The Contractor’s State License Board arrested Tony Van Dang, 30, of Santa Rosa on Friday on charges that he has violated numerous state laws that regulate contractors’ work.

In a release, the CSLB says the multiple charges (four felonies and seven misdemeanors) “are the result of three consumer cases in Santa Rosa and Sebastopol where Dang allegedly took more than $26,000 from the consumers and provided minimal landscaping work before abandoning the jobs.”

Under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, Dang is innocent of all the charges unless and until he is found guilty of them. 

State law requires than any contractor job undertaken for more than $500 must use licensed labor. At the time of his arrest Friday, Dang was already in hot water with the CSLB over unlicensed-work charges stemming from a 2017 undercover sting in St. Helena. His Santa Rosa business is called the Perfect Yard, and he was arrested without incident on Friday by the Santa Rosa Police Department after a CSLB investigator responded to a Perfect Yard posting on craigslist.

In their release today, the CSLB notes that “likely there are many other consumers who’ve been victimized by Dang.” The board asks anyone who’s hired Perfect Yard to contact CSLB investigator Amanda Martinez, Am*************@*****ca.gov.

The board maintains a portal for consumers to check the license status of contractors at www.cslb.ca.gov.

“There’s far more areas ready to burn in Sonoma County than that burned,” says Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore. “And there’s far more communities that are more in harm’s way than Coffey Park ever was.”

Egads, that’s scary talk coming from the Fourth District supervisor and freshly minted head of the five-member BOS. Gauging from fire-burn maps put out by Cal-Fire, it’s pretty clear that that Windsor, which Gore represents, dodged a flaming bullet in October.

But what of this year, or the next? In the “new normal,” what’s actually being done to prevent or mitigate against future North Bay fires?

Lots, says State Sen. Bill Dodd, who represents Napa and parts of Sonoma county that got scorched. Dodd was himself evacuated and numerous of his neighbors, he says, lost their homes to October’s fires.

The North Bay legislative team in Sacramento has been doing yeoman’s work since the fires to address numerous fire-fallout questions, issuing bills that grapple with an “ember alert” early-warning system, that enact various fire-insurance reforms, and that provide property-tax bridge relief from the state to municipalities now dealing with a cratered tax base to fund the local schools.

And last week Dodd was in Santa Rosa with others from the delegation—Rep. Jim Wood, Sen. Marc Levine—to talk up SB 894, the “downed power line bill,” says Dodd, which offers the most tangible antidote to any future wildfire that may burden the region.

The bill would require utilities such as PG&E to turn off the power when weather conditions reach a critical mass of high temperature, low humidity and high wind. Those factors were all in play on the dread night of October 8, 2017.

“We know,” says Dodd, “that perhaps every fire was started by downed electrical lines in our grid. What we don’t know until the investigations’ over is who is at fault.”

Shutting of the power because it’s hot and windy and dry, Dodd concedes, is a problematic process fraught with the specter of frustrated customers hollering about false alarms. But it’s also a protocol that’s regularly deployed in states that deal with a lot of tornado activity. And in California, too: After the San Diego fires of 2003, the city used a number of available grants, Dodd says, to deploy micro weather stations that provide real-time data on wind speed, humidity and air temperature. Since 2003, San Diego hasn’t faced the fire fury, but Dodd notes that they’ve shut down the power more than a few times because of fire-friendly weather conditions.

There are also complicating factors owing to the power needs of hospitals and the hospitality sector, he says. They’ll have to “be thinking about becoming more resilient.” Translated: Buy a backup generator or a few of them.

Still, since as Dodd notes most wildfires that impact high-population areas begin in the rural interface, that’s where utilities such as PG&E ought to be focusing their turnoff attention. Under SB 894, “the utilities are going to have to get smart about where those turnoff points are,” he says, “and that urban areas aren’t necessarily shut down.”

Supporters of author and death-row inmate Jarvis Jay Masters today called for a statewide day of prayer and action for Masters as they implored Governor Jerry Brown and Attorney General Xavier Becerra to take up his cause.

Masters has been in San Quentin since the early 1980s and was implicated in the murder of prison guard Howell Burchfield in 1985. That earned him a capital charge and he spent two decades on San Quentin’s notorious “Adjustment Center” before being transferred to the East Block in 2007, where most of the state’s nearly 800  condemned men are held. He has maintained his innocence all along and has written a couple of books about his experiences in prison and his rough childhood. One of his big supporters is the American Buddhist Pema Chodron.

The website www.freejarvis.org provides a portal to send a letter to Brown and/or Becerra asking that they tune in to Masters’ plight. He did not prevail in his latest appeal to the California State Supreme Court in 2016. An email from the group of Jarvis supporters reports that he is in poor health as a result of his latest hunger strike, which he initiated in November.

I toured San Quentin’s various death houses a couple of years ago and spent some time with Masters interviewing him outside his cell. I’d been a fan of his 2009 This Bird Has My Wings and really couldn’t believe it when I walked by his cell on the ground floor of the East Block. I extended greetings from a fan of his in New Orleans who had first turned me on to Masters’ books and he lit up in a huge, warm smile. He showed me his writing kit—a bucket for a chair, a pen, a writing cap he always wore. Buddhism had helped him to deal with the intensity of the isolation and stress of the experience.  “Spiritual grounding is a real, real enduring force if you ever find yourself in a situation like this,” he told me.

The state’s execution protocols remain in limbo owing to ongoing issues around the constitutionality of the practice.