Reporter's Notebook: It took a village to start the city’s landfill

During Tuesday’s Del Norte Solid Waste Authority Board meeting, board member Richard Enea asked, “why isn’t the landfill properly lined?”

This prompted authority program manager Tedd Ward to recount the origin of the now-closed dump:

“Some of this is before my time, so I’m going to do my best to recap the history as I understand it,” Ward said.

“Somewhere in the mid-’70s, the community decided they were all going to dump at the end of the same road and that was the start of the Crescent City landfill.

“And for years animals were thrown in the garbage. There was a smoldering pile in another area.  There was a place called castaways where people could get salvaged goods. And it had no liner — in fact it was a burn dump, which was fairly common in many rural areas.

“Over time, the community decided there would be a landfill there. There was no base-liner put in at the time. I don’t know if that was a requirement at the time — it was around ’76, ’77, ’78.

“A document said there was a 10-foot mound of sand with a first layer of garbage underneath. There was no survey done. We don’t know that base topography. We don’t know how that’s changed, but there was certainly no base-liner.

After refuse started piling dozens of feet high, Ward said, “the idea of putting a liner beneath all that garbage became impractical.”

— Adam Spencer

Oh, what a tangled web

Things got tangled up for a bit during the Del Norte High girls varsity basketball game Wednesday night at Thunen Gym.

In the fourth quarter, a Ferndale player was shooting free throws when the net got bunched up.

A referee tried to untangle it by tossing up the basketball from underneath the net, but then the ball got stuck.

While the ball was knocked loose, the net still remained in its unplayable condition.

Another referee, the tallest one on the court, began to jump and grab at the net to straighten it out.

No luck.

Finally, school officials brought out a contraption resembling a step ladder on wheels and someone climbed up and fixed the net.

Game back on.

— Bill Choy

Attending religiously

At Tuesday’s Del Norte County Tea Party meeting, it was clear that an energetic community can spring from mutual discontent.

Some 60 Del Norters convened to hear a few speakers explain what local offices are coming up for election, but whoever had something to say chimed in throughout the meeting.

And people had a lot to say — about local representatives they aren’t happy with; about demands for fiscal responsibility at home, in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C.; about “the kind of liberalism that’s on the School Board,” as one audience member put it.  

“What we do about it,” said speaker John Grey, “is we replace the people that are on the City Council and the Board of Supervisors.

The definition of “we” may be critical.

“This is the only congregation I’ve seen in Del Norte County,” one person in the audience put in, identifying himself as a member since the group’s inception in 2010. “I don’t go to church, this is my church.”

— Emily Jo Cureton

Off to the City Council

School Board members congratulated Director of Personnel Rick Holley for his appointment  to the City Council at Thursday’s board meeting.

Holley joked that he wanted to go to more meetings. He’ll now be attending at least four meetings a month (two City Council and two School Board events).

Board Member Francss Costello got a laugh when she warned Holley that he might end up the subject of a recall effort, as has happened to most of the other current Council members.

— Kelley Atherton

Shrinking school budgets

The School Board will soon be discussing possible cuts to its 2012-2013 budget.

According to the governor’s budget proposal, K-12 education funding won’t be cut if voters approve initiatives to raise the sales tax by 0.5 percent and the income tax by 1–2 percent for Californians earning $250,000 or more per year.

However, if those don’t pass, school districts will face a funding cut of $370 per students who attends school. That would put funding at $4,921 when it would  be $6,742 if steady cost-of-living increase had been made, making the public school system in California one of the lowest-funded in the country.

California’s company at the bottom would include Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada and Arizona.

— Kelley Atherton