News Briefs

Hamburg Guides Campaign

SEBASTOPOL–Former Rep. Dan Hamburg has signed on as the campaign manager for 5th District supervisorial candidate Mike Reilly, at least through the March primary. “Most of my experience has been as a candidate,” Hamburg admits, “but I like the view from this perspective.” The two Democrats have been friends since the early ’80s, when they met working for Dan Hauser’s state Assembly race. Reilly is one of seven candidates vying to take the place of retiring Supervisor Ernie Carpenter, who has held the west county seat for the past 16 years. Hamburg served one four-year term on the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors in the early ’80s, and represented the North Coast in Congress from 1993 to 1995, when he was unseated by Rep. Frank Riggs, R-Windsor.

Council Ducks Union

SANTA ROSA–Internally divided over the issue, the Santa Rosa City Council as a whole elected not to take a stand on the upcoming ballot measure that would give the city’s police and fire department workers binding arbitration in labor disputes. Instead the city will let the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce and the Sonoma County Taxpayers’ Association take the lead in opposing Measure A in the March 26 election.

Conflagration

SONOMA–The Living History Center has withdrawn a bid to help organize the Bear Flag Sesquicentennial celebration next summer, after the community committee planning the event deadlocked over the issue of hiring the Marin-based non-profit. LHC opponents feared the loss of local control if an outside organization was brought in, while supporters felt that an experienced management group would produce a bigger, more successful event, drawing up to 30,000 visitors. Plans are still being formulated for the observation of the 150th anniversary of the raising of the Bear Flag over the Sonoma Plaza, to be celebrated June 14 to July 9.

School Site Update

WINDSOR–The Windsor school board will enlist outside assistance to evaluate the noise and safety issues that have been raised around the district’s proposed new high school site. An EIR prepared for the district says the site, roughly two miles north of the Santa Rosa airport, is safe, but critics have challenged that conclusion and warned that aircraft noise would be disruptive to classes.

Prostitution Sting

SANTA ROSA–Responding to complaints from local businesses, sheriff’s deputies conducted an anti-prostitution sweep on southern Santa Rosa Avenue last week, using a female undercover officer as a decoy and arresting 14 men for solicitation. One woman was also charged with prostitution and indecent exposure. The 14 men ranged in age from 26 to 75, and represented Monte Rio, Sonoma, Cotati, Windsor, Rohnert Park, Petaluma, and Santa Rosa.

Nature Swap Renewed

WASHINGTON, D.C.–A new claim against the corporate owner of the embattled Headwaters Forest has renewed hope that a “debt-for-nature” exchange can be negotiated. The $750 million claim by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Thrift Supervision not only is three times as big as earlier assessments made against corporate raider Charles Hurwitz, but also specifically names his Maxxam company, which holds title to the redwoods, as a co-claimant. The claims are based in the 1988 failure of a Texas savings and loan owned by Hurwitz, which cost taxpayers some $1.6 million.

Four Bombs Found

PETALUMA–Police evacuated residents of a rural Petaluma neighborhood Monday night while the bomb squad detonated four homemade explosives found at a residence. Undercover officers served a warrant at the 681 Gossage Lane farmhouse after neighbors complained of hearing a loud explosion there Sunday morning. However, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Lt. Mike Brown says the blast hasn’t yet been confirmed. During the search, law enforcement officials discovered inside the house and barn two pipe bombs and two shrapnel bombs in glass jars. The explosives were substantial enough to have caused significant damage in a confined area, he adds. Deputies arrested Walter Wayne Pietila, 42, who was booked on charges of felony possession of unlawful weapons. He is being held at Sonoma County Jail without bail.

Unhappy Birthday

BODEGA BAY–A birthday celebration erupted into vandalism at Doran Beach in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, with the celebrants destroying a public bathroom, breaking down and burning a picnic table, and burglarizing a number of cars in the parking lot. Five suspects from Rohnert Park were arrested a short time later in Sebastopol and charged with vandalism and possession of stolen property. Two were adults, aged 18 ad 20, and the other three were juveniles.

From the Jan. 11-17, 1996 issue of The Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Oysters Are Their World

Photo by Janet Orsi

Baywatch: John Finger of Hog Island Oyster Co. harvests mature shellfish from Tomales Bay. Across the nation, the appetite for West Coast oysters and clams has grown to an all-time high with an increasingly sophisticated consumer base that demands quality and is willing to pay for it.

On Tomales Bay, tasty bivalves spell big bucks for local entrepreneurs

By David Templeton

Far off from the shore, crouching knee-deep in the rippling waters of Tomales Bay, John Finger hoists a glistening black-mesh bag, heavy with wet, dripping oysters, up from the spot they have occupied for most of a year.

As water pours out in a great rush, Finger shakes the stiff, flat container from side to side, redistributing its contents evenly before lowering the bag back into the cold, salty tide. It will be at least another five or six months before these oysters are ready to harvest. Until then, they will wait, lounging, feeding, and growing on the muddy bay bottom, the lucky residents of a home that is counted among the most pristine and unsullied estuaries in the country.

In 1983, Finger co-founded the Hog Island Oyster Co., headquartered in the west Marin town of Marshall, along with partners Michael Watchhorn and Terry Sawyer. It is one of a handful of aquacultural companies farming Tomales Bay for oysters, mussels, and clams. Enjoying a reputation as the producer of some of the heartiest, tastiest oysters in Northern California, Hog Island sells 1 million oysters a year, mostly to restaurants (including John Ash & Co., Equus, and San Francisco’s Stars), while holding down a healthy weekend retail business run from its rustic bayside plant just off Highway 1.

It is a favorite stop for motorists pausing to buy a dozen meaty mollusks for $6 to $8 and choosing from four different varieties of oysters, including the East Coast Atlantic variety, of which Hog Island is the sole grower on the West Coast. They also sell mussels and clams, and even abalone, grown by the affiliated Abalone Acres.

Explorers wander the mud flats, poking about among bubbling tanks in which the oysters are stored just before shipping. Picnickers avail themselves of the wooden tables, while photographers have a picaresque field day.

The soul of the oyster farm, however, is not on shore. It is out here in the water, where high tides will cover millions of oysters with six feet of water, and low tides will expose them to the sunlight and the air, a unique cycle that toughens them, ensuring that they will remain fresh for several days after harvesting.

Today, a crew of three–Finger, Craig Dockendorf, and Mark Dean–have just distributed the daily returns (oysters that, during the sorting process, were deemed too small for sale, and must wait until another harvest for their turn in the spotlight), and have now set themselves to harvesting.

It is hard, often back-breaking work, this oyster business, requiring a good deal of brains and brawn. Part wrestler and part scientist, the aquacultural farmer must be able to wrench a 50-pound sack from the vacuum-tight mud and swing it up over his head onto a boat, while citing minute details of the tides and the weather, the bacteria levels in the water, and the biological variables of a species that looks vastly lacking in complexity but is, in fact, incredibly fragile.

Even so, on a mild and sunny day like today, becoming a farmer of shellfish seems an enviable occupation.

“There are mornings when we’re out here,” Finger describes, standing to stretch in the numbingly cold water, “and the fog will just drift down from the hills and out onto the water. Suddenly, you can’t see the shore, but the sunlight filters down, and everything is quiet, hushed. And you stand still–you can almost feel the bay breathing.

“We’ve got a little saying around here,” he adds. “A little rule we teach our employees. It’s simply, ‘Stop! Look where you work.’ We are working in this amazing, incredible part of the planet, and it’d be a shame not to take the time to notice that.”

Finger, an avid surfer originally from New York, chose a career in aquaculture primarily to stay close to the water. He studied at Southampton College on Long Island, a respected training ground for marine biologists, and spent several years working the oyster trade in Ireland, Spain, and nearby Moss Landing.

When he and his partners started the business from scratch, they knew a fair amount about the business. Over the last 13 years, they’ve learned even more. They are now heavily involved in local environmental efforts to sustain the quality of the bay, working with federal regulators and the owners of local dairies, runoff from which can shut the bay down to harvesting for several days following a rainfall. Testing is under way to determine if the bay’s bacteria count, which goes up after every downpour, is affected solely by the farms or if other factors–birds or sea lions, for example–may play a part.

With tough federal regulations in place, Tomales Bay has stayed essentially immaculate, a rarity that has heightened the demand for shellfish produced in this tiny piece of the coast.

Across the nation, the appetite for West Coast oysters and clams in general has grown to an all-time high, with an increasingly sophisticated consumer base that demands quality and is willing to pay to get it.

Most of the oyster farms on the bay are tiny, mom-and-pop-style organizations. Hog Island, one of the largest, has only seven full-time employees. Johnson’s Oyster and Seafood Co., which also operates a restaurant in Petaluma, is the undisputed king of the pond, with a massive shucking-and-bottling operation.

All those oysteries lease their tidal waters from the state Department of Fish and Game, at $35 an acre a year. Seven hundred acres of the bay, a bit less than 10 percent of its total surface area, are allocated for aquaculture, though only a fraction of that is actually producing oysters.

“There are six small growers on the bay,” explains Finger, “and we could all be selling five times what we’re doing now. We’re raising the capital to expand now. We’ve already got 2 million clams planted out in our newly developed area. They won’t be ready for another two years. But the demand continues, and we just haven’t been able to expand enough to meet it yet.”

He suggests that if the growing demand for his product is the best thing about his industry, the worst thing is being at the mercy of the elements.

“This is a farm,” he says simply, “and that means Mother Nature.”

A recent Pacific storm–with its hurricane-force winds that toppled trees and downed electrical towers all across the northern end of the state–has wreaked a bit of mayhem here on the bay as well. Even now, there are dozens of mesh bags turned upside down and sideways, shoved together at the ends of the submerged cables to which they are tethered, sticking up from the water at odd angles, like the skeletal remains of a shipwreck.

The windswept tides tore loose dozens of bags and carried them away. Search teams were forced to retrieve as many as possible.

“We found one of our clam bags way around the point,” Finger says with a laugh. “The storm took it half way to Dillon Beach.”

As he goes about straightening the mess, he describes the various approaches to growing oysters. There is the low-cost cluster approach, such as Johnson’s employs, where 30 to 40 hatchery-grown oyster larvae, called “seeds,” are planted on a single piece of shell and “broadcast” along the bay bottom, where they grow up fused together before finally being broken apart after harvesting.

This method, says Finger, usually results in no more that six or seven viable oysters, unlike the single-seed method employed by Hog Island, wherein one larva is attached to a tiny chip of oyster shell. When the seed has grown to a quarter of an inch, it is placed in the mesh bags, 40 or so to a bag, and tethered to a cable out in the water.

“All of the high-quality half-shell oysters are grown single seed,” Finger explains. “That way we can manipulate their shell, shape, and quality.”

Back on dry land, the crew is busy sorting the day’s harvest. Working on a long wooden counter, they empty each bag and swiftly divide it up into extra small, small, and medium sizes, dropping the oysters into a chute that carries them into the appropriate crate.

Crabs, eels, and other stowaways are tossed out onto the mud.

As they work, the crew members name off some of the positives of an oyster farmer’s life: You work outside, you’re involved with nature, you never lack for fresh air, and people tend to glamorize your occupation.

“Yeah, people think it’s pretty romantic,” Finger laughs. “It’s somehow glamorous, and exciting. And most of the time . . . I guess it is.”

“This is what I like best,” calls Dockendorf. Pulling out his pocket knife, he lifts a good-sized Atlantic and slits the muscle that holds the shell closed.

He cuts the oyster meat loose and swirls it about in the salty juices before tossing it into his mouth. Eyes closed, he savors his snack, then tosses the shell away.

“There,” he says. “Oysters don’t get any fresher than that.”

From the Jan. 11-17, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Another Pearl

Though all local oyster farming takes place on Tomales Bay, not all the companies are based in Marin. Bay Bottom Beds Inc., owned by the husband-and-wife team of Jorge Rebagliati and Lisa Jang, is run from their Santa Rosa apartment. One day a week, the couple makes the trip to the bay to pulls up the harvest.

But don’t be fooled by the size of the operation; that single catch is surprisingly substantial.

Working on four acres of a 90-acre lease, the couple produces half a million oysters a year, with annual revenues of $180,000. Though 80 percent of their product goes to Northern California and abroad, their centralization in Sonoma gives them an edge with local restaurants and markets (John Ash & Co., Hemenway’s, and G & G Market, to name a few), which regularly take the other 20 percent.

They are working hard to expand their local clientele even further.

“We are very interested in becoming better known in the county in which we work and live,” Rebagliati says. “A lot of people know us and buy our oysters, but we still find that many people don’t know we’re here.

“But it won’t be long,” he adds. “We’re spreading the word as fast as we can.”

From the Jan. 11-17, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

News Briefs

Hospital Vote Delay

SANTA ROSA Two strikes, and wait until November. Both a Sonoma County judge and a state appeals court have declined to order that the Save Community Hospital initiative be placed on the March primary election ballot, meaning that the measure will not go before local voters until next fall. Backers of the initiative collected more than enough signatures to qualify for the ballot and their measure was certified Dec. 11 by County Clerk Eeve Lewis, but required action by county supervisors before Dec. 28 to be placed on the March ballot. The supervisors, who have consistently fought the initiative and still hope to have it overruled in court, declined to add it to their Dec. 12 agenda, and did not meet again until Jan. 2. “It’s obviously a part of the board’s political delay strategy to put us over to November and to lease the hospital to Sutter and make the initiative a more irrelevant matter,” fumes Robert Bell, the attorney for the initiative campaign. Bell and the county will lock horns again Jan. 31 over the central issue of the measure’s legality.

Bosco’s Back

OCCIDENTAL Four-term Democratic Rep. Doug Bosco will re-enter the political arena as a candidate for the First District state Assembly seat, the same position that launched his political career in 1978. He has been out of office since 1990, when his fourth re-election bid was thwarted by Republican Frank Riggs, with a major assist from Peace and Freedom candidate Darlene Comingore. Bosco bid to recapture his congressional seat in 1994, but got only 39 percent of the Democratic primary vote. He joins a field of five other Democrats and three Republicans seeking the Assembly seat that has been held by Dan Hauser for the past 14 years. Hauser is being forced to retire under the state’s term limits law.

Pot Petitions Reinstated

SACRAMENTO The campaign to legalize the medicinal use of marijuana has reversed an earlier setback with a ruling from a Superior Court judge that their petitions to win the issue a place on the state ballot next fall are “in substantial compliance” with state election laws. Petitions carrying some 30,000 signatures had been deemed invalid by the San Francisco Registrar of Voters, owing to technicalities in the way the petitions had been printed. The ruling by Judge James T. Ford orders that those petitions be accepted. New petitions have been printed and are now being circulated, as the campaign tries to get 600,000 valid signatures by the end of April to qualify the Medical Marijuana Initiative for the November election.

Rent Control Ending

COTATI A new state law that took effect on the first of the year spells the effective end of the city’s rent control measures, which were enacted by local voters in 1979. The new law allows landlords to boost rents by 15 percent two separate times when a unit is vacated, or as much as 70 percent one time, if they can prove the existing rental rate is below local market rates. Another provision cancels Cotati’s rent control rules altogether for any unit vacated after Jan. 1, 1999. The city has about 640 rental units, including 106 mobile homes, to which the new state law does not apply. The turnover rate for rentals in Cotati is roughly 2 percent per year.

Insanity Plea

SANTA ROSA Shirley Ann Nelson, accused of shooting her ex-husband and then herself at the studio of cartoonist Charles Schulz last July, has entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity to the attempted murder charge against her. She will be examined by two court-appointed psychologists before her trial begins Jan. 29.

From the Jan. 4-10, 1996 issue of The Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Set to Break

Separate but equal songwriting partners click in Box Set

By Bruce Robinson

Make no mistake. Despite its origins as an acoustic duo, Box Set is now a full-fledged, plugged-in, five-man band. Singer-songwriters Jeff Pehrson and Jim Brunberg first expanded with a rhythm section (Chad Heise, bass, and Mark Abbott, drums), and later added keyboard player Sam Johnson to give the group a rich variety of tonal colors with which to deliver their original material, fresh, intelligent pop-folk-rock with literate lyrics and nicely turned melodies.

“When I sit down with the guitar now, I definitely start thinking about parts for five people,” says Pehrson, the amiable hulk who co-founded the San Francisco-based group–one of the most popular unsigned bands on the Bay Area club circuit. “There are so many ways we can go with the instruments, it’s really nice. Having the organ underneath opens us up to do some different things on guitar.” In addition to extra harmony voices, their tonal palette also features Johnson’s harmonica playing and Brunberg’s occasional trumpet licks.

But it was Jim’s songwriting that drew the two together in the first place. It was a chance encounter in a small San Francisco cafe called Simple Pleasures, Pehrson recalls. “One night, Jim was there during the Persian Gulf War and had a song about it that really struck me, and I went up and started talking with him, and the next thing I know, we’re making plans to go up to Oregon and play.”

Thus, with minimal forethought or fanfare, was the initial duo formed. As for their name . . . “I was coming from this band that was already formed, as was Jim, and so when we got together, it was this mishmash of a band,” Jeff says vaguely. “We figured it wouldn’t hurt, publicity-wise, because everybody and their brother was putting out a set. It finally paid off when the Steve Miller Band went out on their Box Set tour. We got thousands of phone calls: “Are you going out with Steve Miller?’ ‘No, but thanks for calling.’ “

Despite their affinity for performing together, four years later Jeff and Jim continue to compose separately, which Pehrson sees as a strength. “It’s really important for Jim and I to explore ourselves as songwriters within Box Set. It kinda adds to the diverse sound that we’re looking for, he and I are so different,” he explains. “Most bands have one writer, or they write together, and the songs come out kind of sounding the same. We don’t want one guy to take over as songwriter.”

With two prolific sources, Box Set has a wealth of new songs, which they have showcased in two early cassette-only recordings, followed by a pair of self-produced CDs, an eponymous debut in early 1994 and last year’s 27. No, it doesn’t boast that many tracks. The significance of the title is that “both Jim and I were 27 when we wrote all the songs,” Jeff confides. ‘It was kind of a fear of putting together this CD and maybe another one, and a fear of getting older and not having anything to fall back on.”

Even before recording 27, Box Set was singled out by Billboard a year ago for the industry magazine’s “Honor Roll of America’s Unsigned Talent,” a slightly unnerving bit of recognition. “We have an interest in being signed, but only the way we want to be signed,” Pehrson says cautiously, explaining that one key point is maintaining control of the publishing rights to their songs. “Major [labels] tend to take everything away from you. We don’t want to sign our lives away,” he continues. “Unless a major comes along with a deal that’s cast just for us, we’re probably looking for an independent. We’re not interested in giving anybody ownership of anything of ours right now.”

Talks are under way with a small, East Coast independent label about a licensing agreement for a planned third CD, which is due to be recorded this spring. “We’re going into the studio March 1st and work on the third one,” Pehrson says with anticipation. “That will be a year to the day after the last one.”

Box Set performs at Magnolia’s, 107 Fourth St., Santa Rosa, on Thursday, Jan. 11. The Willnots open the 9 p.m. show. Tickets are $5. 526-1007.

From the Jan. 4-10, 1996 issue of The Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Getting Back in the Flow

New downtown convention center will aid the $5 million Santa Rosa Creek restoration project

By Bruce Robinson

An old, ill-treated creek and a sparkling new hotel project might not seem to have much in common, but if all goes according to plans, they will prove mutually beneficial in downtown Santa Rosa. A new agreement between the city and Innkeeper Associates of San Francisco will open the door for collaboration between the preparatory work on the Railroad Square convention center site and the restoration of the creekbed as it flows along the edge of the property.

“It’s one of those projects that everybody feels good about, a good marriage between economic development and environmental restoration,” says Steve Rabinowitsh, chairman of the Committee for Restoring Santa Rosa Creek. “That’s an area where you can do something for the business community and the environment both.”

The 9.5-acre site at Third and Morgan streets, home of the former Grace Brothers Brewery, will become a new, long-awaited convention center and upscale hotel, just a block away from Railroad Square. But, like Santa Rosa Creek, which defines the southern edge of the property, the land has seen better days. Other past uses include a tannery, an auto dismantling yard, a gas station, and a railroad spur, “and many of them have resulted in contamination,” says Steve Burke, director of Santa Rosa Redevelopment. “There are a variety of toxic problems we’ve identified. It’s formidable.”

All those problems will have to be cleaned up before hotel construction can begin, and the city has budgeted $3 million to get the work done during the next year. Another $5 million has been set aside to undo the channelization of the creek from Santa Rosa Avenue west to Railroad Avenue. “We’re very fortunate to see the two efforts coming along at the same time,” Burke observes.

Both projects have been in the pipeline for a while. The Master Plan for restoring Santa Rosa Creek was adopted in September 1993, but noted that its implementation “may take five, 10, 25 or more years to fully realize.”

“Things don’t happen as quickly as you would like them to, but I would say the city is committed to the process,” explains Rabinowitsh. “The building blocks are getting put in place, one by one.”

This first highly visible step in the overall restoration of Santa Rosa Creek will focus on the section known in the plan as “Reach C,” which begins at Santa Rosa Avenue, where it emerges from beneath Santa Rosa City Hall and runs under Highway 101, past the old Grace Brothers property, then arcs northwesterly to Pierson Street.

The Master Plan envisions the creation of a “creek promenade” here, with pedestrian and bicycle trails, lighting and benches, paths connecting downtown and Railroad Square, and easy access between the creek and the four nearby parks.

“It will be a place to stroll, to get to shops and businesses, to get from downtown to Railroad Square,” the plan rhapsodizes, “a place to watch nature be reestablished in the creek, a place to rest, and a place to eat.”

That idyllic future contrasts sharply with the waterway’s utilitarian present, a steep, trapezoidal flood-control channel with limited access and little vegetation.

“The creek is in real poor shape,” agrees Mike Sheppard, the member of the Santa Rosa Community Development department staff who heads the city’s creek restoration task force. “The banks have been concreted over and the bottom has a concrete lining. We want to remove the lining and take it back to a more natural state and create some areas where people can walk along the creek and get down to the water’s edge, too.” The process of hiring a consultant to design a specific restoration plan is now under way.

But one major obstacle still looms, according to ecologist Marco Waaland, who served as a consultant to the Santa Rosa Creek Master Plan. “They found a couple of areas along the creek that do have some toxic material under the bed of the creek and under the concrete that lines the banks,” he says. While the Sonoma County Water Agency has accepted responsibility for some of the cleanup, the city and PG&E are disputing who should take care of another portion.

That’s also key to the redevelopment of the Grace Brothers property. “In order to entice a developer to build a convention center on that site, one of the big detriments has been the state of the property and its need to be enhanced. One of the big assets it has is the creek environment” once it is improved, says Sheppard.

Norman Rosenblatt, president of Innkeepers Associates, agrees. Their project “could go on the site without the creek, but I feel the creek is a very definite plus . . . from a visual standpoint.” The landscape plan for the center will work closely with the city to make the design mesh with the restoration work, Rosenblatt adds.

Restoration of that central segment of the creek may also bring another, less visible result–a renewed fishery. “Because of the channelized state that has existed for the past 40 years, the natural habitat along the creek has declined and [fish] find it very difficult to survive,” Sheppard says. “But as strange as it is, they do find steelhead and trout and even salmon in the upper areas around Brush Creek, which means that they somehow make it up that far. It’s hard to understand, but to some limited degree they do.”

Waaland anticipates that creation of creekside pathways under the freeway also will be cause for rejoicing among bicyclists. “This would be a link from east to west,” eventually providing a bike trail connection “all the way from the Laguna out to Melita Road, the Spring Lake area,” he says. “Right now, if you want to ride across town, you really take your life in your hands on city streets.”

Cyclists should have lots of company in pressing for further creek restoration work. “If you restore it and bring some greenery back and add some interesting stream features–boulders and pools–it’s going to make the beauty even greater,” adds Waaland. “That would generate a lot of civic support because people could see the benefit.

From the Jan. 4-10, 1996 issue of The Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Dot to Dot

News and new venues in the theatrical community

By Gretchen Giles

Now that the earth has lugged itself around the sun once again, it seems high time to open all of those mustering old files and deliver that news that hasn’t yet had a chance to gladly shine in the light of day. Things can only get less grandiose . . .

Not now saving the biggest and best for last, the news in Santa Rosa is that the upstairs space at the Lincoln Arts Center–formerly occupied by the Actors Group Playhouse–has been leased to Lennie Dean, who will reopen it as the New Theatre on Jan 5. With a commitment to the brash and the brand-new, the New Theatre will showcase original works by local playwrights as well as offer a rigorous schedule of inexpensive live performances, open-mike opportunities, and ongoing classes.

Three ongoing events are scheduled, beginning with the Bare Stage series of open-mike evenings on the first Friday of every month. Actors are encouraged to drop by and sign up to deliver five-minute monologues and short scenes. The first one is slated for Jan 5 at 7 p.m., and costs $3. A staged reading series known as “Plays on Sundays” begins Jan. 7 at 2 p.m. with Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. With only the bare essentials of lights and script, these actor- and word-based afternoons will be restricted to readings of American plays produced on and off of Broadway during the last three years, and will be acted in and directed by some stellar local talent. Upcoming Sundays include Horton Foote’s The Young Man from Atlanta on Jan. 21, and David Mamet’s Cryptogram on March 10.

Also on Sundays, Benjamin Dean will facilitate a Playwright’s Forum on the first Sunday of each month at 2 p.m. whereby those brave enough may bring their work and have it read aloud and intelligently discussed. For information about the New Theatre, call 522-9361. . . .

A new theater is struggling to birth itself up in Healdsburg with an eye to producing summer-stock musical plays modeled on the success of the Ashland, Ore., Shakespeare Festival. Logically enough named the Healdsburg Theater Company, this fledgling operation hopes to have found enough “angels” (read: backers) to open with outdoor productions of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Man of La Mancha near the downtown Plaza area next August. Company co-founder Jane St. Clair hopes to build a community coalition to benefit local merchants as well as the arts in general. . . .

And while January’s drizzle keeps our thoughts on summer, the Summer Repertory Theatre, based at Santa Rosa Junior College, has announced its 1996 season, which commences on June 19 with Big River, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and continues with Our Country’s Good, Ten Little Indians, I Remember Mama, and Cabaret, and comes to a grand end with A Lion in Winter. . . .

And while we’re still at the junior college, a Jan. 26 fundraiser entitled Rodgers & Hart: A Celebration is being mounted in order to send nine SRJC acting and design students to the American College Theatre Festival in Flagstaff, Ariz. Tickets for the fundraiser are a measly $10, and could make a huge difference in a student’s life. For details, call 527-4419. . . .

The tempest in the teapot is that both the Main Street Theatre/SCRT team and the Valley of the Moon Shakespeare company will be mounting outdoor productions of Shakespeare’s masterpiece about mastery, The Tempest, next summer. The outstanding Eric Thompson (Bullshot Crummond, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) will direct the Sonoma production, whose playing field is set in a magical grove of oaks off the Dunbar School soccer field, while MST will continue its tradition of Shakespeare in Sebastopol’s Ives Park.

From the Jan. 4-10, 1996 issue of The Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Utility Futility

Anger Runs High After Outages:
State probe of PG&E’s emergency preparedness sought

By Bruce Robinson

“It seems to me that things have changed for the worse since last year,” says Mark Foxwell. “I know that PG&E has been laying off its people and spending its money on expanding into Oregon and Washington, but they have an obligation here.”

Foxwell resides in Windsor, where he is a live-in caregiver for a disabled woman who depends on a number of electric-powered support devices, “but none of them are actually life support,” he adds. Still, he is concerned that prolonged power failures–like the one that struck the North Bay a week ago after the first blustery winter storm toppled power lines–may jeopardize others whose lives literally depend on reliable power. If the utility cannot quickly restore lifeline service to these people in the next emergency, “I guess a certain percentage of those people die,” he worries.

In Occidental, where families went more than six days without electricity, the darkness was compounded by a lack of water from pumps that could not operate. Dixie Lee Meiselbach saw her lights go out Dec. 11; they were still out and she “was down to my last gallon of water” when she left for San Francisco the following Saturday afternoon. “My hot-water tank is propane and my stove is propane, so I didn’t starve to death,” she says, “but it got awful dark and cold. The fireplace is on a heatalator [pump], and that doesn’t work when there’s no power.”

PG&E finally restored her service on Dec 17, just 16 hours short of a full week after it first went out.

But regardless of how long they were powerless, thousands of people who had to wait on service crews before they could resume their normal lives are unhappy with their local power monopoly. Eric Koenigshofer, a Santa Rosa attorney and supervisorial candidate whose Freestone home was dark for three days, wants to harness that anger and channel it to the state Public Utilities Commission. “The public needs to have an accounting of what PG&E is doing,” he says. “There are so many people expressing dissatisfaction with the PG&E response [to the storm] that I think it is appropriate to demonstrate that to the PUC.”

Koenigshofer has drafted a petition calling on the PUC to hold a hearing in Sonoma County to address the utility’s “failure to adequately serve rate payers/users in western Sonoma County.” He hopes such a review may force PG&E to reassess its emergency preparedness. “The goal is to have the PUC look at PG&E and their performance and [assess] whether or not it was adequate, because the public impression is that it was not,” Koenigshofer explains.

The utility company also came under fire after last winter’s floods for responding slowly to emergency calls.

The company’s “extremely slow reaction” to getting customers back on line was “absolutely intolerable,” the petition states. It also asserts that “the executive managers of the company have been negligent and have failed to keep the company prepared to meet its public service duty as a public utility.” In addition, it states that “the failure of PG&E to adequately maintain its power lines and other facilities, and excessive reductions in staff were obvious in this event.”

Public response was more than immediate. Even before he left the copy shop at which he had the petitions duplicated, “people working there were asking me if they could sign one or take some to circulate,” Koenigshofer says. He has no goal for the number of signatures he hopes to collect, and plans to present the petitions to the PUC in January.

According to PG&E spokesman Jeff Lewis, some 135,000 households and businesses throughout Sonoma County were affected by the scattered outages, some for a matter of hours and others for more than six days. Crews made repairs at 322 locations. Most of the longest outages were in isolated rural areas, such as Camp Meeker and Occidental, where extensive damage taxed even the generally high level of emergency preparedness. “People in rural areas are more adversely affected by power outages than people in urban areas,” says Koenigshofer, because they are dependent on electricity to power the pumps for their wells. The low-emission pellet stoves now required by the county also rely on electrical fans to function properly. “People in the outlying areas are especially hard hit, when the urban areas come on first and areas like ours just sit in the dark while our freezers defrost. That just isn’t good enough.”

He suggests that “PG&E might need to rethink how they’re allocating resources” and give a higher priority to those rural customers, especially the elderly. “There are many people whose age and physical circumstances just don’t accommodate night after night of darkness and absence of heat, no hot water, or wells that don’t operate,” Koenigshofer adds.

The widespread impacts of the windstorm, which swept across Northern California with gusts over 100 mph, knocked down 450 miles of power lines, including a line of 32 transmitter towers near Chico. The resulting damage was more severe than that caused by the 1988 Loma Prieta earthquake. “In a sense, we got hit with a hurricane,” says PG&E spokesman Lewis. “That’s something we’ve never experienced.”

Most of the worst damage “was invisible to the customer, but devastating to the system.”

PG&E canceled plans to furlough some 800 workers after the storms of last January and March, Lewis says, just to maintain a higher level of readiness. The hard choice for management, he says, is “what do you do with an extra 300 employees 360 days a year, and how do customers feel about paying for them?” Some 3,000 workers, including mutual-aid crews imported from Los Angeles and San Diego, worked 36 hour shifts to repair the damage in difficult conditions, Lewis continues, with only a single minor injury. The total repair bill is likely to exceed $40 million. “Comparing this to other similar events, we didn’t do too badly,” he says, “but it’s hard to tell customers that.”

Koenigshofer is one of the more gentle skeptics. “We have heard a lot of rumors about reductions in maintenance and staffing relating to field crews to respond to emergencies such as we just had,” he says, while at the same time, “If you track the performance of PG&E stock over the last few years, it’s been very strong. It’s clearly not acceptable if service levels are being sacrificed for the result of having stock value increase, because profits go up as expenditures go down.

“The result is that people don’t get the level of service they are paying for.”

Sigrid Hawkes, an outreach coordinator for the utility watchdog group TURN (Toward Utility Rate Normalization), is more blunt in her criticisms of PG&E. “Their best is a far cry from good enough,” she says. “There needed to be so many more crews. I understand Oregon received a very similar battering from the storm, and they mobilized the utility people early and didn’t have the weeklong outages we had here.”

TURN is strongly supportive of grassroots efforts to force the PUC’s attention to these issues, Hawkes adds, “but you have to hit them over the head with a two-by-four to get their attention.” She suggests that in addition to signing petitions, people angry with PG&E should vent their frustrations on Pete Wilson’s office, too, since “the governor appointed these fellows” on the PUC.

From the Dec. 28, 1995-Jan. 3, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

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