News

LAKEPORT, Calif. — The city of Lakeport said it is planning to shut down its Third Street boat ramp because of low water conditions on Monday, the same day that construction will begin on a new parking project.

While the Third Street launch will be closed, the Fifth Street launch will remain open and continue to be monitored, city officials reported.

Officials said the depth at the end of the Third Street ramp is -3.6 feet Rumsey, the special measure used for Clear Lake, while the Fifth Street launch is -5.3 feet Rumsey, making it the deepest public ramp in the county.

City Manager Kevin Ingram told Lake County News that this is the first time the Third Street ramp has been closed due to low water since it was built in 1984.

The city also reported that the Waterfront Parking Rehabilitation Project will begin on Monday.

Argonaut Constructors has contracted with the city to construct the project. Work includes water line replacement, storm drain upgrades, curb, gutter, sidewalk and the reconstruction and paving of the parking lot between Third and Fifth streets.

The first phase of construction will include utility and concrete work in sections of the parking lot for minimal disruptions to the parking areas.

Temporary lane closures, vehicle and pedestrian detours will be implemented at various stages of the project.

The parking area will be closed from Sept. 20 to Oct. 8 to allow for the complete reconstruction and paving of the parking lot.

Some portions of work will be completed at night to minimize the impact on traffic.

The project’s estimated completion date is Nov. 17.

For more information, contact the Lakeport Public Works Department at 707-263-3578.

CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Woodland Community College’s Lake County Campus will host a socially distanced barbecue on Monday, Aug. 2, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The event will serve as an opportunity to learn more about the student services and academic programs offered by the college.

The WCC-Lake County Campus is located at 15880 Dam Road Extension in the City of Clearlake.

Staff and faculty will host the event for the entire community.

Those in attendance will have the opportunity to meet program staff, enroll in classes for the fall semester, get information about financial aid and enjoy fun activities.

The event has no cost to attend and goodie bags will be available to participants, while supplies last.

“This event will serve as an opportunity to welcome back our students and community to our campuses in a safe manner, refocus on our future and get back on track to improving the lives of the communities we serve,” said WCC President Art Pimentel.

For those who can’t attend the event, the college invites the community to visit the website at http://woodland.edu or stop by the Lake County Campus in the City of Clearlake.

Campus office hours are scheduled, Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In-person and virtual services are available.

The fall semester begins on Monday, Aug. 16.

For more information, contact Carid Servin at 530661-5711 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday met with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss wildfire challenges across local, state and federal agencies.

Governor Newsom called for federal investments for additional firefighting personnel, aerial firefighting equipment, more aggressive wildfire response, and long-term access to satellite technology for early fire detection.

Gov. Newsom, President Biden and Vice President Harris were also joined by six additional governors battling Western wildfires, including Brad Little of Idaho, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Greg Gianforte of Montana, Kate Brown of Oregon, Jay Inslee of Washington and Mark Gordon of Wyoming.

“I’m grateful President Biden and Vice President Harris have taken a hands-on approach to combating devastating wildfires across the western states,” said Gov. Newsom. “In California, we’re taking bold steps to address our year-round climate-change-driven wildfire season with historic investments in wildfire resiliency and emergency management. Wildfires know no borders - we need to work together across states and with our federal partners to combat wildfires burning down our forests and destroying homes and critical infrastructure.”

Earlier this week, Gov. Newsom and Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak surveyed a Tamarack Fire damage area.

The Tamarack Fire has burned 68,696 acres on both sides of the California-Nevada border.

Amid unparalleled risk of catastrophic wildfire driven by climate change impacts, Newsom’s office said he has invested $2.2 billion to build wildfire resiliency and advance emergency response this calendar year alone, the largest such investment in state history.

The funding supports additional firefighting crews, new firefighting equipment and expanded land and forest management efforts and builds on the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience action plan, previous budget investments in emergency management, and executive actions to help combat catastrophic wildfires.

Additionally, Newsom surged Cal Fire’s firefighting ranks in March by authorizing the early hire of 1,399 seasonal firefighters, and this month supplemented the department’s capacities with 12 additional aircraft to fight this year’s wildfires.

Last year, Gov. Newsom announced the first statewide Climate Action Corps to mobilize Californians to be part of the solutions to address climate change.

The first class of Climate Action Corps fellows are focused on projects that advance wildfire resilience, urban greening and food waste recovery.

The wildfire cohort is supporting 13 community partners from Butte County down to San Diego in wildfire mitigation activities such as asset and risk mapping, community education and direct fuels reduction.

In California, the yearly increase in the assessed value of real property cannot exceed 2%, due to Proposition 13.

Thus, when after many years under Proposition 13, a reassessment to current fair market values occurs it can cause a dramatic increase in real property taxes.

Reassessments are a result of a “change in ownership” (sections 60, et. seq. of the Revenue and Taxation Code).

Whether a change in title triggers a partial or complete change in ownership depends on how real property is being retitled and other factors.

Let us consider the change in ownership rules for tenants in common and for joint tenants (California Code of Regulations sections 462.020 and 462.040).

The creation, transfer of termination of either a tenancy in common or a joint tenancy is a change in ownership of the interest that is transferred unless an exception applies.

Important exceptions exist for interspousal transfers, transfers of a primary residence from parent to child (and sometimes from grandparent to grandchild), and a transfer at death from one cotenant of their primary residence.

Interspousal transfers excepted from reassessment include, “the creation, transfer, or termination, solely between spouses, of any co-owner’s interest,” and, “transfers which take effect upon the death of a spouse.”

For example, take adding your spouse to title; transferring a portion of your undivided interest as a tenant in common to your spouse, either as an additional tenant in common or as a joint tenant with you as to your original undivided interest.

As of Feb. 15, 2021, under Proposition 19, the parent to child exclusion is limited to transfers from parent(s) to child(ren), or grandparents to grandchildren (where the parent is deceased), of the transferor’s primary residence provided that the child(ren), or grandchildren (if applicable), live there as their primary residence (and do so within one year of the transfer).

For transfers before Feb. 15, the prior Proposition 58 rules still apply.

A transfer of ownership at death between either tenants in common or joint tenants of their primary residence whereby the surviving tenant owns 100% of the residence is excepted from reassessment upon filing an affidavit of cotenant residency.

Specific change in ownership rules apply once joint owners create a joint tenancy. That is, once joint owners transfer their undivided interests to themselves as joint tenants they become so-called, “original transferors.”

Moreover, the same is true even if the transfer adds additional owners, who are called “other than original transferors.” So long as all original owners either become or remain as joint tenants, after the transfer, there is no change in ownership.

If an original transferor joint tenant dies or transfers his interest whether there is any change in ownership depends on if after the death or transfer there remains one, or more, of the original transferor joint tenants on title.

If an “other than original transferor” joint tenant dies or transfers his interest then whether there is a change in ownership depends on if an “original transferor” joint tenant remains. So long as there is an original transferor there is no reassessment.

Once the interest of the last original transferor ceases (due either to death or transfer) then there is a 100% change in ownership.

Also excluded from reassessment is termination of a joint tenancy if the co-owners retain their same proportionate interests in a new form of co-ownership.

For example, the joint tenants transfer their interests to themselves as equal tenants in common.

In order to administer the real property tax rules when title to real property changes, change in ownership documents are required to be filed with the local assessor.

Additionally, to claim an exclusion from reassessment, documents such as the “claim for reassessment exclusion for a transfer between parent and child” or the “affidavit of cotenant residency” must be filed on a timely basis with the local county assessor’s office to request an exclusion.

The foregoing discussion is only a simplified and partial discussion of more complex tax rules. Consult an attorney if needing real property tax advice.

Dennis A. Fordham, attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and 707-263-3235.

Magnetars are bizarre objects — massive, spinning neutron stars with magnetic fields among the most powerful known, capable of shooting off brief bursts of radio waves so bright they're visible across the universe.

A team of astrophysicists has now found another peculiarity of magnetars: They can emit bursts of low energy gamma rays in a pattern never before seen in any other astronomical object.

It's unclear why this should be, but magnetars themselves are poorly understood, with dozens of theories about how they produce radio and gamma ray bursts. The recognition of this unusual pattern of gamma ray activity could help theorists figure out the mechanisms involved.

"Magnetars, which are connected with fast radio bursts and soft gamma repeaters, have something periodic going on, on top of randomness," said astrophysicist Bruce Grossan, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, or SSL. "This is another mystery on top of the mystery of how the bursts are produced."

The researchers — Grossan and theoretical physicist and cosmologist Eric Linder from UC Berkeley and postdoctoral fellow Mikhail Denissenya from Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan — discovered the pattern in bursts from a soft gamma repeater, SGR1935+2154, that is a magnetar, a prolific source of soft or lower energy gamma ray bursts and the only known source of fast radio bursts within our Milky Way galaxy.

They found that the object emits bursts randomly, but only within regular four-month windows of time, each active window separated by three months of inactivity.

On March 19, the team uploaded a preprint claiming "periodic windowed behavior" in soft gamma bursts from SGR1935+2154 and predicted that these bursts would start up again after June 1 — following a three month hiatus — and could occur throughout a four-month window ending Oct. 7.

On June 24, three weeks into the window of activity, the first new burst from SGR1935+2154 was observed after the predicted three month gap, and nearly a dozen more bursts have been observed since, including one on July 6, the day the paper was published online in the journal Physical Review D.

"These new bursts within this window means that our prediction is dead on," said Grossan, who studies high energy astronomical transients. "Probably more important is that no bursts were detected between the windows since we first published our preprint."

Linder likens the non-detection of bursts in three-month windows to a key clue — the "curious incident" that a guard dog did not bark in the nighttime — that allowed Sherlock Holmes to solve a murder in the short story "The Adventure of Silver Blaze.”

"Missing or occasional data is a nightmare for any scientist," noted Denissenya, the first author of the paper and a member of the Energetic Cosmos Laboratory at Nazarbayev University that was founded several years ago by Grossan, Linder and UC Berkeley cosmologist and Nobel laureate George Smoot. "In our case, it was crucial to realize that missing bursts or no bursts at all carry information.”

The confirmation of their prediction startled and thrilled the researchers, who think this may be a novel example of a phenomenon — periodic windowed behavior — that could characterize emissions from other astronomical objects.

Mining data from 27-year-old satellite

Within the last year, researchers suggested that the emission of fast radio bursts — which typically last a few thousandths of a second — from distant galaxies might be clustered in a periodic windowed pattern. But the data were intermittent, and the statistical and computational tools to firmly establish such a claim with sparse data were not well developed.

Grossan convinced Linder to explore whether advanced techniques and tools could be used to demonstrate that periodically windowed — but random, as well, within an activity window — behavior was present in the soft gamma ray burst data of the SGR1935+2154 magnetar.

The Konus instrument aboard the WIND spacecraft, launched in 1994, has recorded soft gamma ray bursts from that object — which also exhibits fast radio bursts — since 2014 and likely never missed a bright one.

Linder, a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, had used advanced statistical techniques to study the clustering in space of galaxies in the universe, and he and Denissenya adapted these techniques to analyze the clustering of bursts in time.

Their analysis, the first to use such techniques for repeated events, showed an unusual windowed periodicity distinct from the very precise repetition produced by bodies rotating or in orbit, which most astronomers think of when they think of periodic behavior.

"So far, we have observed bursts over 10 windowed periods since 2014, and the probability is 3 in 10,000 that while we think it is periodic windowed, it is actually random," he said, meaning there's a 99.97% chance they're right. He noted that a Monte Carlo simulation indicated that the chance they're seeing a pattern that isn't really there is likely well under 1 in a billion.

The recent observation of five bursts within their predicted window, seen by WIND and other spacecraft monitoring gamma ray bursts, adds to their confidence. However, a single future burst observed outside the window would disprove the whole theory, or cause them to redo their analysis completely.

"The most intriguing and fun part for me was to make predictions that could be tested in the sky. We then ran simulations against real and random patterns and found it really did tell us about the bursts,” Denissenya said.

As for what causes this pattern, Grossan and Linder can only guess. Soft gamma ray bursts from magnetars are thought to involve starquakes, perhaps triggered by interactions between the neutron star's crust and its intense magnetic field.

Magnetars rotate once every few seconds, and if the rotation is accompanied by a precession — a wobble in the rotation — that might make the source of burst emission point to Earth only within a certain window.

Another possibility, Grossan said, is that a dense, rotating cloud of obscuring material surrounds the magnetar but has a hole that only periodically allows bursts to come out and reach Earth.

"At this stage of our knowledge of these sources, we can't really say which it is," Grossan said. "This is a rich phenomenon that will likely be studied for some time.”

Linder agrees and points out that the advances were made by the cross-pollination of techniques from high energy astrophysics observations and theoretical cosmology.

“UC Berkeley is a great place where diverse scientists can come together," he said. "They will continue to watch and learn and even 'listen' with their instruments for more dogs in the night."

Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — In a Tuesday vote, the Board of Supervisors approved an urgency ordinance to impose a temporary moratorium on issuing early activation permits on land use projects in unincorporated Lake County.

The urgency ordinance, which went into effect immediately upon the board’s unanimous Tuesday vote, will be in effect for 45 days unless the board takes further action to continue it, said County Counsel Anita Grant.

Supervisors Jessica Pyska and Moke Simon, members of the Community Development Department Ad-Hoc Committee, presented the item to the board.

Pyska said they’d been working closely with County Administrative Officer Carol Huchingson — who the board has named interim Community Development director while the county searches for a permanent director — and other staff to become familiar with what is going on in the department. She said Grant drafted the ordinance.

Pyska said they have opportunities to improve, including streamlining and modernizing Community Development processes to make it easier for people to work with the department and to make the most efficient use of staff time.

“It will enable the public we serve to know what they can expect and how long things will take,” said Pyska.

“Improving our use permit process is the priority, especially during a severe drought emergency,” she said, adding, “Quality environmental review is a must for our board to make good land use different decisions.”

Pyska said they also want to ensure that the public has appropriate opportunities to weigh in on these projects.

“We want to be proactive in developing opportunities in our county but sometimes you have to take a beat and reset,” she said.

“Ultimately streamlining the use permit process is our best opportunity right now and pausing new early activations is going to help with that,” Pyska added.

Simon said the temporary prohibition on issuing early activation permits also will address a significant backlog of applications and ensure permits are not issued without thorough consideration and meeting the criteria allowing early activation.

He emphasized that early activation applications submitted before the effective date of the ordinance and deemed acceptable will be allowed to proceed.

Board Chair Bruno Sabatier questioned the urgency ordinance’s language regarding those permits that have already been submitted and “deemed acceptable.”

Grant explained that it meant that an application has been submitted and on its face it meets the requirements to be submitted.

She explained that early activation is a temporary six-month permit intended to stand alone while other parts of an application are jelling and coming together. “And now it's become kind of an entitlement or treated as an entitlement which is a temporary permit it wasn't intended to be.”

Grant said the whole process now seems bogged down because people are trying to do more than one thing at once — pursue early activation while also going after use permits.

The committee’s direction, she said, was that the early activation permit process needs to be put on pause in order for the process to become more streamlined and clear.

Sabatier said he felt the matter fell in line with asking for more water analysis on projects, which the board did through another urgency ordinance earlier that day. “And it should be a rare case at this moment in time due to the drought that early activations are as easily provided and granted.”

He said last year there were 100 early activations sought versus not yet 20 this year. Later in the meeting, he asked how many early activation permits were in the pipeline. Staff said they didn’t have that number immediately but would provide it as soon as possible.

Sabatier said if the number is zero, they should just do a regular moratorium, not a temporary one.

During public comment, the board heard from community members including Mike Mitzel, a cannabis grower who said early activation allows for projects to be properly tested out before getting long-term permits.

That was contrasted with comments from Clearlake Oaks resident Don Van Pelt, who said he has experience living next door to a cannabis project that received early activation. He said the board needed to look at long-term impacts of projects. “We can say today that everything's going to be fine but nobody really knows.”

Several speakers raised concerns that the pause on early activation was focused primarily on cannabis projects.

Sean Connell, who formerly served as Mendocino County’s cannabis program manager, said Lake County needs to establish a cannabis department to focus on the industry, with professionals who understand the unique planning and permitting aspects of cannabis.

Grant noted that the point of the 45-day pause is to allow the Community Development Department and the ad hoc committee the opportunity to review and determine whether they want to have a separate division, department or bureau.

Mary Jane Montana, a former Community Development director, said early activation has been a part of the county’s zoning ordinance for many years and isn’t just related to cannabis. She said it has been used for applications which didn’t require grading or building permits.

“There was quite a backlog from the very beginning,” Montana said.

She asked the board to consider allowing early activation to continue for small acreage, between one and five acres, to let people recoup some of their considerable financial outlay.

Daniel Tyrrell asked the board to take small farmers into consideration, noting the county could start to see more of a move to unpermitted grows. That creates a different problem for a different agency, he said.

“Early activation is a process that’s not specific to cannabis but it has become the standard on nearly all of the new cannabis projects,” said Lake County Farm Bureau Executive Director Brenna Sullivan.

“We agree that the process does deserve a thorough review,” Sullivan said, noting the process has created a number of other unintentional issues that deserve thorough review.

“We’re doing this to improve the processes, to improve efficiencies, to improve expectations and delivery. This is to make the process better and stronger,” Pyska said after hearing the comments, adding it’s the right time because it’s already the middle of the growing season.

Supervisor EJ Crandell pointed out that in the 2019 county budget it looked at creating a cannabis department in Community Development. Since then they have hired one technician and a planner, but haven’t been able to get a program manager.

Finding that staff, said Pyska, is part of the ad hoc committee’s work.

Simon offered the urgency ordinance, which the board approved 5-0.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.