GHOST POTS

California’s crab fleet is back in action after many months of being stuck at the dock waiting for domoic acid levels to drop in the Dungeness fishery. Now that they’re back to work, State Sen. Mike McGuire,
D-Healdsburg, has another crab-related bill he’s pushing through the Legislature—one to keep the ocean free of lost crab gear, or “ghost pots,” as they’re called. McGuire last week offered a bill that aims to help California’s whale population from getting entangled in lost or abandoned crab gear that litters the ocean floor. His bill, SB 1287, provides incentives to fishermen “to retrieve Dungeness crab fishing gear that would otherwise be lost.”

It’s the first program of its kind in California that isn’t a voluntary pilot program; other coastal states have also enacted ghost-pot retrieval laws. Every year, writes McGuire’s office in a release, hundreds of pots, some with hundreds of feet of rope attached, are lost during the fishing season. Whales get entangled in the gear, and it’s a bad scene for the mammals.

The McGuire plan would be administered through the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. Who’s going to pay those incentives to gear retrievers? The crabbers themselves will fund the program. Under McGuire’s bill, the crabber whose lost or abandoned pot is retrieved will pay a retrieval fee once it’s been salvaged. That fee has yet to be set by Fish and Wildlife.

A single commercial Dungeness crab pot retails for around $100, according to online sources. They’re not cheap to replace. Does the fisherman who lost the pot at least get it back after paying the retrieval fee? Yes, he does. The State Senate’s Natural Resources Committee takes up the McGuire bill on April 12.

WEEP AND QUAIL

Petaluma-based vegetable and quail-egg farmer Molly Myerson recently lost her business to a fire, a tough deal for her and the Bay Area restaurants that purchase her eggs and produce. Myerson, a thirty-something native of New York City, operates the one-acre Little Wing Farm between Bloomfield and Tomales, and was profiled in these pages last Thanksgiving for the amazing, locally sourced holiday menu she contributed to the pages of the equally amazing, locally sourced Inverness Almanac. There was a benefit for Myerson at the restaurant Saltwater in Inverness last week, the first of a few that are in the offing as Myerson tries to get back on her feet. If you want to help her out, contact Myerson directly: PO Box 2770, Petaluma 94953.

GO RENTAL

Santa Rosa City Council member Julie Combs sent us a heads-up text last week as the Santa Rosa City Council was voting on a couple of rent-related regulations that we wrote about last month. Combs reported that a rent-stabilization and a just-cause-for-eviction measure were voted out of a council subcommittee “with a recommendation to support” on April 1. Those measures will come up for a full vote on May 10 and would enact a so-called soft rent stabilization program that won’t come with a big new enforcement bureaucracy.

$15 AND SENSE

Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday signed legislation that will steadily raise California’s minimum wage over the next five years to the $15 an hour that’s animated a national fight over living wages over the past couple of years. The California minimum wage presently stands at $10 an hour and will increase by $1 an hour until 2022, at which point the cost of living will have outpaced $15 an hour and we’ll be living in our car again, eating gas station peanuts for dinner. You just can’t win.

The term “iron ranger” may invoke a misbegotten 1980s hard-rock hybrid between San Francisco’s Night Ranger and British metal legends Iron Maiden—but of course beach-loving readers of the Bohemian know the iron rangers as the devilish devices that the state wants to install in eight coastal parks and parking lots in Sonoma County.

Critics have knocked the state’s pay-to-park plan for its dishonoring of the 1976 California Coastal Act, which enshrines equal access to the beach for all, regardless of one’s race, class or gruesomely weathered lizard skin. The issue will likely be resolved late next week when the California Coastal Commission meets in Santa Rosa to take up the proposal.

The pay-to-park fight has waged for several years between the California Department of Parks and Recreation (which wants the parking fees) and Sonoma County (whose supervisors unanimously rejected the plan in 2013). The iron rangers would be installed at destinations like Goat Rock, Salmon Creek, Shell Beach and other spots along a 35-mile stretch of Sonoma County coast.

The state appealed the county’s decision to the commission, which will meet on April 13–15 at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Santa Rosa. The meeting was moved from a smaller facility in anticipation of big crowds.

Every indication is that the commission is going to nix the state’s plan, since that’s what commission staff recommended in an epic February report on the dust-up that ran to over 700 pages. There, commission staff noted the popularity of the subject beaches, which draw over 3 million visitors annually—almost all of them arriving by car, and many from lower-income residences of Sonoma County.

“These facilities are essential for continuing lower-cost access to the coast at all for many economically disadvantaged groups,” the commission staffers noted, “including the significant Latino population centers located near and within the city of Santa Rosa. In many ways, the question of whether to charge fees here can also be considered a question of social justice.” That’s what local critics of the plan said when the state first announced its intention to install the iron rangers.

The machines have themselves been upgraded by the state over the years, and the state apparently believes this should be reason enough to install them—while also suggesting that charging people $8 to park for the day will bring more people to the beach. Don’t you love how technology provides its own rationale?

In a 2015 letter to the Coastal Commission, the state says it “will demonstrate pay station installation will not result in damage to coastal resources, and will actually enhance public access to the coastline within Sonoma County. . . .”

“The available technology now employed has rapidly evolved and improved,” the letter continues, before describing the high-tech machines as solar-powered, WiFi-equipped devices that “allow for the purchase of day use access through the use of cash, debit, credit, and Pay Pass options. . . . Users can add time using their smartphones in locations where cell phone service is available, and [California State Parks] can alternate rate schedules to ensure maximum access is promoted.”

“You’re motoring / what’s your price for flight?” asked Night Ranger’s Santa Rosa–based frontman Jack Blades, in the band’s hit “Sister Christian.” Next week’s Coastal Commission meeting ought to answer that question once and for all. Oh, the time has come.