Your Sunday Photos

Photos by Cheri Frost

Get A Room 2

Oh, Lordy, the Arroyo Grande city manager/police/investigation/story just keeps getting sadder.  (see my Sept 25 posting) City Manager Steve Adams has now resigned, written a long O/Ed piece
 ( http://www.newtimesslo.com ) declaring that on July 3 he and Community Development Director Teresa McClish always never didn't do anything wrong/illegal, that "nobody was at any time unclothed or partially clothed," but for the sake of the City he'll be heading out of Dodge to "pursue new opportunities elsewhere." 

The independent investigation, however is still ongoing so this sad drama will continue to unfold and will likely end with a whimper and some sort of resolution and everyone will likely go home vindicated in some way, except for the two major players in this drama, who learned a bitter lesson the hard way: If you are a Public Servant in any position of real authority or in the public eye in a major way, do not drink enough alcohol that will require you to "sober up" enough to drive.  Do not drink any amount of alcohol that will require "sobering up" in any fashion whatsoever.  In fact, remove the words "sober up" from your vocabulary for the duration of your employment.

Being alone late at night in city hall, forgetting to call home after- hours so a worried spouse sends the police out looking for you,  said police finding you looking "disheveled," all of that is survivable.  But those two little words -- sober up --are what moved this "incident" from merely an "incident" into the realm of, "Oh,  this ain't gonna end well."

And so it didn't. 

Sigh. 

Not Little, But Too Late

Calhoun's Can(n)s for Sept 27, 2014

There's never a wrong time to do the right thing.

                                                       Anon

Former RWQCB Chairman, Jeffery Young, wasn't man enough to show up.  He left it to Vice Chair,  Dr. Monica Hunter,  to do the right thing:  Vote (which was unanimous) to rescind 45 CDO's and APOLOGIZE to The Los Osos 45 and to the community for the cruel and pointlessly ridiculous "Mad Hatter Tea Party and Torequemada's Auto de Fe Trial," inflicted on them by the previous Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Dr. Hunter had recused herself when the mad "trial" was underway because she lives in Los Osos and so had a conflict of interest on that proceeding.  Which was a shame because she alone apparently knew what the rest of that Board refused to know:  They had  swallowed a false Kool-Aid narrative about the community, carefully fed to them by the former Chief of Staff, a furious, incompetent and equally uninformed Roger Briggs, and his clockwork second-in-command, Harvey Packard.  This false narrative was that Los Osos was some kind of Dogpatch filled with urine-swilling "Anti-Sewer Obstructionist" scofflaws.

Naturally, urine-swilling scofflaws, whose only sin was voting to move a sewer plant out of town, needed punishment in order to bring them to heel.  And what better way to do that than singling out 45 hapless residents, very publicly slap a Cease and Desist Order on their homes, put them through a ridiculous "trial," threaten their homes, and disrupt their lives, in a little piece of illegal electioneering which would, as then-Chairman Young brazenly put it from the dais, get the community to "vote the right way." 

The Mad Hatter Trials were reported on here and the whole sewer debacle thoroughly documented on Ron Crawford's blog at www.sewerwatch.blogspot.com so there's no need to rehash the insanity.  Except to note how these unfair CDOs on only 45 people serves as a window into how looney the Regional Board's policies and procedures had become.

Unlike everyone else in the PZ, The Los Osos 45 were required to pay big bucks to inspect and pump their tanks every three years (despite expert testimony that unnecessary pumping made wastewater discharges worse, not better, and despite the fact that nobody else in town had a similar burden.), send that report to the Board and notify the Board if the property was sold. So, clearly the Board was trying to make some sort of vague "scientific" connection between "water quality" and pumping and inspecting a septic tank on a piece of property that would justify that CDO.

But here's the kicker. The CDO's were put on an individual, not on the property.  If a CDO recipient sells their house, the CDO goes away.  Poof!  A new family moves in.  Same house, same tank, same leach field, same discharge, but no CDO, no expensive pumping, no reporting, nothing.

This, of course, is pointless incompetent bureaucracy run amok.  And has been the operating methods of the Regional Board from day one.  Under Chairman Young's leadership, the Board chose to ignore science, ignore practical reason, ignore common sense and instead allowed frustration, anger, misinformation and their own incompetence and ignorance to lead them into a farce  -- "The Mad Hatter Tea Party Trial" -- a piece of lunacy that would have been genuinely funny had not the consequences to 45 real people and the community been so wasteful and so harmful.

And now, here it was, the final chapter in this epic piece of embarrassment and ex-chairman Young didn't have the guts to even show up.  But Dr. Hunter did and she alone had the courage and decency to acknowledge and apologize to those 45 and to the community as a whole.  The apology was too late, but it was no small thing.

Except to our newspaper of record.  Two days after the meeting the Tribune carried not one word about the vote, or about the apology.  Nothing. Not a surprise, seeing as how they, like the Board, had already swallowed that same false narrative about Los Osos and became water-carriers for the Board.  And  now, when the community finally received an apology --an acknowledgement by the Vice Chair that The 45 and the community had been  wronged by the Water Board -- the community won't read about it in the Tribune.

While deliberately blinding yourself, silencing your critics and burying your mistakes is par for the course for bureaucrats and Boards, for a newspaper, it's inexcusable.

So, congratulations to The Los Osos 45.  While the community (and the Tribune) have forgotten you, Dr. Hunter did not.  While the apology was too late in coming, it did finally arrive and that in itself is no small thing.  

Get a Room

This odd Arroyo Grande controversy involing City Manager Steve Adams and Community Development Director Teresa McClish continues to show up on the front page.  The initial story appeared to involve some sort of July 3rd late night canoodling uncovered by A.G. Police when Ms. McClish's husband became concerned about her whereabouts.  The cops showed up at City Hall, saw her car there, entered the darkened premise to look around, thinking maybe she might be ill or in trouble, and found Adams and McClish om Adams' office. apparently in some sort of state of dishabile. 

The two of them claimed they were just sobering up so they were "safe to drive home," and scurried out the door.  The Police wrote up a report.  And then the you know what hit the headlines and hit the fan.  The AG city council said, "Nevermind," which ticked off the Police who thought they were being dissed and wrongly painted as a bunch of unreliable Nosey Parkers, and everyone started demanding an "investigation," which promptly went off the rails because of the old Fox and Henhouse problem and the Police Officers Association and their supporters showed up at a recent meeting to demand that this "investigation" be "completely public so that everyone can determine for themselves what the truth is."

Well, o.k.  We're four-square in favor of "truth," but here's my question so far on all this:  The Tribune reports that Adams and McClish "had a few drinks at two restaurants in the Village that night and were talking in Adam's office to ensure they were safe to drive home."

If these two didn't feel safe to drive home, how did they get from restaurant A to restaurant B to City Hall?

Walk?

Red Bounty

Such a generous grapevine.  The Roger’s Red is the first harbinger of spring, its soft green buds promising the end of winter.  And all summer long, its massed  leaves – perfectly formed, stereotypical-looking “grape leaf” leaves – form a cascade of greenery that simply  shouts “summer day.”





Then in fall, that perfect green waterfall of leaves turns into a glorious wall of fire – their last blazing gift before winter dark.

Over the years, as they grew and matured, I would notice little dried up sprigs of grapes here and there and thought, since they’re supposed to be a native, their fruiting was sparse and inedible. So I paid them no mind.

Then this year, while poking  around , head under the tumbling leaves and vines doing a little pruning, I was shocked to see this, lots and lots of this:


                         

 So it was grab a bucket time, call a friend and together we harvested 4-6 of these:




And since the grapes are quite small and mostly skin and seed, utilizing all that surprise bounty meant this:













Some washing, some prep time snipping and sorting and out came this:

Intense.  Very, very intense.  And tart.  Very tart. Even cut with water, well, it was a rich-on-the-tongue vintage year indeed.  To your good health.  L’chaim!

Thank you Mr. Red.