A group of Napa County neighbors fed up with odor, noise and light intrusions are pushing for a review of how Upper Valley Disposal Service operates its Whitehall Lane facility.
About 35 residents, county officials and UVDS representatives met via Zoom Tuesday evening to have what county Supervisor Diane Dillon hoped would be “a productive dialogue” regarding years of complaints about the facility’s impacts on the local community.
Neighbors in the bucolic agricultural area say they’ve endured terrible smells, loud noises and bright lights that intrude on their sleep and prevent them from enjoying their homes and property.
Whitehall Lane resident John Williams said the facility’s impacts are so bad that “you’re ready to sell your property.”
“This is not a small problem,” Williams said.
Another neighbor, Lauren Pesch, said the odors ebb and flow during different times of the year but “when it’s smelling, it smells really bad.”
“For the past three or four years, we haven’t been able to enjoy where we live,” Pesch said.
Some residents said they’ve complained about the facility, which handles recycling and processes compost, to county and company officials but still feel like their concerns are falling on deaf ears and would like an independent third-party to review the facility’s operations.
Christy Pestoni, UVDS chief operating officer, assured the neighbors that the company is working hard to address their concerns and has taken several steps to reduce the facility’s impacts.
“We’ve made a lot of what we feel are accomplishments in the past 20 months,” Pestoni said, noting that she has met with neighbors a number of times to listen to their concerns.
The company has taken on a new management team, worked to clean up the facility and added a new aeration system to a holding pond that in the past has been a source of odors, she said.
She also said UVDS has installed new equipment and improved the way they process grape pomace from the wine industry in an effort to reduce odors and have decided against accepting commercial food waste at the facility, which has been processing recycling since 1963 and compost since 1966.
This year, the company does plan to start accepting residential food scraps equal to 1 percent of the of all the household green waste and grape pomace it processes, which totals roughly 20,000 tons in a typical year.
Pestoni said the residential food scrap program won’t require additional trucks or operating times at the facility.
Also, the company has made changes to the facility’s outdoor lighting and told neighbors that if the lights are still bothering them “to reach out and let us know,” Pestoni said.
UVDS has also taken steps to reduce some of the noise neighbors have complained about and plans to add more than 200 trees and shrubs around the facility in order to help screen it from nearby homes, she said.
Bryce Howard, the company’s general manager, said they’re looking at additional steps they can take to further mitigate the noise issues.
“There have been dramatic improvements and there’s still more to do,” Howard said.
Pestoni, who said her family has lived in the neighborhood since 1921, also offered to give people a tour of the facility if they’re interested.
Peter Ex, the county’s solid waste program manager, said the facility’s operations were “trending in a positive direction” and that he will work with the company on a better process for neighbors to report odor issues.
Dillon, the Napa County supervisor, also sits on the Upper Valley Waste Management Agency board, which has some oversight responsibilities for the facility.
She said she would look into to the neighbors’ request for a third-party review of the facility’s operations and get back to them.
In the North Bay’s agricultural community, Larry Peter is often presented as a hardworking and charitable dairyman who took a big risk by going into debt to purchase the Petaluma Creamery in 2004.
However, public records obtained by the Bohemian show that the story is more complicated. Over the past 20 years, Peter has racked up complaints with city, county and state regulators, and often failed to fix problems in a timely fashion.
Instead, Peter and his attorneys often cite his central role in the North Bay’s historic dairy industry and his business’s financial struggles as a reason regulators should go easy on him.
For a long time, Peter’s strategy seems to have worked well enough, but, as the Bohemian reported last month, Peter’s time running the historic Petaluma Creamery may be coming to an unceremonious end.
In a Dec. 21 letter to Peter, City Manager Peggy Flynn, citing the Creamery’s history of unpaid fines and uncompleted safety requirements, threatened to effectively shut down the business at the end of February if it does not complete a long list of safety improvements. Two months later, as the deadline nears, it appears Petaluma is sticking to its threat, despite Peter’s request for extensions.
In a Feb. 5 letter to Peter, Flynn stated that the city is still considering placing a lien on the Creamery to collect some of the business’s unpaid water use fees and fines, which city officials say total $1,425,258. On Friday, Feb. 19, Flynn told the Bohemian “we are working with the Creamery to gain compliance and that effort continues. There have been no extensions granted, and the February 28 deadline currently stands.”
The prospect of closing the historic Creamery, even temporarily, no doubt dismays members of the North Bay’s agricultural community. However, Peter’s track record begs the question: when do repeated code violations require a stronger response from regulators?
For instance, at the same time the Petaluma Creamery racked up fines and unpaid water bills in Petaluma, officials from the Sonoma County permitting and North Coast Water Quality Control Board attempted to get Peter’s Two Rock dairy to comply with environmental and building regulations.
And, although Peter and his attorneys routinely referenced the struggles of Peter’s businesses in conversations with regulators, public records show Peter has taken out loans to purchase numerous North Bay properties instead of paying off his decade-old debt to the city of Petaluma or bringing the Creamery into compliance with safety requirements.
Peter did not reply to a request for comment.
County Complaints
Over the past 20 years, Peter’s dairy business, located on Spring Hill Road in Southern Sonoma County’s dairy-heavy Two Rock area, was under scrutiny by Permit Sonoma, the county’s building code enforcement agency, for over a decade, and raised serious concern from a regional water regulator.
Between 2001 and 2004, inspectors with Permit Sonoma opened a series of investigations about the state of Peter’s property.
The range of alleged code violations included operating a creamery out of an unpermitted building, burying trash on the property, completing grading work without a permit and installing a handful of unpermitted buildings to house workers and host visitors on educational tours.
In a July 28, 2006 hearing with Permit Sonoma officials in front of an administrative law judge, Peter, who had recently purchased the Petaluma Creamery in downtown Petaluma, said he thought the structures were allowed by the property’s agricultural zoning or, in the case of the Creamery building, which he said was built in 1947 by a previous owner, were grandfathered into the property.
Peter told the judge he purchased the Creamery, in part, to comply with Permit Sonoma’s investigation. Now, he said, the Creamery was on the verge of bankruptcy.
The administrative judge ultimately ordered Peter to receive proper permits for some of the buildings identified by Permit Sonoma, to stop making cheese on the property, fix some other problems on the property and to pay fines for some of the unpermitted work discovered by inspectors.
But the case, which might have seemed close to complete, remained open for nearly a decade. After years of stops and starts, all of the necessary work was finally permitted and completed in October 2014. Then, all that remained was to come to a financial settlement, to cover Peter’s unpaid fines and cover the county’s expenses.
Eric Koenigshofer, an Occidental attorney and former West Sonoma County supervisor, represented Peter in his drawn-out fight with the county’s building permit agency.
On Dec. 8, 2015, Deputy County Counsel Holly Rickett responded, in frustration, to a May 2015 letter in which Koenigshofer laid out Peter’s defense.
“In sum Mr. Peter ‘argues’ that he is a good guy who provides important components to the Sonoma agricultural economy; that he did not rebuke the county and didn’t benefit financially from the delay; that he made some mistakes; and that ‘financial constraints’ kept him from coming into compliance sooner,” Rickett wrote.
Still, despite Rickett’s skepticism about whether Peter’s story would hold up in front of a jury, she told Koenigshofer that the county had agreed to knock down the fine considerably.
During the July 2006 hearing, a county permit official calculated Peter’s outstanding fines at $33,775, if Peter failed to file for the proper permits within 30 days.
By December 2015, Rickett said that the total bill had reached $83,717.88, due to daily non-compliance fines in addition to county lawyer’s fees.
But, instead of standing firm, Rickett told Koenigshofer that the county had agreed to drop a daily fine against Peter and cut the five years of county lawyers’ fees by 15 percent.
On Jan. 5, 2016, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors approved a $35,000 settlement with Peter for his permit violations, a meeting document shows. So, despite spending almost 10 years trying to get Peter’s property into compliance, the county settled for little more than it asked for in the 2006 hearing.
Koenigshofer did not reply to a request for comment about his work for Peter.
Waste Waters
But that wasn’t all. While county officials hounded Peter for building violations, the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office and state regulators pursued him for spilling nearly 50,000 gallons of wastewater into a streambed near his dairy property.
The saga began on Jan. 2, 2009, when state environmental regulators, responding to a tip, discovered dairy employees attempting to pump the manure waste water out of a stream bed down the hill from Peter’s Spring Hill Road dairy.
According to an account written by the state inspectors, dairy employees said the manure water spilled while they were trying to transfer it from one holding pond to another, days ahead of a projected rainstorm. Instead, the waste water spilled from the transfer pipe and down the hillside, where it began to form pools—some of them two-feet deep—in a dry stream bed nearly a mile from the sewage storage ponds on Peter’s dairy.
According to an account of the spill by a North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board (NCRWQCB) inspector, dairy employees hauled away 13 truckloads of the manure water on the afternoon of Jan. 2, for a total of 49,100 gallons of manure water. The dairy employees later used 35 truckloads of fresh water to wash the creek bed clean.
One of the neighbors told state regulators they first saw the spill on the afternoon of Dec. 31, two days before the state investigators arrived.
Two of Peter’s neighbors told inspectors at the time that manure spills were a common occurrence, though maybe not on the same scale.
“Manure water releases similar to this have been an ongoing problem, but agencies have not done anything about it,” one neighbor was quoted as saying.
In a July 2009 letter to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office, Luis Rivera, then the acting assistant executive director of the NCRWQCB, recommended the District Attorney’s office press criminal charges against Peter for failing to notify regulators of his plans to move the wastewater, or of the spill once it happened, a violation of the state’s Water Code.
“Mr. Peter never filed a report of waste discharge prior to pumping out his pond, and allowing the waste water to flow to the creek,” Rivera wrote in his letter to county officials.
The spill was particularly notable because of the location of Peter’s dairy in the Stemple Creek watershed, a dairy-rich area surrounding a creek which bisects the Sonoma-Marin County border.
The Stemple Creek watershed, which is home to many dairies, was added to a federal list impaired waterways in 1990.
The watershed has been listed as “impaired” since 1990, a undesirable designation under the federal Clean Water Act, which indicates that a body of water has excessive levels of pollutants. In the case of Stemple Creek, it’s an excessive amount of nutrients and sediments in large part tied to the region’s heavy concentration of industrial agriculture operations.
A 1997 Water Board report states that the “Manure from concentrated animal feeding operations (dairies and poultry) has been identified as the primary source of the impaired water quality conditions in the Stemple Creek watershed.”
Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch’s office did not press criminal charges, but did pursue a civil case against Peter for unlawfully discharging wastewater.
On Feb. 14, 2012, Peter reached a court settlement with Ravitch’s office which required Peter to pay a small fine and to join the Water Board’s dairy waste regulation program, which, among other things, required him to file annual reports with the board.
However, Peter failed to follow the rules of the settlement.
In June 2014, Ravitch’s office took Peter to court again for failing to file his report with the Water Board two years in a row. In November 2014, the Water Board fined Peter $37,125 for failing to file reports properly.
Cherie Blatt, a water resource control engineer with the Water Board, told the Bohemian that Peter has paid the fine and filed annual reports properly since 2014. The Water Board has not received reports of a significant spill on the property since the 2009 incident, according to Blatt.
Purchases
Over the past six years, Peter has received press coverage for buying new businesses. The articles do not mention that he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Petaluma at the time of the purchases.
In July 2015, while Koenigshofer negotiated a settlement with Permit Sonoma, Peter purchased the Washoe House, a historic bar outside of Petaluma, according topress coverage from the time. Also in 2015, he purchased the Tomales Bakery in Marin County, Marin Magazinereported.
Property records reviewed by the Bohemian indicate that those purchases were part of a larger trend. In recent years, Peter took out large loans from banks, as well as smaller loans from members of some of Sonoma County’s older dairy families, to finance a string of property purchases.
In September 2018, for instance, Peter’s dairy property company, Western Dairy Properties, paid $3,900,000for a property near his Spring Hill Road dairy.
On Nov. 20, 2020, Western Dairy Properties purchased a dairy farm on Peterson Road outside of Sebastopol for $2.1 million.
Peter has even continued to buy property after Petaluma ramped up its threats to close the Creamery in December. In January, Peter purchased two properties on Santa Rosa’s Mission Boulevard, according to public records.
Petaluma Cracks Down
In her Dec. 21 letter to Peter, after two small fires broke out at the Creamery in six months, Flynn, the Petaluma city manager, threatened to effectively shut down the business if it fails to meet a long list of safety improvements before the end of February.
Two follow-up letters sent by Flynn to Peter on Feb. 5 and Feb. 19 indicate the city is sticking to its threat to revoke the Creamery’s water-use permit and to decline to issue a crucial safety permit on March 1, despite Peter’s pleas for more time.
In a Feb. 5 letter, Flynn batted away Peter’s go-to argument: that his business is central to the region’s agribusiness and that its struggles to comply with regulations and pay fines are an inherent trait of the modern dairy business.
“We would like nothing better than to have the Creamery around for another 100 years—if it were operating responsibly,” Flynn wrote.
“While the dairy industry continues to struggle, the issue with the Creamery is not one of sustainability, but of accountability. Similar ag-supporting businesses in our community meet the rules and regulations, despite the challenges experienced in the industry. It is good, and necessary, for business,” Flynn added.
While it seems the city will stick to its threats this time, the crackdown has been a long time in coming—and, at least in part, pushed by an outside actor.
A February 2018 audit of the city’s wastewater pretreatment program obtained by the Bohemian states that members of the city’s Environmental Services staff outlined seven ways to increase the city’s enforcement efforts in a Jan. 5, 2016, letter to the city’s Director of Public Works and Utilities.
The recommendations ranged from requiring the Creamery to install additional monitoring equipment, temporarily shutting down the Creamery until it “demonstrates permit compliance” or immediately revoking the Creamery’s wastewater permit.
Although a city permit issued on Nov. 1, 2016 required the Creamery to install additional water bypass equipment, “none of the other recommendations in the memo have been implemented,” the 2018 audit, which was completed by a contractor to fulfill an Environmental Protection Agency requirement, states. As a result of the lack of action, the audit ordered the city to increase its enforcement efforts.
“The City is required to implement its [enforcement response plan] ERP by taking enforcement action to address Petaluma Creamery’s pattern of noncompliance and failure to comply with the bypass monitoring requirement of its permit,” the audit stated.
In April 2018, two months after receiving the audit, the city launched a legal action against the Creamery. And, in November 2018, a judge ruled that Peter owed the city $624,046.06 in 24 monthly installments. But, Peter did not pay the full amount by the Dec. 31, 2020 deadline, according to Jordan Green, a deputy city attorney.
Now, the city appears to be on the verge of closing the Creamery, at least temporarily, until Peter, or a new owner, brings it into compliance with safety regulations.
Throughout February, the Marin County Free Library has hosted a slew of virtual events and other programming pertaining to Black History Month. This week, the library presents several more events, including “Food for the Soul: Black Experience in Marin,” which invites the public to hear a cross-generational panel discussion about living while Black in Marin. The online event brings together County of Marin African American Employee Association leader Meloni Page, youth activist Sophia Martin, Tam Wellness coordinator Amber Allen-Pierson, PLAY Marin Executive Director Paul Austin and others on Thursday, Feb. 25, at 7pm. Free. Marinlibrary.org.
Virtual Reading
Longtime educator Lauren Coodley is the author of three books on Napa history, as well as a textbook of California history and a biography of Upton Sinclair. On March 1, Coodley will release her latest book, Lost Napa Valley; and this week she participates in an online reading and discussion with the Napa County Historical Society as part of the society’s “Who Tells Our Story” event series. Lost Napa Valley takes a deeper look into once-beloved Wine Country landmarks, like the Kay Von Drive-In and the Bel Aire Bowl, that now live on only in memory. Coodley launches the book on Thursday, Feb. 25, at 7pm. Free. Napahistory.org.
Virtual Event
Later this year, the Museum of Sonoma County will exhibit “Collective Arising: A Positionality of Insistence from Black Bay Area Artists,” which tells the story of how Black artists in the Bay Area turned to artists’ collectives to help amplify their voices. This week, exhibit co-curators Ashara Ekundayo and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh will discuss the history of artists’ collectives and their philosophical and political foundations. The two will also preview the forthcoming exhibit, which will feature varied works made by contemporary Black artists living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Join the discussion on Thursday, Feb. 25, at 7pm. Free. Museumsc.org.
Virtual Variety Show
Last year, Occidental Center for the Arts took to the internet to present streaming entertainment in the wake of Covid, and the center wraps up February with its fifth virtual variety show, titled “Winter Classic.” The show will emphasize early 20th century classics and standards, and features pianist Mary Watkins (pictured) and members of the Santa Rosa Symphony. Other stellar musical acts to be included are Dirty Cello Band, Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco, Eric Wiley, Black Brothers Band, Jazz Messengers, Black Sheep Brass Band and a dramatic performance by Steve Fowler and Andrea Van Dyke from Richard Sheridan’s comedy of manners, “The Rivals” (1775). The “Winter Classic” is presented on Saturday, Feb. 27, at 8pm. Free; Donations appreciated. Occidentalcenterforthearts.org.
Virtual Concert
One of the first orchestras to make virtual orchestral concerts a reality, the Santa Rosa Symphony returns to the digital stage this weekend for another stirring presentation as part of its “SRS @ Home” series. Music director Francesco Lecce-Chong conducts the orchestra in a performance of Antonín Dvořák’s “Czech Suite,” Richard Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” and works by prolific African-American composer William Grant Still and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. The online presentation is preceded by a live, pre-concert talk and followed by a live, post-concert Q & A with Lecce-Chong—all on YouTube on Sunday, Feb. 28. Talk, 2pm; concert, 3pm. Free. Srsymphony.org.
Artist and educator M. Louise Stanley—“Lulu” to her friends—captures the imagination and confronts social issues through a humorous storytelling style of art that has made her a Bay Area legend for half a century.
Now, MarinMOCA in Novato is celebrating Stanley’s impressive body of work in a new retrospective exhibition, “M. Louise Stanley: No Regrets.”
Drawing from 50 years of Stanley’s art—and highlighting her socially conscious subject matter—the exhibit opens for by-appointment viewing on Saturday Feb. 27 and runs through April 18.
“When you begin, you don’t know where you’re going, and you don’t know where you’ll end up,” Stanley says. A granddaughter of missionaries, Stanley says she knew at a young age that “art was going to be my religion.”
Already a technically proficient artist when she came to the Bay Area in 1965 from Southern California to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts—now called the California College of the Arts—she wanted to be more than proficient.
“In those years, you had to have an authentic mark,” Stanley says. “You had to develop your own style that you could put your name to. That was my big quest.”
In graduate school, Stanley and her friends started a practice of making “bad art” that would allow them to break all the rules of “serious art.”
From there, she became involved in artist movements like the feminist movement of the 1970s. Yet, Stanley often stands alone in the art world for the boldness and deft commentary found in her richly colored paintings, which can simultaneously evoke the power of ancient Gods or the milieu of modern banality.
Stanley’s most famous works feature exaggerated characterizations of subjects that range from 1940s housewives to ancient Roman deities. These subjects often appear in juxtaposing, post-modern scenarios that find angelic muses hunched over computers or Venus applying lipstick while surrounded by beer cans.
“You don’t draw what you see, you draw how you feel about it,” Stanley says. “The reason I was distorting the figures, I was trying to get at the idea of a person, not necessarily what they looked like, but how I felt about them.”
At times, Stanley enhances her neoclassical scenes by painting classical faux-frames on the edges of her canvas or creating works that resemble altarpieces called “predellas.”
“I paint Italian paintings with an American accent,” Stanley says.
After exhibiting in five solo shows in 2019, Stanley went into retrospective mode at the onset of Covid, though she still draws in her sketchbooks and makes artistic protest signs.
“I like to paint with my friends and have a dialogue over the paint,” she says. “I don’t know when it’s going to get back to that, but you have to live day to day and do what you’re going to do. I can’t wait to finish framing (for this show) so I can get back to painting!”
“M. Louise Stanley: No Regrets” opens for by-appointment viewing on Saturday, Feb. 27, at MarinMOCA, 500 Palm Dr., Novato. Marinmoca.org/visit.
In his first few months as Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell has given us a preview of how Republicans will behave for the next four years. They will use every tool at their disposal, like the filibuster, to cling to power and stop progress. They used it to block civil rights legislation in the ’60s. They used it to block background checks for gun sales in 2013. And they’ll use it to block EVERYTHING Democrats want to do in 2021.
Republicans have changed the rules to entrench their power, and we need to fight fire with fire. The only reason Mitch McConnell hasn’t already gotten rid of the filibuster is because he hasn’t needed to. He has changed the rules in order to pack federal courts with judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade, declare the ACA unconstitutional and go after our civil rights, at a minimum.
Democrats won the majority, and they should act like it. They promised Americans bold relief and they shouldn’t let Republicans use procedural hurdles like the filibuster to block their agenda. The best chance of keeping Republicans from permanently controlling the levers of power is by passing big, bold democracy reforms—and the only way we do that is by eliminating the filibuster. Mitch McConnell is too eager to use it.
Born in the Czech Republic and now based in Sonoma County, Lenkadu is an avant-garde performer who uses her voices as her instrument and combines eye-popping visuals to accompany her far-out music.
Lenkadu shows off her full range of dynamic and emotional artistry in the new single, “Birthing,” available now for streaming on Spotify and other platforms and as a music video via YouTube.
“I wrote this song from the experience of giving birth to our son,” Lenkadu writes in a statement. “Birthing for me was a sublime participation in mother nature’s ingenious design for creating and protecting life. My mind and body worked in a unison, allowing me to relax as I was carried on the journey of life and filling me with confidence in my capacity to endure.”
For the new single, Lenkadu utilized audio samples of her son nursing, manipulated vocal tracks that move from stratospheric heights to animal-like lows, exotic scales and pulsing tribal rhythms. Lenkadu’s mentor, Boston-based electronic musician Lucid Creatures contributed beats and bass for the song, and Patrick Stephenson contributed to the visuals for the music video; the rest was self-produced by Lenkadu in her ‘Magic Garden’ studio.
As the song transforms from gentle anthem into a dance track, Lenkadu sings both in English and Czech, painting a rich visual picture of her experiences in motherhood.
“Birthing also taught me that pain is an inherent part of a major transformation,” Lenkadu writes. “Before giving birth, pain to me was something to avoid, a signal to retract from whatever I was doing. While birthing my baby and simultaneously a new version of myself, I had to recode my relationship to pain. To surrender, participate, even welcome pain, ride the current wave, breathe before the next wave hits and most of all just be, be present.”
Like her other recent releases, “Birthing” showcases an artist pushing musical boundaries while taking on the new role of motherhood and enduring a pandemic.
“Our current world is filled with much pain and mourning, forcing us to reinvent how we take care of ourselves and others,” Lenkadu writes. “Filled with confidence in nature’s coherent design and in our human capacity to endure, I hope this song can bring a reassurance that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.”
“Birthing” is available to stream now on Spotify, and the music video is on YouTube.
The Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS) responded last week to an investigative report published in the North Bay Bohemian and Pacific Sun in early December.
On Tuesday, Feb. 9, PRNS staff sent out an email newsletter titled “Corrections to Media Coverage on the General Management Plan Amendment” to an unknown number of recipients. The agency posted the same text to a Frequently Asked Questions page of its website under the subtitle “Corrections regarding misinformation published in the press.”
The newsletter presents itself as an effort to correct alleged “factual inaccuracies” in “Apocalypse Cow: The Future of Life at Point Reyes National Park,” an investigative article by Peter Byrne published in the Bohemian and Pacific Sun on Dec. 9, 2020. However, PRNS management’s statements about the facts presented in the article are demonstrably inaccurate.
Two month’s prior to the seashore park’s posting of these public facing messages, on Dec.15, PRNS’s Melanie Gunn emailed the Pacific Sun’s editors contesting the accuracy of several facts as reported in “Apocalypse Cow.”
The editors reviewed Gunn’s allegations and decided that the article was accurate. In a Dec. 21 email, news editor Will Carruthers informed Gunn that the article was factually correct and offered to participate in an electronic meeting with Gunn and Byrne to discuss the documentation of the facts.
Gunn did not respond to the Pacific Sun’s offer. Instead, almost two months later, NPS officials published a revised version of Gunn’s original allegations in the newsletter and on its website without first contacting the Pacific Sun for a response.
In an email to Gunn and the Seashore’s new superintendent, Craig Kenkel, last week, Byrne requested that the federal agency remove the inaccurate information from its website and send a retraction to the newsletter email list. Byrne sent the park officials and their bosses at the U.S. Department of Interior a factually detailed rebuttal of the allegations. So far, the agency has not issued a retraction, nor has it removed the offensive information from the website.
The PRNS’s campaign to push back on Byrne’s reporting comes weeks after Kenkel was appointed by the outgoing Trump administration as superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore. In his prior position, Kenkel served as superintendent of Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio, a national park which offers leases to farmers.
In a December interview with thePoint Reyes Light, Kenkel was open to extending 20-year leases to cattle ranchers using the PRNS, stating that there is “a long history of ranching at Point Reyes” which is “worth preserving.”
Below we respond to a few of the Park Service’s allegations about our reporting. A full rebuttal to the allegations is available here.
Park or Seashore?
The PRNS’s first allegation is that the article’s headline is “wrong.”
“The park name is Point Reyes National Seashore not Point Reyes National Park,” the Feb. 9 newsletter complains.
Whether or not the use of “Seashore” or “Park” meaningfully changed any readers’ understanding of the issues covered in the article, Gunn’s first allegation is undercut by the Park Service’s own publications.
The PRNS website features a subhead reading “Learn About the Park” and other references flagging the National Seashore as a “park.”
The NPS also uses “park” to refer to the PRNS in a standard lease issued to ranchers by the PRNS which defines the “Park” as “all lands, waters and structures within the legislative boundaries of or within areas administered by Point Reyes National Seashore…”
Despite using “park” in the headline, Apocalypse Cow repeatedly referred to the park by its more formal appellation — Point Reyes National Seashore — throughout the story.
Protected Species
The PRNS’ Feb. 9 newsletter alleges that the article inaccurately identified Tule Elk as a threatened or endangered species, which are legal terms. The article did not use those terms. It correctly identified tule elk as a “federally protected species,” which is a true statement supported by the Park Service’s written policy.
The elk have long received federal protections inside the park, leading to the Pacific Sun’s choice to refer to them as “federally protected.” For example, the Park Service’s’ 1998 “Tule Elk Management Plan” repeatedly refers to the elk as “protected”:
The NPS has an agreement with California binding it to “Protect and preserve the tule elk population at Tomales Point consistent with NPS policies.”
“Tule elk are a distinct subspecies of elk endemic to California that was given special protective emphasis by State and Federal agencies (Phillips 1976), although it is not a state or federally listed threatened or endangered species.”
Unfortunately, in accusing the Pacific Sun of factual inaccuracy, the Park Service has resorted to issuing false statements about a critical story. For more details documenting the Park Service’s errors, please see the Pacific Sun’s full response.
Gummies aren’t just for kids anymore. The cannabis-infused, gelatine-based, chewable sweets are meant for adults every day of the year—and especially on Valentine’s Day. Pumped up with CBD and THC, they’re just what the doctor ordered, and they’re one of the most popular products at cannabis retailers all over California.
Eli Melrod, co-founder and CEO at Sebastopol’s Solful—often voted the best dispensary in Sonoma County—tells me that 50 percent of all edible sales at his shop are for gummies. “People, from 22 to 82, want them for sleep,” he tells me. “There are a lot of different products to choose from.” Melrod adds, “If you have never smoked or inhaled, a gummy is a good way to start using cannabis. Gummies will help save your lungs.”
I like gummies because there’s no muss and no fuss. I don’t have to roll a joint, which can be tricky, or bother with matches, a lighter or an ashtray.
Recently, California-based cannabis manufacturer Plus sent me five small, round tins with CBD and THC. The THC strains are named “Granddaddy Purple,” “Lemon Jack” and “Pineapple Express.” The first is an indica, the second a sativa and the third a hybrid. The CBD gummy, which is good for sleep, also contains melatonin. I’ve tried them all and I‘ve enjoyed them.
Ari Mackler, Ph.D. and MBA, the chief scientist at Plus, likes gummies because no combustion is involved, they don’t have carcinogens, they fit into a purse or a backpack and they are precisely dosed. “I never had cannabis until relatively recently, as an adult” Mackler tells me. “I was a product of Nancy Reagan.” The First Lady’s “Just Say No” campaign in the 1980s discouraged some Americans from using cannabis, though sooner or later they were brave enough to smoke a joint, get high and enjoy the sensations.
Mackler became interested in cannabis as medicine when he met patients who used CBD to help them cope with epilepsy. “That blew my mind,” he tells me. “I changed the way I thought about the marijuana plant.”
During a longish phone conversation, Mackler suggested that when I use cannabis I pay attention to the smell, the taste and the feeling. “Try to unpack the complex combination of senses,” he says. “Appreciate the chemistry, the psychological and the physiological. Plus, gummies have terpenes as well as THC and CBD. The combination of ingredients creates the entourage effect.”
My favorite gummies are vegan. They’re made by Elefante, an SF-based company that also makes topicals and pre-rolls. The Elefante gummies are also handmade.
In the brave new gummy world, mindfulness is my new mantra. Hey, Nancy and Ronnie: you don’t know what you’re missing.
Jonah Raskin wrote this column after eating a gummy with no CBD and a lot of THC.
I’m kind of a food pleb. For my last meal, I would likely request a sandwich and a cup of tea. I would ask for it to be served with a novel.
But this week marks the start of Sonoma County Restaurant Week (February 19-28), which puts me in mind of favorite restaurants, both past and present. Let’s start with the former this week and the present next.
My love of cross-cultural cuisine began at the legendary-but-now-defunct Aram’s Cafe in Petaluma in the ’90s. My best friend and I were 15 and trying hard to appear 20. Come Saturday we would snag a table at Aram’s; an act terribly bohemian. After ordering braised vegetables and rice—the cheapest dish on the menu—we’d read Rob Brezsny’s horoscopes out loud and nod sagely. Then, in hushed tones, we’d weave elaborate stories about our fellow diners. The cafe was right in the hub of downtown and provided prime people-watching for us teens, whose only real excitement was born of our own imaginations.
I think what we gravitated to most was the ritual nature of it: always the same guy reading a newspaper out front, the same cast of characters parading by and the same waitress, who we idolized. One Saturday our waitress asked if we liked chicken. I told her that I loved chicken and that coincidentally my last name meant chicken in Polish. I pronounced it in the Polish way, feeling very cultured and at least 18 years old. She suggested I try the pomegranate chicken. “We’re kind of known for it,” she said. Well. If she wanted me to try the pomegranate chicken, by Jove I would splash out and try the chicken. “I’ll only charge you for the braised vegetables,” she said, winking at me before sashaying away to place our order. I nearly passed out from adoration.
I remember my first taste of that piquant pomegranate sauce—simultaneously sweet and tart—and the dark meat of the chicken falling off the bone. It was sublime. The pomegranate is a fruit ascribed manifold meaning: prosperity, fertility, marriage, immortality and so on. It is even thought to be the actual fruit from the tree of knowledge. How about that? Like Mediterranean cuisine, the pomegranate splits itself across cultures and is as abundant in symbology as it is in seeds. I’m sure I tasted all of that infused into the syrup as I ecstatically cleared my plate, and as my vegetarian friend tried hard not to convey her disgust that I was consuming a once-living creature’s flesh. Between that memorable dish and the flaky baklava Suzy slipped us as we left, is it any wonder I fell for Mediterranean cuisine?
I was gutted when Aram’s closed. But to my delight upon moving back here in my 30s, I discovered that the Speakeasy, only steps down from the former Aram’s, had acquired the recipe for their pomegranate chicken. All was not lost! It was still the same recipe all right. I got that divine fix of fowl each time my swing band played The Big Easy. Sadly, it’s no longer on the menu, so I’ll have to make do with the tangy memory hanging on the tip of my tongue. I’m actually salivating thinking about it, so I was perhaps being disingenuous about having a simple sandwich for my last meal. It’s pretty obvious what I should choose: pomegranate chicken with a side of braised vegetables and baklava for dessert.
Alia Curchack Beeton is a multidisciplinary performer who blogs at LucidLipsLifeLetters.com. Her essay collection, “The Miraculous Lives in the House of the Mundane,” is coming soon.
A group of Napa County neighbors fed up with odor, noise and light intrusions are pushing for a review of how Upper Valley Disposal Service operates its Whitehall Lane facility.
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Virtual Event
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By Sandra Rae Davies
My poems are great
Don’t wait
Until I’m famous
Artists foresee
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So asking $10.00 for my poem
People say I’m crazed
Quite the contrary
BOLD
I’m a star poet
I know it
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Love in your tummy
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Eli Melrod, co-founder and CEO at Sebastopol’s...
Remembrance of Purple Poultry Past
I’m kind of a food pleb. For my last meal, I would likely request a sandwich and a cup of tea. I would ask for it to be served with a novel.
But this week marks the start of Sonoma County Restaurant Week (February 19-28), which puts me in mind of favorite restaurants, both past and...
