Inside UDJ by Editor K.C. Meadows

Last night I moderated a discussion of the possibilities of retail or other development at the Masonite property now owned by the developers known as DDR. They have not yet submitted a formal plan for the site but have made it clear they are looking at a big box regional mall.
Last night’s session was another in a series of Citizen U seminars hosted by The Ukiah Valley Smart Growth Coalition, The Ukiah Main Street Program and others. The two speakers were Michael Shuman, an author and economist who wrote “Small Mart Revolution,” an anti-chain store book. He is paid by local groups to travel around to sessions like these and explain why chain stores, especially big box are almost always a bad idea. He also made a presentation earlier in the day to a Main Street-hosted session. Also on the panel was Marie Jones, a City of Fort Bragg planner who is working on that city’s redevelopment of the waterfront property that used to be the Georgia-Pacific mill.
Shuman and Jones both gave interesting and coherent presentations about why a big box mall at the Masonite site would be a planning and/or financial disaster for the Valley.
Some of Shuman’s reasoning on things like retail leakage from Ukiah to Santa Rosa - he believes it is largely a myth - escaped me, and he seemed convinced that 70-90 percent of Ukiah Valley residents already oppose a mall there, which I’m not sure is realistic.
Both Shuman and Jones were singing to the choir of an audience of about 200, most of whom are already staunchly opposed to any DDR plan they can imagine.
And regardless of whether you support retail there or not - and I have not personally made up my mind - there were some really good discussions about what as a community we ought to be doing to take our development future into our own hands.
One thing that was said which struck me, was that communities everywhere should stop simply using land use as the measurement for economic development. Zoning should come after all the decisions about how you want your community to look, what kind of businesses you want to attract or allow, and where. Not the other way around.
Jones said she saw no reason why the county couldn’t simply let the old Masonite site sit there for a few years and see what the future brings. Shuman suggested a non-profit fund that would attract big investment dollars that would buy up in fill properties and other local sites that might make good economic development areas for specific projects to be decided by the community. Jones disagreed on the idea of non-profits - essentially government - buying up property.
Both agreed that the site should not be allowed to simply lay idle for a couple of decades. That would not be productive.
And both assured those in the room that the only way DDR can move forward with retail is if the county supervisors decide to allow a rezoning. They said mixed use could work to bring some smaller retail - some chain, some not - with light industrial and perhaps some housing, but that would take a really concentrated and community involved process.

Posted by K.C. at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Anna Taylor, in her comment about the Covelo coverage, wants to know why we haven't asked for the salaries of public employees. We have and are awaiting the response from both the county and the city of Ukiah. (for those who don't know, the California Supreme Court has ruled that all local government salaries - including law enforcement officers - are public information. Before, local entities got away with telling the media only the salary ranges for job positions, not the actual person in the job and what he or she made. The court ruled that the specific person and their salaries and overtime etc.) were fully public).
There has been some controversy in the media itself about publishing the names and public income of all local public employees. At least one Southern California newspaper I know of put all the information on its web site and got a storm of protest from local residents who are public employees saying they thought it was a huge invasion of their privacy. The newspaper then removed the names from the web site. That started a conversation within the media as to whether every public employee's salary should be published - doing it just because we can, not because it serves any great purpose. Knowing the salaries I believe helps us look at trends in spending, possible favoritism, perhaps surprising inequalities and other things. I am tending toward publishing everything, for one thing, because all this money is coming out of our pockets.
I'd be interested to hear what you all think about that. When we have the names and compensation of every city and county employee by name - do we publish them?

Posted by K.C. at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

If you're like me and not entirely sure you understand the whole caucus versus primaries thing and where the contests are all being held and when, the BBC has explained it very succinctly at http://news.bbc.co.uk/.
Assuming that Europeans may not understand how it works they have come up with an informative Q&A and interactive map of the US that I found simpler and more direct than anything I've seen in a U.S. media outlet. If you go to the site today, click into the analysis of the Obama win in South Carolina and a whole menu of U.S. political news options will be in a menu on the right including how the process works.

Posted by K.C. at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sacramento today was asked if he would tell us who he endorses in the presidential race.
Smiling, he replied, "I will go as far as to say ... any candidate that writes a $14.5 billion check to the state of California, I will endorse."
That was the ending to a half hour of Q&A at the California Newspaper Publisher's Association annual Government Day here in Sacramento which I am attending. I have to say Arnold is an impressive speaker and his star quality has not faded. This is, of course, a governor with an important agenda at the moment and talking to publishers and editors from throughout the state probably seemed like a good idea. He has a $14.5 billion budget deficit to deal with and he knows we in the media will be hearing from all the interests that the state government touches about how their ox is being gored.
The Governor is pushing a 10 percent across the board cut to all state spending, which panels of legislators we heard earlier in the day assured us would never happen.
Everyone agrees, however, that there will be severe cuts and this may finally be a time when the state legislators do some serious soul searching about transforming the state's taxation and spending systems to avoid the hills and valleys that the budget suffers every time there's a bump in the economy.
The Governor believes we ought to have two things: first a rainy day fund that is set aside whenever the state's revenues are climbing. Instead of allocating it all to additional program spending or new programs, Gov. S. believes we ought to set at least $4 billion aside for economic downturns. Second he thinks we ought to have systematic budget adjustments any time revenues begin to fall off. In other words, set up budgetary triggers that automatically cut spending in certain ways whenever sales taxes, business taxes, income taxes or other revenue streams decline. He was asked if that doesn't eliminate the accountability of legislators to make the hard decisions when these times come along. No, says Gov. S.: the triggers are planned out and decided on by the legislature after serious consideration and votes during times when a crisis is not at hand. The decisions are still made, but at a time when everyone is more rational and when there is time to make thoughtful choices.
At any rate, all that will have to come after the legislature deals with the immediate crisis which is to make mid-year cuts right now and 2008-09 cuts in 30-60 days.
One Democratic legislator earlier in the day noted that if Gov. S. would reinstate the vehicle license fee upon which he was elected in the recall election against Gray Davis, that would be $6 billion in the coffers right off the bat.
Gov. S. was also asked if he felt he had been a little hard on Davis on the subject of special interest funding given the amount he's taken himself for his own campaign chest. He said that there's nothing wrong with taking money as long as you don't sell out your constituents (in his case the people of California) when you do.
He was then asked how a voter is supposed to know which politician is going to sell them out and which isn't. He said it's the same thing we do when we decide to choose a presidential candidate. We look them right in the eye and we decide whether we can trust them.
On the subject of the economy, he said he would be trying to fast track infrastructure projects that are already funded through the $37 billion public works bond the voters have already approved. Instead of spending the $29 billion that's left, over 10 years, he'd like to get some of the projects speeded up to create employment now. Of course he also said that will mean getting past some regulations.
On water supplies state wide he said that the legislature is looking to put a
water supply bond measure on the ballot in November but there is still wrangling about how the process of approving things like new dams will be carried out. Gov. S. believes that if the legislature is given the last word every time no new dam will ever get built.
Earlier in the day we heard from a panel of sophomore legislators who had come to speak as newbies last year. Now they've had a year to see what being a legislator is like. Those who came from the local governmental process, like mayors or county supervisors said they were pleasantly surprised at the level of respect and civility in Sacramento compared to local politics. Some said the sheer pace was daunting.
They otherwise had views adhering to party lines.
Even though this was after all a meeting of newspaper publishers and editors, I was still surprised at the sheer number of photographers that follow Gov. S. around. He had no secrets to reveal or special information for our group, and he was here in Sacramento where he is a lot of the time - and yet there are a dozen or so photographers (TV and still) on hand to record the event. Of course they all left with him. I wonder if these people do nothing but follow him around all day every day.

Posted by K.C. at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The past week I have gotten feedback from a number of people about our stories delving into what may have been going on up in Covelo that may help us to understand the suicides of two sheriff's deputies who worked there.
Some of the feedback has come as phone messages, some emails and some letters.
Except for one or two letters to the editor for publication, all these communications were either anonymous or not for attribution.
There are two opinions that have come across that I want to address.
First: Why haven't we gotten to the real bottom of the story? This theory goes that everyone in Covelo knows what was going on, why haven't we published it?
Well, I've heard a lot about what people believe was going on up there too, but that doesn't mean I can just publish it. There are people who are still alive involved in these stories and we have to be careful about publishing what our investigations turn up. Good sources make good stories, but even with good sources, we have to watch what we print. To the extent that we can find out things that we are certain are true, that are corroborated by more than one person or which have the added benefit of being told to us by participants or witnesses, we can go forward.
But simply "knowing" what happened and publishing it are two very different things.

The second problem of perception is that we somehow delight in publishing bad things about Covelo, that we should now go our of our way to publish something nice about Covelo in return for the not-nice things we published last week.
Well, we don't make this stuff up. What is coming out about what may have been going on in Covelo is news and important to the community at large - especially since two deputies are now dead. As for good news, I remember we did stories last summer on Covelo's organic meat ranch, and also on a Covelo vegetable coop. We don't get out to Covelo too often because of its remoteness and I would be happy to have a Covelo resident who would like to write a regular column about good news from Covelo writing for us. Anyone out there?

Finally, and I guess this harks back to the first thing, about knowing versus publishing, I got a phone message from a woman who said I was in some way responsible for Deputy Eric Gore's suicide, since had we published some of these stories earlier, after Deputy Brett White's suicide, perhaps Gore would have been able to come forward with whatever he knew and been relieved of carrying the burden. All I can say is that these kinds of situations are tricky for us, for the people involved, and for people who think they know what's going on. It takes a combination of people willing to come forward on the record to get at these problems. There are families and careers involved in stories like these and we can't force people to step out on those limbs. We are always grateful when they do, and it usually ends up providing an opening that gives us a good wedge to keep widening it.

Posted by K.C. at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I got a call this morning from a local reader who was very upset about mail-in voting. Like the rest of us who have been prohibited from voting at a polling place, this woman got her mail-in ballot late last week. She voted and sent it back. Then, this week she gets the official State of California proposition summary explanation booklet and believes she voted the wrong way on the Indian gaming propositions. Now she's very upset that her vote is all wrong.
It raises another important question about the problem of mail-in voting: how can a county clerk send out ballots to be voted before all the official information has been distributed? This is not a case of a voter casting a mail in ballot early and then going to a political forum or reading a newspaper article and finding out something she disn't know about a candidate (which is a big problem with mail in voting already). This is one branch of government not paying attention to what another branch is doing, resulting in more voters losing faith in our system of elections.
Some of you may have heard my hour-long interview with our new county clerk Susan Ranochek on KZYX last week. Unfortunately, her attitude is that mail in voting is great, that it brings a higher turnout (although she admits voter registration is dropping in this county but she doesn't attribute mail-in voting to that) and that if you're worried about voting too early, then just keep your ballot to the very end. She also says the only input she's had so far in her new post is that people love mail in voting.
So, first of all, those of us who hate mail in voting should start calling and writing her right away. She needs to know that people want their polls back.
Second, the people in Covelo should demand equal treatment with the rest of the county. Everywhere in the county except Covelo, you can drop a ballot off at a polling place somewhere (although it may not be in your hometown). If you live in Covelo, that means driving all the way into Willits by 8 p.m. election night. Ranochek says - as did her predecessor Marsha Wharff - that it's not a problem for Covelo since they can drop their ballots if they wish, at the post office in Covelo by postal closing time, 5 p.m., and she sends people out to pick them up. That means that people in Covelo have three fewer hours than everyone else in the county to vote. ( I suspect there are other remote areas where this probably also holds true.)
Third, the county clerk ought to put a clear notice on all mail ballots that they may get more official information from the state of California about what's on their ballot in the coming days and should hold off voting until then. The county should know exactly what date the state plans to send out its voting booklet and make sure that the mail ballot tells the county voter when to expect that booklet.
Fourth, Ranochek makes the same claims that Wharff did that mail in balloting relieves the county from having the complications of having to have different ballots for different people at the polls. This is a smokescreen For instance, I live in Hopland, but I do not live in the Hopland Public Utilities District. Therefore I get a ballot that does not include matters dealing with the HPUD. When I went to the polls, the poll worker would look up my name, know that I was to get a ballot without the HPUD stuff on it and that's the one I got. In the 18 years I have lived in Hopland, not once was I handed a ballot that had HPUD matters on it by mistake. Eliminating polls does not eliminate the need to print different ballots for all these different people. The mail-in balots have to be uniquely printed for each separate voter's local water or fire district too. It only means that the county clerk's office - with no evidence at all - decided it does not trust poll workers to figure it out.
Call Susan Ranochek today and tell her you want your polling place back. The longer we agree to do without them, the harder it will be to put them back.Call her at 463-4376 or 463-4371.

Posted by K.C. at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Somehow I knew Manchester State Beach, my favorite camping spot where my husband and I have camped regularly for years, would be on the Governor's list of state parks to close. Manchester has already been sliced in half, with 15 or so campsites out of 30 eliminated last year, supposedly for seaside habitat protection - although you find state park rangers riding all over the dunes in four-wheelers - but the tiny state camping area was still a great spot if you could get there quick enough to get a camping space. I don't have high hopes that it will be saved, but it will be a big loss to me personally. The KOA on the same road is nice, but it's expensive and, excuse me, riddled with children and big crowds of people in giant RVs. Not a quiet camping weekend experience. Don't get me wrong, when my grandchildren come to town, that's where we stay. They can ride their bikes all over, go play pool or the video games and swim in the pool. And they love it. But Manchester was one of the first places my husband and I discovered after we caught our breath from our first experience of seeing the Mendocino Coast and it holds special memories of our early marriage years 18 years ago.

Posted by K.C. at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last night I sat in the UDJ office and listened for two hours to the high speed-low-speed pursuit of three guys who had apparently robbed a home in Laytonville and were trying to get away.
I didn't know anything about the crime itself at the time but heard the chatter on the office scanner. I was the only one there as it was after 8 p.m. and the reporters had all gone home and the Tuesday edition was done. Since I knew I would not be able to get any details on the incident while it was still unfolding all I could do is sit and listen. Since I'd heard an officer say the people in the car were likely armed and dangerous I felt I needed to keep listening to make sure something horrible didn't happen, like someone starting to shoot. As I listened the chase was on south of Willits on Highway 101 at 80--90 mph. It was unclear which police agencies were involved but I could tell both CHP and the Sheriff's office were in on it. I heard that a spike strip was being laid out at Gobbi Street, but somehow the perps missed it and it got instead some poor shlub in a full size pickup. We're trying to find out what happened to him. Anyway the perps headed east on Talmage and headed down Old River Road. They were leading the police on a chase down that curvy road at 60 mph. Then there was chatter about which way they would go at Hopland - up 175 or back to 101. Dispatch said they had contacted Lake County to alert them in case the perps took 175. Then they said there would be a spike strip just before the roundabout in old Hopland. As I listened there were regular reports of the milepost markers and the speeds. The perps hit the spike strip at the roundabout at about 8:30 p.m. and continued toward Hopland. In the meantime officers asked the Ukiah Police Department to go back and look around at the Talmage Road off ramp to see of the perps had thrown anything out of the car. The rear passenger door seemed to be open throughout the chase down Old River Road. By this time the officers had determined there were three people in the vehicle, a large dark grey or blue SUV. After the perps hit the spike strip they slowed to about 15 mph and kept heading to Hopland, then back onto 101 south and toward Sonoma County. They slowed to 10 mph and the police followed them for an hour and a half down 101 at 10 mph. They stopped traffic both ways on 101 and just followed along. They called in a helicopter from Benicia and the copter got there about 30 minutes later but the pilot said it was too dark and hilly along that stretch of road to hover about so he headed back toward Cloverdale. He was called in case the perps abandoned the car and started running - or "taking leg" as the officers put it. But they didn't. I guess looking at the Russian River on one side and large hills upward on the east side of the road, it didn't look like a good place to start running. The slow speed chase went on and on with reports every couple of minutes like, "Mile post 8.81, 10 miles per hour," as they slowly approached the Sonoma County line. Sonoma County Sheriff's and Cloverdale police were waiting at this point and had closed off the exit to 128 from 101 at Cloverdale. The Mendocino County Sheriff's officers were ready to hand off the pursuit to Sonoma County when they hit the county line. They didn't make it. Just at Geysers Road where the road turns up a serious hill, the perps started to slow and then stopped. They were arrested without incident thank goodness.
I have to say I was fascinated by this slow motion drama. I assume there are protocols about handling these situations but it certainly wasn't what you'd expect.
Anyway, as I headed home myself to Hopland at about 10 p.m. I couldn't resist driving down to the incident site where the SUV stood with all four doors open and two Sheriff's cars guarding it. I turned and went home.
Since there was no official information and we have a policy of not going to print with scanner information only, and, the incident ended quietly, I left it for the morning and there should be something on the Web now about it. But I thought I'd give you my audio version. Why, do you ask, didn't I race down to Hopland to get in on the action? Believe me I thought about it. But since I didn't have a hand held scanner, if I left the office I would be out of touch and would no doubt have simply been stopped at 101 in Hopland not able to find out how it ended. So I opted to stay in the office and listen. Of course this is all info from what I heard on the scanner and isn't official. But it all happened as I heard it I'm sure and we'll get more details as the day progresses.

Posted by K.C. at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just the other day I was asking someone why nothing has ever happened on the city's idea for a River Park along the Russian River out Gobbi Street. The reason was that they did not get any grant funds to get started. Now, I understand the city's latest $4 million grant application with the California Resources Agency for the
development of Riverside Park has made it past the intital state review, the first step. This is significant given that they did not make it to this point with the last application. So maybe there's hope this time around.

Posted by K.C. at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have to say the new Comfort Inn in Ukiah is very nice. My husband and I and our dog checked in this evening after a phone call to PG&E at about 4 p.m. today (Saturday) when our electricity was supposed to be restored. The woman at PG&E told me we would have no electricity until at least 1 p.m. Sunday. Our electricity went out overnight Thursday and we've been without since. One night with the Coleman stove and flashlights and candles is Ok, kinda fun, but two nights? Nope. I know I am lucky to be able to drive down the road and check into a nice hotel and I feel for the folks out there still sitting in the dark and increasing cold. I know I'm not happy with PG&E right now but I'll be willing to bet that all the people still without power will be the result of PG&E's simple lack of crews out there, not some overwhelming series of events. They knew we had a bad one coming. I think they just choose to keep employment low and the heck with the customers. As we approached the 48 hour mark PG&E had not even planned to send a crew out to our part of the world until Sunday. I know I'll be submitting a claim for all the meat in my freezer which I will be afraid to eat now.
Anyway, hurrah for the Comfort Inn, their pet-friendly rooms (we got a lovely suite for less than we would have paid for a room just up the street) and their friendly service.

Kudos to the Ukiah City Council for its vote Friday to ask the supervisors to put repealing Measure G on the June ballot.

Posted by K.C. at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The blog is back and now that the new year is here and things are getting back to normal, I'll be blogging regularly again. We hope soon to add a blog from Kate Marianchild, who our readers may have noticed is creating a regular feature on flora and fauna of our area. And we are setting up a blog for the local Girl Scouts, to help keep the community up to date on scouting in our area. If you would like to blog for the Daily Journal, shoot me an email and let me know what you subject is and we'll talk about it. The more voices out here in the cyberworld the better.
I want to take a moment here to thank Valerie Holm Warda, a Ukiah High School teacher who has been writing a monthly column for our Sunday pages for many years, and who, over the holidays decided to rearrange her life's priorities and would no longer have time to do it. I thank her for her many, many thoughtful columns which - she on occasion reminded me - we got for free. If anyone out there would like to try their hand at a monthly Sunday column, again, email me with two or three samples of columns you would write and we'll have a look. I can be reached at udjkcm@pacific.net.
We are also setting up a blog for our new sports editor Anthony Dion, who is quickly getting to know the sports scene locally and is looking forward to the coming sports season. Covering sports on Sundays and Monday for us now too is John-Michael Kibrick, a Ukiah HIgh senior. Feel free to contact him with sports info on those days.

I got a call the other day from a reader who saw the article about lagging voter registrations. She said she's not really surprised and that there may be many reasons people have decided to give up on voting. "I don't vote because the federal government can walk in and overturn my vote," she told me. " I will not vote as long as my vote doesn't count.
I am no longer registered to vote. I want to vote but I have to stand by my principles." Besides the Supreme Court decision which put George W. Bush in the White in 2000, this reader also feels that her vote was discounted when Californians voted to legalize medical marijuana but the federal government still calls it illegal.

A reminder that the Redwood Region Logging Conference is coming back to Ukiah this year in March at the fairgrounds. The conference goes back and forth between Eureka and Ukiah each year. An Education Day will be held Thursday, March 20, the opening day of the 70th annual Redwood Region Logging Conference. Attendance will be limited to 1,500 Mendocino and Lake County school children, grades 3-6th. So for teachers and others interested in getting kids to that event or for more information about attending the conference, visit the web site at
www.rrlc.net, In addition, the Redwood Region Logging Conference is offering local schools the opportunity to have educational materials provided to students. Teachers interested in having a Resource Professional (Forester, Wildlife or Fisheries Biologist, Geologist, etc.) visit their classroom, or schedule a log truck visit to their school are invited to visit the web site, as well about scheduling an event.

Posted by K.C. at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)