This still image from drone footage shows the Robin Lane sewage spill stretching down a roadway and onto properties.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The city of Clearlake has declared a local emergency in response to a massive ongoing sewage spill that began on Sunday due to a failure in the county-managed wastewater system.
The incident on Robin Lane, which began on Sunday morning, has impacted dozens of homes in and around the city of Clearlake, spilling raw sewage that has flooded the area south of Pond Road, north of Rumsey Road, east of Pamela Lane and west of Robin Lane, and spreading into drainage ditches, waterways, Burns Valley Creek and Clear Lake, officials reported.
The wastewater system is managed by the Lake County Sanitation District, or Lacosan, which is under Lake County Special Districts, headed by Administrator Robin Borre.
Lacosan has urged property owners to use bottled water only and not use private well water over concerns for contamination, with an emergency station for clean drinking water having been established at Pond Road and Old Highway 53.
Water provided by public water systems remains safe to use, Special Districts reported.
While posts on social media sites included statements from area residents about the extent of the spill — with at least one estimating more than 2.5 million gallons released — on Monday afternoon, county spokesman Trevor Mockel said the extent of the release had not yet been fully calculated due to the ongoing nature of the response and repair work.
He said Lake County Special Districts “is actively mitigating the situation to stem the spread while repairs are underway, and assessments are continuing in real time.”
Mockel added, “Until crews are able to fully access the forced main and complete a thorough assessment, all we can confirm at this point is that the forced main failed underground.”
He said a confirmed cause of the failure “will only be determined after repairs are complete and a full evaluation of the line can be conducted.”
Clearlake City Manager Alan Flora told Lake County News that multiple repairs were supposedly completed on Monday, but when he was on-site of the spill’s source in the afternoon, it was still leaking.
“No city facilities have been impacted yet,” Flora said.
Flora said the city helped with traffic control on Sunday “but that is the only request we have received” to assist the county.
Video of the spill site shared by the city of Clearlake showed the wastewater flowing down roadways, across fields and yards, with pumper trucks and large hoses in place throughout the area.
The Robin Lane sewage spill spread across multiple properties. Photo courtesy of the city of Clearlake.
Emergency declaration gives more details on spill
On Monday night, Flora issued the city’s emergency proclamation, which is expected to be ratified by the Clearlake City Council at its first meeting of the year on Thursday.
The document gave greater details about the incident, which began at 7:45 a.m. Sunday when a 16-inch force main located on Robin Lane ruptured, spilling raw sewage.
The proclamation noted that “the spill quickly resulted in raw sewage flooding the area south of Pond Road and north of Rumsey Road, east of Pamela Lane and west of Robin Lane.”
The city reported that an estimated 58 properties within the spill’s footprint have been directly impacted, “with the majority of those homes using private wells for water supply.”
The document also noted, “multiple faulty valves prohibited isolating the leak and the leak continues up to this point,” and “impacts to the properties, the underlying aquifer, the City’s storm drainage system, road network, creeks and waterways, Clear Lake and many residents is on-going and still unknown in total scope.”
The city’s proclamation requests that the county of Lake and Lacosan also declare a local emergency and a public health emergency.
With the emergency declaration, the city also is seeking from the governor a proclamation declaring an emergency in the city of Clearlake.
The city’s declaration opens the door for the city to receive recovery assistance from the state and help through federal disaster relief programs.
If the spill is in fact in the millions of gallons, it would put it on par with an April 2006 incident in which between 3.6 and 6 million gallons of treated wastewater ran off the City of Lakeport Municipal Sewer District site, into a tributary of Clear Lake and eventually into the lake itself.
That event resulted in the city being required to make numerous upgrades to its wastewater system in order to address state actions including a hookup ban.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, and on Bluesky, @erlarson.bsky.social. Find Lake County News on the following platforms: Facebook, @LakeCoNews; X, @LakeCoNews; Threads, @lakeconews, and on Bluesky, @lakeconews.bsky.social.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – What led to the Lake County Community Development Department’s deficit just months after approval of its final budget, necessitating a loan request to the Board of Supervisors to support the department’s operations?
It wasn’t just a drop in building permits that drove the Community Development Department into the red. It was a years-long practice of spending about $1 million in Building Division reserves to prop up other divisions, officials revealed in December.
When the Community Development Department, or CDD, requested a $390,000 emergency loan from the county on Nov. 18 to meet payrolls amid a budget deficit — just two months after supervisors approved a “balanced” budget — CDD Director Mireya Turner attributed the shortfall to “a significant drop in building permits.”
But on Dec. 9, staff exposed a deeper structural issue at the Board of Supervisors meeting: The department’s Building Division, which is funded primarily by building permit fees, had been effectively using the division reserve to subsidize the Planning and Code Enforcement divisions for multiple years until the reserve was drained.
The years-long transfer of Building Division reserves within CDD went through multiple budget cycles without being identified and corrected by the county’s budgeting process that involved the department, the administrative office as well as the Board of Supervisors.
While the board directed staff to provide further analysis in January, questions regarding the legality of transferring division reserves remain unanswered, as does the concern of paying back general fund loans using income from future permitting costs.
“The source of this problem is a slow and steady trend of reserve spending,” CDD Deputy Administrator Shannon Walker-Smith told the board on Dec. 9.
“Most of that is due to contributions to Code and Planning department operations that began in Fiscal Year 2022-23 when Building’s reserves have gotten significantly high,” Walker-Smith said, indicating that the Building Division’s reserve got up to over $900,000 at that time.
“So the Community Development [Department] was directed to start spending down those reserves as was appropriate at the time,” she said. “Unfortunately, that spending continued.”
Deputy County Administrative Officer Casey Moreno later cited a higher figure, saying more than $1 million had been internally transferred to cover salaries in the receiving divisions.
“Over the past three years, about $1.1 million has been transferred as contributions to those divisions, while just over a million was for salaries,” Moreno said. “Last year, the amount transferred to Code nearly doubled.”
“We did know reserves were spending down, you know, at a rate that was unsustainable,” Walker-Smith said during her presentation. “But it's very difficult when most of the budget revenue is locked up in salaries and other obligated expenses.”
Department records showed the internal transfer of reserves, labeled as “contributions,” started as early as fiscal year 2020-21 at about $400,000 and peaked at almost $800,000 in fiscal year 2023-24.
Fiscal year 2023-24 “would have been a good time for us to start looking at course correction,” Walker-Smith said. “But unfortunately, that did not happen.”
Turner admitted that it was her “error” as the department head to “take on the direction of spending down the reserves without a proper full-circle understanding of where that stops and like the long term use of those reserves,” she said. “So I do apologize for that.”
The admission marks a distinct shift in the department's narrative over just three weeks: what was first presented as an external shock — a drop in permitting revenue — is now acknowledged as a result of internal financial decisions.
Lake County News reached out to the county asking about the conflicting explanations of the CDD’s deficit.
Chief Deputy County Administrative Officer Matthew Rothstein, the administrative office’s spokesperson, said the CDD staff shared “initial impressions” in November with the intent to conduct further analysis.
“From a budgetary standpoint, revenue did not support appropriations,” Rothstein said in an email on Dec. 11, indicating the department was spending more than it was bringing in. “However, further analysis revealed reserve spending in recent budget years was the greater concern.”
“Director Turner acknowledged that the recent investigation had grown her understanding,” he added.
The financial “course correction” that officials admit was needed years ago appeared to be happening now.
“Immediately, we have a pause on all intradepartmental funding,” Walker-Smith said. “So no more contributions from Building to Code and Planning, beginning this entire fiscal year.”
However, the sudden stop of these internal transfers creates an immediate hole in the Code and Planning budgets, which rely on that money for salaries.
“That’s a direct 100% hit to the general fund that obviously we don't necessarily have,” said Assistant County Administrative Officer Stephen Carter. “We need to work out part of that plan at the same time.”
Carter suggested coming up with a CDD plan, not just a plan for the Building Division.
Staff from the CDD, Administrative Office, and County Counsel are scheduled to provide further analysis of the financial problem, repayment plan, and legality at the Board of Supervisors meeting this Tuesday, at 2 p.m.
Repayment proposal: Extended from one year to three years
The resolution of the CDD loan approved in November requires a full payback by June 30, 2026 — the end of the current fiscal year.
“We do anticipate a return to historic norms of permitting in the future, and are confident that we will be able to repay this loan within the fiscal year,” Turner said.
All supervisors at that time said they were skeptical about the viability of the plan. Nonetheless, they voted unanimously to approve the request, with Supervisor Eddie Crandell absent.
“Obviously we have to do something; We’ve got to make payroll,” Supervisor Brad Rasmussen said back then.
“But I don’t see how we’re going to get paid back,” Supervisor Jessica Pyska added.
In December, staff reiterated that confidence — but with a significantly extended timeline. “We do think we can recover and rebuild this budget within a three-year period,” said Walker-Smith.
Carter said the reason for the three-year proposal is because the department needs to build back their reserve which is now depleted.
Without recovering the reserves, “every July, they’ll have a cash flow problem where they would need a loan of about two months worth of salary,” Carter said. “So that's why, at the same time as paying us back, you need to put a little bit in reserve.”
Supervisors were less skeptical about the longer repayment timeline.
“I’m comfortable with the three-year repayment, because I think it's important to be able to build reserves while at the same time paying that back,” said Supervisor Rasmussen.
Still, Supervisor Bruno Sabatier warned that there is an opportunity cost with loans the county gives out.
“Anything that we loan out is coming out of our general fund reserves,” he said, adding that these reserves are being invested and generating revenues in the pool. “We’re losing that.”
He continued: “We’re handing — wrong term — we are ‘providing support’ in loans which take away from our taxpayers’ dollars to be invested and create more dollars to put back into services, into our community.”
“So the longer the loan is, the more we lose out on those opportunities,” Sabatier added.
Right now, the county has given out two loans to avoid disruptions in departmental operations.
In addition to the $390,000 lent to CDD, the Board of Supervisors in June approved a $2 million loan to Behavioral Health which initially required payback within 90 days. That deadline was not met.
In September, the board approved a 180-day extension for the repayment with Sabatier the sole dissenting vote.
The December meeting did not result in any formal changes to the CDD’s loan agreement.
Concerns on legality of loan repayment and reserve spending
At the November meeting, Supervisor Sabatier said he had “grave concerns” about a repayment plan that depends on future permit revenues.
At that time, he noted that the county is not supposed to “make money off” the rates on county services, raising doubts on the legality of using future permit revenues to pay for services rendered in the past.
In December, Sabatier brought it up again.
Sabatier said he received a “white paper” from staff saying it is allowable to use permit fees for the loan repayment — and that he disagrees.
“I just don't understand how a developer in March can pay a fee that helps repay for salaries spent in October,” he said. “That, to me, makes no sense at all.”
Sabatier’s concerns were also compounded by the new discovery of reserve transfers and overspending.
“I do still have concerns in the way that we have used our funds, the sense that we've used reserves from Building to help pay for Planning — completely different projects.”
Lake County News requested a copy of the “white paper” from the county after the December meeting. Rothstein said in an email that the document was “not disclosable on grounds including attorney-client privilege and attorney work-product privilege.”
What is the legal justification for using these restricted funds of the Building Division to subsidize other divisions? Has the Board of Supervisors authorized such transfers, or is there a section of county code that permits them?
Lake County News posed these questions in the same request to the county.
Rothstein’s response did not provide an immediate reference to county code. He reiterated the unavailability of a legal explanation. “As previously noted, legal analysis supporting those statements is not disclosable at this time.”
He added that County Counsel Lloyd Guintivano will be prepared to publicly discuss some of the issues in January.
Unanswered questions
However, as of the last public discussion in December, many questions regarding the department’s financial decisions and the county’s budgeting oversight remained untouched:
How had the Building Division accumulated a reserve pool of over $900,000 in the first place? Who or what processes directed and authorized the inter-division transfer of those reserves for years? Why wasn’t a “course correction” made sooner — and why did the Board of Supervisors and county staff only appear to recognize the problem after the division reserve was drained and a loan was needed to cover salaries?
Why didn’t this discussion surface at the June budget hearings — or at least, prior to the final budget approval in September?
“The Administrative Office relies on departments who accurately project their financial needs to sustain operations,” Moreno said at one point, before she went into details of the CDD’s reserve spending. “During the annual budgeting process, we meet with each department to review their budget and as needed throughout the year.”
Later, Turner of CDD briefly brought up the lack of sufficient, productive time with the administrative office during budgeting.
“Additionally, in preparation for this meeting, we have had a number of meetings with admin that have been productive and helpful,” Turner said. “And there, we were able to have the types of discussions that we don't usually get to have when we're preparing a budget, because they're busy with everybody's budgets, and so we get a little bit of time.”
Email staff reporter Lingzi Chen at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
LAKEPORT, Calif. — The Lakeport Planning Commission will consider an ordinance to change city code to allow for temporary cannabis events at the Lake County Fairgrounds.
The commission will meet at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 14, in the council chambers at Lakeport City Hall, 225 Park St.
To speak on an agenda item, access the meeting remotely here; the meeting ID is 814 1135 4347, pass code is 847985.
To join by phone, dial 1-669-444-9171; for one tap mobile, +16694449171,,81411354347#,,,,*847985#.
Comments can be submitted by email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. To give the city clerk adequate time to print out comments for consideration at the meeting, please submit written comments before 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 14.
The commission’s main item of business is its consideration of the recommendation of an ordinance amending sections of the Lakeport Municipal Code regarding commercial cannabis events.
Specifically, the proposed changes would allow limited temporary cannabis events at the Lake County Fairgrounds, whose chief executive officer recently contacted the city about a proposal to host a temporary cannabis event this spring with cannabis retail sales permitted, according to a report to the commission from Community Development Director Joey Hejnowicz.
“The Lake County Fairgrounds has expressed interest in hosting a cannabis-related event as part of its broader, year-round event programming strategy intended to increase community engagement, attract visitors, and support the long-term financial sustainability of the Fairgrounds,” Hejnowicz wrote. “The Fairgrounds regularly hosts large, managed events and has the infrastructure, staffing capacity, and security experience necessary to accommodate specialized, regulated events.”
He said the proposed cannabis event “is envisioned as a springtime gathering designed to showcase and celebrate Lake County's local cannabis growers and farmers, many of whom are long-standing agricultural producers within the region. The event would combine cannabis-related programming with live music and entertainment to create a destination-style event that highlights Lake County's unique agricultural identity and emerging cannabis economy.”
Hejnowicz’s report said the amendment to the municipal code “is structured as a prohibition citywide with a limited exception at a single established venue,” in this case, the fairgrounds, and requires compliance with state law and all Department of Cannabis Control license conditions.
Staff is recommending the commission adopt the draft ordinance with the changes and find that the proposed amendment to Chapter 5.34 of the Lakeport Municipal Code “appropriately balances local control with state cannabis regulations, supports economic development and community events at an established venue, and maintains robust safeguards to protect public health, safety, and welfare.”
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, and on Bluesky, @erlarson.bsky.social. Find Lake County News on the following platforms: Facebook, @LakeCoNews; X, @LakeCoNews; Threads, @lakeconews, and on Bluesky, @lakeconews.bsky.social.
As an infectious diseases physician and researcher, I’ll be keeping an eye on a few viruses in 2026 that could be poised to cause infections in unexpected places or in unexpected numbers.
Influenza A – on the cusp of a pandemic
Influenza A is a perennial threat. The virus infects a wide range of animals and has the ability to mutate rapidly. The most recent influenza pandemic – caused by the H1N1 subtype of influenza in 2009 – killed over 280,000 people worldwide in its first year, and the virus continues to circulate today. This virus was often called swine flu because it originated in pigs in Mexico before circulating around the world.
In 2026, scientists will continue to look for any evidence that H5N1 has changed enough to be transmitted from human to human – a necessary step for the start of a new influenza pandemic. The influenza vaccines currently on the market probably don’t offer protection from H5N1, but scientists are working to create vaccines that would be effective against the virus.
Mpox – worldwide and liable to worsen
Mpox virus, formerly called monkeypox virus, was first discovered in the 1950s. For many decades, it was seen rarely, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. Contrary to its original name, the virus mostly infects rodents and occasionally crossed over into humans.
Mpox is closely related to smallpox, and infection results in a fever and painful rash that can last for weeks. There are several varieties of mpox, including a generally more severe clade I and a milder clade II. A vaccine for mpox is available, but there are no effective treatments.
In 2022, a global outbreak of clade II mpox spread to more than 100 countries that had never seen the virus before. This outbreak was driven by human-to-human transmission of the virus through close contact, often via sex.
Most people with the virus experience fever, headache and muscle aches. The illness usually lasts just a few days, but some patients have weakness that can persist for weeks. The illness can also recur after someone has initially recovered.
There are many unanswered questions about the Oropouche virus and the disease it causes, and there are no specific treatments or vaccines. For decades, infections in people were thought to occur only in the Amazon region. However, beginning in the early 2000s, cases began to show up in a larger area of South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Cases in the United States are usually among travelers returning from abroad.
In 2026, Oropouche outbreaks will likely continue to affect travelers in the Americas. The biting midge that carries Oropouche virus is found throughout North and South America, including the southeastern United States. The range of the virus could continue to expand.
Around the world, people, animals and the wider environment are dependent on each other. Vigilance for known and emerging viral threats and the development of new vaccines and treatments can help keep everyone safe.
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