Why spend more on question that's answered?

There is movement afoot to dissolve the Del Norte Solid Waste Management Authority despite public sentiment in favor of the agency and despite county officials being unable to find any substantial way to improve the agency after two years of searching.

The authority is a local public entity created to monitor the local landfill (now closed, and for good reason) and to handle the county’s trash flow. It is highly efficient, keeping much of our garbage from ever reaching a landfill in the first place.

Run by living-wage employees under public scrutiny at no cost to the taxpayer, the authority contributes to the economic development of the county, contracting with multiple local businesses.

Personally, I am grateful for their good work. The endless waste of our consumer society is a serious environmental problem, affecting water quality and hence, public health. The best way to manage public health is through public oversight and the authority does that well.

Business owners producing large volumes of rubbish feel burdened by fees. But frankly, so does everyone else. That’s the point! People should have to pay to pollute and, despite the formality that it’s legal, dumping in a landfill is still pollution.

Commercial pickup rates proportionate to volume will create the incentive to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Consequently, businesses that provide their services with minimal waste will be rewarded. Who wouldn’t want that?

I applaud the intentions of anyone who wants to come up with ideas to save the city and county money by doing things differently. But dissolving the Solid Waste Management Authority (SWMA) would not be one of those ideas.

There is a long list of reasons to keep it in place, as well as some fears to dispel.

The state of California mandated the closure of the Crescent City landfill because it was not in compliance with environmental regulations.  It also mandated that waste be reduced by 50 percent. The SWMA was formed to monitor the old landfill site (to prevent future fines) and build a transfer station. 

What do proponents of dissolving the SWMA mean when they say they want to privatize waste? It already has been privatized. Recology does trash collection, Julindra does recycling, and Hambro runs the transfer station.

And since Recology and Hambro had to do a lot of initial capital investment to purchase equipment, they have relatively long-term contracts.

What’s more, the SWMA’s budget is paid for by these three organizations in the form of fees at the transfer station and a franchise fee that the SWMA charges Recology and Julindra. The SWMA is funded  by the partners, not by taxpayers.

Rates tend to “jump” because once a new contract is negotiated, the contracted partners have limited power to raise rates, while the cost of doing business continues to rise. So by the time the next contract is negotiated, the partners sometimes need to make market corrections. 

Shane Brooks and Ana Garcia with one of the liberated butterflies from Mrs. Walsworth’s first-grade class at Joe Hamilton School. Del Norte Triplicate /Michele Postal

Symbolism hard to miss as caterpillars turn into butterflies

At a Rotary Club meeting about a year ago, I listened with interest as Bonnie Finley told our group about a program she’s involved in through United Way called Schools of Hope. Bonnie stood at the podium asking for volunteers to tutor first-graders in reading.  

As someone who has spent an entire career dependent on people who want to read, it seemed only natural to put my name on Bonnie’s sign-up sheet. She was asking for only one lunch hour a week to help a child learn to read. Surely I could do that.

After fingerprinting, a background check and a brief orientation, I was dispatched to Joe Hamilton School with a name tag, a packet of paperwork and some suggested assignments. A few days prior, as instructed, I had e-mailed a first-grade teacher introducing myself and she replied with the names of the two students I’d be tutoring.

It had been many years since I walked into an elementary school office to sign in. On that first Wednesday afternoon last fall I was nervous and, I’ll admit, coping with some feelings of regret about volunteering so hastily for this commitment. What was I thinking?

I found Room 9 where Mrs. Walsworth’s class was beginning story time after lunch. Mrs. Walsworth seemed relaxed in a rocking chair while her students sat on a carpet at her feet waiting for her to show them the page of the book she was reading out loud. She introduced me to the class and to the two students I’d be working with. In a designated reading room around the corner, I spent the first 20 minutes with the little girl and the last with the boy.  

Dissolving Waste Authority expensive 

Something stinks in our county and it’s not coming from garbage. The push to dissolve and privatize the public agency that manages our trash by some supervisors makes no sense and is a really bad and ultimately expensive idea.

Our nearest neighbor, Curry County, privatized all of its solid waste handling, which has resulted in a steady increase in fees to their customers. This has been consistent with other communities in the nation that have done the same.

Is it any wonder that Curry residents travel to Del Norte’s transfer station to dump their trash? It’s certainly not to benefit from California’s high gas prices! 

What’s really behind this obsession to get rid of the Solid Waste Management Authority? After a one-year study by a public committee and then another year with 10 city and county officials forming a new board revisiting the issue, the authority received a satisfactory if not exemplary report card for its services … and no recommendation for dissolution or privatization.

Two events, one published and the other yet to be reported, are causing me pause.  The question that comes to my mind these days is our system of checks and balances. Both events involve the omnipotent California Coastal Commission.

Event 1: A May 9 Triplicate headline reads, “Lots at Pacific Shores Sought: Airport needs wetlands as set-aside for project.”

I rhetorically ask why property owners in the Pacific Shore development are being solicited to sell their parcels at garage sale prices. At face value it would appear that clustering those lots might help to satiate the unreasonable 4:1 acre ratio mandated by the commission to permit the expansion of the airport.

As a supervisor, I am charged with a countywide fiduciary responsibility. The property clusters newly acquired from the private sector could be turned over to a public conservancy for future wetlands considerations. The current government ownership of property in Del Norte County thereby would increase from approximately 78 percent to a higher percentage. Results: less property tax revenue generated, less services offered.

If we continue to convert private property into public lands, we remove property tax income from our already threatened ability to afford adequate public services, such as police protection, fire suppression, clean streets, quality drinking water, waste management, and a host of other public benefits.

At what cost to public safety do we add more, often inaccessible, public areas to this county? Would you prefer the ability to walk through a wild marshland to your inability to drive down a public street in your neighborhood that no longer can be maintained due to the lack of public funds? 

How do you like the sheriff’s current inability to afford more than two patrol cars per shift? Would you like to have an improved air terminal and commercial air transportation to Crescent City Airport or would you prefer to continue joining your many traveling friends who drive to the Medford, Arcata or even the San Francisco airports? These questions travel right to the root of healthy economic growth for Del Norte County.

The older I get the more fun it is to look back at Warrior athletics that were going on at Del Norte High School while I was still a student at Crescent Elk.

Some of those memories involve students that I had the privilege of getting to know personally since my dad was a teacher and coach at Del Norte at that time.

Don Reinemer, a 1947 DNHS graduate, was one of those special Warriors. Dan was an excellent three-sport athlete, playing football, basketball and baseball, and was good at all of them.

In football he was an excellent running back, playing his junior year under coach Kruger and his senior year under Phil Crawford. Don was part of the group that brought 11-man football back to Del Norte after a seven-year layoff.

He played his first three years of basketball as a lightweight, helping the Warrior lightweights to a second place finish in the league as a junior. His size dictated his playing lightweight as a junior, not his ability. He was an outstanding basketball player.

If you were to look at the red and white Warrior blanket that once hung in the Warrior gym and now hangs in the Historical Society museum, you would see “1947 basketball Don Reinemer.”

Emergency responders tend to students portraying drunk driving accident victims at a previous Every 15 Minutes event at Del Norte High School. Del Norte Triplicate file / Rick Postal

Every 15 Minutes event at high school next week; parents advised to converse with kids about drinking, driving

House Calls runs monthly. Today’s column was written by Rita Nicklas, Emergency Department coordinator at Sutter Coast Hospital.

Every 15 minutes someone in the United States dies in an alcohol-related car crash.

Drinking and driving has become a serious issue among American teenagers.

In order to drive safely, a person has to be alert, capable to make and carry out decisions based on what is happening around them. This coordination while driving becomes difficult under the influence of alcohol.

Alcohol leads to loss of coordination, poor judgment, slowing down of reflexes and distortion of vision, all of which may cause an accident. The statistics related to alcohol and driving paint a gruesome picture about the entire trend.

Did you know that car crashes cause more teen deaths each year than drugs, violence or suicide?

Did you know that this year, like every year, more than 5,000 teens will likely die on America’s roads?

Did you know that 400,000 teens suffer serious driving-related injuries every year, and many of these are alcohol related?

Did you know that three out of four teens killed in drunk driving accidents were not wearing seat belts?

I keep hoping for a good run of nice warm weather, but it never lasts long enough when it comes.

I want to grow some veggies, but I keep remembering last year — how beautifully I had tomatoes, peppers, squash and pumpkins growing — and how suddenly over a couple weeks they curled up and died, no matter what I did.

So thus far, I have two tomato plants and four mild jalapeno plants, and a bunch of seeds that I’m looking at longingly.

Should I do it?

Nothing tastes better that home-grown vegetables. And last year, I discovered yellow tomatoes and yellow bell peppers, and

I’m hooked.

I’ll probably go ahead and plant them, though I’m going to need help — at least until that pinched nerve in my back gets resolved. That is definitely not a fun thing to have. But as I’ve often said before,  I’m happiest when surrounded by green, growing things. And a few days ago, someone emailed ne about a gadget that will make sounds that will repel those masked four-legged bandits, so perhaps it will be worth it to try again.

From the pages of the Crescent City American, May 1930.

William Kennon Davis, for 30 years a resident of this city, and who has been most active in civic affairs, passed peacefully away at his home on J Street Sunday night, May 11. 

Mr. Davis was a veteran of the Civil War and Mexican Wars and a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization composed of members of the Union Army, Marines, U.S. Navy and Revenue Cutter Service who served in the American Civil War.

For a while, he also served under General Custer and narrowly escaped being with the general in his last battle by declining to serve longer in the service, just a day or two before the general’s  last campaign. 

Mr. and Mrs. Davis came west to Oregon 45 years ago, where they settled in Medford for 15 years before moving to Crescent City. Mr. Davis was a millright and carpenter by trade and worked in this profession until he retired a few years ago. He and his wife have resided in Crescent City for the past 30 years, where they raised their four children. 

Mr. Davis was laid to rest Tuesday, May 14, with full military honors, the Rev. J. Freelen Johnson officiating and the Veterans of Foreign Wars taking charge of the services at the grave. 

Boston bombing shows need for tighter border

The Brothers Tsarnaev have just delivered a pressure cooked meal of steel to the streets of Boston America as groggy citizens  try to blink away incredulity from awe-struck eyes.

Images of corpses and shredded flesh  imbed on the national psyche as medical teams cart the human carnage away  to be swathed in yards of comfort cotton. The rigors of  sweating  flesh pounding miles of pavement ended with the  flash of  searing heat, and the marathon would never be the same.

Nor would America. Nor should America. It is so past time to review our immigration policy. What does it benefit America to keep up the literal river of humanity pouring into our increasingly impoverished nation? And what are our political leaders thinking by allowing immigrants of nations that continue to pronounce America as their mortal enemy?

Chechnya is a known cauldron of terrorist activism  directed more toward Russia than the U.S., but Islam is the driver  and the West  is radical Islam’s mortal enemy.

Let us not forget that 16 Chechan terrorists were apprehended after crossing our red carpet southern border in 2008 and they weren’t heading here for a picnic.

The immediate question is how many other terrorists have crossed that notoriously porous  border?

Not only are terrorists crossing into the U.S., but terrorist organizations have reportedly collaborated and colluded with the Mexican butchers whose penchant for violent terror makes them akin to the terrorists themselves.