How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
News
With the aid of a federal grant, the California Highway Patrol will present the “Age Well, Drive Smart” program to provide senior drivers with the necessary tools to remain safe, independent, and confident on the road.
The one-year, $150,000 Keeping Everyone Safe, or KEYS, grant, which started Oct. 1, supports the CHP’s Age Well, Drive Smart classes that help familiarize older drivers with current California driving laws and safe driving practices.
Aging leads to changes in physical, mental, and sensory skills that affect a person’s ability to drive safely, but senior drivers may not be aware of these changes.
For many older drivers, a broader awareness of the solutions, rather than a focus on the problem, is the key to continued safe driving.
The Age Well, Drive Smart program includes a self-assessment to help senior drivers identify these changes and make corrections.
“Helping seniors continue to drive safely is key to their independence and the safety of the motoring public,” said CHP Commissioner Warren Stanley. “The Age Well, Drive Smart program provides additional education to seniors and their families to ensure they are able to drive well into their golden years.”
The free, two-hour class is offered at CHP Area offices and other venues throughout the state. Anyone who would like to attend an Age Well, Drive Smart class may contact their local CHP office.
The Clear Lake Area CHP office can be reached at 707-279-0103.
Funding for this program was provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Jack Lasota, 28, Berkeley; Gwen Danielson, 25, transient; Emma Borhanian, 28, of Albany; and Alexander Leatham, 24, whose area of residence is not known to authorities, were arrested during the four-hour incident, according to the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.
On Friday, Nov. 15, at approximately 3:40 p.m., deputies were dispatched to a call of unwanted people at Westminster Woods camp, which is located in the 6500 block of Bohemian Highway.
The suspects had blocked both entrances to the camp with vehicles, preventing anyone from leaving. One person was reported to have a gun, authorities said.
When deputies arrived, they first detained one unarmed man claiming to be a reporter. They then found three people wearing robes and anonymous-style masks, the sheriff’s office said.
Deputies detained them given the report of a person with a gun on the property. Authorities said the suspects did not follow basic orders and began yelling when they were placed in handcuffs. Deputies found and detained a fourth suspect wearing the same style robe and mask.
The sheriff’s office said the suspects were continuously verbally and physically uncooperative. They were all wearing black-hooded robes, black gloves, black silicone shoe covers and anonymous-style masks.
Two of the individuals were carrying walkie-talkie radios, one was wearing a body-worn camera and one was carrying pepper spray, according to the report.
Deputies also found flyers and a written plan for the protest. The sheriff’s office said deputies determined this incident was a protest against one of the groups attending the camp called the Center for Applied Rationality.
While some deputies detained the suspects, other deputies and SWAT team members spread out into the camp to find the guests and workers. The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office’s Henry 1 helicopter assisted from the air. California Highway Patrol officers assisted with the search and closed Bohemian Highway.
Deputies found people throughout the camp in open areas and buildings and began evacuating them from the property. SWAT safely evacuated approximately 36 people who were sheltered in place in the armored rescue vehicle known as the Bearcat, authorities said.
In total, approximately 50 people were evacuated from the property and driven to the Occidental Fire Department in a school bus. The sheriff’s office said SWAT systematically searched the property but did not find the reported person with a gun.
The suspects had blocked the driveways with a small bus and a box truck and parked a Toyota Prius near the main office. The EOD team, commonly called the bomb squad, searched the vehicles for explosives and determined they were safe. All the vehicles were towed, authorities said.
The five people detained were interviewed at the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. The four suspects dressed in robes continued to be uncooperative and would not fully identify themselves. Detectives determined the fifth person who had originally claimed to be a reporter did not commit any crimes and he was released.
After interviews, the four suspects were arrested and later identified through fingerprints. All four were arrested for felony child endangerment, felony false imprisonment, felony conspiracy, misdemeanor resisting arrest, wearing a mask while committing a crime and trespassing.
Authorities said Lasota, Danielso and Leatham are in custody at the Sonoma County jail on $50,000 bail. Borhanian was released on Nov. 16 on $50,000 bail.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said it supports people exercising their rights to peacefully protest. However, it said these protestors were not peaceful, were arrested for multiple crimes, and caused fear and anxiety amongst the children and adults at the camp.
“We sincerely appreciate the camp staff being alert and calling the sheriff’s office right away said in a statement. “This allowed us to respond early in the incident, before things escalated.”
Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon are free to slow down, block or prioritize internet traffic as they wish, without interference by the federal government. That’s the effect of an October ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding a 2017 ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that reversed rules requiring what is called “net neutrality” – treating all internet traffic equally, regardless of where it’s from or what kind of data it is.
Giving corporate telecom giants this power is wildly unpopular among the American people, who know that these companies have overcharged customers and interfered with users’ internet access in the past.
However, people who advocate for an open internet, free of corporate roadblocks, might find solace in another aspect of the court’s ruling: States and local governments may be able to mandate their own net neutrality rules.
The effort is underway
Governors in six states – Hawaii, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont – have already signed executive orders enforcing net neutrality by prohibiting state agencies from doing business with internet service providers that limit customers’ online access. Four states have passed their own laws requiring internet companies to treat all online content equally: California, Oregon, Washington and Vermont. A New Hampshire bill is in the works.
More than 100 mayors representing both large urban centers such as San Francisco and small cities such as Edmond, Oklahoma, have pledged not to sign contracts with internet service providers that violate net neutrality.
These mayors are leveraging the lucrative contracts that their municipalities have with internet providers to wire public schools, libraries and local government buildings to pressure these companies into observing net neutrality throughout the city.
The emerging patchwork of local- and state-level net neutrality legislation could help ensure that millions of Americans have access to an open internet. However, people living outside of these enclaves will still be vulnerable to the whims of for-profit internet service providers. In our new book, “After Net Neutrality: A New Deal for the Digital Age,” we argue that the best way to protect the public interest is to remove internet service from the commercial market and treat broadband as a public utility.
Corporations focus on profits
Broadband giants have spent millions of dollars lobbying against federal open internet regulations since 2006. Industry-backed efforts even included funding a network of far-right online trolls to spam the FCC’s website with anti-net neutrality propaganda. These companies continue to want the power to manipulate online traffic, such as charging users and content providers like Netflix to access each other – even though both are already paying for connections to the internet.
This history of manipulation highlights a recurring challenge to the ideal of net neutrality: Governments seek to reconcile the public’s interest in open, nondiscriminatory online communication with the profit interests of large internet service providers. The resulting policies only narrowly target corporations’ manipulative practices, while letting the companies continue to own and control the physical network itself.
Cities build their own
A different vision of how the internet could operate is already taking shape across the United States. In recent years, many cities and towns around the country have built their own broadband networks. These communities are often seeking to provide affordable high-speed internet service to neighborhoods that the for-profit network providers aren’t adequately serving.
One of the best-known efforts is in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which built its own high-speed fiber-optic internet network in 2009.
Chattanooga’s experiment has been an unequivocal success: According to a 2018 survey conducted by Consumer Reports, Chattanooga’s municipal broadband network is the top-rated internet provider in the entire U.S.
More than 500 other communities around the country operate publicly owned internet networks. In general, these networks are cheaper, faster and more transparent in their pricing than their private sector counterparts, despite lacking Comcast and Verizon’s gigantic economies of scale. Because the people operating municipal broadband networks serve communities rather than large shareholders on Wall Street, they have a vested interest in respecting net neutrality principles.
Thinking bigger
A number of much larger-scale public broadband initiatives have also been proposed to combat the power of the giant internet companies. In the 2018 election cycle, Democratic gubernatorial candidates from Vermont and Michigan proposed building publicly owned statewide internet networks.
Several Democratic presidential candidates have announced plans to build thousands of miles of publicly owned high-speed internet connections. They vary in the details, but all are responses to the concentration of corporate control over internet access – both in terms of who gets high-speed service in what locations at what price, and what content those connections carry.
Together, these initiatives reflect a growing understanding that Americans need a more expansive vision of an open internet to truly realize the democratic promise of an internet that reaches everyone.
High-quality, affordable, restriction-free internet access can come from publicly owned providers that answer directly to the people. In our view, and in the eyes of a growing number of Americans, the broadband industry uses its entrenched market power to serve itself, not the public.
David Elliot Berman, Ph.D. Candidate in Communication, University of Pennsylvania and Victor Pickard, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Pennsylvania
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Pacific Gas and Electric said it may shut off power to 264,000 customer accounts across Northern California early Wednesday due to an incoming wind event, with about one-third of Lake County’s customers expected to be impacted.
Late Monday morning, PG&E said it had sent advance notifications to customers in the potentially impacted areas across Lake and 21 other counties: Alameda, Amador, Butte, Colusa, Contra Costa, El Dorado, Glenn, Marin, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Shasta, Sierra, Solano, Sonoma, Tehama, Trinity, Yolo and Yuba.
In Lake County, an estimated 13,370 customer accounts – of which 2,010 are medical baseline accounts – are expected to be impacted in Clearlake, Cobb, Finley, Hidden Valley Lake, Kelseyville, Lakeport, Loch Lomond, Lower Lake and Middletown, PG&E reported.
During the October public safety power shutoffs, all of Lake County – with a reported total of 37,441 customer accounts – had been impacted, as Lake County News reported.
PG&E said Monday that this week’s potential public safety power shutoff is the result of high fire-risk conditions that are expected to begin early Wednesday morning and continue throughout Thursday.
The National Weather Service has issued a fire weather watch for portions of Northern California, including Lake County, that’s in effect from 4 a.m. Wednesday through 7 a.m. Thursday.
The Lake County forecast calls for wind gusts of close to 40 miles per hour, specifically in the south county, during the day on Wednesday.
PG&E said its meteorologists currently anticipate a wide area of high winds in the shutoff area, including sustained winds of up to 25 miles per hour, gusts ranging from 30 to 50 miles per hour, and peak gusts above 55 miles per hour.
The company said vegetation is extremely dry in its service area, noting that the average precipitation in the Northern Sierra by this point in November is typically 5 inches. This year, that region has received 0.3 inches of rain.
Temperatures in PG&E's service territory are 5 to 15 degrees above average for this time of year, the company said.
The recent series of extreme wind events have also contributed to dry conditions, as wind has a drying effect on vegetation, the company reported.
Once the high winds subside – which is currently expected to be mid-morning on Thursday – PG&E said it will inspect the de-energized lines to ensure they were not damaged during the wind event, and then restore power.
PG&E said it will restore power in stages as quickly as possible, with the goal of restoring most customers by the end of the day Thursday, based on the current weather conditions.
In Lake County, PG&E said it will once again open community resource centers with seating for up to 100 people. The centers will offer, bottled water, snacks, electronic-device charging and blankets, upon request.
The location of the centers in Lake County hadn’t been confirmed early Monday afternoon, PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras said.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
Lt. Corey Paulich confirmed that deputies took a 13-year-old male into custody on Monday morning.
Kelseyville Unified Superintendent Dave McQueen said that early Monday the district received information that a student had mentioned to other students that he wanted to “shoot up” Mountain Vista Middle School.
With the potential active shooter threat coming just days after a fatal shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita – which the district had spoken about in a Facebook post last week – McQueen said he took action out of an abundance of caution.
McQueen said that at that point nobody was on campus and that buses had just gone out.
He said the district immediately contacted the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, and he directed district school buses to a safe location and locked down all district schools. At the same time, the district posted updates on its Facebook page beginning shortly after 7 a.m.
Paulich said the district contacted the sheriff’s office about the threat at around 6:30 a.m. Monday.
Deputies were able to contact the student at about 7 a.m. at his home, Paulich said.
“He was just getting ready to get on the bus,” said Paulich.
“He was not armed,” Paulich added.
Paulich said deputies were able to determine that there were no other threats to the school, and transported the juvenile to the Probation Department for processing.
Shortly afterward, McQueen said the sheriff’s office informed the district that the juvenile of interest had been detained and the threat was nullified.
Shortly before 9 a.m., McQueen posted a brief report on the district's Facebook page.
“Once we knew the person who made the threat was in custody, we reopened schools and resumed bus service. In this day and age, we take every threat seriously. I’d rather overreact and keep everyone safe than assume a threat is idle talk from a student looking for attention. I appreciate the Sheriff’s deputies’ swift response and the KVUSD staff’s professionalism in handling the situation,” McQueen said in the Facebook post.
Later in the morning, McQueen told Lake County News that school was in session and things were back to normal on district campuses.
“I have to take everything seriously,” he said.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
The board will meet beginning at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19, in the board chambers on the first floor of the Lake County Courthouse, 255 N. Forbes St., Lakeport.
The meeting can be watched live on Channel 8 and online at https://countyoflake.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx. Accompanying board documents, the agenda and archived board meeting videos also are available at that link.
In an untimed item, the board will consider what to do in the wake of Registrar of Voters Catherine McMullen’s resignation.
McMullen, who took over the job of the department at the end of June, tendered her resignation Nov. 7, as Lake County News has reported. Her last day on the job is Nov. 22.
“I am requesting an opportunity to discuss next steps with your Board, regarding how best to staff the election function,” County Administrative Officer Carol Huchingson said in a brief memo to the board for the meeting.
In a related item, the board will hold a closed session discussion to hold interviews for an interim registrar and to make the interim appointment.
Earlier this year, Huchingson herself was appointed as interim registrar after then-interim Registrar of Voters Maria Valadez left to take a job in Mendocino County.
The full agenda follows.
CONSENT AGENDA
5.1: Adopt resolution pertaining to tax revenue exchange for annexation to Callayomi County Water District.
5.2: Consideration of side letter to the Lake County Sheriff’s Management Association Jan. 1, 2019 to Dec. 31, 2019, memorandum of understanding.
5.3: Approve the minutes of the Board of Supervisors meeting held June 5, 2019, Sept. 17, 2019, and Sept. 24, 2019.
5.4: Approve request for lateral step hiring of registered nurse, step five for Judith Krings.
5.5: (a) Waive the formal bidding process, pursuant to the Lake County Code Section 38.2, as it is not in the public interest due to the unique nature of goods or services; and (b) approve the agreement between the county of Lake and Neuropsychological Associates of California - A Psychological Services Corporation for Psychological Services for Fiscal Year 2019-20 for a contract maximum of $30,000 and authorize the board chair to sign the agreement.
5.6: Approve Health Services request to appoint Dr. Gary Pace to serve on the Partnership HealthPlan Board of Commissioners and represent Lake County for a period of four years.
5.7: Approve resolution of the board of trustees of the Yuba Community College District ordering an election to authorize the issuance of general obligation bonds, establishing specifications of the election order, and requesting consolidation with other elections occurring March 3, 2020, pursuant to the district's Resolution No. 19-37.
5.8: Adopt a resolution authorizing the Public Services director to sign the notice of completion for work performed under agreement dated Jan. 15, 2019, for the Lower Lake Parks Maintenance Facility, Bid No 18-17.
5.9: Adopt resolution to apply for a grant with county matching funds in the amount of $30,000 for an outdoor fitness court at Kelseyville Community Park and Hammond Park as part of the 2020 National Fitness Campaign.
5.10: Approve Amendment No. 2 to facility space license agreement with T-Mobile West LLC.
5.11: Adopt a resolution authorizing the Public Works director to execute permits to conduct aeronautical activities at Lampson Field airport.
5.12: Adopt a resolution authorizing the Public Works director to sign the notice of completion for the Clark Drive Pavement Repair Project. Federal Project No. BRLS-5914(025); Bid No. 18-24.
5.13: Adopt resolution delegating the County Public Works director authority to enter into a cooperative work agreement with Caltrans to extend the deadline for lapsing funds on the Middle Creek Bridge Rehabilitation Project along Rancheria Road in Upper Lake.
5.14: Approve aeronautical activities permit at Lampson Field airport between the county of Lake and Steve's Aircraft for Fiscal Year 2019 / 2020, and authorize the chair to sign.
TIMED ITEMS
6.2, 9:20 a.m.: Public hearing, continued from the Nov. 5 meeting, consideration of a resolution amending the master fee schedule for departmental services rendered by the county.
6.3, 9:30 a.m.: a) Presentation of Mental Health Services Act annual updates for Fiscal Year 2017-2018 through Fiscal Year 2019-2020 and; b) consideration of a resolution approving the FY 2018-19 & FY 2019-20 annual updates to the Mental Health Services Act Three-Year Program and Expenditure Plan for Fiscal Year 2017-2018 through Fiscal Year 2019-2020.
UNTIMED ITEMS
7.2: Consideration of memorandum of understanding between the California Counties Foundation Inc., Mendocino County and Lake County to host a series of CSAC Institute Courses in Ukiah.
7.3: Discussion and consideration of next steps for the Registrar of Voters Office.
7.4: Consideration of proposed 2020 Board of Supervisors regular meeting calendar.
7.5: Discussion and consideration of the Community Assistance Visit Corrective Action Plan.
CLOSED SESSION
8.1: Public employee appointment pursuant to Gov. Code Section 54957(b)(1): (a) Interviews of interim registrar of voters (b) appointment of interim registrar of voters.
8.2: Conference with labor negotiator: (a) chief negotiator: M. Long; county negotiators: C. Huchingson and P. Samac; and (b) employee organizations: LCDDAA, LCDSA, LCCOA, LCEA, LCSEA and LCSMA.
8.3: Public employee evaluation title: County counsel.
Email Elizabeth Larson at