Inside UDJ by Editor K.C. Meadows

Those who were sitting in the June 10 Board of Supervisors meeting heard from a local man who has been severely abused by the county's planning department and who has still to get any relief. Chris Stone has been trying since January of 2007 to build a little over 200 homes - some houses, some apartments -- on 50 acres at the south end of Ukiah across from the Redwood Health Club. The land is already zoned for exactly his kind of project and the project, by all accounts is well-designed, uses advanced sewer discharge systems, anticipates solar use and carves out a retail space for perhaps a local store. It has the lower, mdidle and upper income homes all together and from what I can gather is exactly the kind of development local politicians say they need and want.
So what does the county planning department do? It stalls and ignores Mr. Stone, demands unnecessary studies and generally makes the man spend hundreds of thousands of dollars without any sign that his project will move forward. Mr. Stone produced the environmental studies - although the project should really get a negative declaration since it's a zoned use - and based them on not only what the county's rules currently demand but used more challenging assumptions than the county would have.
What does the county planning department do? It decides to demand new studies based on what it thinks it might have in the Ukiah Valley Area Plan at some future date. And everyone knows the UVAP is far from being ready to adopt.
So Mr. Stone very politely - for someone who could and probably should have been raging much sooner - went to the Board of Supervisors and complained. The county planning department pretended to be on top of the situation, and supervisors promised Mr. Stone that he would get action from the tippy top, the CEO himself.
Mr. Stone tried to schedule meetings with the CEO to no avail. So he went back to the supervisors in July and lo and behold the county administration suddenly scheduled a meeting and acted like they'd never seen him waiting hopefully in their anterooms.
How that July 17 meeting went is unknown as of now, but Mr. Stone has another gab session in August.
County Planning Director Ray Hall is retiring in days - as far as I'm concerned he should have been retired after the Vichy Springs development debacle in the early 1990s. The county now has an opportunity to recharge its planning department - and not with $177,000 a year consultants and not with anyone who has been working in the department under Hall's "leadership." The county needs a talented planner who it will allow to be creative, but demand be responsive and who will lead the county into the future. This county's reputation for micromanagement, anti-developer sentiment and political mayhem will make that person difficult to find.

Posted by K.C. at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Overheard in a Sonoma County tasting room Sunday was an American couple who live with their children in Beijing explaining that the air pollution in Beijing is so bad (LA is Lake County by comparison) that the Olympic athletes already in the region are actually staying in Tokyo and flying over to Beijing when necessary. They say that young people are routinely urged to wear masks when they are outside but often refuse to do so and that they do not let their own children outside to play. (One wonders what income is worth that but anyway ...)
Today I read in the Washington Post that Beijing has begun a three-week air cleanup program that prohibits all public smoking in the city of 16 million, and that has shut down factories and limited residents' driving to certain days of the week.
Will it be enough to clean up the air by the time the torch is in place? I don't know but I can say that this is one summer Olympics I wont be wishing I could attend in person. And I suspect that a lot of Americans who go over there are going to be rudely awakened to the fact that they can't breathe. Can you clean up the air of a city of 16 million in three weeks?

Posted by K.C. at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tidbit 1: I have noticed in the past couple of weeks that Bruce Bread is no longer available at Safeway. I wonder if thehigh prices of wheast has put a crimp on Bruce Bread's product. They were always the expensive loaf. If cheap bread is now at $4-$5, perhaps Bruce Bread got too expensive? I had actually begun buying Bruce Bread since at $4-plus a loaf it was the same price as the lesser loaves.

Tidbit 2: Gas at Hopland's USA station (or what ever the southernmost one is) is $4.39, the cheapest I've seen around.

Tidbit 3: I understand that Peter Richardson, former owner of Rainbow Construction has settled with Ukiah Unified School District. I don't know for how much. The person who told me said he couldn't divulge that part. As you may recall, Rainbow went out of business after the school district refused to pay more than $3 million in charges the company felt it had coming to it when the Grace Hudson School was finished. The construction was over a year late and the school district said the overages were Rainbow's fault. Rainbow said they were the architect's fault. From what I have seen in reports on the construction and from talking to subcontractors, I believe Rainbow got a raw deal and the school district basically put them out of business (plus the Ukiah Valley lost the more than 200 good construction jobs they represented locally). Also it is telling that UUSD is now suing the architects.

Posted by K.C. at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I read somewhere that the day that Shea Stadium will close down approaches (in September), I recalled a time when Mets games were an important part of family life for me. For those of you who aren't baseball fans or who don't know the New York area, Shea Stadium was opened in 1964 in Queens to house the new New York Mets baseball team. My single mom found it a great place to spend an inexpensive evening with her two daughters, me 10 and older sis 12. You could take a subway right to the park (we never owned a car) and I don't know what admission was, but it was cheap. My mom often had another woman, someone usually from her midtown office, along for the games and my sister and I learned for the first time about baseball. But mostly we were delirious to be out at night with mom, watching as the night deepened and the bright field lights and the deep green outfield and burnt orange infield came alive. We also loved the Mets fans around us. Loud, raucus and almost obsessive, they had coffee cans and wooden spoons, homemade horns, bells, whistles and other noise makers which my sister and I never had a hope of being allowed to imitate. Of course in those days the Mets were new, and not very good as I recall. But we loved them.
I guess my mom wasn't a Yankee fan and Yankee Stadium was harder to get to and not in a neighborhood a single woman wanted to walk with two young girls at night. (Although my Dad, who lived across town from us in Manhattan used to love to tell us that Yankee Stadium was owned by the Catholic Church and, being Catholic, wasn't that just grand?)
One year about 1988 or 89 my husband and I were in NYC visiting my mom and we all decided to go to a Mets day game. I had forgotten how tall Shea Stadium is and when we took our seats in the rafters in a chilly wind, we realized that even the resident crows and pigeons were flying below us and about four innings in, stiff with cold, we decided we'd had enough and left.
Despite that, and the fact that Shea is far from a great ballpark, it will always be part of my childhood - along with the big World's Fair globe nearby - and that's how I'll remember it.

Posted by K.C. at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had an idea the other day that I am going to try out here and if it seems popular we'll move it to its own forum somewhere more prominent on our web site. Let me know if you think this could work.
I want folks locally to share information about how to save money on things they buy regularly. Did you see a good sale on something? Is gas a few cents cheaper in one spot today? Where can you get a loaf of real whole wheat bread (not pretend wheat bread) for under $4. Things like that.

I'll start with what I think is the best deal on coffee in town. The two pound bag of French Roast whole beans at Food Maxx for $7.99 - it may be up to $8.99 now but it's a great deal and the coffee is just fine.

The organic peaches at Safeway for $1.99/lb. were very good and I think they are still there on sale.

Posted by K.C. at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For those who haven't yet seen it, the New York Times has a story in today's online version called, "With Pride, Californians Step Up to Fight Fires," about volunteer firefighters in Mendocino County. As those of us who live here know, these men and women are always at the front of the line when emergencies strike. What this current wildfire situation has told me - and I've said it already - is that we don't have enough resources in the state to cover what will be years to come of summer wildfires, and that our rural county got pretty much put to the back of the list when more populated counties went up. I don't argue that lives and property must trump forestlands, but if there were enough firefighters and tankers and equipment to go around Cal Fire wouldn't have to make those hard choices. Over and over we have heard fire officials tell us there's not enough to go around. In the aftermath, our state and federal legislators better be heeding this call - and not with legislation just to start collecting higher and higher fees from landowners. Firefighting serves us all.

Posted by K.C. at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I hope that it is not too late for the California Transportation Commission's Caltrans fans to realize that much of the millions upon millions of dollars they have spent on highways over the past 10 years should have been going to revitalizing our train systems. How nice would be it be right now to have a passenger train running up and down the Highway 101 corridor on tracks that already exist. Yes, I know there have been more than a few missteps by the North Coast Railroad Authority, but their efforts were often stymied by a lack of funding from the state which never saw a highway it didn't love. I am guessing that had we had available for railroad redevelopment just the money the state has spent at Confusion Hill in the past 20 years we could have a fully functioning passenger railroad up and down the North Coast. I'll concede that the Eel River corridor is a challenge but from Willits south there's no reason we can't have freight and people running on rail tracks. Now that many of us are spending close to $100 a week on gasoline, how nice would it be if I could hop down to the depot in Hopland and take the train to Ukiah every day?
Nationwide our train system is seeing an upsurge in use. For thirty years our federal government has treated Amtrak like a freeloading uncle who won't get a job. It must pay for itself! they cry. I have never understood why federal tax dollars should not go to subsidizing our national transportation system. How much less dependent on oil would we be now if trains were readily available everywhere in our nation - not just in major cities, but everywhere. People get tired of hearing it but it has to be said that the Europeans have the kind of train systems we should have. Even in the smallest towns, a usable and frequent train schedule is available to anywhere.
I hope it's not too late for us.

Posted by K.C. at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)