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February 23, 2006
THE DEDAZO: For something like 70 years,
it went off without a hitch. A few months before an upcoming
"election," the Mexican president, leader of what used
to be a one-party state, would make a public appearance to introduce
the person he had chosen to succeed him. Six years later, just
as he was finishing his term, the new guy would introduce the
next new guy. Six years after that, the next new guy would introduce
the next next new guy. It was called the dedazo -- the
big finger, the tap on the shoulder. Mexico could run things
this way and still call itself a democracy because it had a fig
leaf: A couple of repressed fringe parties offered up challengers
in each election, even though they knew that the ruling party
would stomp all over them at the polls.
Does this remind you of anything? If it doesn't,
ask yourself: When was the last time there was anything resembling
a Democratic primary race for the North Coast's seats in the
state legislature or Congress? Can you remember? It was exactly
a decade ago, as it happens. That's when Eureka's Virginia Strom-Martin
nudged out ex-Congressman Doug Bosco for the chance to represent
local Democrats in the state Assembly, and when attractive carpetbagger
Michaela Alioto finished first in a crowded field of Democrats
itching to take on Rep. Frank Riggs. Strom-Martin won, Alioto
didn't. In the four Assembly and Congressional and two state
Senate primaries that followed, the season has been deafeningly
quiet. If there have been debates of ideas, or of policy, or
of strategy concerning upcoming elections, those debates have
taken place behind closed doors, before a new candidate is anointed.
On Monday, Assemblymember Patty Berg and State
Sen. Wes Chesbro, who is being termed out of office this year,
called a press conference to announce that both were endorsing
Sonoma County resident Pat Wiggins' bid to replace Chesbro in
the Senate. (Rep. Mike Thompson, who could not make the event,
said in a press release that he supported Wiggins as well.) Wiggins
has a long and distinguished record in politics; she is a former
member of the Santa Rosa City Council and was a three-term member
of the state Assembly, before term limits forced her out in 2004.
She's done a lot of work on Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, has organized
efforts to promote smart growth over sprawl and helped beat back
Alaska Water Exports, the company that had tried to secure river
water from Humboldt and Mendocino counties to ship by "water
bag" down to southern California.
If her short speech at Monday's press conference
is anything to go by, the dedazada also appears to care
very deeply about some things that don't get much attention in
Sacramento. Near the end of her short talk, she mentioned that
she is a big supporter of vocational education projects. She
started rattling off statistics -- only 25 percent of California
kids graduate from college, she said -- but didn't get very deep
into her stump speech before her disgust overtook her. "No
one gives a damn about these kids," she said, fairly spitting
the words out.
She'll do just fine. And two years from now, when
Berg is termed out and Chesbro makes the switch down to the lower
house, that'll be just fine, too. Don't worry about it.
WATER BOARDER BOOTED: The governor appointeth,
and the governor booteth. A year ago, on Feb. 15, 2005, California
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Dennis Leonardi, along
with several others, to the North Coast Regional Water Quality
Control Board. On Feb. 10, 2006, the Ferndale owner and manager
of Leonardi Dairy sent the Governor his letter of resignation
-- but not because he wanted to.
During a recent Senate exercise to confirm his
appointment -- these things typically happen a year after the
actual appointment -- the Senate decided that Leonardi didn't
meet the "10-percent rule." That's the federal rule
that says a person can't serve on a state water board if he or
she garners 10 percent or more of his or her income from a business
with a wastewater discharge permit. Leonardi Dairy's milk is
processed at the Humboldt Creamery, which has a wastewater discharge
permit, and the state computed that into a violation of the 10-percent
rule. Leonardi's lawyers disagreed, saying it really amounted
to just 3 percent of his income. Nevertheless, the governor asked
him to resign.
Judging by his letter to the governor, Leonardi
was crushed -- not only because he had just been named board
chairman in December, but because he'd spent the past year immersing
himself in water issues. "This resignation is particularly
saddening given the vast amount of work ahead ..." Leonardi
said in his letter, which the Ferndale Enterprise printed
in its Feb. 16 issue.
On Tuesday, Catherine Kuhlman, executive officer
of the water board, said the board's "really going to miss
Dennis' leadership. He's a really straightforward guy, and really
clear. He'd been on the board a year, he knew where he wanted
to go. And we just lose the momentum now." She said the
issue of the 10-percent rule "had been vetted a year ago,
at the Governor's office, and so it was just surprising to see
that the issue came back up." She said the 10-percent rule's
a little baffling, anyway. "That's one of the things people
feel very troubled by with the 10-percent rule. An environmental
organization can have someone on the board, but people that are
actually working the land, farming and growing things, can't
serve." As for why Leonardi's appointment was suddenly yanked
away, she speculates that the state is beginning to give the
rulebook a closer read. She suspects that'll be a trend, spreading
to other boards -- at least in California. "I did some research,
I called some other states, and they said, `What's the 10-percent
rule?'"
PRAISES, WARNINGS: No, the recent warning
from the Accrediting Commission Team for Community and Junior
Colleges to the College of the Redwoods isn't as ominous as it
sounds, says Paul DeMark, CR public information officer. It just
means the college has to hurry up and communicate how much it
has progressed since the accrediting team roamed the campus and
interviewed its subjects last October and in 1999. "It's
better to get recommendations," DeMark said. "A warning
-- we haven't had that before. But it just means we have to do
a progress report quickly. These are [our] peers, they're here
to help [us]."
As a result of the earlier, routine interviews,
the college had received seven recommendations for improvement.
One of the recommendations was that CR institute a means for
evaluating its programs and making decisions based on data, said
DeMark. "We've known we've need to have a department of
institutional research, to be able to follow through on how our
policies are doing, if they're successful or not." Since
the team's October visit, CR secured a $1.6 million five-year
Title III grant from the U.S. Department of Education to establish
just such an office. So that can be something sent off in the
progress report. DeMark said the college has dealt with many
of the perceived deficiencies since the actual visitations by
the accrediting team.
CR also received eight commendations from the team
for setting aside funds for post-employment retirement benefits,
professional development offerings, progress toward equity and
diversity in hiring and "cultivating a common purpose and
collective vision and commitment to student success that is evident
at every campus and instructional site."
TRUST FUND TOME: In the semi-harried weekly
newspaper biz, press releases come and keep coming, and press
releases go down into the recycling bin (digital or otherwise),
with rarely a nod of appreciation to the person who wrote it.
This week we decided to change all that, and to thank Richard
Johnson of Trinidad for the bubbly media release he sent last
week in regards to the Trinidad Police Trust Fund, a recently
formed nonprofit with a goal of raising cash for a new police
station (the old one was condemned).
The press release/prose poem -- titled "Why
a Trust Fund in Trinidad?" -- takes two pages to get to
the point, which, of course, is to ask for money for a new police
station. Normally this delay would be irritating for an impatient
reader, or a reporter accustomed to the inverted pyramid style
of writing. But in the case of this particular press release,
the two pages of babbling serve to highlight that windy route
of digressions and detours one must delicately navigate before
arriving at the embarrassing juncture when you must change gears,
stop prattling and start asking for money. Some media-savvy people
have no qualms soliciting funds for their causes, but the shier
ones are occasionally the people we notice instead, especially
when they write things like this: "Wave at a Trinidad
officer and he, or she, will smile and wave back. In big cities,
the cops are more likely to tail you -- they'll just know you
are up to no good if you waved at them." Or like this:
"Given the scope of their responsibilities, and their
relatively modest presence, the police in Trinidad do an exceptional
job looking after the town's residents and the area's far larger
legions of visitors. They do so with a style more like that of
a traditional English Bobby than an American cop."
Precious! Still, there are, no doubt, some who
disagree with this assessment of Trinidad's finest. After all,
it was only a few months back when a number of townspeople called
Police Chief Ken Thrailkill a Gestapo agent for pursuing an identity
theft case against political campaigner Richard Salzman (the
case was dropped). In a phone interview, Johnson said he would
like the police department and the community to have a friendly
relationship, and that they really need some money for a new
station. Interested parties can write to the Trinidad Police
Trust Fund at P.O. Box 1039, Trinidad, CA, 95570.
TOP
The Green Revolution
Why does no one attend local meetings of Arcata's
second-largest party?
by HANK SIMS
Two weeks ago, Jesse Goplen, a 27-year-old Humboldt
State student who has been serving as chair of the Arcata Greens
-- a local chapter of the Green Party -- sat down and wrote out
a long mea culpa and a call to arms. He asked for forgiveness
from his fellow Green Party members for actions he had taken
a month earlier, and asked them also to rise up and help reform
an organization that had been running, as he put it, on "autopilot."
What was Goplen apologizing for? On Jan. 17, members
of the Humboldt Coalition for Community Rights -- a group affiliated
with Eureka's Democracy Unlimited, which is itself affiliated
with Green Party politics -- gave a press conference at the office
of the Humboldt County Elections Department. HCCR supporters
were there to announce that they had gathered some 7,600 signatures
from Humboldt County citizens in support of the "Humboldt
County Ordinance to Protect Our Right to Fair Elections and Local
Democracy," an initiative that seeks to ban out-of-town
corporations from donating to local political campaigns. The
signatures were more than enough to put the initiative on the
June 2006 ballot. It was a big success.
Shortly afterwards, though, the Arcata Greens came
out with a press release attacking the HCCR initiative. The release
said that the Arcata Greens believed the initiative to be blatantly
unconstitutional, and noted that Greg Allen, an attorney and
member of the Arcata Greens, would be putting forward a competing
initiative, one that would place a hard cap on all donations
in local races.
In his letter, Goplen said that he had come to
regret voting to approve the press release.
"You see, it almost seemed like the press
release was timed to kick sand in the face of progressives who
supported the measure, just at the height of their grassroots
PR campaign," he wrote. "My friends in the Green Party
couldn't be doing that, could they?"
They could, he concluded. But even more interestingly,
Goplen gave details about how the resolution came to pass. In
fact, he said, only two actual members of the Arcata Greens voted
in favor of the initiative -- he and Allen, the only two Arcata
Greens present at the meeting. A third vote was provided by Charles
Douglas, a gadfly journalist/activist/political campaigner and
a resident of Eureka, who allegedly asked Goplen if he could
use Goplen's Arcata address "for the purposes of the meeting."
Goplen agreed, he later wrote, and so Douglas provided the quorum
necessary to approve the anti-HCCR press release.
The tale raises many questions, not the least of
which is: Why do only two people attend a meeting of the Arcata
Greens, the organization that should speak for a polity of Arcata
citizens with national renown? Ten years ago, Arcata became the
first jurisdiction in the country to elect a Green Party-majority
City Council, and stood as a much-cited exemplar for Greens nationwide
for years to come. More people are registered Green in the city
than are registered Republican. Moreover, the Green Party is
purportedly all about grassroots work on local issues, about
paying attention to what happens in your own watershed. Why don't
people come to meetings?
Bob Ornelas, one of the first wave of Greens elected
to the Arcata City Council, said Monday that for him, the Green
Party is more about a movement than about an institution, and
that he thinks that many others feel the same way. No one wants
to go to more meetings when they've got work to do, he said.
And those who do want to attend meetings often find that the
agenda is predetermined by a cliquish group at the top. He mentioned
Allen and Douglas, in particular.
"The Greens became a cornucopia of oddballs,
locally," he said, adding that many people find that there
are much more effective ways to do political work.
"There's been a shift of a number of Greens
over to the local Democratic Party, because [the local Democratic
Party] is Green," he said. "The local Democrats have
shown themselves to be every bit as progressive and much more
effective than the local Green Party."
After the Arcata Greens issued its press release
condemning the HCCR initiative, the three currently serving Green
members of the Arcata City Council -- Dave Meserve, Harmony Groves
and Paul Pitino -- issued a press release of their own, saying
that they supported the initiative and that the Arcata Greens
did not speak in their names.
Groves said last week that she, too, had attended
only a few meetings of local Green Party chapters. She said that
she found the meetings had a "hostile environment,"
and expressed surprise that Greens like Douglas had not been
more supportive of her work. She and Democracy Unlimited's Kaitlin
Sopoci-Belknap, who was recently elected to the board of the
Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, are frequent targets on
the several web sites that Douglas runs, some of which bear the
logo of the Green Party.
"When you think about elected women from the
Democratic or Republican party, they get so much support from
their parties," Groves said. "In fact, we get the opposite
of support."
In his letter, Goplen asked Arcatans registered
Green to turn out at the regularly scheduled meeting of the Arcata
Greens last Wednesday evening. Paul Pitino, another of the current
City Council members, was one of the several who did so. He,
like the rest of them, arrived at the groups' regular meeting
place only to find the doors locked, and Allen and Douglas nowhere
in sight. However, they did manage to pass a resolution overturning
the previous resolution, and registering the party's official
support of the HCCR initiative.
Pitino said that he didn't know how often he'd
be able to attend future meetings of the Arcata Greens. For one,
he said, the regular meetings were scheduled on the same night
as meetings of the City Council. But he did hope that people
would begin to get more involved.
"I ask that as many people as possible show
up to Green events," he said. "And understand that
when Dave [Meserve] and Harmony and I aren't there, we're probably
at a council meeting."
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