LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Yuba Community College District Board of Trustees has appointed an interim dean to oversee the Lake County Campus of Woodland Community College.
At its meeting on Nov. 9, the board — which oversees both Yuba and Woodland community colleges — unanimously approved the appointment of Patricia Barba as the Lake County Campus’ interim dean.
She succeeds Dean Ingrid Larson, who left in September for a job at Mendocino College.
Barba will receive an annual salary of $113, 774.
The position continues until May 10, 2024.
At the same meeting, the board also unanimously approved other appointments for Woodland Community College, including Geoffrey Hulbert as director of Department of Supportive Programs and Services and Caren Fernandez as the interim assignment for acting director of matriculation and EOPS/CARE Program. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday issued a proclamation declaring November 2023, as Native American Heritage Month.
The text of the proclamation and a copy can be found below.
PROCLAMATION
During Native American Heritage Month, California recognizes and honors the first people to call this state and nation home, while also committing to the personal, collective and institutional work we must continue to embrace as we create a California that respects, values and uplifts Native peoples.
Over the course of the last year, we celebrated the unveiling of a new monument to California Native peoples on the grounds of the State Capitol, witnessed the validation of the Indian Child Welfare Act from the nation’s highest court and felt every emotion with the conclusion of Reservation Dogs. We also saw California tribal nations leading the state in historic efforts to address climate change, launch state-of-the art cultural centers and compel institutions to once and for all return Native ancestors to their lands and communities. These milestones are all testaments to the power of shifting the narrative, making space for Native people to determine their own place in our collective culture and elevating the Native experience in the story of California.
While we celebrate these achievements with Indian Country, we remind ourselves that they are but small signs of goodwill and progress in the journey toward truth and healing. Native people in California have been advocating for greater space, voice and understanding for hundreds of years—during which time their communities and cultures have been actively erased, displaced and painted over. Peoples that long predate even the concept of “California” have fought to keep languages and families intact in the face of ongoing waves of settlement of this place. This month, it is our task to reflect on our knowledge gaps and fully educate ourselves on the histories, cultures and governments of the first peoples of this place in order to codesign a future that elevates Native voices and experiences where many of our predecessors sought their eradication.
If the only time we reflect on the Native Peoples of the United States is during the month of November, we are selling ourselves—and Native peoples—far too short. It is incumbent on all Californians to remind ourselves of the price Native peoples had to—and continue to—pay as a result of centuries of oppression and the settlement of California beaches, grasslands and mountains. We owe it to them to better understand, acknowledge and elevate their place as the first peoples of these lands.
This Native American Heritage Month, I challenge all Californians to commit to the lifelong process of learning more about the diverse Native peoples in California as we work toward truth, justice and accountability for all.
NOW THEREFORE I, GAVIN NEWSOM, Governor of the State of California, do hereby proclaim November 2023, as “Native American Heritage Month.”
IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Great Seal of the State of California to be affixed this 18th day of November 2023.
GAVIN NEWSOM Governor of California
ATTEST: SHIRLEY N. WEBER, Ph.D. Secretary of State
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — It started with a love for science.
Lake County Office of Education's Learning Support Specialist Jennifer Kelly has taken science "out-of-this-world" for Lake County students with her lessons and field trips.
Kelly provides STEAM lessons through classroom visits and field trips to the Taylor Observatory.
STEAM education is an approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics as a starting point to guide student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking.
STEAM projects include the solar system, robotics, Clear Lake topography and water analysis, sound, engineering and so much more.
“When you look at the three dimensions of science learning, I believe the Taylor Observatory and the science lessons help build connections across disciplines and engage students with technical and engineering practices,” said Lake County Superintendent of Schools Brock Falkenberg.
Kelly works with students from kindergarten through the 12th grade. As the students learn the lesson, so do the teachers.
During the 2022-2023 school year, Kelly visited 78 Lake County classrooms and hosted 65 field trips to the Taylor Observatory.
Sixty-five educators from 18 Lake County schools participated in various STEAM activities.
This includes two new activities, Arduino Robotics and the Health of Clearlake.
Arduino Robotics, sponsored by the Reynolds System Inc., is taught in four to six lessons by their engineers and allows students to build robots and control them with Arduino microcontrollers.
The Health of Clear Lake includes up to nine lessons and a field trip to collect and analyze water samples from the lake.
Kelly has her Masters of Education in STEAM. She was also named California Teacher of the Year in 2011 and the Lake County Teacher of the Year in 2010 while teaching at the Middletown Unified School District.
Taylor Observatory / Norton Planetarium / STEAM Center is a facility owned by the Lake County Office of Education, located beneath the dark skies of Lake County, in Kelseyville, California.
The facility features a 36 seat classroom, a 16 inch research grade telescope under a dome, a 32 seat planetarium with a 6.2 meter (20 feet) domed ceiling and an Epsilon Model Digitarium Star Projector System.
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed many parents’ home and work lives, with some changes like shuttered schools and remote learning leading to a drop in enrollment of children ages 3 and 4.
But new data show enrollment has started to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels.
Non-Hispanic Black 3- and 4-year-olds experienced higher enrollment levels (61.7%) in 2022 than in the four previous years, despite a slow enrollment recovery.
The 2022 Current Population Survey (CPS) shows that the share of 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in all U.S. schools, both federally funded and private, increased by 13.0 percentage points from 40.3% in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, to 53.3% in 2022 when the pandemic emergency ended (Figure 1).
There was a smaller change in enrollment of students ages 5 to 17 during that period.
In this article, we focus on changes in school enrollment of children ages 3 and 4.
The share of these children enrolled in school in 2022 was up by 2.9 percentage points from 2021 and 13.0 percentage points from 2020. School enrollment for this group in 2022 was not statistically different than it was in 2018 and 2019.
Hispanic 3- and 4-year-old enrollment
Figure 2 shows the share of 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in school by race and Hispanic origin between 2018 and 2022.
Enrollment among Hispanic 3- and 4-year-olds of any race decreased by 16.8 percentage points between 2019 and 2020 but fully recovered from 2020 to 2022 when enrollment increased by 14.4 percentage points.
Hispanic 3- and 4-year-olds had an enrollment rate of 47.4% in 2022, which was not statistically different from 2021.
Non-Hispanic Black 3- and 4-year-olds
Another large enrollment decline during the pandemic was for non-Hispanic Black 3- and 4-year-olds.
In 2020, 40.9% were enrolled, 14.1 points lower than in 2019 and 20.8 points lower than in 2022.
Non-Hispanic Black 3- and 4-year-olds experienced higher enrollment levels (61.7%) in 2022 than in the four previous years, despite a slow enrollment recovery.
Non-Hispanic white 3- and 4-year-olds
Enrollment of non-Hispanic White 3- and 4-year-olds dropped by 11.0 percentage points between 2019 and 2020. But it rebounded and fully recovered with an 11.2 percentage point increase from 2020 to 2022.
Other race, non-Hispanic 3- and 4-year-olds
Enrollment of Other Race, non-Hispanic 3- and 4-year-olds did not make a statistically significant recovery since 2020. It was 46.4% in 2020, down from 57.9% in 2019. Enrollment inched up to 49.1% in 2022, which was not statistically different from the four years prior.
Definitions and more information on confidentiality protection and sampling and nonsampling error are available in the technical documentation. All comparative statements in this story have undergone statistical testing and, unless otherwise noted, are statistically significant at the 10% significance level.
Adrienne Griffiths is a survey statistician in the Census Bureau’s Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has many dogs of various breeds that are ready to be adopted this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Akita, Chihuahua, German shepherd, Great Pyrenees, hound, husky, Labrador retriever, pit bull, shepherd and terrier.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
"Sissy." Photo courtesy of Clearlake Animal Control. CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has new dogs and other dogs waiting to be adopted this fall.
The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 46 adoptable dogs.
They include “Sissy,” a 2-year-old female German shepherd mix with a tan coat. She has been spayed and is up to date on vaccinations.
Another adoptable dog is “Smak,” a male German shepherd mix with a tricolor coat.
"Smak." Photo courtesy of Clearlake Animal Control. The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Buying drugs on the street is a game of Russian roulette. From Xanax to cocaine, drugs or counterfeit pills purchased in nonmedical settings may contain life-threatening amounts of fentanyl.
Physicians like me have seen a rise in unintentional fentanyl use from people buying prescription opioids and other drugs laced, or adulterated, with fentanyl. Heroin users in my community in Massachusetts came to realize that fentanyl had entered the drug supply when overdose numbers exploded. In 2016, my colleagues and I found that patients who came to the emergency department reporting a heroin overdose often only had fentanyl present in their drug test results.
As the Chief of Medical Toxicology at UMass Chan Medical School, I have studied fentanyl and its analogs for years. As fentanyl has become ubiquitous across the U.S., it has transformed the illicit drug market and raised the risk of overdose.
Fentanyl and its analogs
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that was originally developed as an analgesic – or painkiller – for surgery. It has a specific chemical structure with multiple areas that can be modified, often illicitly, to form related compounds with marked differences in potency.
Fentanyl’s chemical backbone (the structure in the center) has multiple areas (the colored circles) that can be substituted with different functional groups (the colored boxes around the edges) to change its potency.Christopher Ellis et al., CC BY-NC-ND
For example, carfentanil, a fentanyl analog formed by substituting one chemical group for another, is 100 times more potent than its parent structure. Another analog, acetylfentanyl, is approximately three times less potent than fentanyl, but has still led to clusters of overdoses in several states.
Drug dealers have used fentanyl analogs as an adulterant in illicit drug supplies since 1979, with fentanyl-related overdoses clustered in individual cities.
The modern epidemic of fentanyl adulteration is far broader in its geographic distribution, production and number of deaths. Overdose deaths roughly quadrupled, going from 8,050 in 1999 to 33,091 in 2015. From May 2020 to April 2021, more than 100,000 Americans died from a drug overdose, with over 64% of these deaths due to synthetic opioids like fentanyl and its analogs.
Illicitly manufactured fentanyl is internationally synthesized in China, Mexico and India, then exported to the United States as powder or pressed pills. China also exports many of the precursor chemicals needed to synthesize fentanyl.
Additionally, the emergence of the dark web, an encrypted and anonymous corner of the internet that’s a haven for criminal activity, has facilitated the sale of fentanyl and other opioids shipped through traditional delivery services, including the U.S. Postal Service.
During the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached an agreement to combat fentanyl trafficking.
Fentanyl is driving an increasing number of opioid overdose deaths.
Fentanyl is both sold alone and often used as an adulterant because its high potency allows dealers to traffic smaller quantities but maintain the drug effects buyers expect. Manufacturers may also add bulking agents, like flour or baking soda, to fentanyl to increase supply without adding costs. As a result, it is much more profitable to cut a kilogram of fentanyl compared to a kilogram of heroin.
Unfortunately, fentanyl’s high potency also means that even just a small amount can prove deadly. If the end user isn’t aware that the drug they bought has been adulterated, this could easily lead to an overdose.
Preventing fentanyl deaths
As an emergency physician, I give fentanyl as an analgesic, or painkiller, to relieve severe pain in an acute care setting. My colleagues and I choose fentanyl when patients need immediate pain relief or sedation, such as anesthesia for surgery.
But even in the controlled conditions of a hospital, there is still a risk that using fentanyl can reduce breathing rates to dangerously low levels, the main cause of opioid overdose deaths. For those taking fentanyl in nonmedical settings, there is no medical team available to monitor someone’s breathing rate in real time to ensure their safety.
One measure to prevent fentanyl overdose is distributing naloxone to bystanders. Naloxone can reverse an overdose as it occurs by blocking the effects of opioids.
Another measure is increasing the availability of opioid agonists like methadone and buprenorphine that reduce opioid withdrawal symptoms and cravings, helping people stay in treatment and decrease illicit drug use. Despite the lifesaving track records of these medications, their availability is limited by restrictions on where and how they can be used and inadequate numbers of prescribers.
Despite the evidence supporting these measures, however, local politics and funding priorities often limit whether communities are able to give them a try. Bold strategies are needed to interrupt the ever-increasing number of fentanyl-related deaths.
This article was updated on Nov. 16, 2023 to note developments regarding fentanyl at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
Cranberries are a staple in U.S. households at Thanksgiving – but how did this bog dweller end up on holiday tables?
Compared to many valuable plant species that were domesticated over thousands of years, cultivated cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) is a young agricultural crop, just as the U.S. is a young country and Thanksgiving is a relatively new holiday. But as a plant scientist, I’ve learned much about cranberries’ ancestry from their botany and genomics.
Wild cranberries are native to North America. They were an important food source for Native Americans, who used them in puddings, sauces, breads and a high-protein portable food called pemmican – a carnivore’s version of an energy bar, made from a mixture of dried meat and rendered animal fat and sometimes studded with dried fruits. Some tribes still make pemmican today, and even market a commercial version.
Cranberry cultivation began in 1816 in Massachusetts, where Revolutionary War veteran Henry Hall found that covering cranberry bogs with sand fertilized the vines and retained water around their roots. From there, the fruit spread throughout the U.S. Northeast and Upper Midwest.
Cranberries have many interesting botanical features. Like roses, lilies and daffodils, cranberry flowers are hermaphroditic, which means they contain both male and female parts. This allows them to self-pollinate instead of relying on birds, insects or other pollinators.
A cranberry blossom has four petals that peel back when the flower blooms. This exposes the anthers, which contain the plant’s pollen. The flower’s resemblance to the beak of a bird earned the cranberry its original name, the “craneberry.”
When cranberries don’t self-pollinate, they rely on bumblebees and honeybees to transport their pollen from flower to flower. They can also be propagated sexually, by planting seeds, or asexually, through rooting vine cuttings. This is important for growers because seed-based propagation allows for higher genetic diversity, which can translate to things like increased disease resistance or more pest tolerance.
Asexual reproduction is equally important, however. This method allows growers to create clones of varieties that perform very well in their bogs and grow even more of those high-performing types.
Every cranberry contains four air pockets, which is why they float when farmers flood bogs to harvest them. The air pockets also make raw cranberries bounce when they are dropped on a hard surface – a good indicator of whether they are fresh.
These pockets serve a biological role: They enable the berries to float down rivers and streams to disperse their seeds. Many other plants disperse their seeds via animals and birds that eat their fruits and excrete the seeds as they move around. But as anyone who has tasted them raw knows, cranberries are ultra-tart, so they have limited appeal for wildlife.
Reading cranberry DNA
For cranberries being such a young crop, scientists already know a lot about their genetics. The cranberry is a diploid, which means that each cell contains one set of chromosomes from the maternal parent and one set from the paternal parent. It has 24 chromosomes, and its genome size is less than one-tenth that of the human genome.
Insights like these help scientists better understand where potentially valuable genes might be located in the cranberry genome. And diploid crops tend to have fewer genes associated with a single trait, which makes breeding them to emphasize that trait much simpler.
Researchers have also described the genetics of the cultivated cranberry’s wild relative, which is known as the “small cranberry” (Vaccinium oxycoccos). Comparing the two can help scientists determine where the cultivated cranberry’s agronomically valuable traits reside in its genome, and where some of the small cranberry’s cold hardiness might come from.
Researchers are developing molecular markers – tools to determine where certain genes or sequences of interest reside within a genome – to help determine the best combinations of genes from different varieties of cranberry that can enhance desired traits. For example, a breeder might want to make the fruits larger, more firm or redder in color.
While cranberries have only been grown by humans for a short period of time, they have been evolving for much longer. They entered agriculture with a long genetic history, including things like whole genome duplication events and genetic bottlenecks, which collectively change which genes are gained or lost over time in a population.
Whole genome duplication events occur when two species’ genomes collide to form a new, larger genome, encompassing all the traits of the two parental species. Genetic bottlenecks occur when a population is greatly reduced in size, which limits the amount of genetic diversity in that species. These events are extremely common in the plant world and can lead to both gains and losses of different genes.
Analyzing the cranberry’s genome can indicate when it diverged evolutionarily from some of its relatives, such as the blueberry, lingonberry and huckleberry. Understanding how modern species evolved can teach plant scientists about how different traits are inherited, and how to effectively breed for them in the future.
Ripe at the right time
Cranberries’ close association with Thanksgiving was simply a practical matter at first. Fresh cranberries are ready to harvest from mid-September through mid-November, so Thanksgiving falls within that perfect window for eating them.
Cranberry sauce was first loosely described in accounts from the American colonies in the 1600s, and appeared in a cookbook for the first time in 1796. The berries’ tart flavor, which comes from high levels of several types of acids, makes them more than twice as acidic as most other edible fruits, so they add a welcome zing to a meal full of blander foods like turkey and potatoes.
In recent decades, the cranberry industry has branched out into juices, snacks and other products in pursuit of year-round markets. But for many people, Thanksgiving is still the time when they’re most likely to see cranberries in some form on the menu.
The family of Samuel Lawrence, one of 10 people to die in Georgia’s Fulton County Jail in 2023, is fighting for answers and accountability.
“I got to think about him every day of my life and I don’t know when the pain stops,” Lawrence’s father, Frank Richardson, told a local TV station in October 2023. “I pray to God that he touches that jail and puts people in place to help the other ones that are left behind.”
Shortly before his death, Lawrence, 34, had filed a complaint about jail conditions, alleging that he was brutally beaten and isolated, with insufficient food and water.
But Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat largely blamed the jail’s “outbreak of violence” on “the long-standing, dangerous overcrowding and the crumbling walls of the facility.”
In order to “save lives,” Labat said, his county would be requesting a “replacement jail.”
The Georgia sheriff is among many law enforcement officials to claim that people like Samuel Lawrence would be safer if communities reduced overcrowding by building new jails or enhancing existing ones.
But recent research my colleague Weiwei Chen and I published on escalating jail mortality rates nationwide calls into question that rationale.
In an article published in the June 2023 issue of Health Affairs, we examined relationships between jail conditions and jail deaths, analyzing factors such as percent of jail capacity occupied, admission and discharge rates and population demographics.
Among the variables that appeared to be most significantly related to jail mortality were turnover rate – the number of people admitted to and discharged from a facility relative to its average population – as well as the percentage of Black people in the jail population.
Data on how many people die while incarcerated is notoriously inaccessible and often unreliable. Still, available reports on jail deaths from the Bureau of Justice Statistics offer some perspective.
In 2019, overall jail death rates were below the adjusted national average of 339 per 100,000, but leading up to that year, they had steeply increased. Between 2000 and 2019, jail mortality rose by 11%, from 151 per 100,000 to 167 per 100,000.
People hold banners with the names of people who have died in Rikers Island jail during a rally on July 11, 2023, in New York City.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
To conduct what epidemiologist Homer Venters referred to as an “apples-to-apples comparison” of circumstances and deaths in multiple jails during a period of escalating mortality, we relied on a combination of datasets.
For information about facility deaths, we turned to statistics compiled by Reuters news agency reporters, who submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain mortality data from the largest jails across the U.S.
Our data on jail conditions – such as annual admissions and releases, facility capacities and demographics – came from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ census and annual survey of jails.
Ultimately, we assessed mortality rates and conditions in approximately 450 U.S. jails between 2008 and 2019.
Some of our most robust findings about jail deaths had to do with two factors: turnover rate – the sum of weekly admissions and releases divided by average daily population – and demographics.
In the jails we examined, average turnover was 67% (slightly above the national average of 53%). Relatively high turnover rates, we found, were associated with higher death rates overall, as well as due to suicide, drugs and alcohol, and homicide.
In addition to revealing a relationship between turnover rate and mortality, our research showed that the presence of greater proportions of non-Hispanic Black people in populations of relatively large jails was associated with more deaths due to illness.
Race-based differences in illness-related deaths could be due to a variety of factors, including populationwide health disparities in the U.S.
Reliance on jails
Our findings about both turnover and racial disparities should be considered alongside the broader context of jail incarceration in the United States.
Roughly 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed each year, some of them multiple times. Overall, there were approximately 10.3 million admissions to more than 3,000 U.S. jails in 2019.
People in jails have been found to be “significantly poorer” than people outside of jails, and more than 30 percent of those who are detained remain incarcerated because they cannot afford to pay bail.
Research has shown that the cash bail system – a key driver of high jail turnover – “punishes the poor” by ensuring that they are more likely to be detained than their wealthier counterparts for the same crime. A reliance on cash bail also reportedly increases recidivism and undermines public safety.
Beyond incarceration
Our study suggests that ongoing initiatives geared at reducing incarceration – and by extension, jail turnover – could help achieve Sheriff Labat’s goal of saving lives.
Some communities, for example, have successfully limited the use of cash bail. Others have enhanced community-based services that address mental illness, drug use and homelessness without involving police, so jails are less likely to be sites of first resort for people with complex needs.
A year before Samuel Lawrence died, a report from the ACLU suggested that by adopting at least some of the above measures, Fulton County could “reduce its jail population significantly.”
LAKEPORT, Calif. — The city of Lakeport plans to move forward with a feasibility study for a navigation center to address homelessness.
At its Nov. 7 meeting, the Lakeport City Council approved a professional services agreement with Vanir for the study, which will be funded by the Permanent Local Housing Allocation program.
Assistant City Manager/Finance Director Nick Walker’s written report explained that navigation centers “are emerging as a promising approach to addressing homelessness in many communities,” offering temporary shelter, social services, and support designed to help individuals transition from homelessness to more stable and permanent housing situations.
“By providing a safe and welcoming environment, Navigation Centers aim to bridge the gap between homelessness and permanent housing, offering a path to stability and self-sufficiency,” he wrote.
Walker told the council at the meeting, “We’ve been discussing homelessness and how complicated and complex that issue is, not just in the city of Lakeport, but statewide, nationwide.”
He said the city’s plan for awhile has been to start with developing a navigation center. That process begins with a request for proposals to develop the center, Walker said.
He said they received two proposals for the work, noting it’s a relatively new industry.
The grant’s five-year plan includes a feasibility study and predevelopment costs that will be fully covered by Permanent Local Housing Allocation funding, according to Walker, who reported that the city has so far received $369,896 for the first three years of the program. He said they plan to apply for additional funds.
Key aspects of the study include assessing need, identifying potential sites, engaging stakeholders, conducting a financial analysis, developing a program plan, assessing potential impacts and providing recommendations.
“I think it’s important to discuss why we’re recommending a much higher consulting cost than the low bid or low proposal,” said Walker.
Walker said it was clear to the review committee that the level of service that was being offered by the second firm wasn’t comparable to Vanir. He added that it wasn’t easy to recommend something that’s five times the price.
However, Walker said city staff believe that in the long run they will be able to go from this study straight to implementation of a project.
City Manager Kevin Ingram said the selection committee took the matter of the higher cost very seriously, noting Vanir can get them closer to shovel ready.
Councilmember Kim Costa said the proposal makes sense.
“This is a huge project,” she said, noting the city is rolling up its sleeves and getting to work.
Mayor Pro Tem Michael Froio agreed, adding that cities up and down California are trying to find ways to address homelessness.
He said Lakeport’s leadership isn’t just trying to get a navigation center project done in the city but doing it in a way that fits the small and unique community.
District 4 Supervisor Michael Green also voiced his support for the study.
The council voted 5-0 to approve the selection of Vanir to conduct the navigation study.
During the Nov. 7 meeting, the council held a public hearing to discuss a proposed zoning ordinance amendment regarding the time limit for planned development combining district and set a second reading for Nov. 21; approved a $28,740 bid from CR Fence Co. Inc. dba Humboldt Fence Co. for the Xabatin Park fencing; and approved an agreement for a grant with the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
An artist's rendering of a grassy lawn at the planned Berkeley Space Center, an innovation hub where drone research would thrive. Field Operations and HOK. BERKELEY, Calif. — The University of California, Berkeley, is teaming up with NASA's Ames Research Center and developer SKS Partners to create research space for companies interested in collaborating with UC Berkeley and NASA scientists and engineers to generate futuristic innovations in aviation, space exploration and how we live and work in space.
The Berkeley Space Center, announced today (Monday, Oct. 16), aims to accommodate up to 1.4 million square feet of research space on 36 acres of land at NASA Ames' Moffett Field in Mountain View, leased from NASA.
The new buildings, some of which could be ready for move-in as early as 2027, will house not only state-of-the-art research and development laboratories for companies and UC Berkeley researchers, but also classrooms for UC Berkeley students. These students will benefit from immersion in the Silicon Valley start-up culture and proximity to the nation's top aeronautical, space and AI scientists and engineers at Ames.
"We would like to create industry consortia to support research clusters focused around themes that are key to our objectives, in particular aviation of the future, resiliency in extreme environments, space bioprocess engineering, remote sensing and data science and computing," said Alexandre Bayen, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and associate provost for Moffett Field program development.
"We're hoping to create an ecosystem where Berkeley talent can collaborate with the private sector and co-locate their research and development teams,” he added. “And since we will be close to NASA talent and technology in the heart of Silicon Valley, we hope to leverage that to form future partnerships."
Ever since Naval Air Station Moffett Field was decommissioned in 1994 and NASA Ames acquired an additional 1,200 acres, NASA has been focused on developing those acres into a world-class research hub and start-up accelerator. Initiated in 2002, NASA Research Park now has some 25 companies on site, including Google's Bay View campus.
"We believe that the research and the capabilities of a major university like Berkeley could be a significant addition to the work being done at Ames," said NASA Ames Director Eugene Tu. "In a more specific way, we would like the potential of having proximity to more students at the undergraduate and graduate level. We would also like the possibility of developing potential partnerships with faculty in the future. The NASA mission is twofold: inspiring the next generation of explorers, and dissemination of our technologies and our research for public benefit. Collaboration between NASA and university researchers fits within that mission."
UC Berkeley hopes eventually to establish housing at Moffett Field to make working at the innovation center easier for students — without a 47-mile commute each way. Bayen noted that Carnegie Mellon University already occupies a teaching building at Moffett Field. With the addition of UC Berkeley and the proximity of Stanford University, he expects the intensity of academic activities in the area, both instructional and research, to increase immensely.
"We have major facilities here at Ames — the world's largest wind tunnel, NASA's only plasma wind tunnel to test entry systems and thermal protection systems, the agency's supercomputers — and the university will likely build facilities here that that we might leverage as well. So, I look at that as a triad of students, faculty and facilities," Tu added. "Then the fourth piece, which is equally important: If the project is approved to move forward, the university will likely bring in partners, will bring in industry, will bring in startups, will bring in incubators that could be relevant to NASA's interest in advancing aeronautics, science and space exploration."
"What they're doing at NASA Ames is transformational, but in order to make it heroic, in order to make it even larger than what is now possible, they have to use the combined resources of the number one public university in the world, private industry and the most innovative place on the planet, which is Silicon Valley," said Darek DeFreece, the project’s founder and executive director at UC Berkeley.
Claire Tomlin, professor and chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences, sees Moffett Field as a perfect place to conduct research on how unpiloted drones can be integrated into the nation's air control system. Photo by Noah Berger for UC Berkeley. Automated aviation
Bayen emphasized that many academic institutions are now becoming global universities: New York University has demonstrated the ability to operate independent campuses on different continents — the Middle East and Asia — while Cornell has successfully opened a second campus in Manhattan, five hours from Ithaca. In the same vein, UC Berkeley is innovating by launching this research hub that, over the decades to come, could evolve into a campus as instructional and research and development activities grow.
“This expansion of Berkeley’s physical footprint and academic reach represents a fantastic and unprecedented opportunity for our students, faculty and the public we serve,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ. “Enabling our world-class research enterprise to explore potential collaborations with NASA and the private sector will speed the translation of discoveries across a wide range of disciplines into the inventions, technologies and services that will advance the greater good. We are thrilled. This is a prime location and a prime time for this public university.”
Claire Tomlin, now professor and chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, conducted her first research on automated collision avoidance systems for drones at Moffett Field, and foresees similar opportunities there for UC Berkeley students, especially those enrolled in the College of Engineering’s year-old aerospace engineering program.
"With our new aerospace engineering major, it is the right time to get started at Moffett Field. It offers an outdoor testbed for research on how to integrate drones or other unpiloted aerial vehicles, which are being used increasingly for aerial inspection or delivery of medical supplies, into our air traffic control system," she said. "I anticipate great collaborations on topics such as new algorithms in control theory, new methods in AI, new electronics and new materials."
Tomlin envisions research on networks of vertiports to support operations of electric autonomous helicopters or e-VTOLs (electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles), much like UC Berkeley's pioneering research in the 1990s on self-driving cars; collaborative work on how to grow plants in space or on other planets to produce food, building materials and pharmaceuticals, similar to the ongoing work in UC Berkeley's Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES); and collaborations on artificial intelligence with top AI experts in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research lab (BAIR).
"This is the decade of electric automated aviation, and the Berkeley Space Center should be a pioneer of it, not just by research, but also by experimentation and deployment," Tomlin said. "We're interested in, for example, how one would go about designing networks of vertiports that are economically viable, that are compatible with the urban landscape, that are prone to public acceptance and have an economic reality."
"Advanced air mobility and revolutionizing the use of the airspace and how we use drones and unpiloted vehicles for future air taxis or to fight wildfires or to deliver cargo are other areas of potential collaboration," Tu added.
Hannah Nabavi is one UC Berkeley student eager to see this proposed collaboration with NASA Ames and industry around Silicon Valley, even though she will have graduated by the time it comes to fruition. A senior majoring in engineering physics, she is the leader of a campus club called SpaceForm that is currently tapping NASA Ames scientists for research tips on projects such as how materials are affected by the harsh environment on the moon.
"I think one of the primary advantages to UC Berkeley of having this connection is it allows students to obtain a perspective on what's happening in the real world. What are the real-world problems? What are the goals? How are things getting done?" said Nabavi, who plans to attend graduate school on a path to a career in the commercial space industry. "It also helps students figure out what they want to focus on by providing an early understanding of the research and industrial areas in aerospace."
But beyond the practical benefits, she said, "I think that seeing all of these scientists and engineers tackling issues and questions at the forefront of aerospace can serve as a huge inspiration to students."
AI and machine learning
In addition, data science and AI/machine learning are rapidly disrupting the aviation and space industry landscape as it evolves toward automation and human-machine interaction and as ever bigger datasets are being produced. The workforce needs retraining in these rapidly evolving fields, and UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) is well positioned to provide executive and professional education to meet these needs.
“Berkeley Space Center offers the possibility for CDSS students to work on these new challenges, particularly in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics, planetary science and quantum science and technology,” said Sandrine Dudoit, associate dean at CDSS, professor of statistics and of public health and a member of the Moffett Field Faculty Steering Committee.
DeFreece noted that there are NASA collaborations already happening on the UC Berkeley campus. Many leverage the mission management and instrument-building skills at the Space Sciences Laboratory, which is responsible for the day-to-day operation of several NASA satellites and is building instruments for spacecraft that NASA will land on the moon or launch to monitor Earth and the sun.
UC Berkeley researchers are already investigating how to print 3D objects in space, how to create materials to sustain astronauts on Mars, how to test for life-based molecules on other planets and moons, and whether squishy robots could operate on other planets. UC Berkeley spin-offs are developing ways to monitor health in space and provide low-cost insertion of satellites into orbit.
"The Berkeley Space Center could be a place where half of the day students are collaborating with center neighbors, and the other half of the day they might be taking classes and seeing their mentors who are supervising class projects on the satellite that is hovering over their heads at that very moment," Bayen said. "Experiences like these just don't exist anywhere else at the present time."
UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and Berkeley Law are also working on issues surrounding the commercial exploitation of space, including asteroids and other planets, and the laws that should govern business in space.
"Space law and policy are also areas where I think there's some tremendous opportunities to collaborate with the university," Tu said. "What are we going to do when we find resources on the moon, and other countries do as well, and companies want to make money from that?"
A focus on sustainability
In return for its investment and partnership, UC Berkeley will receive a portion of the revenues that the real estate development is projected to generate. While market-based returns are always subject to change, the joint venture conservatively estimates that the research hub will receive revenues more than sufficient to ensure that Berkeley Space Center is self-sustaining, as well as provide new financial support to the core campus, its departments and colleges, and faculty and students.
UC Berkeley also expects significant additional revenue from other, project-related sources, including new research grants, industry participation and partnerships, and the incubation and commercialization of emerging companies born from translational research and technologies created at the site.
SKS Partners, a San Francisco-based investor and developer of commercial real estate properties in the western U.S., will lead the venture. The planning team for the Berkeley Space Center will pursue LEED certification for its buildings — a mark of sustainability — by using solar power, blackwater and stormwater treatment and reuse, and emphasizing non-polluting transportation.
While construction is tentatively scheduled to begin in 2026, subject to environmental approvals, UC Berkeley is already creating connections between Silicon Valley companies on the NASA Ames property, including executive education programs.
"In the next couple of years, we could conceivably have a semester rotation program, where UC Berkeley students spend one semester at Berkeley Space Center, take three classes taught there, do their research there, are temporarily housed there for a semester, just like they would do a semester abroad in Paris," Bayen said. "Ultimately, we hope to build experiences that currently do not exist for students, staff and faculty and create an innovation ecosystem where breakthroughs that require public-private partnerships are enabled.”
The development team includes as co-master planners HOK, an architecture, engineering and planning firm, and Field Operations, an interdisciplinary urban design and landscape architecture firm.
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
Space Technologies and Rocketry (STAR), a student club at UC Berkeley, launches its Bear Force One rocket in Mojave, Calif., on Saturday, June 5, 2021. Clubs such as STAR highlight the great interest in aerospace research among UC Berkeley undergraduates. Photo courtesy of Space Technologies and Rocketry/Berkeley Engineering.
A $400,000 federal grant will help the California Highway Patrol Native-Tribal Traffic Education Program build and strengthen the Department’s relationship with Northern California’s Native American communities.
The grant will support the Tribal Traffic Education Program, or TTEP — the CHP’s first grant-funded safety program specifically focused on reaching Native American communities — with funding for traffic safety education to drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists on and near California’s tribal lands.
With a population of nearly 720,000, California is home to more Native Americans/Alaskan Natives than any other state.
There are 109 federally recognized tribes, each with its own unique culture, history and practices.
The program strives to improve service and public trust in tribal communities by implementing many of the lifesaving traffic safety programs the CHP has to offer.
“We are excited to extend our traffic safety initiatives to tribes and Native American residents within our communities,” said CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee. “The program’s primary goal is to save lives through education, while proactively building and maintaining relationships with California’s diverse tribal communities.”
CHP personnel involved in TTEP serve as resources to Native American/Alaska Native communities and tribes by sharing traffic safety information, conducting traffic safety presentations, and participating in community outreach and tribal cultural events.
The CHP has set a goal of conducting 125 tribal traffic safety presentations and other community outreach activities within the CHP’s Northern, Golden Gate, and Valley Divisions each grant cycle, with the intent of expanding the program statewide.
Program topics will include seat belt safety, proper use of child safety seats, dangers of driving under the influence, pedestrian and bicycle education, defensive driving techniques, distracted driving, teen/parent driving safety, driver license requirements, and other educational subjects.
Traffic safety presentations will be conducted at schools, public health fairs, tribal events, and other activities.
Funding for this program was provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.