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October 20, 2005
WATERFRONT FIRE: Old Town resident Gina Prows and her husband,
Dave Machuga, weren't sure where the fire was at first, but they
knew it was nearby. When they looked out their second story window,
around 1:45 a.m. on Sunday, the billowing black smoke was funneling
up F Street and pouring into their apartment. They could hardly
see the road below. Machuga immediately called 911 and minutes
later they knew for sure that the fire was coming from the construction
site on the boardwalk. "It was an inferno within minutes,"
said Prows. The blaze was made worse by a 20-knot north wind.
Fire crews were on the scene almost immediately and spent approximately
40 minutes extinguishing the initial blaze, then hours more monitoring
hot spots and combing rooftops of nearby buildings for stray
embers. "The saving grace was the rain we had late last
week," said Eureka Fire Chief Eric Smith. "Had conditions
been drier this could have been a real catastrophe. Old Town
is a tinderbox of very old buildings, very close together."
Smith could not provide details about the cause of the fire that
destroyed the Bayfront One project, nor could he pin down how
long an investigation could take. "We're going through it
layer by layer to gather and sort the facts." On Tuesday,
EFD workers sorted through the rubble and inmate crews hauled
away debris in wheelbarrows. Security guards have been stationed
outside of the site at all hours since the blaze was extinguished.
The project is owned by Larry and Lisa DeBeni, Greg and Sharon
Pierson, Catherine Dunaway and Susan Rasmussen. Anyone with information
concerning the fire is encouraged to call the EFD at 441-4000.
PALCO/WATER BOARD SHOWDOWN: One of the many long-standing disputes between
the Pacific Lumber Co. and state water quality agencies is headed
to the California Supreme Court. Last week, the court ordered
the case, Pacific Lumber v. Water Resources Control Board
onto its calendar, with a hearing date set for Nov. 9. The
case concerns the most fundamental issue in the many battles
between the company and the various arms of the State Water Resources
Control Board --- do water quality regulators, in fact, have
the right to limit logging? On March 18, 2005, a state appellate
court assured the agencies that, in fact, they do --- it is this
decision that will be reheard by the Supreme Court next month.
A number of environmental groups --- including the Humboldt Watershed
Council, the Environmental Protection Information Center and
the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisheries Associations have filed
a friend of the court brief in the case, asserting that the agency
can halt timber harvest plans. "This is really huge,"
said Mark Lovelace of the Humboldt Watershed Council Tuesday.
"What this suit is really about is whether Water Quality
has the authority to regulate water quality. It should be pretty
obvious." In the past, Palco has argued that the California
Department of Forestry should have the final say on the approval
of timber harvest plans.
THAT'S MY TREE: On Tuesday, treesitters accused of trespassing
by Pacific Lumber Co. gained momentum in their counter-suit against
Palco, accusing it of trespassing. "Fun was had by
all," said treesitter Remedy (aka Jen Card), who spent a
year in a tree without touching ground (March 2002-March 2003)
before being hauled out by Pacific Lumber. Back in September
2002, following a series of interrupted tree sits in Freshwater,
Palco sued the treesitters in Humboldt County Superior Court.
Activists allege it's a SLAPP suit (Strategic Lawsuit Against
Public Participation), "used by corporations to quash protests
against their operations," said Remedy. Last year, seven
of the treesitters sued back, accusing Palco of assault, battery,
kidnapping, inflicting emotional harm, distress, negligence and
false imprisonment, among other things. They recently added three
new charges: trespassing, forcible entry and invasion of privacy.
"We were alleging that they committed trespass, because
we were in possession of the trees," said Remedy. "Pacific
Lumber alleges, and we agree, we were occupying the trees. Well,
if you look up 'possession,' it means 'occupy.' I, therefore,
had possession of the tree. And Judge Quentin Kopp found that
to be true." Semantically speaking, that is. But Kopp threw
out the treesitters' trespassing charge, because "we had
not shown we had a right of possession," said Remedy. Kopp
allowed the forcible entry and invasion of privacy charges to
remain. "We are arguing they came onto the property by force,
in a menacing way, to remove us," Remedy said. "The
law says, right or wrong, even if you don't have a right to possession,
people cannot resort to 'self-help' do-it-yourself removal. They
have to go through a legal process and get the Sheriff."
The invasion of privacy charge stems from Palco's extraction
crews having hidden cameras in their helmets. Another nuance
of the trespassing charge remains unclear, however. "The
location of the trees occupied by the activists is in the county
right-of-way, directly adjacent to a public road," Remedy
said. "Pacific Lumber has long snubbed the activists' requests
for proof of ownership." Palco had "promised it would
provide 'simplified' proof'" at Tuesday hearing. "But
it did not," according to Remedy.
CRABILL STAYS PUT, FOR NOW: Is College of the Redwoods President Casey Crabill
looking around for a new job? Not at the moment, she says ---
this despite a recent report in the Orlando Sentinel that
listed her as one of the finalists chosen by a committee headhunting
for the post of the presidency at Florida's Polk Community College.
Crabill said that she has since withdrawn her name from consideration.
But the popular president, who has become a community fixture
since taking the reins at CR a few years ago, seemed to indicate
Monday that she might, at some point, look to a future beyond
Humboldt County. "I think that sometimes you can get a lot
of things done, and you get to a point where you might start
thinking about whether someone coming in behind you might be
able to get more done," she said. "What's good for
the institution is what you have to be thinking about. The last
thing you want to do is stay too long." Last year, Crabill
was one of three finalists for the presidency of the Hudson Valley
Community College in her home state, New York.
AUGUST'S BILL: After months of deliberation, the Fortuna City
Council decided this week to shell out for Councilwoman Debi
August's legal fees, which stem from the suit brought against
her by the Humboldt County Grand Jury for an alleged conflict
of interest. The council agreed, 3-1, to give their colleague
$52,000, which covers roughly a third of the $158,000 bill. Voting
for the reimbursement were Mayor Odell Shelton, Mel Berti and
Dough Strehl. Dean Glaser voted against.
WHAT'S THAT RED THING? OK, so most of you probably already know that
the red torpedo jutting at a jaunty angle from the recently dolled-up
median between the 101s (4th and 5th streets) on R Street in
Eureka is actually a big ol' channel buoy. The buoy, the clusters
of pier posts and the lengths of hawser, all planted prettily
amid small boulders, were donated by the Humboldt Bay Harbor,
Recreation and Conservation District to CalTrans as visual aids
to what once was a languishing wreck of an ugly median. CalTrans
is in charge of fixing up that particular stretch of road because
it's also Route 255, which takes the northwest-bound traveler
to the Samoa Peninsula and other points before and beyond. Ann
Marie Jones, CalTrans spokesperson, says the harbor district
"regards the R Street portion of Route 255 as the gateway
to their facilities and an extension of the entrance to their
Woodley Island Marina." Jones says the harbor district and
the Keep Eureka Beautiful committee requested improvements to
the dilapidated approach to the district's domain, and so CalTrans
obliged, with the district's consultation. Eureka community development
staff reviewed and supported the makeover, and it fits in with
future redevelopment in that area, says Jones. She likens it
to another beautification of an ordinary CalTrans rehab project,
the McCullens Street wall with a seaport theme on South Broadway.
"We're always looking to be context-sensitive," Jones
says.
DEADLINE TO REGISTER: The deadline register to vote in the upcoming
Nov. 8 election is Monday, Nov. 24. Registration cards, which
are available at area libraries and other governmental facilities,
must be delivered to the Humboldt County Elections Office at
the corner of H Street and Harris Avenue in Eureka by that date
(if you're mailing your card in, just be sure that it's postmarked
by then.) In addition to the eight statewide ballot measures
up for vote this time, numerous local offices --- including school
districts, community service districts and the Humboldt Bay Harbor,
Recreation and Conservation District --- will be decided at the
polls. Please register and vote, and be sure to check out the
Journal's coverage of local races next week.
TOP
 Rollin ain't rollin'
HSU's president unfashionably
disses pot in 'drug haven'
by HEIDI
WALTERS
Humboldt County residents generally
might be eager to "subvert the dominant paradigm,"
as that old bumper sticker commands --- until, that is, someone
comes along and tries to subvert their dominant paradigm:
The embrace of pot, especially medicinal pot. But that's what
Humboldt State University President Rollin Richmond's been doing
lately, and town's been abuzz since his latest denouncement.
Left: Humboldt
State University President Rollin Richmond.
A couple of weeks ago at the
Arcata City Council meeting, after a desultory discussion among
council members as to whether they should bring the city's ordinance
in line with county guidelines governing medical marijuana, Richmond
scolded the council in a long and passionate speech about the
ills of the weed, and urged the council not to make Arcata "more
of a drug haven."
"There is a very big elephant
in this room, and the elephant is your efforts, or at least the
efforts of some of your members, to essentially move toward the
partial legalization of the use of a drug that can have significant
and negative consequences for a number of people," Richmond
said.
"This is an issue for the
health and safety of this community, both for the university
and for the city," he continued. "Don't be misled by
using the argument that this is a medicine. It is indeed not.
Don't be misled by the argument that you're somehow being compassionate."
Again --- to some residents,
them's fightin' words. But what's behind such vehemence? Where's
the president coming from? Does he maybe have a point?
For Richmond, the issue does
seem to center around health and safety. At the meeting, he railed
against the easy availability of drugs in town. "Last Friday
night, the university police arrested a juvenile for selling
marijuana and LSD... a drug that was responsible for killing
a young person who was my friend when I was an undergraduate
at San Diego State University. His connections and his sources
of those drugs came from the Arcata Plaza."
In an interview in his office
last Friday, Richmond emphasized this concern. "I'm worried
about young people," he said. "Young people, by nature,
want to experiment, they want to try new things, and if you make
drugs readily available --- allowing anybody to carry around
three pounds of marijuana or to grow 99 plants wherever they
want, as long as they've got a medical card that they can buy
from any physician who wants to make a few hundred bucks ---
then you are going to create an opportunity for some young people
to get into serious trouble with drugs. And marijuana today is
a potent drug, it's seven times stronger than it was in the early
'70s. It does, in some cases, act as a gateway drug to other,
really very much more dangerous drugs. That's a concern of mine."
Steve Butler, vice president
for student affairs at HSU, also said that health and safety
are HSU's chief concerns, and that the HSU police department
"makes no moral judgment about marijuana, whether it's medicinal
or not." The university system is allowed, under Title 5
of the California Education Code, to make laws more restrictive
than regular state law --- including, for instance, greater prohibitions
on alcohol consumption on campus. Besides, Butler said, both
county law and state law (Prop. 215) disallow marijuana on or
near school campuses.
But, the clash and entanglement
of county and state laws with university codes (not to mention
federal law) notwithstanding, why is Richmond so adamantly opposed
to allowing medical marijuana on campus?
"It's not a medicine,"
he said. "I do believe there are some people who use it
primarily for medical purposes, but I think there are other ways
to alleviate the pain that they feel. What I would like to see
is our government do a lot more research into the physiological
consequences of marijuana and its analgesic properties which
really has not been done yet. There is some research, but it
needs to be followed up."
Richmond will defy anyone who
accuses him of lacking compassion for those who do use marijuana
for medicinal purposes. "I am a compassionate man. I don't
think this is a case of compassion, I think this is a case of
using people's ills as a mechanism for escaping the consequences
of breaking the law."
He pointed to a piece written
by local neurosurgeon Denver Nelson and published in the Oct.
12 Times-Standard, saying pot isn't a medicine. And Richmond,
a geneticist, has studied the genetic influences on cocaine,
using insects as subjects. "One of the things that I think
most people don't realize is that all of us are genetically different
from each other, and we differ from each other in our propensity
for the actions of psychoactive drugs. You might be a college
student watching your neighbor smoke pot and seeing relatively
little effect besides what looks like a pleasant experience,
but you might not realize the same experience as a consequence
of having a different set of receptors in your brain. I do know
that, from the research that has been done, it's quite clear
that regular use of marijuana does change the number and distribution
of receptors in the brain." (Shortly after this interview,
a Canadian team reported that compounds found in marijuana actually
stimulated the production of certain brain cells in rats, according
to news reports.)
Richmond's also jittery about
enrollment these days. HSU is not meeting the enrollment goals
set by the state university system. "And one of the reasons
we're not reaching those goals," he said, "is because
of the perception and some of the obvious information that people
get when they come to Arcata and see people dealing drugs on
the Plaza, when they learn that it's a tolerant community that
permits drug use for a variety of reasons and where the police
often times are not supported by the community and by the authorities
that they report to. It's damaging the community, in my view,
and it's also damaging the university."
One wonders, almost, if Richmond
has a personal vendetta against pot. He insists not. His kids
didn't --- to his knowledge, anyway --- do drugs. And the one
time he tried it he was underwhelmed. "Once, when I was
a beginning assistant professor, some of my graduate students
invited me over one evening and they had some marijuana that
they were smoking and they said, 'Rollin, you should try this.'
I did, I took one puff on it --- I don't like to smoke, I'm not
a smoker. I didn't think it had any effect and I said, 'I'd prefer
to drink beer, rather than marijuana,' so that's my only experience
with it, which was a long time ago. I'm guessing I was 26-ish."
But pot these days, he repeats,
is different.
So, agree with him or not, Richmond's
sticking by his very unArcatian stance against pot, medicinal
or otherwise. And yet, with the rest of the world seeing Humboldt
County as synonymous with pot, does he perhaps feel as if he's
swimming upstream?
"Yes," Richmond said.
"But like the salmon, perhaps some of the eggs we lay will
grow up and be successful, and go out to sea and come back as
a big successful fish that will change the future."
When asked how much time he
was going to give it, Richmond laughed and laughed. But seriously,
he said, he doesn't think he's alone in his views. "What's
interesting to me is how many people have come up to me and said
how much they admired my courage," he said. "Frankly,
I think there's more support for trying to pay attention to the
consequences of drug use than most people in this community realize."
l
TOP
12 Questions for
Jacob Kevan
by BOB
DORAN
 For a short period of time this year 19-year-old
Hydesville resident Jacob Kevan was Pvt. Jacob Kevan --- a new
Army recruit stationed at Fort Knox. In his first few weeks,
his company's drill sergeants were arraigned for abusive behavior
and Kevan deserted.
Right: Jacob Kevan.
Photo by Kyana Taillon.
1. What happened when you
enlisted?
I was sent to boot camp in Fort
Knox, Ken. I left here Jan. 28 of this year. I think it was Feb.
3, when we actually started boot camp. First day, I realized
something wasn't right. There were inconsistencies from the stories
recruiters told --- their biggest thing recruiters do is to tell
you what boot camp is about.
2. What were you expecting?
I knew it was going to be tough
physically and mentally, but I didn't actually expect to get
struck or any of the other hazing going on. I guess I expected
it would be more professional. It was the complete opposite.
3. What hazing, what happened
in boot camp?
The first day, as soon as we
got off the bus, you had the typical yelling that you expect,
but then when they took us inside, that's when it got interesting.
The first thing was they force-hydrated us, made us drink our
whole canteen. One kid puked. The drill sergeant made him do
pushups right on top of his puke. At first he refused to do it;
that's when they threw him up against the wall locker, then he
finally got down there and did pushups in his own vomit.
Then, after that, it was just
a lot of intimidation.
4. Did there seem to be a
purpose for all this?
They tried to drill in our heads
constantly that the reason they acted like this was because Echo
Company was the toughest, hardest training at Fort Knox, and
that they had zero combat casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Later after we switched companies, after the allegations came
out, we learned that pretty much every company had that same
motto, that they were all proud that they didn't have
any combat casualties.
5. You say "after the
allegations came out." What allegations?
About the fourth day one of
the privates went to sick call and tried to tell some of the
civilian doctors and nurses about what was going on. They didn't
believe it.
There was another company next
door to us. They had actually heard the drill sergeants keeping
us up 'til all hours in the morning, screaming and yelling, spying
on us from their side of the barracks, things like that. They
went through their chain of command and told them about it. It
finally made its way up to the battalion commander who, as soon
as he heard about it, came over and got our testimonies.
All of this happened in the
first week.
6. What happened when time
came to testify against your superiors, the drill sergeants?
Well, it had been pretty hush-hush
after that. The drill sergeants were suspended and we switched
to a different company with new drill sergeants and just continued
training. We didn't hear anything about it.
7. Were things different
in the new company?
They were. It went from one
extreme to another. I think they were definitely concerned about
a lot of us going AWOL, so they gave us a lot more leniency.
I'd describe it as the Army playing kiss-ass to us. We were talking
with the defense and the prosecution for JAG [the Judge Advocate-General].
Then the first day after boot
camp was over the first trial began against [Sgt. 1st Class David]
Price, which is where I testified that I saw him choke a private
when he fell asleep during some classroom briefing. He fell asleep
and the sergeant came up behind him twice and put him in a chokehold
on both occasions.
8. What were the results
of the trial?
They came up with a verdict
that same day. We found out that he was only demoted one rank
in grade. Everybody was frustrated and extremely upset and mad
because that was just walking away.
I knew it was over for me; there
was no way I was going to serve in an Army that acted like this.
The judge was quoted saying
he doubted the seriousness of the charges. The defense attorney
said he was happy with the outcome and that the Army was not
a social club. The way it came out made us look like a bunch
of crybabies and wimps, but in reality, it was brave that we
brought up the allegations to begin with.
9. What happened next?
At that point I wanted to get
out. My mom had been talking with people on the GI Rights Hotline,
getting advice. My commander told me he couldn't let me out just
because I wanted to leave the Army. [I ended up] calling a taxi,
rode in it to a Wal-Mart to get some civilian clothes, went into
Louisville and bought an airline ticket and flew to Seattle.
I spent 40 days AWOL. I found
out from the GI Rights Hotline if I was gone over 30 days I would
be dropped from the rolls in my platoon, which meant after I
turned myself in I would be automatically discharged.
10. At that point you are
considered a deserter?
That's right. So I flew back
to Kentucky and turned myself in, then I spent 2 1/2 weeks at
the SPCPCF, the Special Processing Company Personnel Control
Facility.
11. Then they just let you
go?
They gave me a bus ticket and
I rode the bus for almost a week all the way from Louisville
to Rio Dell. They gave me my release papers and that was the
end of my involvement with Uncle Sam.
12. What do you have to say
to someone who's thinking about joining the military?
I wouldn't say the military
is bad. I just think some people just aren't meant for it. I
know if I hadn't gone through what I experienced in boot camp,
I'd probably still be in.
I'd just say they need to get
the facts. Recruiters are extremely good at what they do. They're
good at telling stories and making it sound great, like they'd
seen the world and had a blast doing it. Especially with the
Army and the Marines, they have to ask what are the chances that
they'll go to Iraq or Afghanistan.
You definitely have to be prepared
and not let the recruiters talk you into anything. You hear about
all the money you can get, bonuses and school money. I don't
think they tell you all the costs. l
TOP
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