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June 12, 2003
Tower
slated for Arcata Bottoms called hazardous
Researcher says homes
are too close
by
HELEN SANDERSON
A 50-foot cell phone tower proposed
for the Arcata Bottoms would be located too close to residences
and could pose a health hazard, a public health researcher said
this week.
Susan Clarke of the Media Research
Institute in Cambridge, Mass., said that given the microwave
radiation danger posed by cell towers, houses should be no nearer
than 1,000 feet and probably should be at a distance several
hundred feet beyond that.
The Cal-North Wireless tower
slated for the Arcata Bottoms would stand as close as 430 feet
to the nearest house.
Speaking before the Humboldt
County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Clarke urged the supervisors
to place a moratorium on cell tower construction. She said more
consideration should be given to the potential health hazards
of cell towers before policymakers approve them.
Tom McMurray of Cal-North Wireless
told the supervisors that all his company's projects are in line
with Federal Communication Commission standards. "We comply
[with] all the regulations. This debate should really be in front
of the FCC and Congress."
Clarke said that exposure to
microwave radiation from cells towers can result in headaches,
memory loss, and sleeplessness. The microwaves have even been
found to interfere with pacemakers, hearing aids and electric
wheel chairs, she added.
Clarke said most scientific
studies have focused on short-term exposure to microwave radiation,
not the steady exposure that residents living in close proximity
to a cell tower would receive. If anything, she said, long-term
exposure is likely to result in more serious health problems.
Supervisor John Woolley, whose
district the Cal-North tower would be located in, stopped short
of endorsing Clarke's call for a moratorium. Instead, he called
for the drafting of an ordinance that accommodates both the public's
health concerns and the wireless communication industry's need
for more towers. He proposed that such an ordinance be drafted
by August.
Meantime, Woolley said, the
potential environmental and health impacts of the tower proposed
for the Bottoms should be studied further prior to a meeting
June 19 before the Humboldt County Planning Commission. Last
month, the commission tentatively approved the tower despite
concerns raised by citizens about health impacts -- and despite
objections from county staff and Arcata officials that the tower,
slated to be disguised as a wooden pole, would be inconsistent
with the area's rural character.
Following the meeting, Clarke
suggested that citizens should draft their own ordinance controlling
cell tower construction.
"It's important that the
citizens are as active in the process as possible," Clarke
said. "It's their health that's at stake."
Supes
opine on bid to recall DA
At least two are opposed
by
ANDREW EDWARDS
In an indication of how local
political leaders feel about the effort to recall District Attorney
Paul Gallegos, two Humboldt County supervisors said they were
opposed and a third expressed concern that it was further dividing
an already fractured community.
Of the four supervisors who
spoke to the Journal, none came out in favor of the recall.
The fifth, Supervisor Bonnie Neely, did not return repeated telephone
calls. Neely's husband, Terry Farmer, was defeated by Gallegos
in last year's election.
The strongest objection was
raised by Supervisor John Woolley, who said that the recall effort,
coming just months after Gallegos took office, was premature.
"I can't support a recall
movement for someone who has essentially just started his job,"
said Woolley, the most liberal voice on the Board of Supervisors.
Also taking a stand against
the recall was Fifth District Supervisor Jill Geist, the newest
member of the board.
While the supervisors have no
control over the recall movement, their views on the matter could
prove influential; the Board of Supervisors is the most powerful
group of elected officials in the county.
At the least, the stand of supervisors,
who represent different districts, could shed light on how the
electorate might vote if sufficient signatures are gathered to
put the recall on the ballot later this year.
In addition to saying that the
recall effort was premature, Woolley said it lacked sufficient
grounds. "All the things that have been charged against
him don't rise to the level of recall," Woolley said.
Geist said the recall was bad
for the county.
"[A recall] would inherently
contribute to divisiveness and I don't think it's in the county's
best interests," Geist said. "We need to work together
and this is just driving a wedge in our community."
Jimmy Smith, often the swing
vote between conservatives and liberals on the board, declined
to take a position on the recall. But he echoed Geist in saying
that he didn't like the impact it was having on Humboldt County.
"This is yet another division
in the community," Smith said. "I would love to see
a downgrading of the high nervousness and tension that is reaching
a critical level in the community, on a whole range of issues."
Roger Rodoni of the Second District,
who has publicly criticized Gallegos' controversial fraud lawsuit
against the Pacific Lumber Co., steered clear of the recall issue.
"There are some things
I try not to think about," Rodoni said. "I don't have
a position."
HUMBOLDT
PEOPLE
To shoot
a boar
County Supervisor Roger
Rodoni leads reporter on wild pig chase
by
ANDREW EDWARDS
 ROGER
RODONI'S LEATHER BOOTS CAME DOWN LIGHTLY ON THE GRASS and torn
earth as we stalked up the hill. He had his rifle, a long black-barreled
.50-caliber muzzle loader, made in Italy, hanging in his right
hand. The sun was fading, smearing the trees and hillside with
a gray-pasty haze.
We came up over the hill, and
there they were: seven or eight wild pigs in an open expanse.
"The white one down in
front is the one you want," Rodoni whispered, looking through
his field glasses.
It was a dirty, white, thick-necked
pig. I raised my rifle, a .270-caliber Remington Rodoni had lent
me, and focused inexpertly on the quarry we'd been hunting for
nearly 10 hours. The crosshairs lined up shakily on its muddied
side. It was maybe 30 yards away.
Its head was down in the dirt,
rooting. Surrounded by its companions, it looked almost domesticated.
Not full-grown, not a hard customer. The wooden weight of the
rifle pressed against my shoulder. It would be no contest.
"Do I just shoot it?"
I asked, looking back over my shoulder.
"Sure," Rodoni said,
grinning under his goatee at my hesitance.
I looked back into the scope,
trying to line the crosshairs up behind the shoulder blade, the
heart. I didn't feel expert enough to hit it behind the ear,
Rodoni's recommendation. The image wavered. I didn't want to
miss. I took a breath, and the rifle tugged back into my shoulder
with a broken jolt.
Conflict of interest?
We'd left after coffee on a
gray, overcast morning in Rodoni's big blue diesel truck, with
his two dogs, Dotty [photo
below right] and Maggy, in the
back. An antler-handled revolver in a leather holster sat in
the cab between us.
Roger Rodoni, a large beefy
man of 62 and Humboldt County's Second District Supervisor, lives
with his wife Janice in a large mobile home set at the top of
a green field above the Eel River off Stafford Road, just south
of Scotia.
 Representing
the ranchers, homesteaders and timber families that inhabit his
sprawling southeastern district, Rodoni presents a deeply libertarian
voice on the board. He doesn't like big government. He can't
comprehend gun control. He says he likes to connect the dots,
look at the reason for things.
Recently, he's run into controversy
over the fact that he leases more than 5,000 acres out in Mattole
country from the Pacific Lumber Co.
Critics say Rodoni has a conflict
that should preclude him from voting where PL is concerned. Rodoni
has denied any conflict, most publicly at the Board of Supervisors
meeting in early March before he voted against District Attorney
Paul Gallegos' request for authorization to hire an outside law
firm in his controversial fraud lawsuit against PL. (While Rodoni
derided the lawsuit at the meeting, he also raised concerns about
expending scarce county resources during a harrowing budget crunch.)
The allegation against him is
not simply that PL is his landlord; it's that he is the supposed
beneficiary of a sweetheart deal. It has been claimed publicly
that Rodoni pays $4,200 a year to run 150 cows while one of his
neighbors pays $17,000 to run 170 cows. Rodoni, in an interview
with the Journal prior to the hunting expedition, said
he only runs 65 animals and that none of his neighbors has nearly
that many cattle. He said most of his ranch was just steep, stumpy
slopes populated by deer and a few hogs.
The ranch, located on a mountainside
above where Oil Creek and Rattlesnake Creek join to form
the Upper North Fork of the Mattole River, is a place apart,
sometimes incredibly so. Rodoni told a story about how one April
a freak storm snowed them in for about a week. When they were
finally able to get out, he wrote a note for his daughter, then
attending Ferndale High, explaining why she hadn't been able
to make it to school. It was rejected. The school secretary didn't
believe that it could be snowing in the mountains that April,
when down in the valley everything seemed comfortable, if a bit
soggy.
On the long drive up and over
the ridge Rodoni said the incident illustrated the fundamental
disconnect between modern society and nature.
"People think pork chops
come from the supermarket," he said.
He recalled a time when some
friends from the city had spent a few days with him on the ranch.
When they left they remarked that now they had to return to the
real world.
"I said, `No, you're wrong.
This is the real world,'" Rodoni said. It was the world
they lived in that was fake.
When we got off U.S. Forest
Service land onto his ranch he slowed down the truck to a steady
trundle to "see if we can scare up a pig."
The hogs we were after are feral
versions of the common barnyard pig. They are not native to California.
Instead, they escaped from Spanish settlers centuries ago and
since have bred with Russian boars introduced as game animals
in the 1920s. Now they're ubiquitous, running wild in
almost every California county.
Nearing the house Rodoni lives
in when he's at the ranch -- a sprawling electricity-free,
redwood affair -- we saw two of them, large and brown, lounging
in the shade of some oak trees not 20 yards away.
They were females and their
bellies were "full of pig," he said, pointing out the
distended teats and stomach. We were after boar.
Old Humboldt
By then it was mid-morning.
The sun was shining beautifully, crisply illuminating an expansive
vista of wooded hills, peaks, valleys and twisting creeks that
rolled out in all directions.
Rodoni first moved out to this
land in 1969, five years after the catastrophic flood of 1964
tore his family's house, barn and most of their land up by the
roots and sent them spinning down the river into the Pacific.
They've never had electricity and until recently, when a cell
tower went up, phone calls were impossible as well.
Rodoni is Humboldt County to
the core, born in Scotia, like so many others, at Pacific Lumber
Co's hospital. His father did odd jobs for PL and ran a 20-cow
dairy on his land in Stafford.
"It was a different world,"
Rodoni recalled. "People would think nothing of seeing a
12-year-old boy riding [his bike] across Eureka with a shotgun
across the handlebars. They would just think, `Oh, he must be
going hunting somewhere.'"
Rodoni said he has developed
two habits over the years: thinking and watching. For about eight
years a young intellectual lived out at the ranch, doing odd
jobs taking care of the place. Rodoni and he used to share books
and between repairing fence lines they'd talk over what they'd
read, sometimes page by page.
He's a diarist and writes regularly
for his own enjoyment. He's also a raconteur, telling tales about
Humboldt's past slowly, deliberately, setting up the listener
for the punch line to get his point across.
And then there's hunting. It
wasn't too long ago that he used spears to hunt boars. He said
spear hunts never fail to reveal how easily a cultured, modern
human being can turn into a howling savage.
He related the story of a schoolteacher's
wife who'd been dragged along on a spear-hunting expedition.
At first she dismissed the whole thing as "testosterone-fueled
bullshit." As the hunt progressed, however, she became more
and more interested. When the moment of truth came, with the
hog cornered down by the river, Rodoni asked who wanted to get
it. "Me," she said. She took a spear and ran it through.
Closing in
After a break we set out on
Rodoni's four-wheeler, the guns strapped up front and the dogs
running behind.
After motoring along a ridge,
past the cell tower Rodoni had mentioned earlier, we dipped into
the valley and saw the first hint of "pig sign."
It was a rough patch of earth,
evidently gouged out by the snout of the creatures we were looking
for. He sent me down the mountainside with my rifle to scout
out the shady draws that lay along the treeline below us. I trudged
down and, seeing nothing, met Rodoni where the treeline met the
road. He was listening. A snorting sound floated on the breeze
from the valley below. I would have sworn it was a pig.
"Grouse," Rodoni remarked,
his spectacled face cocked under his white cowboy hat. We
climbed back on his ATV.
We saw more signs, wallows and
ruts in the springs running out of a grassy lower hillside.
Back at the house we ate lunch:
bread, a beef stew and some cans of MGD, resting out the hottest
part of the day under an oak tree hung with rusting traps of
all shapes and sizes.
 As
the sun began to crawl down the other side of the sky we set
out again, in the opposite direction. We saw some magnificent
deer, and bear tracks down near the river, but still no pigs.
As we drove along slowly, Rodoni's
eyes scanned the hillside; he was looking for pigs sleeping behind
rocks.
The sun was beginning to go
down when we stopped on a hillside with a view far down into
the rolling valley where we'd seen signs earlier in the day.
We stood there for a while just
looking. It was a beautiful view. Tiny cows and tentacles of
forest creeping up draws from the creek at the bottom of the
valley cast long shadows in the dying sunlight.
"There's your boar,"
Rodoni said, pointing. He handed me the binoculars he'd been
looking through.
There, down in the valley, was
a huge hog, rising up, stretching after his afternoon nap.
After testing the wind he recommended
I proceed down the slope to our left and then come across and
catch him. I set off, almost sliding down the slope in my haste.
But by the time I got to the bottom the pig had disappeared.
Rodoni gestured from up above to come back up.
"Did you see where he went?"
I asked, winded after trudging back up the hill. He just pointed.
There across the valley in a small green field I could just make
out a herd of pigs rooting in the twilight.
We dropped off the dogs, who
were just about done for, at the truck. Rodoni grabbed
his curved hunting knife. And then we drove back, coasting down
the hill, parked the ATV under a snaggy oak, and approached our
quarry.
The kill
 I
lost focus in the sight when I pulled the trigger. The pigs were
scuttling for the brush. The white pig was flopping across the
field as if not completely in control of its midsection. I tried
to shoot again, forgetting that I hadn't pushed a new cartridge
into the bolt-action rifle's chamber. I snapped it back and the
golden shell popped out.
I walked across the torn field,
the colors rapidly fading. The pig was still flopping, now lying
in the grass. I felt sorry for it, and mumbled an apology, not
so much for killing it as for failing to kill it as fast as I
would have liked. Rodoni was grinning happily; we'd finally done
what we came to do.
I shot it again in the back
of the head. It kept twitching where it lay in the tall grass.
I shot it one more and it lay still.
"Have you got that pig
good and dead?" Rodoni called across the field. I just looked
at it. I've eaten pepperoni, pork, I thought. This is just a
piece of meat now.
Rodoni came up and cleaned the
pig, quickly reaching in to pull the innards out of the chest
cavity. The bullet, which had left a small bloody hole in the
boar's white side, had torn its liver and the lower part of its
lungs to shreds.
It was pretty big, less than
200 pounds, but maybe only a few years old. The rest of
the hogs in the field were sows, Rodoni said. We pulled it down
the hill behind us, and he strapped it on the back of the ATV
as the sun finally faded completely.
Failed
frame-up?
Before she murdered Eureka acupuncturist
Kevin LaPorta, did Dianna Mae Preston try to frame him as the
molester of his 18-month-old daughter?
That's one of the possibilities
Eureka police are examining two weeks after Preston, 59, was
convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death last July
of the 47-year-old LaPorta.
Spurring the continuing investigation
are two lingering questions: Why was semen found on the child,
and whose was it?
"I'm still pursuing the
case. I've got some extremely slim possibilities, but quite frankly,
I need help from somebody out there who knows something about
this case and will give me a call," said Detective Robert
Metaxas.
Preston, the toddler's grandmother,
said she shot LaPorta in the parking lot of his Eureka acupuncture
office because she believed he was molesting the child during
visits with her. (Preston's daughter, Heather Pearce, and LaPorta
were not married.)
Preston gunned down LaPorta
just hours after it was determined that the semen on the child
was not his.
Metaxas said police have made
a determination on whether or not the child was actually molested,
though he declined to reveal that information, saying the case
was still open. He said police do not believe LaPorta or Pearce
planted the semen.
"The donor may know who
put it there, or the donor may not even have a clue that his
semen was on the child," Metaxas said. "Obviously,
this semen got there somehow. I'm looking for some help from
the community, [someone] out there who may know something."
Metaxas said police have not
ruled out the possibility that Preston planted the evidence.
The Napa jury that heard the
Preston case also determined that she was sane at the time of
the killing. She faces life in prison; sentencing will take place
at Humboldt County Superior Court within the coming weeks, Deputy
District Attorney Rob Wade said.
Police
group backs recall
The Eureka Police Officer's
Association has voted unanimously to support the recall drive
against District Attorney Paul Gallegos.
"Our major concern is that
the safety of the communities and the neighborhoods of Eureka
has declined," spokesman Bob Martinez said at a press conference
Tuesday. "What concerns us is not just the last six months,
but the next six months. Safety is our primary concern."
Gallegos responded in a press
release Tuesday afternoon: "For the past five months my
office has aggressively prosecuted everything from domestic violence
to elder abuse to drug dealing. I'm disappointed by the association's
decision, but I remain committed to working with the law enforcement
community to prosecute criminals and protect Humboldt County
residents."
The association is primarily
a labor organization that represents more than 50 police officers,
evidence technicians, animal control officers, property clerks
and police service officers of the city of Eureka. Its membership
does not include Police Chief David Douglas or other higher-level
managers in the police department.
The announcement comes two weeks
after the Humboldt Deputy Sheriffs Association threw its support
behind the recall, claiming that Gallegos was soft on crime.
That action engendered its own
controversy. The DA investigators who belong to the group quickly
made clear that they supported their boss. More recently, the
probation officers in the group have had their ability to make
objective sentencing recommendations called into question by
a defense attorney.
Martinez, in what amounted to
a warning to Gallegos, said the police association might play
an active role in the recall campaign, perhaps taking out ads,
if the DA doesn't demonstrate a greater concern for public safety.
As with the sheriff's group,
the police association did not provide many specifics -- beyond
citing what has drawn virtually all of the criticism, a plea-bargain
agreement Gallegos accepted in a drive-by shooting case.
The original vote to support
the recall was made about a month ago, but no public action was
taken at that time. According to Martinez, the officers first
wanted to meet with Gallegos in private. A meeting took place
last week that "cleared the air considerably," but
when another vote was called the unanimous decision stood.
Both Martinez and officer Curtis
Honeycutt, the association's vice-president, stressed that this
is not going to hurt their working relationship with the district
attorney's office.
"We're professionals,"
Honeycutt said.
Not
so bad?
The county workforce cuts are
coming, and though things don't look great, they're certainly
better than they could have been.
According to Administrative
Officer Loretta Nicklaus, the county is hoping to reduce the
number of people laid off next year to fewer than 10.
"I think we have a good
chance," Nicklaus said in a phone interview at press time
on Tuesday. "We're talking to a lot of people about time
off, voluntarily furloughs and retirements. We're hoping to save
enough."
Over the last two years the
county has cut its budget by 30 percent. That belt tightening,
which included department consolidations and a hiring freeze,
means the measures that now appear necessary will not be as severe
as they might have been.
The layoffs that do need to
be made are likely to fall particularly hard on the legal end
of county government. The District Attorney's office, Public
Defender's office, conflict council, alternate council, the Probation
Department and the county coroner's office are all looking at
layoffs.
Additionally, there will be
funding cuts in county animal control and in the University of
California Cooperative Extension program.
SoHum
schools lose
The third time wasn't a charm
for Southern Humboldt schools.
The Southern Humboldt Joint
Unified School District lost its third attempt to raise taxes
at the polls on June 3, when just 62 percent of voters approved
Measure D, a $75-per-year parcel tax. The measure needed a two-thirds
majority, or 67 percent, to pass.
The money is needed to keep
Agnes J. Johnson Elementary School in Weott open, and to continue
offering smaller class sizes, some high school courses, and activities
such as music, drama and sports, supporters of the tax measure
said.
About 55 percent of the district's
4,770 voters turned out to cast their ballots in the single-issue
election.
Grassroots organizers, who have
mounted increasingly aggressive campaigns, said they would try
again to drum up support for the struggling district.
Alien-eating
goats
California State Parks has hired
an Oregon company to help it get rid of invasive weeds by opening
parkland to herds of goats.
What park officials see as pesky
exotic plants that disrupt natural habitats, the goats see as
lunch.
"The goats actually prefer
eating many of the exotic plant species over native species,"
said Jay Harris, senior resource ecologist for the state parks,
in a written statement.
The goats, brought in by Caprine
Restoration Services/Western Weed Eaters of Redmond, Ore., have
already started their work on the English ivy at Patrick's Point
State Park, and will be invited to sample the yellow star thistle
at Humboldt Redwoods State Park in early July.
Control of the invasive plants
is a high priority for the state parks, as such plants displace
native species and affect nutrient cycles, hydrology and the
frequency of wildfires, Harris said. The goats are an economical,
environmentally friendly alternative to other plant-removal methods,
such as mechanical removal or herbicides.
Bear
spotted
A black bear was sighted near
Guintoli Lane in the Valley West area of Arcata last week.
The bear was seen snuffling
around two of the area's mobile home parks late at night.
Officers of the Arcata Police
Department rushed to the scene and caught sight of the browsing
bruin as it trundled back to the woods. They let the animal go.
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