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The president of St. Bernard’s Catholic School submitted his resignation to the school this week to accept a similar position in the San Francisco area.
Tags: ca, Eureka, Humboldt, Humboldt County, Humboldt County News, Local, San Francisco
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It’s been said that Southern Humboldt radio station KMUD is the only station in the country to report the location of cops en route to a bust.
During CAMP season, when the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting is in full swing, and caravans of unmarked vehicles are seen heading up a windy SoHum road, for example, KMUD broadcasts the sighting. The information is usually relayed to the station by the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project.
Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman says such announcements put officers at risk, particularly when dealing with drug cartels growing weed in the timberlands and parks.
None of this is new — KMUD and CLMP have been reporting where large caravans of cops are for years. But now that all things Humboldt marijuana are in the spotlight many aspects of the local culture are getting their 15 minutes.
Here’s the story from the San Francisco Chronicle, with a link to a recent California Report broadcast on the not-so-new news.
Tags: ca, California, CAMP, Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, Humboldt, Local, marijuana, Mendocino, Mendocino County, Northern California, pot, San Francisco, Southern Humboldt
Posted in Humboldt Blogs, Opinion | Comments Off
Investment managers, labor unions and politicians often get the blame for exploding debt in government pension plans. But some critics point to another culprit: actuaries, the financial experts expected to make sure the plans are sound.
The case of one East Bay actuary shows the deep impact of inaccurate benefit calculations. Ira Summer and the firm he owns, Public Pension Professionals, have been accused of errors that cost local government plans in California and Florida millions.
Fresno and Kern counties were among the entities that sustained losses on Summer’s watch. In both San Joaquin Valley communities, the growing shortfall now threatens the financial health of pension plans.
Actuaries are responsible for the economic and demographic assumptions that ensure employees and employers pay enough into a plan. They estimate how much a plan will make from investments, how long retirees will live, what will happen to salaries over time.
Pension boards approve the assumptions, but board members tend to rely on the expertise of actuaries because the estimates are based on complex information.
Summer has made millions of dollars from contracting with local governments in California, some of which retained him for several years. In one year alone, he earned about $400,000 total from five California counties where his firm provided actuarial service.
In separate lawsuits, Fresno and Kern counties successfully sued Summer and his firm for professional negligence. Fresno reached a settlement, and Kern won in court. The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District also won a judgment against Summer, and shoddy work has been alleged by pension managers in San Mateo, Tulare and Imperial counties.
Some communities may have skipped legal action because Summer let his insurance lapse in 2006, leaving little financial recourse for those who win suits.
Summer said he couldn’t comment for this story because he’s involved in a dispute with insurers.
Records show, however, that Summer has acknowledged mistakes in plans he handled. In 2006, when Fresno County’s retirement board had his work audited, Summer promised to correct errors, according to board minutes. That same year, Summer told a retirement board in Palm Bay, Fla., that his firm had erred in some calculations, according to that board’s minutes.
When one pension plan replaced Summer, the new actuary found that an error by Summer had had a significant financial impact, according to a report by the Conference of Consulting Actuaries. The report doesn’t identify which plan, and the conference would not elaborate.
Summer declined to help the actuary get to the bottom of the mistake and failed to cooperate in the conference’s investigation of his conduct, according to the conference, which took the rare step of publicly reprimanding Summer.
Fresno County’s pension shortfall has grown fourfold in the last five years, to almost $800 million last year – one of the biggest increases among the state’s largest local government plans.
Investment losses account for about one-third of that increased shortfall, records show. More debt was created by actuarial changes to the plan, including changes resulting from Summer’s work.
In 2006, four years after he was hired, Fresno County requested an independent audit of Summer’s work. Although aware of problems with Summer elsewhere, county retirement administrator Roberto Peña said the audit was done simply because it is good practice to do so.
The audit by actuaries in the San Francisco office of the Segal Co. turned up a number of problems. First, following Summer’s advice, the county required employees to pay for cost-of-living increases in the plan, breaking the previous practice of splitting that cost with employers, and differing from other plans across the state, auditors found.
The Fresno County Employees’ Retirement Association opted to reimburse the employees, further depleting the fund.
The audit also turned up problems with how Summer calculated inflation for some pensioners.
While those mistakes might not appear serious, they carried high costs.
“All of the changes that affect plan cost, the impact is multiplied for plans that have relatively larger benefits,” said Paul Angelo, the Segal actuary who audited Summer and later replaced him as Fresno’s actuary.
Fresno County has one of the most generous plans in the state. The county had to set up a supplemental pension because then-Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the higher benefit approved by county leaders in 2000.
As a result of corrections made after the audit, the county’s pension shortfall grew by almost $160 million, records show.
In its lawsuit, Fresno County’s retirement association accused Summer and his firm of causing $99 million in damages to the plan. The association’s attorney claimed Summer was running a “sham company” out of his home, and said the company had “a long and exotic history of failing to ensure that they have the assets or insurance necessary to satisfy the many claims against it.”
Because of Summer’s insurance problems, the retirement association agreed to settle the suit for $250,000 last year, Peña said.
In retrospect, he said, the association erred by not checking Summer’s insurance. It routinely makes those checks now.
In a brief conversation with The Bee, Summer said he continues to work as an actuary in California but declined to say where.
Tags: attorney, ca, California, court, Humboldt, law, lawsuit, Local, Northern California, San Francisco
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Two popular local psych rock bands, Vampire Hands and Daughters of the Sun, are preparing to leave on a massive month and a half tour of the US.
Tags: ca, Eureka, Humboldt, Humboldt County, Humboldt County News, Sacramento, San Francisco
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Darian Ahler, in plaid shirt, brainstorms with other young Christians earlier this week in San Francisco about what they can do to honor Jesus.
SAN FRANCISCO – When Darian Ahler leaves for church, he walks from his bedroom to his living room.
The congregation – San Francisco hipsters in their 20s and 30s – comes to him. No one delivers a sermon. No one sings. The group brainstorms together on what they can do to honor Jesus, besides just pray to him.
“These days, religion is intellectual masturbation. It’s not experimental enough,” said Mark Scandrette, the founder of the group, called ReImagine, and author of the book “Soul Graffiti.”
“We look at what Jesus taught,” Scandrette said, “then we try to develop an experiment that helps us learn that.”
The group is one of a growing number of do-it-yourself Christian communities forming in the Bay Area, looking for alternatives to institutional churches and what its members see as their passive rituals. As other Christians attend church Sunday, ReImagine members will celebrate Easter by heading to the beach.
“The modern version of worship, of sitting on a bench and being read to, is on the way out. It’s boring everybody, including the pastors,” said Matthew Fox, an Oakland pastor and author of several books on spirituality. “People are hungry and thirsty for something to touch their hearts and souls.”
Researchers at the Ventura-based Barna Group, which studies trends in religious beliefs and practices, have seen alternative Christian groups rise in popularity. About 6 percent of adults surveyed last year said they met regularly with a self-governed Christian group, and 33 percent said they had attended a worship service outside of a conventional church in the previous month.
‘Like a Jesus dojo’
After Scandrette moved to San Francisco from Minnesota 12 years ago, he began calling himself a recovered fundamentalist Christian. He says he was like many young Christians who migrate to the Bay Area from a conservative setting: burned out on institutional Christianity, but not ready to give up on Jesus. Rather than focus on the savior from eternal damnation, he wanted to focus on Jesus as a guru of simplicity, a fighter against poverty and oppression.
“We think spiritual formation that’s really vibrant looks more like a karate studio than a conference hall,” he said. “It’s like a Jesus dojo.”
So on Thursday nights, at Ahler’s two-bedroom apartment overlooking Valencia and 22nd streets, about 15 Christian hipsters gather to eat pizza and sip beer. They squeeze onto the Craigslist couches and compliment each other’s cuffed jeans and neat bangs.
At one gathering, Ahler’s roommate Adam Klein read a short passage from the Gospel of Luke, the part where Jesus tells the rich folk to invite the poor wretches to their feasts. Then they separated into groups of four.
They filled out a worksheet cataloguing their material vs. non-material riches, and discussed simplicity. The following week: personal budgets. The following month: Jesus on creativity. Easter time: conversations about truth. When people want to take their translation of faith into action even further, they can sign on to one of ReImagine’s activist campaigns to combat human trafficking, neighborhood crime or hunger.
“Bible groups are more focused on orthodoxy,” said Ahler, 26, a mechanical engineer and regular dojo member. “ReImagine is more orthopraxy, where the focus is more doing than talking.”
Raves, minus the drugs
For Fox, the Oakland minister, the focus is more dancing than talking. Fox has long recognized that church hymns make the best lullabies. Years ago, he looked to raves for spiritual inspiration. He spent months talking to ravers, developing his own Christian version, the Cosmic Mass, melding prayer and multimedia images of Jesus with electronica, house and jungle beats.
“If you connect the liturgical message to the rave, you don’t need the drugs,” Fox said. “We can create a form that makes getting high possible again.”
Hundreds of people line up outside Sweet’s Ballroom in Oakland on Cosmic Mass nights – repeated once a month at first, now down to twice a year because of difficulty raising funds. Images of Christ and other holy figures from all religious backgrounds are projected onto several screens for people to meditate on while they dance. The computer effects and the fractals that break through the images are today’s stained glass, Fox says.
The ritual uses dance to escort participants through feelings of ecstasy, anger, grief, and recovery. So many people have been moved by the experience, Fox has consulted with others who’ve started Cosmic Masses around the world, from Kansas City to Melbourne, Australia.
Place not needed
When people first move to a new city, many spend a couple of weeks shopping for a church. They’ll settle on one for a month or two. Then, pastors are noticing, small groups will break off from the Sunday regulars and form their own weekly gathering at someone’s home, or a café, or a bar.
“It’s not a particular place or mode of how we do things that is sacred,” said coffee shop churchgoer Jason Kuo, “but it’s the belief that God is present in all places and following Jesus can be something that can be done in any sphere of life.”
Church, Kuo says, is an identity that need not be secluded behind private walls. So he and his friends meet at a café on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, to make their faith part of the city landscape rather than separated from it. They take turns reading from the Bible, writing down reflections, and praying.
“You can still be the church if you’re in a coffee shop, in a pub, in a park, or at a basketball gym,” Kuo said. “You’re participating in blessing the local neighborhood.”
As more people become interested in implementing their own vision of worship, ReImagine is getting more hits on its Web site. And Scandrette and Klein are getting calls from people all over the country who want to start their own local tribe, their own experiment.
“This movement is to look for what you want and find it,” Klein said. “And if you can’t find it, create it.”
At Darian Ahler’s two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, about 15 Christian hipsters gather on Thursday evenings to eat pizza, sip beer – and discuss the role of faith in their lives.
Tags: ca, California, CAMP, Humboldt, Local, meth, Northern California, San Francisco
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U.S. Forest Service rescuers Nick Meyers, left, and Eric White, center, pack and weigh gear at Weed Airport while awaiting an attempt to locate Oakland climber Thomas Bennett.
The Siskiyou Sheriff’s Office has confirmed that a search and rescue team has found the body of Thomas Bennett, the 26-year-old climber who was last seen alive Saturday near Mount Shasta’s summit.
Bennett’s family today was at a Siskiyou County airport where rescuers assembled for their ascent of the 14,162-foot mountain.
Rescuers flew up the mountain in a powerful California National Guard Chinook helicopter, a heavy-lifting chopper with twin rotors, which arrived at the small airport near the town of Weed on Wednesday.
On board the Chinook were six Air National Guard soldiers, three U.S. Forest Service rangers expert in climbing and four Siskiyou County search-and-rescue personnel.
The Chinook was supposed to land in a snow field near the summit about 100 feet from where Bennett was last seen. Five rescuers were on board — the three Forest Service rangers and two Siskiyou County search and rescue personnel — to climb to where they believe Bennett took refuge.
On Wednesday, cloud cover near the summit forced two lighter helicopters to return to the rural landing strip along Interstate 5 that is serving as a rescue base.
Rescue personnel waited there Wednesday for breaks in the weather. With no indoor gathering place, they stood in the cold or sat in vehicles.
The massive volcanic peak loomed over all, its upper reaches veiled in clouds.
“I have a great respect for this mountain,” said Eric White, the Forest Service’s lead climbing ranger on Mount Shasta, who is participating in the rescue effort.
Bennett, a chemical engineer from Oakland, fell ill Sunday near the mountaintop. He had reached the summit Saturday with climbing partner Mark Thomas, 26, a structural engineer from Berkeley.
On the peak, they were surprised by an approaching storm and took shelter for the night behind boulders at about 14,000 feet.
Thomas told his father that the pair made it through the night in warm clothes and sleeping sacks and were in good spirits Sunday morning as they prepared to descend.
But Bennett collapsed while he was putting on his crampons and within 45 minutes was unresponsive, Jay Thomas said his son told him. Mark Thomas’ efforts to revive the man were unsuccessful, his father said.
After putting Bennett in a snow cave with food and water, Thomas started down the mountain Sunday afternoon and on Monday was picked up by rangers on snowmobiles.
He told authorities he believed Bennett was suffering from severe altitude sickness and might have died.
Experts in high-altitude medicine said Wednesday that altitude sickness was an unlikely cause if Bennett suddenly collapsed and quickly slid into unconsciousness.
“That’s not the way acute mountain sickness is,” said John Severinghaus, a retired professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prominent researcher in high-altitude medicine. “It’s a slow onset process with lots of symptoms first. It begins with headache and nausea and vomiting and feeling terrible.
“If it gets bad enough, it could turn into cerebral edema (a swelling of the brain tissue),” he said. “You can’t stand. You’re dizzy. You complain like crazy. It occurs over many hours.”
A more likely cause, doctors said, was a stroke or a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot that develops in the legs and moves to the lungs. Hours of exertion and huddling in the cold at high altitude could have caused it, they said. Then, as Bennett was putting his crampons on, the clot could have broken free and blocked the arteries going to his lungs, doctors said.
People who experience the condition “spiral downhill very rapidly,” said Thomas Dietz, an emergency room physician in Oregon who for years treated climbers for altitude-related illnesses at a clinic near Mount Everest’s base camp. “Over a period of minutes, maybe an hour, the person slides into a coma. If that’s what happened, there’s nothing you could do on the mountain.”
Officials have continued to operate on the assumption that Bennett could be clinging to life on the wind-scoured pinnacle of ice and rock. The summit has experienced sub-zero temperatures, snow and gale-force winds in recent days.
At about 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, rescue teams were hopeful they could take advantage of a break in the weather to reach Bennett’s location, but deteriorating conditions forced a California Highway Patrol helicopter to return to base.
A few hours later, at about 2:40 p.m., a larger Super Huey helicopter sent by the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection made a reconnaissance flight but could ascend only to about 12,000 feet because of cloud cover.
“We were looking for that weather window, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to get it,” said Tom McConnel, a veteran pilot with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The Chinook arrived, and rescuers agreed to try again this morning.
Forest Service climbing ranger Dan Tower, in red, thanks Highway Patrol pilot Bob Stetser after their landing Wednesday at Weed Airport.
Ranger Eric White gets a hug from an unidentified friend of missing climber Thomas Bennett.
Tags: ca, California, California Highway Patrol, CAMP, county airport, Humboldt, Northern California, Oregon, San Francisco, Shasta, U.S. Forest Service
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U.S. Forest Service rescuers Nick Meyers, left, and Eric White, center, pack and weigh gear at Weed Airport while awaiting an attempt to locate Oakland climber Thomas Bennett.
Rescuers plan to make another attempt today to reach Thomas Bennett, a 26-year-old climber stranded since Saturday near Mount Shasta’s summit.
This time they intend to use a powerful helicopter that left Mather Field on Wednesday.
The California National Guard Chinook, a heavy-lifting helicopter with twin rotors, arrived at a small airport near the Siskiyou County town of Weed on Wednesday, just before 3 p.m.
Cloud cover near the summit forced two lighter helicopters to return to the rural landing strip along Interstate 5 that is serving as a rescue base.
Team members from the U.S. Forest Service, Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department and other agencies waited at the airport Wednesday for breaks in the weather. With no indoor gathering place, they stood in the cold or sat in vehicles.
The massive volcanic peak loomed over all, its upper reaches veiled in clouds.
“I have a great respect for this mountain,” said Eric White, the Forest Service’s lead climbing ranger on Mount Shasta, who is taking part in the rescue effort.
Authorities said they would make another push today at about 7 a.m. – when they hope skies will be clear and winds will be light – to reach Bennett.
The chemical engineer from Oakland fell ill Sunday near the mountaintop. He had reached the summit Saturday with climbing partner Mark Thomas, a 26-year-old structural engineer from Berkeley.
On the 14,162-foot peak, they were surprised by an approaching storm and took shelter for the night behind boulders at about 14,000 feet.
Thomas told his father that the pair made it through the night in warm clothes and sleeping sacks and were in good spirits Sunday morning as they prepared to descend.
But Bennett collapsed while he was putting on his crampons and within 45 minutes was unresponsive, Jay Thomas said his son told him. Mark Thomas’ efforts to revive the man were unsuccessful, his father said.
After putting Bennett in a snow cave with food and water, Thomas started down the mountain Sunday afternoon and on Monday was picked up by rangers on snowmobiles.
He told authorities he believed Bennett was suffering from severe altitude sickness and might have died.
Experts in high-altitude medicine said Wednesday that altitude sickness was an unlikely cause if Bennett suddenly collapsed and quickly slid into unconsciousness.
“That’s not the way acute mountain sickness is,” said John Severinghaus, a retired professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prominent researcher in high-altitude medicine. “It’s a slow onset process with lots of symptoms first. It begins with headache and nausea and vomiting and feeling terrible.
“If it gets bad enough, it could turn into cerebral edema (a swelling of the brain tissue),” he said. “You can’t stand. You’re dizzy. You complain like crazy. It occurs over many hours.”
A more likely cause, doctors said, was a stroke or a pulmonary embolism – a blood clot that develops in the legs and moves to the lungs. Hours of exertion and huddling in the cold at high altitude could have caused it, they said. Then, as Bennett was putting his crampons on, the clot could have broken free and blocked the arteries going to his lungs, doctors said.
Those who experience the condition “spiral downhill very rapidly,” said Thomas Dietz, an emergency room physician in Oregon who for years treated climbers for altitude- related illnesses at a clinic near Mount Everest’s base camp. “Over a period of minutes, maybe an hour, the person slides into a coma. If that’s what happened, there’s nothing you could do on the mountain.”
Officials have continued to operate on the assumption that Bennett could be clinging to life on the wind-scoured pinnacle of ice and rock. The summit has experienced sub-zero temperatures, snow, and gale-force winds in recent days.
At about 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, rescue teams were hopeful they could take advantage of a break in the weather to reach Bennett’s location, but the weather forced a California Highway Patrol helicopter to return to base.
A few hours later, at about 2:40 p.m., a larger Super Huey helicopter sent by the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection made a reconnaissance flight but could ascend only to about 12,000 feet because of cloud cover.
“We were looking for that weather window, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to get it,” said Tom McConnel, a veteran pilot with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The Chinook arrived, and rescuers agreed to try again this morning.
Meanwhile, Bennett’s relatives and girlfriend, and surviving climber Thomas, were reported to be gathering in the area, awaiting news and preparing for the worst.
They could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
MOUNT SHASTA Experts said that altitude sickness was an unlikely cause if climber Thomas Bennett collapsed suddenly and quickly slid into unconsciousness. A more likely cause is a stroke or a pulmonary embolism, they said.
Forest Service climbing ranger Dan Tower, in red, thanks Highway Patrol pilot Bob Stetser after their landing Wednesday at Weed Airport.
Ranger Eric White gets a hug from an unidentified friend of missing climber Thomas Bennett.
Tags: ca, California, California Highway Patrol, CAMP, Humboldt, Northern California, Oregon, San Francisco, Shasta, U.S. Forest Service
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A series of small earthquakes has hit northern California. The U.S. Geological Survey says a 3.1-magnitude quake struck shortly before midnight Saturday and was centered about 10 miles northeast of San Jose.
At 2:39 a.m. Sunday, another 3.1 temblor hit about 25 miles northwest of Santa Rosa, the USGS said.
Tags: ca, California, earthquake, Humboldt, Northern California, San Francisco, Santa Rosa
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George Eldridge dreamed up the idea for today’s welcome home parade, expected to draw about 400 Vietnam veterans to the Tuolumne County town of Sonora.
SONORA – When George Eldridge reported for duty in 1965 at the U.S. Navy base in Hawaii, people there told him it wasn’t a good idea to wear his uniform in public. The sentiment against the Vietnam War was strong, and it was best to keep a low profile.
Eldridge was a journalist for the military, and he saw a lot of fighting during his tour of duty. He flew from one end of Vietnam to the other, often in the planes that sprayed the defoliant Agent Orange over the countryside. He returned home with post-traumatic stress syndrome, and it would be 20 years after he retired from the Navy before he would tell anyone that he’d been in the military.
“We were scorned and treated badly when we got home, and it wasn’t pleasant,” said Eldridge, now of Jamestown. “The war, and what you saw, was just something you wanted to forget.”
But Eldridge will be back in uniform this afternoon, one of scores of Vietnam veterans lining up at 1 p.m. on Sonora’s Washington Street for a half-mile parade to celebrate Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day.
For many of the 400 or so veterans expected, it will be the homecoming they didn’t get 40 years ago. The streets will be lined with their children and grandchildren and their neighbors and business partners. The veterans will march or ride in convertibles and trucks and sport-utility vehicles, their old uniforms pulled tight against thicker bodies and their military haircuts replaced with balding pates or silver hair. Some – like Eldridge, who is on dialysis due to ailments caused by his Agent Orange exposure – are too sick to walk.
“This is a chance for people to show the vets that the attitude has changed tremendously since the ’60s,” Eldridge said. “It will heal a lot of old wounds.”
According to Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 391 of Tuolumne County, Sonora’s parade is the first Vietnam Veterans Day parade in the country. Eldridge, the chapter’s public affairs officer, dreamed up the event shortly after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill 717 last year establishing March 30 as California’s annual Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day.
More than 8.2 million Vietnam-era veterans live in the country, according to the Census Bureau, and the parade is expected to draw participants from as far away as Washington state and Arizona. But some Vietnam veterans in Tuolumne and Calaveras counties, where many have retired, will be skipping the event. Even now, they say their memories of returning home to hatred and ostracism are still too raw.
“They aren’t going to change history by having a parade,” said Richard Eller of Sonora, who served two tours of duty with the Navy in Vietnam from 1967 to 1970.
“Why have a parade to celebrate such a poor time in history and such bad memories?” Eller asked. “I don’t want to relive that trash, and I don’t like being forced to remember it. It’s history. Get over it.”
When Eller returned home from his first tour in 1968, he said, he was stationed on San Francisco’s Treasure Island. He recalls busloads of students from Berkeley and elsewhere going to the airport to shout insults and throw garbage at returning vets. Eller says veterans were denied jobs and had difficulty fitting in on college campuses, where anger at soldiers and the war was so intense. He re-enlisted.
“Fighting the war was bad, but coming home was worse,” he said. “That’s where we found where our real enemies were. I wanted an enemy that was shooting at me from the front, not stabbing me in the back.”
Many Vietnam veterans were drafted and went to war against their will. Eller went out of a sense of duty and patriotism. His father had been a fighter pilot, and Eller remembers Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev brandishing his shoe at the United Nations and, on another occasion, predicting that communism would “bury” capitalism.
“That formed my view of communism,” he said. “In my mind, fighting communism was something you had an obligation to do.”
Eller ultimately spent 24 years in the military, enlisting in the Marines after Vietnam and going to Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1990, which the United States quickly won.
“We didn’t get a parade after Vietnam because we lost,” he said. “You don’t get a parade when you come in second place.”
Eldridge and others in the 500- member Chapter 391 – the largest contingent of Vietnam veterans in California and ninth largest in the nation – understand that vets like Eller and others in Tuolumne and Calaveras counties won’t be marching today. The Sonora Union-Democrat newspaper has published letters opposing the parade, and Eldridge has gotten calls from some vets who don’t like it.
But the parade is as much for the public as it is the vets, Eldridge says. There are some hard feelings to patch up, but with the country now in other far-off ground wars, it seems like the right time to put those memories to rest.
“There are mixed feelings about the parade, we get that,” Eldridge said. “We were not greeted cordially when we came home. We were scorned and so forth, and it wasn’t pleasant. But it’s time for everyone to get over it.”
Vietnam veterans, from left, Dan Brown, 66, George Eldridge, 66, Al Sickle, 61, and Dick Southern, 66, read a resolution presented to them by the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors for their service and sacrifice 40 years ago.
Tags: ca, California, CAMP, Humboldt, job, meth, Northern California, San Francisco, shooting, United States
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The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) is suffering a second loss this month to the California Coastal Commission.
After a blistering defeat three weeks ago, the San Francisco First District Court of Appeal found sea birds have rights when faced with 4th-of-July yahoos. And like the PLF’s recent Balloon Track lawsuit, the argument was over jurisdiction.
From the Press Democrat:
The case pitted those supporting a July 4 pyrotechnic show in Gualala against those trying to protect sea birds on a island near the Sonoma and Mendocino county line.
The display was halted after two years following complaints that it disturbed sea birds on Gualala Point Island. A study in 2007 indicated sea birds fled their nests at about the time of the fireworks show.
The Coastal Commission said the Gualala Festivals Committee would need to apply for a coastal permit to continue the show. To obtain a permit, the group would need to demonstrate it could avoid upsetting the birds.
Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation sued the commission on behalf of fireworks supporters, contending the commission does not have jurisdiction over fireworks.
Complaints followed the first fireworks show in 2006 when birds fled Gualala Point Island. The island is protected by the federal Bureau of Land Management and part of the California Coastal National Monument Program.
In Eureka, PLF sued the Coastal Commission over the Balloon Track last month, claiming the state agency doesn’t have jurisdiction over any half-baked “clean-up” plans for the contaminated property.
Tags: Balloon Track, ca, California, coast, court, Eureka, festival, Humboldt, law, lawsuit, Mendocino, Mendocino County, Northern California, Sacramento, San Francisco
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Tri-City – When Starfire plays at the Arcata Theatre Lounge this Saturday, March 27, he’ll be joined by MartyParty, Masta Shredda and Mike D. The event starts at 10 p.m. and the cover is $10 in advance, $10 at the door until 11 p.m. and $15 after 11 p.m. This is a 21-and-over show.
Tags: Arcata, Arcata Theatre, ca, California, Humboldt, Humboldt County, live music, Orleans, pot, San Francisco
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Eric Clawson knocked out a bar patron, and witnesses say a racial epithet preceded the Chico attack.
A San Francisco man is facing prison after being found guilty Wednesday of punching an African American man because of his race and the fact he was enjoying himself at a Chico bar.
A jury of six women and six men deliberated 2½ hours at the conclusion of a three-day trial in Sacramento federal court before finding Eric Loren Clawson guilty of a hate-based violation of Carl Whitfield’s civil rights.
Clawson, 28, was taken into custody following the verdict. He was handcuffed and escorted out of the courtroom by deputy U.S. marshals as distraught family members, including his parents and sister, looked on.
Once an amateur mixed martial arts champion in the light heavyweight division, Clawson knocked the 6-foot-4, 240-pound Whitfield down and out with one punch. Witnesses said he was out for 20 to 30 seconds, and in a daze for a while.
Clawson testified he approached a group that included Whitfield and inquired why they were looking across the room at him and “seemed disturbed.” When he asked, “What’s the problem?” Whitfield stood up and faced Clawson, looking angry and “ready to fight,” so Clawson went on the offensive, he said.
The element of surprise is a bar fighter’s best friend, and Clawson testified he’s been in dozens of them.
He acknowledged that earlier, in ordering and paying for drinks, he made two remarks to the bartender that included a racial epithet generally applied to African Americans.
But, Clawson testified, he was not describing Whitfield but meant it as a euphemism for “cheap.” He said he saw Whitfield only later when he and others around him began staring and acting as if they were unhappy with Clawson.
Whitfield, his girlfriend and bartender James Kellon Thompson testified that as Clawson and friend Joe Grivette entered Riley’s Bar & Grill on the night of July 6, 2008, somebody said, “I’m not sitting here with that n—–,” and it came from their direction.
The three prosecution witnesses said Clawson, without provocation, wordlessly walked up behind Whitfield, tapped him on the shoulder and, when Whitfield turned, hit him.
Clawson denied using the epithet in reference to Whitfield, insisting he didn’t even see Whitfield when he came into Riley’s that Sunday night.
“That’s nonsense,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Russell Carlberg told the jury in a rebuttal argument.
“He saw Carl Whitfield. Everybody knows it. He picked him out and attacked him.”
Defense lawyer Emily Doringer told the jury in her closing argument that, while her client is a brawler, he bears no racial animus and only one other of his many altercations involved an African American man.
“He has no problems interacting, socializing and otherwise dealing with African Americans,” she said. “There’s just no history here.”
She noted that Whitfield and girlfriend Noelle Keese testified they heard a racially derogatory comment when Clawson and Grivette came in, but did not tell that to Chico police officers who took their statements shortly after the incident.
“That means there is doubt,” Doringer argued.
She also said that, if Clawson were going to direct an epithet at Whitfield, he would have done it when he approached him, but he said nothing.
“That is serious doubt about what was going through Mr. Clawson’s mind,” she told the jury.
“He let his fist do the talking,” was Carlsberg’s rejoinder.
Clawson and Grivette were both charged with the hate crime.
Grivette, 29, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge a week ago and validated the prosecution’s version of the incident.
Grivette was outside when Clawson felled Whitfield. But minutes before the punch, as he left Riley’s, he assured his friend, “Whatever you do, I’ve got your back.”
Under the terms of a plea bargain, Grivette’s lawyer is free to argue for as little as two months behind bars.
Clawson’s sentencing is set for June 10. His crime carries a maximum 10 years in prison.
Tags: attorney, ca, California, court, Humboldt, law, lawyer, marsh, Northern California, Sacramento, San Francisco, Trial
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Horizon Air today announced several changes to its summer schedule. The new schedule increases service in several markets while refining others to meet shifting summer demand.
The summer schedule focuses on increased service in the states of Montana, California and Idaho as well as the cities of Reno, Nevada and Portland, Ore. Below is a market-by-market listing. All changes take effect on June 6, unless noted otherwise.
Increased Service
Reduced Service
Horizon serves 48 cities throughout Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Baja California Sur (Mexico), and British Columbia and Alberta (Canada). Together, Horizon Air and Alaska Airlines serve more than 90 cities and are subsidiaries of Alaska Air Group, Inc. (NYSE:ALK).
Tags: ca, California, Eureka, Humboldt, Oregon, Sacramento, San Francisco
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Shallow salt beds cover a 1,436-acre former salt production site in Redwod City where agribusiness giant Cargill Inc. and Arizona-based DMB Associates want to build up to 12,000 housing units. More than 100 environmental and political leaders have singed a petition opposing the project.
REDWOOD CITY – A proposal to construct the largest housing development on the shores of San Francisco Bay in more than 40 years has run headlong into a phalanx of environmentalists and politicians who want to derail the project even before initial environmental studies begin.
The so-called Saltworks 50-50 Plan would build as many as 12,000 housing units on about 1,400 acres of what is now a retired salt production facility just east of Highway 101, not far from the San Mateo Bridge in Redwood City.
The proposal, being pitched by agribusiness giant Cargill Inc. and Arizona-based DMB Associates, has come under political fire in recent weeks by more than 100 environmental and political leaders who signed a petition asking Redwood City officials to cease any further consideration of the proposal.
“Nothing so breathtaking in size or misguided in scope has been proposed in half a century,” reads the preamble to the Feb. 26 petition circulated by Oakland-based Save the Bay.
“Salt ponds are not land to be paved,” the petition continues. “They are part of San Francisco Bay to be restored to tidal marsh for wildlife habitat, natural flood protection for our communities, cleaner water and recreation areas for everyone to enjoy.”
The list of petition signers reads like a Bay Area who’s who, including state Sen. Mark Leno and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, and David Chiu, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Officials from all nine Bay Area counties have signed it, including 13 mayors, 11 members of the Association of Bay Area Governments and eight members of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission.
David Lewis, executive director of Save the Bay, called the project unprecedented since a 1965 state law called the McAteer-Petris Act gave birth to what is now the 27-member Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The law has served as the key legal provision preserving the bay from being indiscriminately filled.
“We don’t pave over restorable wetlands. We don’t need an EIR to tell us that,” Lewis said, using shorthand for a state-required environmental impact report.
To be sure, officials acknowledge that the bay is one-third smaller than it was during the state’s Gold Rush of 1848-1855 as a result of developers filling in the waterway.
But according to David Smith, a DMB Associates vice president, the project wouldn’t be built on either bay fill or a former tidal marsh, but on land used in industrial salt production since 1901.
“We’re perplexed as to why these Bay Area environmental groups and these political leaders would want to stop the CEQA process,” Smith said, referring to the California Environmental Quality Act, which requires environmental review of such development. “If anything, you would think they would want to get all the facts out about this project.”
Smith says Minnesota-based Cargill and DMB see the proposal as a chance to build high-quality, transit-oriented housing for Silicon Valley-area workers who now commute from far away. As currently designed, the development would accommodate about 30,000 people and feature a large number of upscale apartments and condos.
Saltworks project proponents have been floating the idea around Redwood City for the past three or four years. What’s changed in recent weeks is that Redwood City officials have started looking for consultants to put together the environmental impact report that CEQA requires. It’s expected to take from 18 to 24 months to complete.
Redwood City Mayor Jeff Ira says the environmental study must be allowed to proceed.
“I appreciate how passionate people are about this – I really do,” Ira said last week. “But the study will provide us with important information that we don’t have now. … Only then, with that information, can we make the best decision possible.”
Even so, Lewis and other critics say they plan to keep pressuring Ira and the Redwood City Council until the panel drops the Saltworks project entirely.
If the coalition is successful, Lewis said, the next step would be for federal authorities or a nonprofit conservation group to buy the land and let it revert to a tidal marsh. Examples of similar efforts dot the South Bay and Peninsula shorelines and surround the Saltworks property.
Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors President John Gioia, a veteran member of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and one of the eight commissioners who signed the petition, agrees.
“This proposal is a direct assault on the whole Bay Area,” Gioia said in a statement. “We all have a stake in what happens in Redwood City. It’s about habitat (and) biological diversity. The bay defines our quality of life and who we are.”
A drainage site.
Tags: assault, ca, CAL FIRE, California, city council, Highway 101, Humboldt, law, marsh, Northern California, redwood, San Francisco, Trial
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The Times-Standard isn’t just reporting the news these days. Eureka’s daily paper has become the news.
The City of Eureka moved for a protective order in January to stop T-S reporter Thadeus Greenson from attending depositions of city officials in a harassment case filed by former city employee Tawnie Hansen. The T-S and Hansen oppose the protective order.
“As with any civil case, there is a significant chance this case will never see a courtroom trial, and there is also a significant chance the city will opt to settle out of court,” wrote Greenson in a Declaration filed with the court last week. “If this were to happen, the citizens of Eureka would wind up spending their tax dollars on the defense of this action and/or a settlement without ever having the benefit of knowing exactly why those dollars were spent.”
The T-S and Greenson are represented by Holme Roberts & Owen of San Francisco.
“At its heart, this case is about the appropriation of thousands of dollars of public funds, the ability of Eureka’s government to protect its own citizens from harassment and the conduct of the city’s elected officials and department heads while acting in an official capacity,” Greenson wrote. “It is the position of the Times-Standard, and my personal opinion, that the citizens of Eureka have a right to know how their tax dollars are spent, and to know how their government functions, even surrounding uncomfortable issues.”
The First Amendment Coalition also filed a brief in opposition to the protective order. The non-profit noted the jury pool in Humboldt County is four times the circulation of the T-S. “Given this fact, it is clear twelve unbiased jurors can be found to hear this case,” wrote FAC.
A hearing on the proposed protective order will be held at 8:45 am on March 30th at the Humboldt County courthouse.
Tags: ca, California, court, Eureka, hearing, Humboldt, Humboldt County, Humboldt County Courthouse, law, lawsuit, Northern California, San Francisco, Trial
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