How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
News
Lakeport Police Lt. Dale Stoebe said the threat was sent via email to Konocti Christian Academy, which is located on the Lake County Fairgrounds at 401 Martin St.
“The KCA received an email that had approximately 30 additional addressees, that included Anti-American rhetoric and the threat of an explosive device on campus with a set detonation time,” Stoebe said.
Stoebe said that, at that time, local and regional threat assessment information centers had no similar information from other locations.
“When presented with all of the known information, school administration elected to exercise an abundance of caution and send students home,” Stoebe said.
He said that a search was conducted of the campus with no suspicious objects located.
The school did not immediately respond to a message sent via email by Lake County News Monday afternoon seeking comment.
The council will meet at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 17, in the council chambers at Lakeport City Hall, 225 Park St.
The agenda can be found here.
The council chambers will be open to the public for the meeting. Masks are highly encouraged where 6-foot distancing cannot be maintained.
If you cannot attend in person, and would like to speak on an agenda item, you can access the Zoom meeting remotely at this link or join by phone by calling toll-free 669-900-9128 or 346-248-7799.
The webinar ID is 973 6820 1787, access code is 477973; the audio pin will be shown after joining the webinar. Those phoning in without using the web link will be in “listen mode” only and will not be able to participate or comment.
Comments can be submitted by email to
During Tuesday’s meeting, City Manager Kevin Ingram will ask the council to consider a resolution officially renaming the park at 800 and 810 N. Main St.
The proposed name is Xabatin — pronounced Ka-bah-ten — “Big Water” Community Park.
The seven-acre park is located on the site of the former Natural High School. It’s funded by a $5.9 million grant from the Proposition 68 State Parks and Water Bond.
Ingram’s report explained, “The park project was initially referred to as ‘Lakefront Park’ in the grant application, though this was a placeholder name employed to facilitate the grant application process. City staff never intended for this nondescript name to be the permanent designation for this vital community asset.”
Ingram said the city has worked with local tribes to select a name that pays tribute to the area’s Native American heritage.
The result is that the park will be called Xabatin, which translates to “Big Water,” the original Pomo name for Clear Lake, Ingram reported.
Also on Tuesday, Police Chief Brad Rasmussen will give an overview of the Lakeport town hall on homelessness and mental illness held on Sept. 27.
In other business, the council will present a proclamation designating October 2023 as Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and meet new Public Works employees AJ Adams, Jonathan Ocana and Nicolaj Murray, and Utilities Department employee Anthony Casanova.
Assistant City Manager Nick Walker will update the council on the challenges and opportunities related to the city’s fee program and Utilities Director Paul Harris will ask for the council’s approval of a purchase agreement for the procurement of a HOMA Sewer Pump - Model AMSS644-300.
On the consent agenda — items considered noncontroversial and usually accepted as a slate on one vote — are ordinances; minutes of the regular council meeting on Sept. 19; approval of Application 2023-024, with staff recommendations, for the 2023 Lakeport Elementary School Halloween Parade; and authorization for the mayor to sign the Second Amendment to the 2019 PEG agreement extending the term of the agreement through June 30, 2025.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
The board will meet beginning at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 17, 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, online at https://countyoflake.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx and on the county’s Facebook page.
Accompanying board documents, the agenda and archived board meeting videos also are available at that link.
To participate in real-time, join the Zoom meeting by clicking this link.
The meeting ID is 937 4846 3305, pass code 978938. The meeting also can be accessed via one tap mobile at +16699006833,,93748463305#,,,,*978938#.
At 9:15 a.m., the board will host a ceremonial swearing-in of new Chief Public Defender Raymond Buenaventura.
Buenaventura, the mayor of Daly City, was hired last month to head up the creation of a new public defender’s office.
Also on Tuesday, at 10:15 a.m., the board will hear a presentation on the Clear Lake Integrated Preparedness and Resilience Plan for Dreissenid Mussel Management: A Rapid Response and Transition to Containment Plan.
The full agenda follows.
CONSENT AGENDA
5.1: Adopt proclamation recognizing the month of October as Head Start Awareness Month in Lake County.
5.2: Approve Amendment No. 2 to agreement between the county of Lake and Mountain G Engineering Inc. for consulting services for development of a Lake County Hazard Tree Removal Project in the amount of $42,000 and authorize the chair to sign.
5.3: Approve long distance travel retroactively for Supervisor E.J. Crandell to Denver, Colorado for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Farm Ranch and Rural Communities Advisory Committee meeting as an appointed member.
5.4: Adopt resolution approving an agreement with the state of California, Department of Food and Agriculture for State Organic Program Cooperative Agreement # 23-0093-000-SA in the amount of $4,565.00 for period July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024.
5.5: Approve agreement between county of Lake and Mother-Wise for the Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program in the amount of $125,000 for fiscal years 2023-26 and authorize the board chair to sign.
5.6: Approve closure of Lake County Behavioral Health Services Department locations to the public to hold an all-staff training on Friday, Dec. 1, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
5.7: Adopt resolution authorizing the Lake County Behavioral Health Services director to sign the standard agreement and acknowledgement of grant terms and conditions for the California Providing Access and Transforming Health Justice-Involved Planning and Capacity Building Program Round Three and authorize the board chair to sign.
5.8: Approve continuation of proclamation declaring a Clear Lake Hitch emergency.
5.9: Approve continuation of proclamation of the existence of a local emergency due to pervasive tree mortality.
5.10: Approve continuation of an emergency declaration for drought conditions.
5.11: Approve continuation of proclamation of the existence of a local emergency due to low elevation snow and extreme cold.
5.12: Approve the continuation of the proclamation declaring a shelter crisis emergency due to the current need for sheltering for those experiencing homelessness during the weather and temperature patterns that the county of Lake has been experiencing.
5.13: Approve Board of Supervisors Meeting minutes from Aug. 22, Sept. 26 and Oct. 3, 2023.
5.14: Adopt resolution amending Resolution No. 2023-117 and the position allocation chart for fiscal year 2023-2024 establishing position allocation for fiscal year 2023-2024, Budget Unit 2201, Sheriff-Coroner and Budget Unit 2301, Sheriff-Jail Facilities and approving compensation adjustments for classifications in the deputy sheriff class series, public safety dispatcher class series and deputy sheriff-corrections class series.
5.15: Waive the formal bidding requirement and authorize the IT director to issue purchase order for three servers to Dell Marketing L.P.
5.16: Approve the agreement between the county of Lake and GSM Landscape Architects Inc. for professional design services for the Hammond Park Improvements Project, and authorize the chair to sign the agreement.
5.17: (a) Waive the formal bidding process, per Purchasing Code 38.1, as this is an annual contract for services that have not increased more than the consumer price index; and (b) approve agreement between the county of Lake and IC Solutions LLC for fiscal year 2023/24 with no change from the original contract and authorize the chairman to sign.
5.18: Approve Amendment between the county of Lake and Keefe Group for fiscal year 2023/24 with no change from the original and authorize the chairperson to sign.
5.19: Approve contract between county of Lake and Redwood Toxicology Laboratory Inc. for drug and alcohol testing, in the amount of $30,000 per fiscal year from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2026, and authorize the chair to sign.
TIMED ITEMS
6.2, 9:07 a.m.: Pet of the Week.
6.3, 9:10 a.m.: Presentation of proclamation recognizing the month of October as Head Start Awareness Month in Lake County.
6.4, 9:15 a.m.: Administer ceremonial oath of office to Chief Public Defender Raymond Buenaventura.
6.5, 10:15 a.m.: Presentation of the Clear Lake Integrated Preparedness and Resilience Plan for Dreissenid Mussel Management: A Rapid Response and Transition to Containment Plan.
UNTIMED ITEMS
7.2: Consideration of the following advisory board appointment: Food Policy Council.
CONSENT AGENDA
8.1: Public employee evaluation: County Counsel Lloyd Guintivano.
8.2: Conference with legal counsel: Existing litigation pursuant to Gov. Code sec. 54956.9 (d)(1) – FERC Project No. 77, Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project.
8.3: Conference with legal counsel: Existing litigation pursuant to Gov. Code section 54956.9(d)(1) - Center for Biological Diversity, et al. v. County of Lake, et al.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
When wildfire smoke turns the air brown and hazy, you might think about heading indoors with the windows closed, running an air purifier or even wearing a mask. These are all good strategies to reduce exposure to the particles in wildfire smoke, but smoky air is also filled with potentially harmful gases. Those gases can get into buildings and remain in the walls and floors for weeks.
Getting rid of these gases isn’t as simple as turning on an air purifier or opening a window on a clear day.
In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, colleagues and I tracked the life of these gases in a home exposed to wildfire smoke. We also found that the best way to get rid of the risk is among the simplest: start cleaning.
The challenge of smoke particles and gases
In December 2021, several of my friends and colleagues were affected by the Marshall Fire that burned about 1,000 homes in Boulder County, Colorado. The “lucky” ones, whose homes were still standing, asked me what they should do to clean their houses. I am an atmospheric and indoor chemist, so I started looking into the published research, but I found very few studies on what happens after a building is exposed to smoke.
What scientists did know was that smoke particles end up on indoor surfaces – floors, walls, ceilings. We knew that air filters could remove particles from the air. And colleagues and I were just beginning to understand that volatile organic compounds, which are traditionally thought to stay in the air, could actually stick to surfaces inside a home and build up reservoirs – invisible pools of organic molecules that can contribute to the air chemistry inside the house.
Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, are compounds that easily become gases at room temperature. They include everything from limonene in lemons to benzene in gasoline. VOCs aren’t always hazardous to human health, but many VOCs in smoke are. I started to wonder whether the VOCs in wildfire smoke could also stick to the surfaces of a house.
Tracking lingering risks in a test house
I worked with researchers from across the U.S. and Canada to explore this problem during the Chemical Assessment of Surfaces and Air, or CASA, study in 2022. We built on HOMEChem, a previous study in which we looked at how cooking, cleaning and occupancy could change indoor air.
In CASA, we studied what happens when pollutants and chemicals get inside our homes – pesticides, smog and even wood smoke.
Using a cocktail smoker and wood chips, we created a surprisingly chemically accurate proxy for wildfire smoke and released small doses into a test house built by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST’s house allowed us to conduct controlled chemistry experiments in a real-world setting.
We even aged the smoke in a large bag with ozone to simulate what happens when smoke travels long distances, like the smoke from Canadian wildfires that moved into the U.S. in the summer of 2023. Smoke chemistry changes as it travels: Particles become more oxidized and brown, while VOCs break down and the smoke loses its distinctive smell.
How VOCs behave in your home
What we found in CASA was intriguing. While smoke particles quickly settled on indoor surfaces, VOCs were more insidious.
At first, the house took up these smoke VOCs – on floors, walls and building surfaces. But once the initial smoke cleared, the house would slowly release those VOCs back out over the next hours, days or even months, depending on the type of VOC.
This release is what we call a partitioning process: During the smoke event, individual VOC molecules in the air attach to indoor surfaces with weak chemical bonds. The process is called adsorption. As smoke clears and the air cleans out, the bonds can break, and molecules “desorb” back out into the air.
We could watch this partitioning happen in the air by measuring smoke VOC concentrations. On surfaces, we could measure the weight of smoke VOCs that deposited on very sensitive balances and then were slowly released.
Overall, we concluded that this surface reservoir allows smoke VOCs to linger indoors, meaning that people are exposed to them not just during the major smoke event but also long after.
Why worry about VOCs?
Smoke VOCs include well-known carcinogens, and high levels of exposure can induce respiratory and health problems.
While smoke VOC concentrations in our test house decreased with time, they remained persistently elevated above normal levels.
Given that VOC concentrations from other sources, such as cooking and cleaning, can already be high enough in homes to harm health, this additional long-term exposure source from smoke could be important. Further toxicology studies will be needed to determine the significance of its health effects.
How to clean up when smoke gets in
So, what can you do to remove these lingering smoke gases?
We found that air purifiers can remove only some of the VOCs that are in the air – they can’t clean the VOCs on your floors or in your walls. They also work only when they’re running, and even then, air purifiers don’t work particularly well to reduce VOCs.
Opening windows to ventilate will clean the air, if it isn’t smoggy or smoky outside. But as soon as we closed windows and doors, smoke VOCs started to bleed off the surface reservoirs and into the air again, resulting in an elevated, near-constant concentration.
We realized that to permanently remove those smoke VOCs, we had to physically remove them from surfaces.
The good news is that cleaning surfaces by vacuuming, dusting and mopping with a commercial, nonbleach solution did the trick. While some remediation companies may do this surface cleaning for you after extreme exposures, surface cleaning after any smoke event – like Canadian wildfire smoke drifting into homes in 2023 – should effectively and permanently reduced smoke VOC levels indoors.
Of course, we could reach only a certain number of surfaces – it’s hard to vacuum the ceiling! That meant that surface cleaning improved but didn’t eliminate smoke VOC levels in the house. But our study at least provides a path forward for cleaning indoor spaces affected by air pollutants, whether from wildfires, chemical spills or other events.
With wildfires becoming more frequent, surface cleaning can be an easy, cheap and effective way to improve indoor air quality.
Delphine Farmer, Professor of Chemistry, Colorado State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
While NZMS have been detected in other portions of the watershed, this is the first confirmed detection at Warm Springs Hatchery.
NZMS were detected in an intake pipeline and an aeration pond during a regularly scheduled quarterly hatchery survey this summer.
Since the detection, scientists have conducted surveys in about 75% of Coho-bearing streams in the watershed and have not observed NZMS presence beyond previously known locations.
Warm Springs Hatchery operates production and release programs for Coho salmon (a federal and state-listed endangered species) and steelhead (federally listed threatened species).
The NZMS surveys have focused on stocking locations for these fish species, which are conducted mostly in Russian River tributaries in the lower basin.
“The detection levels so far have not been alarming, but we want to do everything we can to minimize the spread,” said CDFW North Central Regional Manager Morgan Kilgour.
Dense populations of NZMS can displace and out-compete native species; they may consume up to half of the food resources in a stream and have been linked to reduced populations of aquatic insects, including mayflies, caddisflies, chironomids and other insects important to trout and salmon.
Invasive NZMS were first discovered in California in 2000 in the Owens River. It is believed that the species was introduced to western rivers through shipments of live sportfish, but subsequent spread is likely due to recreational activities.
Dry Creek, which flows by Warm Springs Hatchery, has previously been identified as positive for NZMS. The source of the recent NZMS detections is unknown, but it is suspected that the snails came to the hatchery via its source water of Lake Sonoma.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, or USACE, operates the Russian River Coho Salmon Captive Broodstock Program at Warm Springs Fish Hatchery, and contracts with CDFW to operate its steelhead program. In addition to the surveys, CDFW has increased biosecurity measures at the hatchery.
The hatchery will continue to operate its Coho and steelhead programs. CDFW is working with USACE and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which permits the hatchery, to determine if any changes in Coho release protocols are needed given the detections.
“NOAA Fisheries fully supports CDFW and the USACE’s efforts to minimize the risk of further spread of aquatic invasive species such as NZMS within the Russian River and other watersheds that provide critical habitat for listed salmon and steelhead,” said Robert Coey, north central coast supervisor in NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast region.
Boaters, anglers and others who visit the Russian River watershed are asked to decontaminate equipment and follow the “clean, drain and dry” directive with all equipment used in the river:
• If you wade, freeze waders and other gear overnight (at least six hours).
• After leaving the water, inspect waders, boots, float tubes, boats and trailers or any gear used in the water.
• Remove any visible snails with a stiff brush and follow with rinsing. If possible, freeze or completely dry out any wet gear.
• Never transport live fish or other aquatic plants or animals from one waterbody to another.
Additional information about stopping the spread of NZMS can be found on CDFW’s California’s Invaders: New Zealand Mudsnail webpage.
KELSEYVILLE, Calif. — A $4,920 grant from the Guy Fieri Foundation has allowed Kelseyville High School to expand its culinary arts program and increase students’ access to opportunities provided by the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, a national career and technical student organization.
In 2022, the Guy Fieri Foundation awarded an initial grant to integrate the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, or FCCLA, into the KHS Culinary Arts Program.
As culinary teacher Tami Cramer explained it, “FCCLA is to culinary arts as FFA is to agricultural sciences.”
FCCLA helps students develop real-world skills, explore career pathways, and become college- and career-ready through participation in competitive events, becoming involved in community service opportunities, student leadership, and attending leadership conferences, according to FCCLA’s website.
This year’s grant will make possible an additional capstone class and more entrepreneurial opportunities for students.
Grant funding will pay for another pizza oven, two carts, a 20-quart stand mixer, a stainless steel table, a dough sheeter, a speed rack and various cake decorating supplies.
Cramer explained that the new class may focus on advanced culinary skills such as cake decorating for weddings or advanced pastry-making.
“The idea is with these new skills and supplies, students will be able to use what they have learned to put on fundraisers to cover the costs of competition, including travel and lodging,” Cramer said. “Being able to offer a capstone class will give students the ability to expand into new areas, which will be really important if they choose to pursue a career in culinary arts.”
Kelseyville Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Nicki Thomas thanked Cramer for her dedication to supporting Kelseyville students and to the Guy Fieri Foundation for making the expanded learning opportunities possible.
The Guy Fieri Foundation is a nonprofit charity based in Petaluma with a mission to help local culinary arts programs in the middle schools, high schools, and community colleges. The Guy Fieri Foundation is committed to helping youth through nutrition education, exploring careers in hospitality, and encouraging goals for their future.