On Wednesday, on the first day of a three-day meeting, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission sat down to begin working through the process of turning proposed groupings of communities across the state into new district maps for state and federal representation.
The 14-member commission met with staff in Los Angeles but the meeting was available on its website. The public will be able to watch all three days of the meeting there.
Those visualizations weren’t received well by local officials on Tuesday, as they showed Lake County grouped far differently than it is currently.
That prompted the Board of Supervisors to vote to send a letter to the commission asking it to move the county into other potential district boundaries.
Under the visualizations presented on Tuesday, Lake might be placed with a large group of North Coast counties for Congress and the State Assembly, and with Napa and Solano counties for the state Senate. All of its current alignments would no longer be in place.
When the commission began its meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Chair Trena Turner told the members, “Time is not our friend,” in light of the amount of work to be done.
After a closed session that ran nearly an hour and a half, the commission returned to open session to begin going over Voting Rights Act requirements and public input statistics.
They started with the State Assembly Districts for the North Coast region, the large area running up the coast that includes Lake, Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity, and portions of Siskiyou and Sonoma counties.
Commissioner Pedro Toledo, who hails from Sonoma County, said Lake has provided testimony that it wants to be paired with Sonoma.
As the discussion began, staff pointed out challenges with making large shifts, as it would have a large ripple effect and impact other areas. They also said that the commission’s previous direction had been to not have boundaries run across the Golden Gate Bridge.
Later in the meeting, some of the commissioners said they were willing to cross the bridge if necessary to get the right boundaries dialed in.
As the meeting progressed, some different options and alternatives were suggested.
One that appeared to pique interest was made by Commissioner Jane Andersen, a civil and structural engineer who lives in Berkeley, who suggested creating a wine country district that could include parts of Sonoma, Napa, Lake and Yolo counties.
Other commissioners suggested modifications to add more portions of Sonoma County, and as the discussion progressed, it was suggested that there might be more than one wine country district.
No firm decisions were made and the commission adjourned early Wednesday evening.
The meeting is scheduled to take place from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday and 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Toledo told Lake County News in a Tuesday interview that the work being done at this week’s meeting will be used to draw maps in the coming weeks.
Those maps, in turn, will be the basis for getting to the final district boundaries, which must be completed in December, as they will be used for the June primaries.
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.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Lake County Sheriff’s Office said the body of a Lakeport woman who went missing on Monday has been found.
Authorities said the body of 75-year-old Shirley Schield, 75, was found at 11:20 a.m. Wednesday in a brushy area approximately one quarter mile from her residence in the Northport Trailer Park, located at 5020 Lakeshore Blvd.
The sheriff’s office said foul play is not suspected and an autopsy is scheduled for later this week to determine her cause of death.
Schield, also known as Carol Mann, had last been seen leaving her home at around 3 a.m. Monday, the sheriff’s office said.
The sheriff’s office said she was carrying a dog leash and headed on foot toward the Lakeport area on Lakeshore Boulevard.
Schield’s family had told authorities that she may have suffered from dementia.
On Tuesday, the Lake County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue and Kelseyville High School K-Corp continued the search for her in the north Lakeport area.
On Wednesday, the Marin County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue and the California Rescue Dog Association joined the search.
Also on Wednesday, the sheriff’s office had asked residents to check their properties for Schield and also to check footage on their surveillance cameras.
Early Wednesday afternoon, the sheriff’s office confirmed the search had ended with the discovery of her body.
The sheriff’s office offered condolences to Schield’s family.
The agency also thanked the Marin County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue team and the California Rescue Dog Association for their help with the search.
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.
Tom Corringham, University of California San Diego
Ask people to name the world’s largest river, and most will probably guess that it’s the Amazon, the Nile or the Mississippi. In fact, some of Earth’s largest rivers are in the sky – and they can produce powerful storms, like the ones now drenching northern California.
Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow bands of moisture in the atmosphere that extend from the tropics to higher latitudes. These rivers in the sky can transport 15 times the volume of the Mississippi River.
When that moisture reaches the coast and moves inland, it rises over the mountains, generating rain and snowfall. Many fire-weary westerners welcome these deluges, but atmospheric rivers can trigger other disasters, such as extreme flooding and debris flows.
In the past 20 years, as observation networks have improved, scientists have learned more about these important weather phenomena. Atmospheric rivers occur globally, affecting the west coasts of the world’s major land masses, including Portugal, Western Europe, Chile and South Africa. So-called “Pineapple Express” storms that carry moisture from Hawaii to the U.S. West Coast are just one of their many flavors.
My research combines economics and atmospheric science to measure damage from severe weather events. Recently I led a team of researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Army Corps of Engineers in the first systematic analysis of damages from atmospheric rivers due to extreme flooding. We found that while many of these events are benign, the largest of them cause most of the flooding damage in the western U.S. And atmospheric rivers are predicted to grow longer, wetter and wider in a warming climate.
Rivers in the sky
On Feb. 27, 2019, an atmospheric river propelled a plume of water vapor 350 miles wide and 1,600 miles long through the sky from the tropical North Pacific Ocean to the coast of Northern California.
Just north of San Francisco Bay, in Sonoma County’s famed wine country, the storm dumped over 21 inches of rain. The Russian River crested at 45.4 feet – 13.4 feet above flood stage.
For the fifth time in four decades, the town of Guerneville was submerged under the murky brown floodwaters of the lower Russian River. Damages in Sonoma County alone were estimated at over US$100 million.
Events like these have drawn attention in recent years, but atmospheric rivers are not new. They have meandered through the sky for millions of years, transporting water vapor from the equator toward the poles.
In the 1960s meteorologists coined the phrase “Pineapple Express” to describe storm tracks that originated near Hawaii and carried warm water vapor to the coast of North America. By the late 1990s atmospheric scientists had found that over 90% of the world’s moisture from the tropics and subtropics was transported to higher latitudes by similar systems, which they named “atmospheric rivers.”
In dry conditions, atmospheric rivers can replenish water supplies and quench dangerous wildfires. In wet conditions, they can cause damaging floods and debris flows, wreaking havoc on local economies.
Helpful and harmful
Researchers have known for some time that flooding due to atmospheric rivers could cost a lot of money, but until our study no one had quantified these damages. We used a catalog of atmospheric river events compiled by Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, and matched it to 40 years of flood insurance records and 20 years of National Weather Service damage estimates.
We found that atmospheric rivers caused an average of $1.1 billion in flood damages yearly in the western U.S. More than 80% of all flooding damages in the West in the years we studied were associated with atmospheric rivers. In some areas, such as coastal northern California, these systems caused over 99% of damages.
Our data showed that in an average year, about 40 atmospheric rivers made landfall along the Pacific coast somewhere between Baja California and British Columbia. Most of these events were benign: About half caused no insured losses, and these storms replenished the region’s water supply.
But there were a number of exceptions. We used a recently developed atmospheric river classification scale that ranks the storms from 1 to 5, similar to systems for categorizing hurricanes and tornadoes. There was a clear link between these categories and observed damages.
Atmospheric River category 1 (AR1) and AR2 storms caused estimated damages under $1 million. AR4 and AR5 storms caused median damages in the 10s and 100s of millions of dollars respectively. The most damaging AR4s and AR5s generated impacts of over $1 billion per storm. These billion-dollar storms occurred every three to four years.
A moister atmosphere means worse storms
Our most significant finding was an exponential relationship between the intensity of atmospheric rivers and the flood damages they caused. Each increase in the scale from 1 to 5 was associated with a 10-fold increase in damages.
Several recent studies have modeled how atmospheric rivers will change in the coming decades. The mechanism is simple: Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the planet. This causes more water to evaporate from oceans and lakes, and increased moisture in the air makes storm systems grow stronger.
Like hurricanes, atmospheric rivers are projected to grow longer, wider and wetter in a warming climate. Our finding that damages increase exponentially with intensity suggests that even modest increases in atmospheric river intensity could lead to significantly larger economic impacts.
Better forecasting is critical
I believe that improving atmospheric forecasting systems should be a priority for adapting to a changing climate. Better understanding of atmospheric rivers’ intensity, duration and landfall locations can provide valuable information to residents and emergency responders.
It also is important to discourage new construction in high-risk areas and help people move to safer locations after major disasters, rather than rebuilding in place.
Finally, our study underlines the need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. These storms will keep coming, and they’re getting stronger. In my view, stabilizing the global climate system is the only long-term way to minimize economic damage and risk to vulnerable communities.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Health officials on Wednesday gave an update on COVID-19 booster guidance and said the state of California is preparing to roll out COVID-19 vaccinations for younger children once federal and state approvals — expected next week — are complete.
In a Wednesday morning briefing, Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of California Health & Human Services Agency, and Dr. Erica Pan, state epidemiologist with the California Department of Public Health, discussed vaccine booster eligibility and the state’s plan to vaccinate children ages 5 to 11 once the federal and state review process is complete.
Later in the day, Gov. Gavin Newsom received a Moderna vaccine booster at an Asian Health Services’ clinic in Oakland’s Chinatown, encouraging eligible Californians to get their booster and keep immunity strong, especially as the winter months approach.
As of Wednesday, nearly two million Californians had received their booster dose, representing 14.3% of the nationwide total recipients as reported by the CDC.
Ghaly said that, to date, 52 million COVID-19 doses have been administered across California, where 87% of the eligible population have received at least one dose.
He said the case numbers across the state have stabilized, but they are still seeing a significant impact on the unvaccinated, who are 6.6 times more likely to be infected, 12 times more likely to be hospitalized and 18 times more likely to have the worst outcome in death.
As of Wednesday, Ghaly said California had a seven-day case rate of 1.9% and testing positivity of 2.2%, numbers which have stopped declining and are plateauing. In some parts of the state, where there are higher numbers of unvaccinated residents, Ghaly said they are concerned they may be starting to witness an uptick in cases.
At that time, there were about 4,000 people hospitalized, with about 1,000 in intensive care units, Ghaly said.
Ghaly said health officials are concerned about COVID-19 as well as other respiratory illnesses like flu circulating in the fall and winter months, and they need to double down on vaccination efforts.
Last year at this time, Ghaly the state started seeing an increase in cases, and California’s seven day positivity rate peaked at 17.1% at the end of the year. In January, around 21,000 people were hospitalized, and more than 18,500 people in California died that month, accounting for 25% of the pandemic’s death toll in the state.
“Vaccines continue to save lives,” said Ghaly, noting they will help the state get back to normal.
With the Food and Drug Administration extending emergency authorization to all three vaccine manufacturers for booster shots, Ghaly urged Californians to get boosters as well as the flu vaccine, which can be co-administered.
He said those who received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine and are eligible should get a booster six months after they received their series.
Those who are eligible are age 65 years and older, those 18 and older who live in long-term care facilities, have underlying health issues or who are at increased risk of social inequities — such as living in a community hard hit by COVID-19 — or who have significant risk for exposure due to work.
Everyone older than 18 who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccinate should get a booster two months after the vaccine, he said.
Ghaly — who along with Pan has received a booster — said mixing and matching boosters have now been approved for COVID-19, and it’s a strategy common with other vaccines. “We now have more options than ever before for maintaining this protection.”
He said the nation’s top immunization experts and state experts have analyzed the data and determined that these boosters are safe and effective.
There are reports of mild side effects such as headache, fever and soreness but no serious illness due the boosters, Ghaly said.
State ready to roll out vaccinations for children
Dr. Pan, who is herself a parent, said the state’s youngest children have remained vulnerable to COVID-19 as older Californians have received vaccines. “Now the time is coming to protect them,” she said of children.
As of Oct. 21, over six million children in the United States have been infected by COVID-19, with more than one million child cases added over the last six weeks. Pan said the proportion of pediatric cases have increased as older people have been vaccinated.
She said there are nearly 700,000 cases in young people 17 and younger, with the median age of 11. There have been more than 35 pediatric deaths in California alone, more than what is seen in a very bad flu season.
In an FDA advisory committee meeting on Tuesday, Pan said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the number of COVID-19 deaths among 5- to 11-year-old children was equivalent to the top 10 leading causes of death in that age group recently.
She said there isn’t an acceptable number of childhood deaths when protection is available.
Pan said children can experience “long COVID” as well as multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C, which is a rare inflammatory condition associated with COVID-19 that can damage multiple organ systems, can require hospitalization and is sometimes life-threatening.
As of Oct. 25, the California Department of Public Health reported that there have been 677 cases of MIS-C in the state among children with a median age of 8 years old.
Pan said the FDA has made an emergency authorization recommendation for Pfizer for children ages 5 to 11.
About 4,000 children ages 5 to 11 have been enrolled in the clinical trials, which have shown a strong immune response for children and more than 90% efficacy. She said it’s given in two doses and is about a third the size of adult doses. She said research has found there might be mild side effects, with serious side effects being rare.
COVID-19 vaccines were authorized for children ages 16 and older in December and 12 and up in May, Pan said.
Pan said it’s expected that vaccines for children will be available as soon as the end of next week after the review process is completed and if recommended by both the CDC and the Western States Scientific Review Workgroup.
“We are ready to administer in California,” Pan said.
She said the United States government has procured enough vaccine supply to vaccinate all 5 to 11 years old in the state, which total about 3.5 million children, or 9% of the population.
There will be 1.2 million doses in the first week when the vaccine is fully approved for children, and Pan said it will be administered in accordance with the state’s COVID-19 action plan.
She said 4,000 sites are ready to administer the vaccine to children, with more than 8,000 providers enrolled to provide the services. More than 860,000 doses have already been ordered.
The state will leverage existing infrastructure for this latest vaccination effort, working closely with health departments, schools, community partners and clinics to administer it through mobile clinics and vaccine pop ups across the state, Pan said.
Once the vaccine is fully approved for 5- to 11-year-olds, Pan urged parents to call their pediatricians or local clinics to schedule their children for the vaccine.
In Lake County, vaccination clinics for students and community members at large have been hosted at some schools.
As for whether schools would again be involved in the vaccination effort for younger children, Jill Ruzicka, director of communications and government affairs for the Lake County Office of Education, told Lake County News, “For right now, we're waiting for the approval of the vaccine for the younger children, so we know the exact details. Once we know the details, we will work with all of our state, local and school district partners and come up with a plan that works best for our community.”
Vaccinations for children and adults also can be scheduled via the state’s My Turn website.
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.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The California Citizens Redistricting Commission on Tuesday released visualizations that will be used to draw district boundaries for State Senate, Assembly and congressional seats, and the Board of Supervisors responded with concern for how Lake County could be aligned over the coming decade.
Last month, the supervisors approved a resolution to the redistricting commission calling for all of Lake County to be kept in a single congressional district that included both Napa and Sonoma counties. The city of Clearlake submitted a similar resolution to the commission.
However, the initial visualizations show Lake County being grouped with Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity, and portions of Siskiyou and Sonoma counties for its congressional and State Assembly seats, and with Napa and Solano counties for the State Senate.
Based on that initial scenario, Lake County could see all of its representation completely change.
Pedro Toledo, one of the 14 members of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission and a Sonoma County resident, said he can understand why local leaders would be upset.
“These maps are not the final maps. They're not even the draft maps. They are to start conversation,” he said.
Toledo said there will be a lot of changes and refinements before maps are drawn and finalized, noting he has a lot of comments and directions to give those drawing the lines himself.
He said the proposed districts will probably shift, “and they may shift a lot,” and once they get into the actual map drawing phase in a few weeks, more changes can be expected.
The California Citizens Redistricting Commission is due to discuss the latest developments in the process at its visualizations meeting, which takes place from Wednesday through Friday in Los Angeles.
To submit your comments, visit the commission website and scroll down to “Visualizations Feedback Form,” which is in the section providing information on the commission’s Oct. 27 meeting, below the welcome text and four action buttons (“Sign Up,” “Participate,” “Request Presentation” and “Visualizations”).
Toledo told Lake County News in a Tuesday night phone interview that the commission is expected to discuss the Northern California visualizations first once it emerges from a planned closed session on Wednesday afternoon.
He said the meeting will be the first opportunity for the commission to sit down and look at the state completely drawn out.
“We’ll be tackling the whole state at that point, starting with the north,” Toledo said.
Toledo said it’s the perfect time for local officials and community members to weigh in on the work so far. “We need community feedback to be able to draw these lines correctly.”
Board voices disapproval for visualizations
A link to the visualizations was released by the commission in an email shortly after 4:30 p.m. Tuesday.
About a half-hour later, the Board of Supervisors emerged from a closed session for department head evaluations and voted to add an extra item to the agenda in order to discuss the visualizations, with Board Chair Bruno Sabatier noting that the matter had come up unexpectedly.
After a short discussion, the board voted unanimously to send a letter to the commission voicing its concerns in response to the initial visualizations.
County Administrative Officer Carol Huchingson said her staff, including Deputy Administrative Officer Matthew Rothstein, had worked quickly to draft the letter, which can be seen below.
Supervisor Jessica Pyska read a line from the commission’s email announcing the visualizations, which said, “You told us which communities you wanted to be grouped together with, and which you did not want to be grouped with, and we listened. This week's new set of visualizations is based upon feedback given to the line drawing team by the commissioners during the last round of deliberations.”
She and other board members said they didn’t feel like the commission had listened to them based on what was presented on Tuesday.
“If they are saying they listened, they went exactly opposite of what we asked them to do,” said Sabatier.
Clearlake City Manager Alan Flora, who joined the meeting via Zoom, said the city also is “extremely concerned” and plans to submit a letter similar to the board’s.
“It’s very troubling that all of our state and federal representation would change,” Flora said.
That’s a concern that Sabatier said flustered him, and board members felt the result of the redistricting process so far appears detrimental for the county.
The final version of the letter notes that the total loss of alignments in the county’s State Assembly, State Senate and congressional districts, “would be a great disservice to Lake County at what is a critical time.”
Lake County’s unique concerns
Toledo told Lake County News in a September interview that the commission’s goal, based on requests from local officials and residents, was to keep Lake County and its cities together as much as possible, and that the census data would tell the commission if it could do that.
So far, Lake County is being kept together as a whole in the visualizations. However, Toledo said there are still multiple scenarios for how it could ultimately be settled in a new district.
While the visualizations have Lake County either wrapped into a larger North Coast district or put with Napa and Solano counties, Toledo said there are other options as well.
“There is quite a bit of discussion on the commission on where Lake County should land,” Toledo said.
Over the last couple of weeks, based on community input, Toledo said some commissioners are seeing Lake County more closely connected to Mendocino and the far north.
“We also see the connection that Lake County has with Napa and Sonoma,” Toledo said, explaining that those are the areas Lake County has been connected to in public input.
Ultimately, he said it really will come down to the input from Lake County residents, governments and businesses, as well as the surrounding communities.
He said the commission has not received any input from nearby communities that don’t want to be with Lake County — which they have had happen for some other counties.
“Everyone is very receptive to having Lake in their area,” he said.
He said the commission will take input from Lake County and do all it can to make sure it’s in the district where its residents and leaders want it to be.
In late September, the commission received data it needed from the US Census Bureau, which was itself delayed in its work by the pandemic.
The University of California, Berkeley, made additional adjustments to the data to account for state requirements to count prison inmates in their home counties in order for the commission to start its process.
The state redistricting commission had an initial deadline to complete its work by Dec. 15. Toledo said they asked the California Supreme Court to have the deadline moved back to Jan. 14 to make sure county elections offices would have time to implement the final maps, which will be used for the June primaries.
Instead, the Supreme Court gave the commission until Dec. 27, which he said is challenging due to being in the middle of the holidays.
Even so, he thinks the commission is on schedule to get its work done, and in the process offer more public opportunity for input than was done 10 years ago through the visualization process, which is new.
Challenges this year include accounting for the loss of one congressional seat in California, bringing the total to 52. Toledo said each district must have 750,000 residents in it. The State Assembly districts have more discretion.
There are other criteria as well, including voting rights rules. “It's like putting a jigsaw puzzle together,” he said.
Once the commission received the census data, it started the process of visualizing, which is where it is now. That step has involved working to align communities of interest data with the data from the Census Bureau, Toledo explained.
Toledo said the commission has gone through many iterations of the visualizations over the last couple of weeks.
He said over the next two weeks the commission will finalize the visualizations before moving into the draft maps. “We’ve been getting so much community feedback and input form across the state of California,” said Toledo, adding that he thinks they have tackled most of the difficult issues.
When the commission gets to the map drawing, it will use a live drawing process that allows them to take more community input. Toledo said those on-the-spot drawings will allow people to see what the commission is thinking.
They’ll start with State Assembly districts, which Toledo said tend to be building blocks of the State Senate districts.
Toledo emphasized that community input is critical at this stage.
For information on how to participate, visit the commission’s website. Members of the public also can sign up for notifications from the commission here.
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.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Lakeport Police Department and the Lake Family Resource Center are preparing to launch a new program that will offer resource assistance to homeless individuals and those struggling with mental health challenges, and assist officers with de-escalating crisis situations.
At its Oct. 19 meeting, the Lakeport City Council unanimously approved the new crisis intervention responder program and authorized Police Chief Brad Rasmussen and City Manager Kevin Ingram to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the Lake Family Resource Center.
The program will assign a community crisis intervention specialist, which Lake Family Resource Center will fund, to the Lakeport Police Department.
Rasmussen said the program is the result of a collaboration with Lake Family Resource Center that began over the summer.
City officials and Lake Family Resource Center staff are now in the process of finalizing the memorandum of understanding, with a goal of having the program in place and operating by Nov. 1.
Under the agreement, a community crisis response specialist will work with the Lakeport Police Department and be based out of the agency’s headquarters at 2025 S. Main St.
The Lake Family Resource Center has received grant funding through Dec. 31, 2022, that will enable it to hire and pay for the crisis response specialist’s salary and benefits.
The community crisis response specialist will work primarily with Lakeport Police’s homeless liaison officer.
That team will spend most of its time doing outreach to homeless, but will respond to other calls for service throughout the city while on duty, and will be available to assist with situations where the crisis responder can provide expertise — such as those involving domestic violence and sexual assault.
Rasmussen said there will be minor costs to the police department to implement the program. The council’s approval on Oct. 19 covered an estimated $5,000 financial impact.
The Lakeport Police Department is increasingly getting calls both for homeless individuals as well as people in other types of crisis, including mental health-related issues, who Rasmussen said need the kinds of help and resources that are usually beyond what a police officer can provide.
Due to recent national events involving law enforcement interaction with persons in crisis — including those with disabilities and with substance addictions — Rasmussen said there continues to be a public request for more crisis response specialists on the street handling calls along with the police.
He said his agency has been increasing officer training and efforts to gain more available crisis response over the past several years in order to provide better service to the community.
Seeking solutions for crisis intervention
During a Sept. 9 Lakeport City Council discussion with staff on the city’s challenges in addressing homelessness, Ingram said it was safe to say that a majority of Lakeport Police’s calls involve some combination of individuals who are homeless or need mental health-related services.
“Housing is only one component,” said Ingram, explaining that wraparound services are needed and are just as important.
He said the police department has had an agreement with Lake County Behavioral Health Services for three years in an effort to bring in crisis intervention services.
However, for a variety of reasons — including staffing, COVID-19 and the inability to figure out how to bill out services — Behavioral Health “has never set a foot” in the police station, Ingram said.
Ingram said the city is excited about the potential for working with Lake Family Resource Center to get a full-time intervention specialist.
He said the city gets a lot of calls daily about homeless individuals and those with mental health issues in the city’s parklands and shopping centers.
Rasmussen said of homelessness, “It is a major crisis not only in our community but in our state and our country. It just seems to continue and get worse,” which is why they’ve tried to actively engage with homeless people or those who need mental health services.
It also led to the agency establishing the homeless liaison officer position. Officer Melissa Bedford has been working in that role for more than 18 months, he said.
Even so, Rasmussen said that until the police department gets some kind of social worker or crisis intervention person on the street working with officers, they will have a difficult time making more progress in addressing homelessness.
Rasmussen said the general public expects police to be all things and to make problems go away, and they can’t.
He also touched briefly during that meeting on the city’s work with Lake Family Resource Center to bring that crisis intervention position to his department.
“Unless we have all the services and housing, we’re never going to solve the problem,” he said of homelessness. “It’s going to take all of those components to solve it.”
New agreement offers hope for progress
Rasmussen said his department had been struggling with how to deploy a crisis intervention specialist when, in July, they began talking with the Lake Family Resource Center.
Sheri Young, the center’s victim services program director, said Lisa Morrow, the center’s executive director, had been speaking with Rasmussen about the situation.
Young said center staff began brainstorming about the city’s needs and came up with how grant funding they had in place could be used for a new program to help underserved populations, with a special focus on homeless individuals, those in need of mental health services, victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.
Rasmussen and center staff drew on theories and concepts being used in similar programs in other communities and agencies to create their own program, Young said. “Ours will be unique to our own county.”
In the end, she said it all tied together beautifully and they’re determined to make it happen.
She said center staff have been excited to draft protocols and job descriptions for the full-time position, with interviews of job candidates starting last Friday.
The goal, she said, is to roll out the program on Nov. 1 — whether it’s starting the extensive amount of training the position will require or putting that individual into the field.
Young added that they have a great plan for support and supervision of the crisis intervention specialist and the program as a whole.
Young has a longtime passion both for victim advocacy and law enforcement, and loves to be able to morph those two together. “It’s going to be pretty spectacular.”
From the center’s side, she will oversee the crisis intervention program, along with help from the center’s behavioral health program director, Jennifer Nielson, who brings a background in psychotherapy to the effort.
At the Oct. 19 council meeting, Lakeport City Councilman Michael Green had asked Young about how to sustain the program past the end of the grant funding, which runs out at the end of December 2022.
Since then, she said she’s been thinking about Green’s question.
Both she and Rasmussen believe that, after collecting data over the coming year, it will provide them with the opportunity to find additional funding resources.
If anyone can find the funding and write the grant to get it, it’s Young.
Her talent as a grant writer has brought in significant grants that have allowed Lake Family Resource Center to expand its services in the community, including a growing focus on human trafficking.
“I’m really excited about this,” she said.
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.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The wet weekend weather has raised Lake County’s seasonal rainfall totals well above average, and the National Weather Service said more rain appears to be on the way.
The National Weather Service’s Eureka office said precipitation totals since Oct. 1 show that Lake County is at or above 300% of normal.
The Lake County Department of Water Resources also is reporting that Clear Lake’s level has shown improvement.
The department said that the United States Geological Survey gauge on Clear Lake — which recently was moved due to the low water conditions — showed the lake level to be -2.25 feet Rumsey, the special measure for Clear Lake, on Friday. As of Thursday, it had improved to -1.47 feet Rumsey thanks to the rain.
Now, more rain is in the forecast.
The National Weather Service said above-normal temperatures and precipitation are expected across northwest California through the first week of November.
The regional forecast calls for showers and the possibility of thunderstorms on Friday and Saturday, to be followed by a series of frontal systems expected to impact the area Monday and again on Wednesday.
The specific Lake County forecast calls for chances of showers from Sunday night through Wednesday.
Temperatures over the next week will hover in the high 40s at night, ranging from the mid-50s to high 60s during the daytime hours.
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.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Lake County Planning Commission is set to reconsider a large south county commercial cannabis project approved earlier this year whose owner had to resubmit the project after the Board of Supervisors upheld an appeal filed by the neighbors.
The meeting will begin at 9 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 28, in the board chambers on the first floor of the Lake County Courthouse, 255 N. Forbes St., Lakeport.
To participate in real-time, join the Zoom meeting by clicking this link.
The webinar ID is 913 7825 1263, the pass code is 824276.
Access the meeting via one tap mobile at +16699006833,,91378251263#,,,,*824276# or dial in at 669-900-6833.
The meeting also can be viewed on the county’s website or Facebook page.
In an item scheduled for 9:20 a.m., the commission will reconsider approving the use permit sought by WeGrow LLC, owned by Zarina Otchkova.
The 309-acre Middletown property is located at 16750 Herrington Road, 17610 Sandy Road and 19678 Stinson Road. The nine-acre cultivation site is at the Herrington Road location.
Otchkova proposes a project that includes 32 90-foot by 125-foot greenhouses, two 90-foot by 125-foot greenhouses for immature plant starts, four 50-foot by 100-foot drying buildings, one 200 square foot shed, 20 5,000 gallon water tanks, one 6-foot-tall galvanized woven wire fence covered with privacy mesh to screen the greenhouses from public view.
The project will remove 100 blue oak trees, which will require a three to one ratio tree replacement using similar species trees before cultivation starts.
However, the board approved the appeal without prejudice, which allowed Otchkova to reapply for the project after further study.
In other businesses, the commission will consider Lake Vista Farms LLC’s project at 2050 and 2122 Ogulin Canyon Road in Clearlake with up to 25.8 acres of cannabis, and modifications to existing projects, Green Bear Farms Cali LLC at 4680 Clark Drive in Kelseyville and Sunny S Ranch at 19424 Butts Canyon Road in Middletown.
The full agenda follows.
AGENDA
Consideration of the approval of minutes from the Oct. 14 Planning Commission Meeting.
Consideration of proposed 2022 planning commissioner regular meeting calendar.
9:05 a.m.: Public hearing to consider major use permit (UP 19-36). Applicant: Brian D. Pensack and Garrett W. Burdick (Lake Vista Farms LLC). Owner: Lake Vista Farms LLC. Proposed project: Applicant is applying for 15 acres of outdoor commercial cannabis canopy area within five fenced cultivation areas, up to 25.8 acres. Cultivation accessory items include portable toilets, trash enclosures, vegetative waste storage area, 2,500-gallon water storage tanks at each cultivation area, and Conex shipping containers and/or 8-foot by 8-foot storage sheds (or similar) for storage of pesticides, fertilizers and hazardous materials. On-site nursery within an existing barn. Renovated 10-foot by 30-foot shipping container to house security equipment and camera monitors, and 6-foot-tall security fencing, secured by locked gates, to enclose cultivation areas. Address: 2050 and 2122 Ogulin Canyon Road, Clearlake. (Planner Michael Taylor)
9:10 a.m.: Public hearing to consider approving modification (MMU 21-22) of original Use Permit UP 18-35. Applicant/owner: Green Bear Farms Cali LLC / Wais Amin. Proposed Project: Amendment to original canopy/cultivation area; 16 additional greenhouses, and one A-Type 13 Self Distribution license to allow legal transport of cannabis to and from the site. Location: 4680 Clark Drive, Kelseyville. (Planner Eric Porter)
9:15 a.m.: Public hearing to consider approving modification (MMU 21-20) of original Use Permit UP 18-43. Applicant/owner: Sunny S Ranch/Shannon Sanders. Proposed project: Four 2,499 square foot nursery areas (greenhouses) for immature cannabis plants in conjunction with previously approved file No. User Permit 18-43. Location: 19424 Butts Canyon Road, Middletown. (Planner Eric Porter)
9:20 a.m. Public hearing to reconsider approving Use Permit UP 20-22. Applicant/Owner: WeGrow LLC/Zarina Otchkova. Proposed project: 15 A-Type 3B mixed light commercial cannabis cultivation licenses and one A-Type 13 “self distribution” license. The applicant is proposing 32 90-foot by 125-foot greenhouses, two 90-foot by 125-foot greenhouses for immature plant starts, four 50-foot by 100-foot drying buildings, one 200 square foot shed, 20 5,000 gallon water tanks, one 6-foot-tall galvanized woven wire fence covered with privacy mesh to screen the greenhouses from public view. Total proposed cultivation area is 387,600 square feet (roughly nine acres); total proposed canopy area is 330,000 square feet. The applicant is also proposing the removal of 100 blue oak trees, which will require a 3:1 tree replacement using similar species trees before the start of cultivation. Location: 16750 Herrington Road, Middletown (cultivation site); 17610 Sandy Road, Middletown, CA and 19678 Stinson Road, Middletown consisting of 309-plus acres. (Planner Eric Porter)
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.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Lakeport City Council will hold a special meeting to finalize the process for raising water rates for city utility customers.
The council will meet at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 26, in the council chambers at Lakeport City Hall, 225 Park St.
The council chambers will be open to the public for the meeting. In accordance with updated guidelines from the state of California and revised Cal OSHA Emergency Temporary Standards, persons who are not fully vaccinated for COVID-19 are required to wear a face covering at this meeting.
If you cannot attend in person, and would like to speak on an agenda item, you can access the Zoom meeting remotely at this link or join by phone by calling toll-free 669-900-9128 or 346-248-7799.
The webinar ID is 973 6820 1787, access code is 477973; the audio pin will be shown after joining the webinar. Those phoning in without using the web link will be in “listen mode” only and will not be able to participate or comment.
Comments can be submitted by email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. To give the City Clerk adequate time to print out comments for consideration at the meeting, please submit written comments before 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. Oct. 26.
Indicate in the email subject line "for public comment" and list the item number of the agenda item that is the topic of the comment. Comments that are read to the council will be subject to the three minute time limitation (approximately 350 words). Written comments that are only to be provided to the council and not read at the meeting will be distributed to the council before the meeting.
The meeting’s only item is the discussion and final action on the proposed increase to city water rates.
Last Tuesday, the council unanimously approved resolutions increasing the city’s water and sewer rates, but Lakeport’s municipal code requires a second reading in order to finalize approval of a water rate hike.
Should the council approve the resolution establishing the new water rates, they will go into effect, along with the previously approved sewer rates, on Nov. 1.
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.
Jaymes Pyne, Stanford University; Elizabeth Vaade, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Eric Grodsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Nationally, one in six children miss 15 or more days of school in a year and are considered chronically absent. Education officials have lamented that all this missed instruction has for years constituted an attendance crisis in U.S. elementary, middle and high schools.
The fear among policymakers is that these chronically absent students suffer academically because of all the classroom instruction they miss out on. In 2015, the U.S. secretary of education and other federal officials responded to this perceived crisis, urging communities to “support every student, every day to attend and be successful in school[.]” Their open letter stated that missing 10% of school days in a year for any reason – excused or unexcused – “is a primary cause of low academic achievement.”
Worrying about whether children attend school makes sense. After all, if students don’t show up, teachers can’t teach them.
But what if America’s attendance crisis is about much more than students missing class? What if, instead, it is a reflection of family and community crises these students face – such as being evicted from the family apartment, fearing for their safety in their neighborhood or suffering an illness? These circumstances can both limit children’s academic achievement and keep them from getting to school.
Excused absences are those for which a parent or guardian contacts the school, or responds to the school’s request for information, explaining why the child is not or won’t be in class. If that doesn’t happen, the child is marked “unexcused.”
Our study tracks how both types of absences are linked to elementary school reading and math test scores in Madison, Wisconsin, which is home to a diverse urban public school district.
We show that absences excused by a parent or guardian do little to harm children’s learning over the school year. In fact, children with no unexcused absences – but 15 to 18 excused absences – have test scores on par with their peers who have no absences.
Meanwhile, the average child with even just one unexcused absence does much worse academically than peers with none. For example, the average student in our study with no unexcused absences is at the 58th percentile of math test scores. The average student with one unexcused absence is at the 38th percentile of math test, and the average student with 18 unexcused absences is at the 17th percentile.
Signals of family crisis
Does this mean schools shouldn’t worry about a student’s education as long as a parent calls in each time the child misses class?
Not exactly.
But our findings don’t make sense if absence from school affects achievement mainly because kids miss class time.
That is most apparent when considering the relationship between 18 unexcused absences and test score achievement. Accounting for differences among students unrelated to the current year of instruction – including their health conditions, prior academic achievement and family education and income – explains 88% of that relationship. That means children with so many unexcused absences would almost certainly have similarly low test scores even if their parents called in or if they had attended school more regularly.
Instead, we believe unexcused absence is a strong signal of the many challenges children and families face outside of school. Those challenges include economic and medical hardships and insecurity with food, transportation, family and housing. Unexcused absences can be a powerful signal of how those out-of-school challenges affect children’s academic progress.
To be clear, our evidence suggests unexcused absences are problematic, but for a different reason than people often think. Absence from school, and especially unexcused absence, matters mainly as a signal of many crises children and their families may be facing. It matters less as a cause of lower student achievement due to missed instruction.
How researchers and the public choose to think of school absences matters for educational policy. National, state and school district attendance policies typically hold schools and families accountable for all of the days children miss, regardless of whether they were excused or unexcused absences.
These policies assume that missing school for any reason harms children academically because they are missing classroom instruction. They also assume that schools will be able to effectively intervene to increase academic achievement by reducing student absences. We find neither to be the case.
As a result, these attendance policies end up disproportionately punishing families dealing with out-of-school crises in their lives and pressuring schools who serve them to get students to school more often.
We instead suggest using unexcused absence from school as a signal to channel resources to the children and families who need them most.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — In a brief special meeting on Tuesday evening, the Lakeport City Council took the final step necessary in order to implement new water rates for city residents.
During the seven-minute meeting, the council voted unanimously to approve a resolution to implement the new increased rates from 2022 to 2026.
However, a 1954 ordinance in city municipal code requires that any resolution to increase water rates must have two readings, rather than one.
That necessitated the council holding the special meeting on Tuesday night.
There was no public comment before the council took its vote and adjourned.
City officials said the new water and sewer rates will go into effect on Nov. 1.
The new rates will support the city’s plans for $7 million in capital utility projects over the coming five years.
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.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — It’s time once again to lift Lake County’s annual burn ban for the late fall and winter season.
The burn ban will be lifted for 2021 as of 8 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 26, the Lake County Air Quality Management District reported.
The ban is being lifted now that Cal Fire has determined that wildfire risk has been significantly reduced by the recent rains, the district said.
Lake County’s joint fire agencies and Air Quality Management District’s open burning program has incorporated both fire safety and air quality management since 1987.
In related news, Cal Fire’s Sonoma Lake Napa Unit said it has suspended its burn ban for the season for Colusa, Lake, Napa, Solano, Sonoma and Yolo counties effective on Oct. 26, for areas in the State Responsibility Area.
However, Cal Fire referred residents of that coverage area to their respective air quality management districts to verify it is a permissive burn day according to local regulations.
Burn permits are required for all outdoor burning in the Lake County air basin. Burn permits will be available at your local fire protection district.
The Lake County Air Quality Management District said a smoke management plan is required for multiday burns, overnight burns, standing vegetation burns, whole tree or vine removal, burns over 20 acres, and any other burn where significant smoke impacts may occur or sensitive receptors may be impacted.
A smoke management plan can be obtained at the Lake County Air Quality Management District office; call 707-263-7000 to make an appointment.
Bring a map showing the burn location, burn site coordinates (GPS locations), parcel number or address, acres to be burned, and details of vegetation to be burned. A fee is required for all burn permits, payable at the time the permit is issued.
Smoke management plans, agricultural burn permits and residential burn permits are $29, land development/lot clearing burn permits are $88. Cash or check only (exact change is appreciated).
Only clean dry vegetation that was grown on the property may be burned. Residential burn permits require a one acre or larger lot of record, a burn location that is at least 100 feet from all neighbors, and at least 30 feet from any structure in order to qualify.
Lot clearing/land development burns require special permits available at your local fire protection district. Read your burn permit carefully and follow all the conditions.
Officials ask community members who plan to use burning to please be considerate of their neighbors. A permit does not allow you to create health problems for others. You can be liable for health care costs, fines, and other costs resulting from your burning.
Consider composting or using the vegetative waste pickup provided with your waste collection service as an alternative to burning leaves.