the town dandy / By Hank Sims

The $100,000 Club

But the plain old bureaucrats at the tops of their departments are doing fine, as well. County Administrative Officer Loretta Nickolaus makes $148,733. Sheriff Gary Philp makes $141,474. Community Development Services Director Kirk Girard makes $101,509. The biggest fish, Director of Health and Human Services Phil Crandall , makes $161,621.

Lest you think everything is roses over at the County of Humboldt, take a look at the long list of employees in Crandall’s department. Here are pages and pages — several hundred social services workers, in-home health care personnel and others — doing only moderately well or doing very poorly indeed. Many names are at minimum-wage level, and many more aren’t very far above it. Some of these names are part-time employees, no doubt, but many of them are not. The top of the pyramid reaches quite high, but there’s a great big base underneath it.

There was a mistakein last week’s column, the one that concerned the so-called “alternative plans” that the Maxxam Corp. — currently in the final rounds of the Pacific Lumber Co. bankruptcy trial — is hoping to cram down upon Humboldt County and the company’s creditors. The “alternative plans,” you’ll recall, are the ones buried deep within Maxxam’s several hundred pages of proposals the company set before the Corpus Christi judge hearing the bankruptcy case. They’re the ones that Maxxam hopes will come into play if, as is likely, bickering between the multitudinous interests in the case prevents them from coming to accord over the future of the company. You’ll be hearing a lot more about them very soon — the court is set to ratify the various options on the table at a hearing on Thursday, Feb. 28, at which point the various parties will vote for this plan or that.

We got the gist of the “alternative plans” right, but we erred on their scale. In their broad outlines the “alternative plans” are simple: One set of creditors gets Scotia and the mill and another set gets most of the company’s land. Maxxam, meanwhile, would hold onto a significant chunk of Humboldt County property. But we were wrong, last week, when we said that Maxxam sought only to hold onto those 6,600 acres of prime forest it calls “The Ancient Forests”; in fact, Maxxam honcho Charles Hurwitz want to hold onto the entire 28,000 acres of land between Fortuna and Kneeland that he believes can be developed.

Ballsy move from the Hurwinator, and one not to be discounted. What Maxxam is arguing is that according to the arcane rules of bankruptcy law its “alternative plans” are the only ones eligible for something called “cram-down,” in which the judge can unilaterally tell creditors that they’re not going to get their money back. The creditors who loaned money against the town and the creditors who loaned money against the forest each have their own reorganization plans for the company. They’re both somewhat ecogroovy, or have the potential to be so, but if they’re competing against each other it’s likely as not that neither of them will succeed. Which may leave the cram plan as the only plan standing, when all is said and done. At least that’s what Hurwitz appears to be counting on.

1 2 SHARE