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August 10, 2006
FAIR AND JUST | SPONTANEOUS PEACE | POLITICS
QUICK | SPRAWL NOT
FAIR AND JUST:
If St. Joseph Hospital management and nurses do not come to an
agreement over employment contracts by Wednesday, Aug. 9, RNs
have threatened to strike on Aug. 17 and 18. The Eureka hospital,
meanwhile, has a team of "highly skilled and professional"
nurses ready to fill in for a minimum of four days. On Tuesday,
Kathryn Donahue, a St. Joe ICU nurse and member of the California
Nurses Association negotiating team said St. Joe nurses do not
want to strike and that, typically, bargaining is ironed out
at the 11th hour. They have never resorted to a strike before,
she said. "But sometimes," Donahue said, "you
just have to take a stand when the issues are so important."
The most important issue to nurses, she explained, is patient
safety. It is the contention of the RNs that care at St. Joe's
has been compromised since May when 74 layoffs occurred in the
wake of a financial meltdown.
Among the contract deal-breakers are revamped language
concerning "floating" (RNs are currently required by
management to cover shifts in areas of the hospital outside of
their expertise, where staffing might be low on any given day);
maintaining nurse-to-patient staffing ratios as mandated by state
law; successorship, which upholds their contract if the hospital
is sold; and better pay.
In a press release issued by St. Joe's p.r. department
Monday titled, "St. Joseph Hospital Prepares for Nurse's
Strike — Commitment to Quality Care is Unwavering,"
the hospital did not discuss floating, ratios or successorship
but instead blamed stalled negotiations squarely on compensation
squabbles. "St Joseph Hospital has had a difficult year
financially, and we believe our offer was fair and just,"
said Interim St. Joe CEO and Navigant Consultant Joe Mark in
the missive. A pay raise of 4 to 10 percent starting January
2007 was offered. "Our hope is that our nurses will see
that this proposal is a genuine reflection of our commitment
to them."
Even if the hospital is doing its best to pony
up more money for nurses, it still is not enough to keep some
RNs in the area. "It is not a competitive wage," Donahue
said. "I know nurses that have already done their job interviews
other places and will be leaving. They're nurses who have been
here a long time." An RN only needs to go to hospitals in
Crescent City, Ukiah or Redding for better paying positions,
she said. As it is now, according to Donahue, St. Joe nurses
are overworked and take sick days to cope with emotional stress
and physical exhaustion.
In recent weeks, Mark has asserted that the hospital
is still struggling financially in part because nurses have scared
away potential patients with their claims of unsafe conditions.
— Helen Sanderson
TOP
SPONTANEOUS
PEACE: Spunky SoHum peace activist Ellen Taylor called us
after all sorts of deadlines to get some ink for a late breaking
event — a peace rally this Saturday, Aug. 12, at noon on
the Humboldt County courthouse steps in Eureka. "The objective
is to attract attention," she explained. We felt obliged.
The gathering was organized kind of last-minute, Taylor said,
triggered by the "murderous" Congressional vote to
support Israel's attack on Lebanon. "There are cease-fire
rallies happening all over the country, all the major cities
and the capitals of Europe as well," Taylor said. Rapidly.
"We finally just got one together." The rally will
have the dual function to protest the war in Iraq. Participants
are encouraged to bring signs with anti-war messages. Questions?
Contact Taylor at 629-3500 or 441-1624 ext. 128.
— Helen Sanderson
TOP
POLITICS QUICK:
Campaign season is heating up and our inbox is getting plump
with announcements from HumCo candidates and wonks. Here's a
sample: At noon, Friday at Eureka City Hall Mayor Peter LaVallee
is scheduled to announce his bid for a second term. Also in Eureka,
Kritter Kountry owner Randall Herzon withdrew his candidacy for
Eureka's Third Ward last week so as not to detract votes from
candidate Ron Kuhnel, the Planning Commissioner and Eureka Heritage
Society president who is set to challenge incumbent Jeff Leonard.
Alison Nichols, District Attorney Paul Gallegos'
former campaign manager, is back in Texas with the Sheehan-crew
at Camp Casey as part of the Gold Star Families for Peace. And
on the topic of peace, the HumCo supes are seeking applicants
to serve on the Human Rights Commission, the Housing Authority
Commission and the Assessment Appeals Board. Call 476-2384 for
the low-down on eligibility.
Howard Rien of the Humboldt Taxpayers League and
a former Times-Standard employee is worked up about the
Eureka Utility Tax situation and the projected 7 percent budget
shortfall that is predicted if the tax fails. "I for one,
and judging by the phone calls, feel that this is really misleading
the public," he writes. "The budget is closed, so obviously
the city has been betting on the come. Any casino can talk to
you on those odds." Um, speaking of casinos, Fred Mangels,
the Humboldt Libertarian blogger, sparked some conversation on
his site about disenrollment of Indian tribal members if they
oppose political positions taken by casinos. Meanwhile, Fred
is still waiting for Nancy Flemming to stop by his place on her
door-to-door campaign trek through Eureka to boot HumCo Supervisor
Bonnie Neely from District 4.
And on Tuesday, Aug. 8, the Redwood Peace and Justice
Center sent off a last minute form letter plea, penned by Michael
Twombly, asking environmentally conscious Californians to tell
senate and assembly members to oppose SB1056, which would, he
says, "override future restrictions on genetically engineered
crops and seeds, as well as all other local regulation of seeds."
— Helen Sanderson
TOP
SPRAWL NOT: It's
hard to believe that sprawl (or a big timber cut) could happen
in the lush wooded slopes behind Sunnybrae, off Old Arcata Road,
where trails and creeks course through the trees and wildlife
find refuge. But when you live next to such a gift, you're unwise
to take it for granted. That's what Sunnybrae residents figured
six years ago, when they began raising money to help the city
of Arcata buy the 175-acre Sunny Brae Forest from Sierra Pacific
Industries and add it to the Arcata Community Forest. Last Thursday,
the Sunnybrae/Arcata Neighborhood Alliance received another batch
of donations, amounting to $6,000, said alliance director Mark
Lovelace in a news release last Friday.
"Combined with other recent donations, SANA
now has another $10,000 to add to the $70,000 it raised previously,"
Lovelace said. "SANA has now raised a total of over $80,000
towards its goal of $100,000 to help the city of Arcata purchase
this forest."
In 2002, said Lovelace, SPI offered to sell the
forest to Arcata for $2.7 million. The Sunnybrae alliance offered
to raise part of that, and is now just $20,000 short of the amount
it promised."The Sunny Brae Forest will provide an open-space
buffer against sprawl, and will be managed for recreation, watershed
and habitat protection, and sustainable forestry," Lovelace
said.
— Heidi Walters
TOP
The Island of Harvey
A blind citizen-activist tugs at the tangled
wires of bureaucracy
story and photo by HEIDI WALTERS
Harvey Jossem and his caregiver, Shaun Case, hauled
a small, worn, brown-topped card table out of the dark cave of
Jossem's crumbling, green, cramped little house and propped it
up in the front yard. Next they brought out some mismatched stools.
The early afternoon sun shone on the rooftops of this isolated
pocket of rundown houses in northeast Eureka — where Dial-A-Ride
often gets lost and is a no-show — and warmed the dirt
of the unnamed alley that serves as Jossem's and his neighbors'
front-door street. But Jossem's house and yard were enveloped
in the shadow of a towering tree, of unremembered heritage, rising
from one edge of his property. Jossem planted it in 1961, back
when he bought the little house for $6,000 and he could still
see. "It was supposed to be a hedge," he said. But
it turned into a storybook tree, with several merged graceful
trunks soaring into a dark, round canopy. A lilac, perhaps.
From the house next door where a music teacher
lives, the voice of a man warming up his vocal chords rose and
fell through an open window: "oh OH oh OH OH oh OH oh oh."
From the house on the other side of Jossem's, three little kids
ran into the alley and then back, flying past the fence where
their laundry hung, and into the back yard where they keep a
goat, giggling and talking in Spanish. A leaf fell from the giant
tree into Jossem's hand and he smiled, exclaiming, "Oh,
a leaf!"
Left: Kevin the Cat, Harvey Jossem and two troublesome
phones.
Case shivered in the cold shade. But not the "100
percent Norwegian" Jossem, sitting there in his tan T-shirt
with its Native American peace pipe design. But though he was
calm, and smiling, something was putting him on edge:
Namely, the telephone company — the now-merged AT&T/SBC
behemoth — and its stubborn rule that has stripped Jossem,
because of his disability, of the choice to pay his phone bill
however he wants to. The hours he's spent trying to get to the
bottom of the change in his service has eaten up precious time
that might better have been spent, as Case puts it, "reading
Washington Spectator." It was time away from Amy
Goodman, Science Friday, and the myriad other talk shows and
news programs that fill Jossem's days. And that was why he'd
invited a reporter over, to sit at the little card table for
an afternoon chat that stretched into evening.
The 76-year-old Jossem hasn't always been blind.
He was born with glaucoma, but he could see well enough to read
and become a news junkie at a young age, to see the Boulder Dam
being constructed, to be a bicycle messenger in San Francisco,
to climb the oldest oak tree alive (near Chico), to fall in love
with Eureka on a trip up here with his brother in 1954 ("It
was beautiful; it was exquisite"), to develop a preference
for orange cats, to ride a moped — until one day on Myrtle
Avenue when a truck hit his moped, his head hit the truck, and
his vision declined into darkness over the ensuing six years.
By the time he was 41, he was blind.
One thing that didn't change was Jossem's passion
for justice, news and politics. That passion developed early:
As president at his high school in Berkeley, he changed the rule
that had said girls couldn't be president and boys couldn't be
secretary. He belonged to the Peace and Freedom Party —
"before it was kicked off the ballot," he says —
and once tried to run for state assembly on the P&F ticket
because no one else would (there was a problem with the paperwork;
Jossem almost sued). Now he's in the Green Party. Case accompanied
him on the last peace march through town.
"What did they call me?" he said, sitting
at the card table, after recounting a Nixon-era tale. "They
said I was a 'social co-op anarchist.'" And if anyone tries
to tell him he's just a complainer, Jossem will answer: "You've
got to fight back a little bit."
But even so, in his isolated neighborhood, in his
small house whose back steps need fixing and where his main connection
to the world is the radio (his computer blew up awhile back),
and in an isolated county — it's like, someone said that
day while sitting in his yard, he's "on an island within
an island."
So, he's got to shout even louder.
Now the man next door was singing, "Where
was I? Where was I?" Sitting at the card table, which by
now had been moved into the sunny alley, Jossem asked Case to
bring out the old phone the phone company gave him in 1973. Awhile
back, when a friend urged him to get a new free phone that the
phone company was offering, he got into a battle of wills: The
company demanded he send the old phone back first; he balked,
said it was silly. He won that one. Case put the old phone on
the table, as evidence. "Want me to get the new phone, Harvey?"
he asked, then went back inside the house to fetch it. Coming
back out, Case set the new phone next to the old phone. More
evidence. One of Jossem's four cats — orange-furred Kevin,
named after a young friend of Jossem's who died in the 1970s
in a wreck on Humboldt Hill — jumped onto the table and
flopped next to the phones.
The second go around with the telephone company
started "sometime around November or December," Jossem
said, when he tried to pay his phone bill the same way he's been
paying it for about the past three years. He waited until after
8 p.m. — when the customer service people go home and an
automated system takes over — and he speed dialed the number.
The automatic recording asked him, as usual, to punch in his
phone number. Which he did. But then, instead of going through
the paces — speed-dialing his checking account's routing
number, punching in the amount he wanted to pay, and the date,
and so forth — the recording said, "The office is
closed. Please call back."
Jossem called back. And called back. "I thought
the office was really closed," he said, laughing. "And
this went on for three or four months." Then one day his
friend Blue came over and asked Jossem to pay his phone bill
for him. Blue doesn't have a checking account, and sometimes
he gives Jossem the money he owes and Jossem pays Blue's bill
from his checking account. Well, the automated system
took Blue's phone number just fine. But, again, not Jossem's
— the office "was closed."
"So they've got it rigged so that my phone
number doesn't work," Jossem said.
Jossem finally called customer service. Four representatives
and many weeks later — with Case joining in on the calls
— the closest explanation they received was that because
Jossem is blind and receives "accessibility services"
— free directory assistance, free speed dial — and
because he has a free phone from the phone company, he can no
longer use the automated system. One rep. had actually figured
out the problem and, for one month — June — Jossem
was able to pay his phone bill the way he likes to. But in July
he was back to having to call in the daytime and talk to a person.
It's inconvenient, Jossem says, and requires him to pay his caregiver
for the extra time it takes to deal with one more bill, or to
pay by check. He could, he supposes, have it automatically withdrawn
from his checking account — but that's not a good option
because sometimes there isn't enough money in his account on
that particular day — living on a $10,500-a-year fixed
income, money gets stretched. But his reasons are perhaps irrelevant,
because what he's fighting for is his right to pay his bill however
he chooses to, just like a sighted person gets to. The rep. named
Amy told him, if he insisted on his right to the automated system,
he could just send that new free phone right back and give up
free speed dial and free 411.
"She was so strong about it — very adamant,"
said Jossem. "And what I wonder is, how many other people
are being affected by this?"
A couple of days after that meeting with Jossem,
a call to AT&T/SBC's "accessibility services" department
yielded pretty much the same answer: People with disabilities
can't use the automated system any more. A phone rep, "Eva,"
said Jossem's account showed "a Code 53."
"It's a block in the system," she said.
"Because his account is coded to get 411 for free —
and so he gets speed-dialing for free — the computer is
blocking him" from using the automated system to pay his
bill after hours. Yes, she said, he has to talk to a person —
or pay online, or with a check, or have it automatically withdrawn.
She said she didn't know why this was so, but surmised that perhaps
it's because there are all sorts of people with all sort of disabilities
out there — maybe this somehow was protecting them from
abuses.
But Jossem isn't the only one complaining about
the revoked service. Dan Kysor, governmental affairs director
with the California Council for the Blind in West Sacramento,
said on Monday that he has been complaining about this very same
issue. "I'm blind," he said. "I have two phones:
On my work phone, I can use the automated system because I'm
not signed up for special services. On my personal phone at home,
I receive free directory assistance, and that does not allow
me to use the automated system."
Kysor said he had the problem even before the merger.
"I have complained," he said. "I really enjoy
using the automated system. Now I have to deal with a person."
That has meant, at times, being put on hold for 10 minutes or
longer waiting for an operator to assist him. With the automated
system, it takes about three minutes to pay a phone bill.
Some people might say, well, why don't Jossem,
Kysor and other people just deal with the change and get over
it?
"This isn't a question of adapting,"
Kysor said. It's a matter, he said, of having the same options
that sighted people have — especially if they make things
easier in a world that's just a little bit more difficult to
negotiate when you're blind.
A few days later, on the phone, Jossem emphasized
this point: "If there was a sensible reason for it, I'd
accept that," he said. "But this is totally nonsense.
And I don't think we should have to put up with nonsense."
TOP
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