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May 4, 2006
DOUGLAS SPEAKS: The murmuring has died down
somewhat, but many of the questions remain. On Thursday morning,
Chief Dave Douglas, head of the Eureka Police Department, held
a press conference to answer questions on the April 14 police
shooting of downtown resident Cheri Moore, a 48-year-old mentally
ill woman who held off officers with a flare gun for two and
a half hours before a SWAT team entered her apartment and engaged
her, resulting in her shooting and death (see last week's cover
story, "Scenes from a
Shooting," for more details). And while he was able
to provide some basic facts about the confrontation that hadn't
yet surfaced, and to announce that the officers who confronted
Moore would not be facing charges, it could be weeks before questions
about the wisdom of the EPD's strategy in confronting Moore begin
to be answered.
In a long and sometimes confrontation encounter
with reporters, a defiant Douglas began by laying out findings
from Moore's autopsy and initial conclusions reached by the Critical
Incident Response Team (CIRT), an interagency police task force
charged with investigating the shooting. The autopsy showed that
Moore had been shot several times: Five times with a rifle and
three to four times with a semiautomatic shotgun. Each of the
officers involved in the shooting, as well as a third who was
in the apartment and wielding a non-lethal weapon, were placed
on administrative leave following the incident; it was expected
that they would return to their jobs this week. Furthermore,
Douglas said, CIRT had found that the officers "broke no
laws" in discharging their weapons on Moore, as she had
aimed her weapon at them after they gained entry to her home.
The deeper question is why police decided to storm
the apartment in the first place. Douglas said the action was
a tactical approach that had been formulated moments before the
opportunity to implement it arose. Originally, the EPD felt it
had two options: Talk Moore down or confront her. As the afternoon
wore on, though, the EPD came up with a third plan: Wait until
Moore appeared at her window empty-handed, then use that opportunity
to enter the building and catch her unarmed. Soon after the police
decided to follow this course, Moore did show up at her window
without the flare gun. The SWAT team forced her door open and
went down a hallway to the room where Moore was located. When
Moore saw them, Douglas said, she picked up the gun and began
to aim it at the officers. That's when they opened fire.
At the press conference Douglas was asked why the
police had not tried to use the friend with whom Moore had been
in contact throughout the standoff to help defuse the situation.
He said that the police wished to use their own, professional
negotiators, and that the friend could not be placed into a potentially
dangerous situation. Douglas was asked whether, in retrospect,
the third plan the police had developed made sense. The EPD knew
that she was mentally unstable, they knew that she was homicidal
and/or suicidal, they knew that she would have plenty of warning,
since they would have to break down her door. Given all that,
could the police really have expected the fact that she was momentarily
unarmed to make a difference?
Douglas insisted that the plan was sound: "It
should have worked. It should have worked. We thought it would.
We wouldn't have done it otherwise."
— Hank Sims
IDES OF MAY: Hospital Partners of America,
a four-year-old health care company based in Charolotte, N.C.,
that creates physician-owned acute care hospitals, has expressed
interest in buying the financially strapped St. Joseph Hospital
in Eureka, though buyout talks are said to be in the early stages.
At a forum for hospital employees last Thursday, staff was told
by Interim CEO Joe Mark that Hospital Partners — which purchased
Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding from Tenet Healthcare
in 2004 — has not yet visited the Eureka facility nor fully
examined St. Joe's finances, and therefore discussions are preliminary.
Bonnie Hamant, an RN in the urgent care department, said that
at the meeting, Mark also commented that the letter Humboldt
County supervisors sent last week to St. Joseph's corporate office
in Orange County requesting to delay massive job cuts was essentially
pointless, and layoffs would happen as scheduled on May 15.
Meanwhile, as layoff day nears, Hamant said the
atmosphere is tense at the hospital, and she sees a rift forming
between non-union employees and unionized nurses, with some "at-will"
employees expressing approval of the CEO's plans for cuts. "I
think some of them actually believe that nurses are the problem,"
she said. Some workers, Harmant added, have accepted severance
packages and left the hospital early, with the option to be rehired
in six months. Managers, she said, have already told staff how
many full-time equivalent positions will be cut from each department.
In the urgent care unit, where Hamant works, it was revealed
that three part-time employees will be cut, she said. Six nurses
work in urgent care currently, and the RN with the least seniority
will likely have to go. In addition, hours of operation for urgent
care will be scaled back from 8 a.m.-11 p.m. to 8 a.m.-8:30 p.m.
On Saturday, St. Joe administrators, doctors and
the board of trustees — union nurses were not invited — met
St. Joseph Health System CEO Deborah Proctor and other health
system executives at the Fortuna River Lodge to discuss the Eureka
hospital's financial crisis. Cardiologist David Ploss attended
the meeting and said nothing new was discussed, nor was the potential
Hospital Partners buyout. "There wasn't anything that really
gave anybody more clarity about what's going to happen in the
future," Ploss said, adding that St. Joe administrators
gave no indication as to which of the three options — to keep
the nonprofit hospital, sell it or create a public hospital funded
through taxes — they prefer.
At the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors Meeting
on Tuesday, Interim CEO Joe Mark reported that the nonprofit
institution is creating a physicians advisory group, a business
advisory group and possibly a task force, with the intention
of developing a recommendation for the direction of the hospital
by July 2006. Community Health Alliance of Humboldt-Del Norte
Director Allan Katz told Mark and the supervisors that his organization
would like to be part of discussions with the hospital in the
future.
— Helen Sanderson
YES ESA, NO ESA: Last Tuesday the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service said it won't add the Siskiyou Mountains
salamander and the Scott Bar salamander to the Endangered Species
Act list. That prompted an immediate, litigious response from
several groups including the Environmental Protection Information
Center and the Center for Biological Diversity, who had petitioned
for the federal listing. They filed a 60-day notice to sue over
the decision.
Both species of salamander are skin-breathers —
no lungs — who live on rocky slopes under older trees in southwestern
Oregon and northwestern California. The Scott Bar salamander
was only recently distinguished as separate from the Siskiyou
Mountains species — something enviros had hoped might give it
more clout with the feds. The conservation groups said the Bush
Administration had stripped other protections, ones specified
in the Northwest Forest Plan, which required federal agencies
to survey critical habitat and protect the species from logging
and other impacts. And even though the Fish and Wildlife Service
said last week that those protections were re-instated in January,
the enviro groups said they suspect they'll be dumped again in
the future.
The feds, however, said no matter: Threats from
logging "have declined dramatically" and, besides,
the salamanders "have also been found to exist in areas
that have already been clear-cut."
The feds also said state laws are sufficient for
the sallies. The Siskiyou Mountains salamander, for example,
is listed as threatened under the California ESA. But, countered
the groups, the California Department of Fish and Game might
be considering de-listing it.
In somewhat of a reversal in thinking, meanwhile,
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has denied two petitions that
sought to de-list the Western snowy plover. The tiny shorebird
skitters around shorelines of the Pacific Ocean in California,
Oregon and Washington, and nests among up-slope dunes.
The petitioners, the city of Morro Bay and the
Surf-Ocean Beach Commission of Lompoc, tried to convince the
government that the ocean-side plovers were not distinct genetically
from their inland relatives. The feds dared to differ and said,
furthermore, that the Western snowy plover's numbers remain small
in many areas along the coast, and the bird is still in danger
from over-eager unleashed dogs and recreating humans.
— Heidi Walters
SLOW GAME: Slowly, haltingly, moves the
Big Lagoon Rancheria's big Barstow casino project through the
wheel of potential great fortune.
The Big Lagoon Rancheria agreed last year to join
with another California tribe, the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuilla
and Cupeño Indians (near San Diego), to build a double-casino/double-hotel
extravaganza in the southern California desert town of Barstow.
Big Lagoon had originally planned to build a casino at Big Lagoon.
The state balked, saying the lagoon was too environmentally sensitive
for such a project. And they'd been engaged legally over the
matter until the governor said, hey, Big Lagoon, take your game
to Barstow!
Meanwhile, a third tribe, the Chemehuevi of Lake
Havasu (closer than the other two tribes), also wants to build
a casino in Barstow — exclusively. Chemehuevi supporters got
enough signatures to put a measure on the June ballot that would
create a casino zone in Barstow that includes land the Chemeheuvi
would build on but excludes the site where Los Coyotes and Big
Lagoon want to build their project. (Barstow, like any good wannabe
casino town situated nicely along the well-trod route to Las
Vegas, I-15, is smilingly opening its arms to all comers.)
But even without that interesting tangle, the mere
process of building an off-reservation casino is cumbersome:
There have to be city-tribe agreements, the governor has to sign
gaming compacts with the tribes, the land has to be put into
trust for the tribes, and the state legislature has to ratify
the gaming compacts. Big Lagoon and its Los Coyotes partner are
slowly jumping through the hoops. But last week Sen. Wes Chesbro,
who supports the Barstow casino project and who introduced a
bill to ratify Big Lagoon's and Los Coyotes' gaming compacts,
suddenly gutted the tribal casino text from the bill before it
got to the senate. It was replaced with text proposing a California
Veterans Home Veterans Bill of Rights — quite another matter
(we think?).
Agents for the third tribe interpreted this as
near-victory: "There appears to be no support for the compacts
in the legislature," Larry Tenney, a representative for
the Chemehuevi, was quoted as saying in the San Bernardino
Sun.
So, did Chesbro have a change of heart? No, said
Chesbro spokesperson Darby Kernan. It was just a broken arm.
"One of the tribal chairs with the Los Coyotes
tribe, who was supposed to testify at the full senate hearing,
broke her arm," Kernan said. "She's a very elderly
woman, and she's a powerful speaker, and we wanted to accommodate
her. So we gutted the bill and put it in Senate Bill 168."
That bill will begin its journey later and eventually work its
way to the full Senate. "It was just to buy time. The bill
is very much alive.
— Heidi Walters
TOP
Sun Valley's May Day dilemma:
flowers, or power to the workers?
story and photo by HEIDI WALTERS
Long before May Day took a bloody turn for the
better, so to speak in 1886, when people in this country actually
died so that we could have an 8-hour work day it was chiefly
a day for flowers and celebrations of spring. And, most years,
flowers and spring still seem to dominate the May Day landscape,
with that dark period of growth and painful progress hanging
in the shadows.
Except this year, when May Day returned loudly
to the theme of workers' rights, as hundreds of thousands of
workers marched through cities including hundreds in Eureka demanding
immigration legislation reform and some form of amnesty for the
estimated 12 million undocumented people working in the United
States.
Out at the Sun Valley Floral Farm where flowers
run the show every day this national Day of Protest posed a bit
of a dilemma as different May traditions clashed. The floral
farm's workforce is 55-60 percent Hispanic, according to Sun
Valley Group President Lane DeVries, and nationwide the immigrants'
rights protests leading up to the May Day marches have prominently
featured Latinos. But because it is May and Mother's Day is approaching
this is the busiest time of year for the floral farm. One day's
loss of production could be devastating, the company's management
decided, and that wouldn't help the
workers in the long run.
So they decided to ask everyone to come to work
on Monday instead of taking the day off to join the march in
Eureka. "We're celebrating May Day right here at the farm,"
DeVries said last week. But DeVries, who immigrated legally to
the United States 22 years ago from Holland, said he supported
the cause behind the day of protest. "Our nation is made
up of immigrants. We're all descendants at one point of people
who came to this country and built this country." He himself
became a citizen in 1991.
Right: Guadalupe Sicarios and Salvador Pineda.
In solidarity with the nationwide movement, he
said, the company would participate in the buy-nothing component
of the May 1 protests. "Except lunch," said DeVries.
"We're going to buy our employees lunch on May Day. But
our purchasing manager is going to put on an apron and gloves
and spend the day on the production lines." And that's what
they did.
Last Friday out at the floral farm, a few Latino
employees wandered one by one into Salvador Pineda's office to
share their thoughts on the rising crescendo of protests for
immigrant rights. While another employee made forays to the "tulip
line" to find workers willing to talk to a reporter, the
salt-and-pepper-mustachioed Pineda, who is director of safety
and training, sat at his desk with a map of the world on the
wall behind him and talked about his own venture into this country
29 years ago as a young man seeking to learn about flowers.
"I studied agriculture, in school, in Mexico,"
he said. His first job when he came to the United States without
documents was in the fields "picking cherries, picking mushrooms"
and so on, in the Salinas area. In 1986, he qualified for amnesty.
The rest of his family mother, brothers, sisters have remained
in Mexico.
"Eventually, I worked in a place where they
grew flowers," Pineda said. Finally he came to the Sun Valley
farm in Arcata. "I like the flowers that's why I came here."
He planned to be at work on May Day. "This
time is very busy for us, and I'm the safety director I want
to be here," he said. "We don't have a brakes factory.
The flowers don't stop growing just because something is happening."
Pineda said that all of the immigrant workers at
the farm are legally in this country the farm won't hire people
who can't show the proper documents, he said. But he said he
thinks undocumented workers ought to be given a chance in this
country. "If they are already here and are already working,
and if they are a plus for the community, there should be a way
to integrate them. I wouldn't be so concerned about the people
who want to come here and who have good intentions."
Susana Esteves walked into Pineda's office in a
plastic apron, pulling off her work gloves. She'd been washing
tulips. With Pineda helping translate, Spanish to English, Esteves
said she planned to work on May 1, although a family member who
had a night job was going to join the march in Eureka.
She said working immigrants already here, who don't
have documents, should be given amnesty. "Why not, if people
are working?"
Guadalupe Vega came in next, also from the tulip
line. Vega is from Sinaloa, Mexico. Her husband came to this
country first, and then she followed later with their children.
She has worked at the floral farm since she came to this country.
Vega said she didn't think the march was necessary,
because from what she's heard, amnesty is already a strong possibility
for the nation's undocumented workers. And a march might give
the wrong idea. "I think not buying anything, not buying
gasoline or food, is enough support," she said.
After Vega went back to the tulip line, Guadalupe
Sicairos came into the office wearing a black ball cap, his jeans
dirty from work. He, too, planned to work on Monday, but he would
not buy anything that day "to show that it affects the economy."
"I think that it's OK if people want to do
their march," Sicairos said. "But I think we should
work. I have my priorities: My family first, then my job and
then whatever is next playing fútbol, whatever."
Sicairos came to this country legally as a student
and later an employer helped him get the proper work documents
to stay. But he said that hasn't stopped people from treating
him with suspicion.
"I believe that sometimes people are discriminated
against just because they are Mexicans," he said.
He was going to school in Sinaloa when he received
permission to come to the United States to attend culinary school.
He did, focusing on Italian cooking, and after three years of
study and an internship at an Italian restaurant, he moved from
San Mateo to Humboldt County with his culinary school certificate
in hand. But when he applied for a job at an Italian restaurant
in Eureka, the manager scoffed at him, he said.
"He said, `No, you can't cook Italian food
you're Mexican,'" recalled Sicairos. "I showed him
my certificate from the cooking school, and he said, `No, that's
fake.' And so then I gave him the telephone numbers" of
the school and the place where he'd interned. "I felt very
bad, then. I studied almost three years, only to be told `No.'"
So he applied for a job at the Sun Valley Floral
Farm and was hired. Not long after, he heard from the restaurant
manager in Eureka, who said it looked like Sicairos been telling
the truth after all about his Italian cookery training, and did
he want the job? "No way," said Sicairos.
Neither Esteves, Vega nor Sicairos were fond of
another idea that's been kicked around by some legislators back
in Washington building a fence along the border to keep out illegal
immigrants. "I think it's a bad idea, because it's like
going to the past, like the Berlin Wall," said Sicairos.
Friday afternoon, the local group Democracy Unlimited
sent out a last minute e-mail alert encouraging "respectful
calls to Sun Valley Floral Farms requesting that they give workers
the day off." The alert gave Sun Valley's main phone number.
But by the end of the day, and through Monday, Sun Valley's management
said it received maybe only one or two calls.
"I didn't receive any phone calls myself,"
said DeVries, Monday afternoon.
TOP
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