Estate planning is not just about avoiding probate, although that is often important. It is about protecting you, your family’s future and your legacy.

What would happen to you and your family if you were incapacitated? How will your family prosper without you? How will your family remember you?

With the big picture in mind, let us consider the issues that may be important to you, your surviving spouse, your descendants, and your charitable interests.

First, are you and your family protected if you become physically or mentally disabled? Appoint someone you trust to manage your finances and property, to arrange for your personal care, and to provide for your spouse and dependents.

A comprehensive durable power of attorney for finances and property management, or a living trust, allows your agent, or trustee, to step in to pay your bills, taxes and control your assets.

You also can authorize gifting to your family members should you need to receive needs based government benefits and wish to preserve more assets for estate planning reasons.

Second, a durable power of attorney for personal care allows your agent to hire care givers to provide in-home care, get your mail, and, if necessary, to place you in a hospital or nursing facility. And, an advance health care directive allows your health care agent to implement your health care instructions when you lack the capacity.

Next, is your spouse protected if you become disabled, and later when you die? If your spouse is dependent on your resources ensure that your agent and trustee, as relevant, have authority to use your assets (inside and outside your living trust) to provide for your spouse.

Determine whether your retirement plans adequately protect your spouse. If not, consider life insurance. Your trust can keep assets for your spouse’s use after you die and then transfer them to your children. If your spouse is unable to manage assets, have someone else manage your estate as successor trustee for your spouse’s benefit.

In regards to your children and grandchildren, the approach you take should suit each person’s own individual circumstances.

Consider whether any of them have special needs, creditor issues, spendthrift issues, or might still be minors when you die.

If so, then some shares of your estate may pass to special needs trust, asset protection trusts, or to minor’s trusts for their benefit. Also, consider your aspirations for what you wish to enable them to achieve.

Do you wish them to have money for college, to start a business, buy a first home; if so, your estate plan could be drafted to provide for such goals.

Your charitable and philanthropic interests may coincide with your own financial and asset protection needs.

You may wish to turn an asset, like a home, into a current stream of income by gifting it during your lifetime to a charity in exchange for charitable gift annuity during your lifetime.

You may want a tax deduction for gifting assets while living to see the fulfillment of a goal. Consult with a qualified financial planner about these potential win-win opportunities.

The foregoing ideas are just some of the important topics that may, to some extent, be relevant in your own personal situation.

The point is to think broadly about what is, or may, become important to you. Planning now will give you peace of mind and protect you and your family in the future.

Dennis A. Fordham, attorney (LL.M. tax studies), is a State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law. His office is at 55 First St., Lakeport, California. Dennis can be reached by e-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or by phone at 707-263-3235. Visit his Web site at www.dennisfordhamlaw.com .

LAKEPORT, Calif. – A fundraiser for the new Kelseyville BMX Park will take place at the Lakeport Speedway on the night of Saturday, June 9.

BMX riders from the area will be strutting their stuff in an effort to raise money to help build and maintain a BMX park in Kelseyville.  

The event will take place after racing starts at 6 p.m.

BMX, which stands for Bicycle Moto-Cross, is an athletic sport where specialized bicycles can be jumped over jumps, objects or nothing at all.

Riders are very talented and practice continually to twist, turn and flip their bicycles in synchronized displays of control and talent.

The Kelseyville BMX Group was formed after losing their longtime place to ride on private property.

Going through all of the legal channels with the help and support of Kelseyville parents as well as Supervisor Rob Brown, the group has secured permission to build a public BMX park, located at the Kelseyville County Park on State Street in Kelseyville.

With the support of Dave Furia and Lakeport Speedway, the group is raising funds each Saturday and is currently building the perimeter fence and access lane for the BMX Park in Kelseyville.

The Kelseyville BMX Park will be built and maintained 100 percent by labor and funds donated by the community.

For further information about the project or to donate contact District 5 Supervisor Rob Brown, 707-263-2368; or parent representative Valarie Sullivan at 707-533-3051.

One of the top suspects behind killer vascular diseases is the victim of mistaken identity, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, who used genetic tracing to help hunt down the real culprit.

The guilty party is not the smooth muscle cells within blood vessel walls, which for decades was thought to combine with cholesterol and fat that can clog arteries. Blocked vessels can eventually lead to heart attacks and strokes, which account for one in three deaths in the United States.

Instead, a previously unknown type of stem cell — a multipotent vascular stem cell — is to blame, and it should now be the focus in the search for new treatments, the scientists report in a new study appearing June 6 in the journal Nature Communications.

"For the first time, we are showing evidence that vascular diseases are actually a kind of stem cell disease," said principal investigator Song Li, professor of bioengineering and a researcher at the Berkeley Stem Cell Center. "This work should revolutionize therapies for vascular diseases because we now know that stem cells rather than smooth muscle cells are the correct therapeutic target."

The finding that a stem cell population contributes to artery-hardening diseases, such as atherosclerosis, provides a promising new direction for future research, the study authors said.

"This is groundbreaking and provocative work, as it challenges existing dogma," said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at UC San Francisco, who provided some of the mouse vascular tissues used by the researchers. "Targeting the vascular stem cells rather than the existing smooth muscle in the vessel wall might be much more effective in treating vascular disease."

It is generally accepted that the buildup of artery-blocking plaque stems from the body's immune response to vessel damage caused by low-density lipoproteins, the bad cholesterol many people try to eliminate from their diets.

Such damage attracts legions of white blood cells and can spur the formation of fibrous scar tissue that accumulates within the vessel, narrowing the blood flow.

The scar tissue, known as neointima, has certain characteristics of smooth muscle, the dominant type of tissue in the blood vessel wall.

Because mature smooth muscle cells no longer multiply and grow, it was theorized that in the course of the inflammatory response, they revert, or de-differentiate, into an earlier state where they can proliferate and form matrices that contribute to plaque buildup.

However, no experiments published have directly demonstrated this de-differentiation process, so Li and his research team remained skeptical. They turned to transgenic mice with a gene that caused their mature smooth muscle cells to glow green under a microscope.

In analyzing the cells from cross sections of the blood vessels, they found that more than 90 percent of the cells in the blood vessels were mature smooth muscle cells. They then isolated and cultured the cells taken from the middle layer of the mouse blood vessels.

After one month of cell expansion, the researchers saw a threefold increase in the size of the cell nucleus and the spreading area, along with an increase in stress fibers.

Notably, none of the new, proliferating cells glowed green, which meant that their lineage could not be traced back to the mature smooth muscle cells originally isolated from the blood vessels.

"Not only was there a lack of green markers in the cell cultures, but we noticed that another type of cell isolated from the blood vessels exhibited progenitor traits for different types of tissue, not just smooth muscle cells," said Zhenyu Tang, co-lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering.

The other co-lead author of the study, Aijun Wang, was a post-doctoral researcher in Li's lab.

"The different phenotypes gave us the clue that stem cells were involved," said Wang, who is now an assistant professor and the co-director of the Surgical Bioengineering Laboratory at the UC Davis Medical Center. "We did further tests and detected proteins and transcriptional factors that are only found in stem cells. No one knew that these cells existed in the blood vessel walls because no one looked for them before."

Further experiments determined that the  newly discovered vascular stem cells were multipotent, or capable of differentiating into various specialized cell types, including smooth muscle, nerve, cartilage, bone and fat cells. This would explain why previous studies misidentified the cells involved in vessel clogs as de-differentiated smooth muscle cells after vascular injury.

"In the later stages of vascular disease, the soft vessels become hardened and more brittle," said Li. "Previously, there was controversy about how soft tissue would become hard. The ability of stem cells to form bone or cartilage could explain this calcification of the blood vessels."

Other tests in the study showed that the multipotent stem cells were dormant under normal physiological conditions. When the blood vessel walls were damaged, the stem cells rather than the mature smooth muscle cells became activated and started to multiply.

The researchers analyzed human carotid arteries to confirm that the same type of multipotent vascular stem cells are found in human blood vessels.

"If your target is wrong, then your treatment can't be very effective," said Dr. Shu Chien, director of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at UC San Diego, and Li's former adviser. "These new findings give us the right target and should speed up the discovery of novel treatments for vascular diseases."

Grants from the National Institutes of Health and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine helped support this research.

Sarah Yang writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.

KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – Sheriff's officials are searching for a suspect who allegedly was involved in an early Friday afternoon robbery attempt at the Westamerica Bank in Kelseyville.

Sheriff's deputies and officers with the California Highway Patrol responded to the scene before 1 p.m.

Radio traffic indicated the suspect was a white male adult who was carrying a maroon backpack, wearing a hat, a dark shirt and an olive-colored vest.

CHP Officer Kory Reynolds said there was no vehicle associated with the suspect, as the man left the scene on foot.

By 2 p.m. CHP had left the scene, according to Reynolds.

The bank was reported to be on lockdown, with all questions referred to its corporate headquarters.

Senior Vice President Robert Thorson would not give out specifics about the incident as he said the bank was cooperating with authorities.

However, Thorson did say no bank staffers were harmed.

“All of our employees are fine which is our biggest concern,” he said.

He could not say if the bank had yet reopened. “We do have a protocol that we go through and once complete the branch is re-opened.”

Additional information will be posted as it becomes available.

California will receive federal support to expand a distracted driving pilot program, federal officials announced Thursday.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood on Thursday released a “Blueprint for Ending Distracted Driving” that offers a comprehensive strategy to address the growing and dangerous practice of using handheld cell phones behind the wheel.

The plan outlines concrete steps stakeholders around the country – from lawmakers and safety organizations to families and younger drivers – can take to reduce the risk posed by distracted driving.

While unveiling the plan, Secretary LaHood also announced $2.4 million in federal support for California and Delaware that will expand the Department's "Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other" pilot enforcement campaign to reduce distracted driving.

"Distracted driving is an epidemic. While we've made progress in the past three years by raising awareness about this risky behavior, the simple fact is people are continuing to be killed and injured – and we can put an end to it," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

He added, "Personal responsibility for putting down that cell phone is a good first step – but we need everyone to do their part, whether it's helping pass strong laws, educating our youngest and most vulnerable drivers, or starting their own campaign to end distracted driving."

The "Blueprint for Ending Distracted Driving" outlines a plan that builds on the national momentum that Secretary LaHood and USDOT have spearheaded for the last three years.

Recognizing the extent and complexity of the problem, the plan:

• Encourages the remaining 11 states without distracted driving laws to enact and enforce this critical legislation.
• Challenges the auto industry to adopt new and future guidelines for technology to reduce the potential for distraction on devices built or brought into vehicles.
• Partners with driver education professionals to incorporate new curriculum materials to educate novice drivers of driver distraction and its consequences. Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) show drivers under the age of 25 are two to three times more likely than older drivers to send text messages or emails while driving.
• Provides all stakeholders with actions they can take that go beyond personal responsibility to helping end distracted driving nationwide.

Applying a 'proven formula' to California, Delaware enforcement programs

Coinciding with the release of the "Blueprint for Ending Distracted Driving," Secretary LaHood announced that California and Delaware have been selected to receive federal support for pilot projects that will test the effect of increased law enforcement and high-profile public education campaigns on distracted driving.

"We know from the success of national efforts like 'Click It or Ticket' that combining good laws with effective enforcement and a strong public education campaign can – and does – change unsafe driving behavior," said NHTSA Administrator David Strickland. "Now, along with two great state partners, we're using this proven formula to help tackle distracted driving."

DOT is providing California and Delaware with $2.4 million of federal support for pilot programs that will examine whether increased police enforcement coupled with paid media and news media coverage can significantly reduce distracted driving over a widespread area.

The California program will take place in the Sacramento Valley region comprising eight counties and 3.8 million residents, while the Delaware program will be conducted statewide.

Both projects are expected to be under way in fall 2012.

The multi-market efforts in these states mirror the approach used in smaller-scale demonstration projects completed in 2011 in Hartford, CT, and Syracuse, NY.

The 2011 pilot projects found dramatic declines in distracted driving in the two communities tested – with texting dropping 72 percent in Hartford and 32 percent in Syracuse.

In 2010, at least 3,092 people were killed in distraction-affected crashes – accounting for approximately one in every ten fatalities on the nation's roadways.

Meanwhile, among the findings from NHTSA's first nationally-representative telephone survey on driver distraction released earlier this year, more than three-quarters of drivers reported that they are willing to answer calls on all, most, or some trips.

Survey respondents acknowledged few driving situations when they would not use the phone or text, and yet reported feeling unsafe when riding in vehicles in which the driver is texting and supported bans on texting and cell phone use.

Almost all respondents (about 90% overall) reported that they considered a driver who was sending or reading text messages or e-mails as very unsafe.

Nationwide, 39 states, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and Guam ban texting behind the wheel. Ten states, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and Guam prohibit all hand-held cell phone use while driving.

To learn more about NHTSA's efforts on distracted driving visit www.distraction.gov .

MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – On Saturday, friends, family and the community with gather in Hidden Valley Lake to remember the life of a vibrant, compassionate and hard working young woman whose life ended too soon.

A memorial service for 33-year-old Bethany Vogel of Cobb will take place beginning at 2 p.m. Saturday, June 9, at the Hidden Valley Community Church, 18160 Spruce Road Ext., Hidden Valley Lake.

Her family said the community is invited to come and take part in the Saturday memorial.

Bethany Vogel’s father, Derek Vogel, and his girlfriend Kami Huston discovered the young woman’s body in her Cobb home on the evening of Friday, May 4.

Later that night, sheriff’s deputies arrested 44-year-old James Carpy, her ex-boyfriend, for her murder.

Carpy was found unresponsive in his jail cell two nights later, and was pronounced dead.

The exact causes of death for both Bethany Vogel and Carpy have not yet been released by the sheriff’s office.

However, the Vogel family said Bethany Vogel’s body showed signs that she was brutally beaten, leaving them – and her friends – to conclude that an act of domestic violence ultimately claimed her life.

The tragedy is made the sharper for those who knew her because her life was going in a positive direction, thanks to her pursuit of an education that was leading her toward becoming an educator.

“She was doing very well in school. She was top of her class,” said Derek Vogel.

He became emotional as he said, “She was a happy girl. She always had a smile on her face.”

And while not much of a cook, she had recently become somewhat of a cupcake expert, and made the little treats for everyone and anyone, according to her father.

He and Huston said she offered tremendous support to her friends and family.

“She was amazing. She really was,” said Huston. “She was just taking care of people.”

Derek Vogel said his daughter was planning to move to Lakeport and had a job lined up working with special needs children.

Dr. Laurie Daly, a professor in early childhood education at Yuba College’s Clearlake campus, had gotten to know Bethany Vogel over the course of the last semester, with Vogel taking three of her classes.

“She was really an awesome, awesome student, and I don’t want her to be forgotten, and I don’t want her to be remembered as this murder victim,” said Daly.

Daly said Vogel was blossoming thanks to her studies and her new direction, and that may have caused her trouble in her relationship with Carpy.

“Bethany was an outstanding student, a knockout,” said Daly, noting that the young woman did everything with excellence, was always prepared, was curious and had an infectious desire to learn.

Vogel “was clearly wanting to become a teacher,” said Daly, but still actively trying to find her niche and exploring the grade levels she wanted to teach.

Working with special needs children was becoming an interest for her, especially after she had done a case study on friend Sabrina Jose’s young daughter, who has Down syndrome.

“That was a new ‘Aha’ for her,” said Daly.

Fun and easy to be around

Jose, who lives in Middletown, had become Vogel’s friend as they attended classes together.

“School was important to both of us and that’s what we had in common,” Jose said.

Vogel “was all about the kids,” said Jose, who added that Vogel had been a nanny at one point, traveling with a family to France.

She also had clicked with Jose’s daughter who has Down Syndrome.

Vogel was smart, easy to be around, trustworthy, reliable, loud and funny, Jose said.

Jose said Vogel was feeling good about the changes in her life, and looking forward to what was going to happen next. “She had her whole life ahead of her, and I think she could feel that.”

However, “She just didn’t get enough time.”

Daly said she last saw Vogel on the night of Thursday, May 3, in class. They had taken part in an all-day conference and were watching a DVD that had them all laughing.

“It was a fun night,” Daly said. “She left with a smile on her face and we were laughing.”

Looking back, Daly said, “We were probably the last people who were with her.”

The next day, Vogel was supposed to be at Jose’s home, where she was going to spend time taking pictures with Jose’s young daughter. But she never showed up.

That afternoon, Huston received a phone call from Vogel’s older half-sister, who also was to have seen her that day. But she never arrived, and her cell phone went to voice mail

Huston went to the Hogan Hill Lane home where Carpy and Vogel were living together, although they were no longer romantically involved.

She knocked on the sliding glass door to Vogel’s bedroom but got no answer, and the shades were drawn. She also got no answer at the front door.

Later, she and Derek Vogel returned. They again got no answer at Bethany Vogel’s room, but they got Carpy to answer the front door. They gained entry to the house and found the young woman’s body in her bedroom.

Sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers responded to the scene following the family’s 911 call and arrested Carpy.

But it wasn’t until the weekend that Bethany Vogel’s friends found out what had happened.

Daly said she initially wasn’t concerned when Jose called her on Saturday to say that she hadn’t seen Vogel. Later, they found out about Carpy’s arrest.

Jose, who said she’s had a life with plenty of hard knocks, still said her friend’s death has hit her hard.

“It’s almost too much for me,” she said.

In the wake of the murder, Daly called in help from Lake Family Resource Center – where she is a board member – in order to provide grief counseling to her students.

The center sent two grief counselors, with Executive Director Gloria Flaherty also coming to class during the week to assist with ministering to Vogel’s grieving fellow students.

Together they tried to process the tragedy, sharing their memories of the happy, bubbly young woman whose excitement and engagement in her education was palpable.

Shortly before her class on May 9, Daly said she received a call from Vogel’s mother, who asked if she and other family members could come. Daly said yes.

“It’s not in the textbooks how to prepare for that one,” she said.

Daly reminded her students that they were caregivers, and that Vogel’s family wanted to connect with her through them.

When Vogel’s mother, grandmother, aunt and niece arrived, “We just loved on them,” Daly said.

Vogel really cared for her fellow students, said Daly. “Bethany bonded us in a way that we’ll never be the same.”

In memory of Vogel’s passion for working with young children, Daly set up the Bethany Vogel Early Childhood Education Scholarship Fund.

“It just seemed like the right thing to do,” Daly said.

Donations are payable to Yuba College, with “Bethany ECE” in the memo, 15880 Dam Rd., Clearlake, CA 95422.

The family also is requesting donations in Vogel’s memory to Lake Family Resource Center’s domestic violence shelter, Freedom House, 5350 Main St., Kelseyville, in order that part of her legacy can be helping victims of domestic violence, which they believe is what took her life.

Daly and Jose also will be speaking at Vogel’s Saturday afternoon memorial.

To those who knew her, Vogel was not just a fun and thoughtful young woman. She also was intelligent and powerfully introspective.

Shortly after her death, as Daly was reading through some of Vogel’s final papers, she said she found Vogel’s writing so alive and vibrant it was hard to believe she had died.

In one of those papers, as Vogel was reflecting on an early childhood education conference,she wrote, “What could possibly be more important than what we are doing right now?”

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

LAKEPORT, Calif. – A week before its union-represented nurses were set to go out on another one-day strike, Sutter Lakeside Hospital has reached a tentative agreement on a new collective bargaining contract with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United.

According to reports from Sutter Lakeside and the union, negotiations on Wednesday night led to an early Thursday morning agreement after hospital officials withdrew all concession proposals.

“Our nurses play an integral role in providing patients in our community with quality care,” said hospital Chief Administrative Officer Siri Nelson. “We are very pleased to bring closure to this process and to reach agreement on a new contract for our nurses.”

Carrie Roth, a medical surgical registered nurse at the hospital and a member of the CNA nurse bargaining team, called the tentative agreement “a major victory” both for nurses and patients in Lake County.

She added, “Our new contract enhances our ability to provide our patients with the care they deserve.”

California Nurses Association/National Nurses United represents 120 registered nurses at Sutter Lakeside Hospital.

Roth said Sutter Lakeside's nurses will meet on Monday, June 11, to ratify the new contract.

On Monday the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United had announced that the nurses they represented at several hospital around Northern California – including Sutter Lakeside – were preparing to walk out on June 13.

However, once the agreement at Sutter Lakeside was reached Thursday, the union withdrew its official notice of intent to hold the one-day strike in Lakeport on June 13. The union said a strike at other Bay Area Sutter hospitals is still set to go forward.

Sutter Lakeside nurses had previously participated in a one-day strike on May 1, as Lake County News has reported.

During that one-day walkout, Roth had told Lake County News that Sutter Lakeside's nurses were more united than ever, and determined to continue working on settling contract negotiations.

Sutter Lakeside's withdrawal of concessions “provides a significant contrast with other Sutter Bay Area hospitals where corporate executives are demanding more than 100 sweeping concessions that would erode patient care conditions and RN standards,” the union said in a Thursday afternoon written statement.

Roth said there were some small takeaways but they were smaller than what the hospital originally sought.

She said it came down to give and take between the bargaining teams.

“We're realized we have an obligation to the community and our patients,” and so they stuck it out to come to an agreement, Roth said.

“It's been a long haul,” she said, with the nurses' original contract ending in 2010.

She said the nurses and hospital will have to go back to the table to begin work on a new contract in June 2014.

For now, however, Roth said the nurses are happy and ready to get back to work caring for their patients.

Sutter Lakeside did not reveal any of the details concerning the tentative agreement or contract negotiations, which it said will be forthcoming upon ratification of the contract.

California Nurses Association/National Nurses United did offer some basic details of the agreement, which the union said includes new patient care protections, enhanced autonomy of charge RNs to utilize independent professional judgment in accepting patient assignments – including meal and break coverage – and workplace violence protections.

There also are to be modest wage improvements – including a new pay scale with additional pay steps with a new 20-year longevity step – and layoff and severance protection and compensation, the union said.

Other points the union said are included in the tentative agreement are enhanced daily cancellation language that considers the severity of patients’ illnesses, and new admissions, prior to canceling RNs from their shift; improved just cause/disciplinary action language and protection for RNs; new language that allows charge nurses to carry out their patient advocacy roles with full union protections; and improved leave of absence policies relating to medical, family care, military and professional leaves.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

LAKEPORT, Calif. – While the primary election is over, the Lake County Registrar of Voters Office is continuing the necessary work to finalize and certify the June 5 election results.

Registrar of Voters Diane Fridley said she has until July 3 to certify the election, but hopes to be finished by the end of this month.

She said Thursday that her office has a lot of vote by mail ballots turned in at precincts as well as provisional ballots still to process. Fridley expected to have tallies on those votes by Friday.

Among the issues that arose during this year’s primary, Fridley said her office received some complaints from county residents who were unhappy about precinct adjustments that resulted from last year’s redistricting process.

She estimated that there are probably 1,000 voters now receiving their ballots by mail rather than having a precinct to vote at due to the changes.

Part of her job during certification is to check the write-in candidates for president and U.S. senator. At this point, those are the only contests that have qualified write-in candidates, she said.

In local supervisorial races and the judicial race – in the latter there were 26 write-ins reported in the initial tally – there are no qualified write-in candidates, Fridley said.

Individuals who want to appear as a write-in candidate must follow a process, which Fridley said includes collecting signatures, filing a statement of write-in candidacy and being qualified to run for the office.

“They they could have their name written on the ballot,” she said. “We could count those.”

But her office doesn’t track unqualified write-ins, she said.

As part of the certification process, Fridley’s office will conduct a public manual tally of a minimum 1 percent of randomly selected precincts for the June 5 presidential primary.

That manual tally will take place beginning at 8 a.m. Thursday, June 14, at the Registrar of Voters Office, located in Room 209 on the second floor of the Lake County Courthouse, 255 N. Forbes St., Lakeport.

The selection of the precinct – or precincts – to be included in the manual tally will be randomly chosen on June 14 before the tally begins, Fridley reported.

Fridley said observers are invited to view the manual tally of the ballots, but shall not interfere with the election process.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

NORTH COAST, Calif. – A major milestone was reached on Wednesday in the effort to establish Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) along California’s coast.

In a 3-0 vote, the California Fish and Game Commission approved and adopted regulations for the North Coast MPAs, completing the network of MPAs in California’s open coastal waters, from Mexico to the Oregon state line.

The network of MPAs is the first in the United States to be designed from the ground up as a science-based network, rather than a patchwork of independent protected areas without specific goals and objectives.

“This is a great day for California’s ocean and coastal resources,” said Secretary for Natural Resources John Laird. “As promised, we have completed the nation’s first statewide open coast system of marine protected areas, strengthening California’s ongoing commitment to conserve marine life for future generations. Through the process, we also established the first ever special designation allowing tribes to continue ancestral fishing practices on the North Coast.”

Assemblyman Wes Chesbro (D-Arcata) spoke to the commission to urge its members to adopt Marine Life Protection Act proposals worked out by a coalition of local fishermen, environmentalists and area tribes known as the North Coast Regional Stakeholders Group.

“It’s unanimous: We on the North Coast all support protecting our ocean fishery resources and we highly value sustainable commercial, recreational and traditional harvests,” said Chesbro, who spoke at the commission’s meeting in Eureka.

The proposal ultimately was accepted as part of the MPA.

The public planning process for the North Coast region began in June 2009 and included numerous public workshops and more than 75 days of meetings that provided opportunities for formal and informal public input through a regional stakeholder group, a science advisory team, and a blue ribbon task force.

Public comments were also received throughout the regulatory and environmental review processes for the proposed North Coast MPAs.

“Our decision today was made possible by the hard work and dedication of hundreds of stakeholders up and down the California coast,” said Michael Sutton, vice president of the Fish and Game Commission who presided over the historic vote. “California can be proud not only of its new, comprehensive network of protection for the marine environment, but of the cutting-edge public process that made it happen.”

The North Coast regulations include a provision for federally recognized tribal members to continue harvesting and gathering fish, kelp and shellfish as they have for countless generations.

The provision will allow noncommercial take to continue, consistent with existing regulations, in MPAs other than State Marine Reserves, where there is a record of ancestral take by a specific tribe.

“We sincerely appreciate the state’s willingness to hear the concerns of the tribes and develop a plan that meets critical marine conservation and tribal cultural protection goals,” said Chairwoman Priscilla Hunter of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, a consortium of 10 federally recognized North Coast tribes based in Mendocino and Lake counties. “The start of this process was very difficult and contentious, but thanks to Secretary Laird and Governor Brown, we have ended in a very positive place with a strong framework for future tribal consultation on important conservation and environmental issues.”

The North Coast region covers approximately 1,027 square miles of state waters from the California/Oregon state line south to Alder Creek near Point Arena in Mendocino County.

The plan, adopted by the commission with broad community support, includes 19 MPAs, a recreational management area, and seven special closures covering approximately 137 square miles of state waters or about 13 percent of the region.

California encompasses approximately 5,285 square miles of open coast state waters. The open coast portion of the statewide network of MPAs now includes 119 MPAs, five recreational management areas and 15 special closures covering approximately 16 percent of all open coast state waters.

Approximately half of California’s new or modified MPAs are multiple use areas, with the remaining in no-take areas.

The MPAs were developed to be consistent with California’s landmark Marine Life Protection Act, the first statutory mandate of its kind in the nation, requiring that California’s MPAs be redesigned based on the best available science, with identified goals and objectives, with the advice and input of stakeholders and experts to create a statewide network.

“This statewide system will benefit fish and fishermen in California for generations to come,” said Charlton H. Bonham, director of the Department of Fish and Game. “The science shows that by protecting sensitive ocean and coastal habitats, marine life flourishes and in turn, creates a healthier system overall.”

The North Coast MPAs adopted by the Commission today are expected to go into effect by early 2013.

For more information on the Marine Life Protection Act, visit www.dfg.ca.gov/mlpa/ .