘80s, and the oldest from almost a century ago. At Willits High School, the parking lot is badly in need of an upgrade, and at Blosser Elementary, the roof is leaking. Despite the urgency of these issues, superintendent Mark Westerburg couldn’t do much about it, because there was no money to deal with the rapidly deteriorating buildings. Last week, that changed. The Willits School District voters passed measure I, allowing the district's board to issue $17 million dollars in bonds over the next 10 to 12 years. The access to funds should allow them to keep their buildings in decent shape and tackle problems as soon as they come up.

People in Mendocino Village are notoriously left of center politically. On November 4th, they shared their feelings of disappointment and frustration, optimism and hope.

November 4, 2020 — The entire country kept a long-awaited appointment with its democratic destiny yesterday. In Mendocino County, not quite half the ballots from 53,651 registered voters were counted by midnight. A huge amount of confusion resulted from the all mail-in procedure, with the majority of election-day voters casting provisional ballots because they lost track of the ballots they received in the mail last month.

November 2, 2020 — Since the county entered the red tier on Tuesday, a few restrictions have been loosened. On Friday, Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren addressed what will be allowed in the new tier, how to celebrate the holidays safely, and talked about plans to improve testing capacity, especially now that UCSF has canceled its lab contract with the county.

October 29, 2020 — The Measure B committee reviewed the first draft of its strategic plan, went over some financial information, and discussed the training center in Redwood Valley at Wednesday’s meeting . Some commissioners were surprised that Measure B is now paying for services that have not appeared on previous budgets, but Commissioner Carmel Angelo said this is the beginning of the commission paying its own way. The decision about who will run the psychiatric health facility, or puff, and the crisis residential care unit, or CRT, will be made this winter. And next week, the Board of Supervisors will discuss a virtual training module, which would run trainees through various scenarios with people in mental health crises.

The city of Ukiah’s newest employees have floppy ears, hooves, and will eat almost anything you put in front of them, which makes them the perfect fit for their job: eating the invasive species and flammable material on the Ukiah section of the Great Redwood Trail.Most years, the City of Ukiah hires contracts inmate crews from Chamberlain Creek Camp, a prison in Mendocino, to remove excess brush from the abandoned Ukiah train tracks and a few other city properties. But due to both COVID and the massive amount of fires burning around the state, those crews were sent elsewhere. This is an important job, as excess brush is proven to have a direct relationship to more severe fires. So the City hired Tony Gonzalez, owner and founder of Gonzalez Brush Busters, and his 200 goats to do the work. So far, the project has been a success. The goats seem to be doing their work -- clearing the ground of everything edible, and are bringing smiles to the faces of many Ukiah residents.

October 29, 2020 — The Measure B committee reviewed the first draft of its strategic plan, went over some financial information, and discussed the training center in Redwood Valley at Wednesday’s meeting . Some commissioners were surprised that Measure B is now paying for services that have not appeared on previous budgets, but Commissioner Carmel Angelo said this is the beginning of the commission paying its own way. The decision about who will run the psychiatric health facility, or puff, and the crisis residential care unit, or CRT, will be made this winter. And next week, the Board of Supervisors will discuss a virtual training module, which would run trainees through various scenarios with people in mental health crises.