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- Written by: LAKE COUNTY NEWS REPORTS
Following action last week to support Hawaii, on Tuesday Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the deployment of additional wildfire recovery personnel to Hawaii as well as wildland fire strike teams to Oregon to help battle ongoing wildfires.
California is deploying 201 specialized personnel, 25 vehicles, and more resources to help our neighbors in Hawaii and Oregon.
“I’ve been in close contact with our neighbors in Hawaii and Oregon as they deal with these devastating wildfires, and they know that California has their back — we’re doing everything we can to help,” Newsom said.
Newsom instructed his Office of Emergency Services, or Cal OES, to coordinate the deployment of 101 state and local government personnel in total to Hawaii:
• 69-member Incident Management Team from Cal Fire (67 members) and Cal OES (two members) to support overall incident management;
• Three Cal OES wildfire debris removal and hazardous waste experts;
• One Cal OES recovery professional in maximizing community-based federal funding;
• One Cal OES Fire and Rescue personnel specialized in urban search and rescue (US&R);
• One Cal OES mass fatality incident management expert;
• 12 US&R Task Force members;
• 10 local government K-9 teams;
• Four forensic anthropologists.
As multiple wildfires continue to burn across the west slope of the Cascades in Oregon, Gov. Newsom directed Cal OES to deploy five firefighting strike teams to provide additional capacity as firefighters battle the Lookout and Bedrock fires: 25 engines and 100 personnel are deploying to Oregon from Alameda, San Mateo, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties.
Last year, California deployed firefighters, disaster recovery experts and other personnel to Oregon, New Mexico and Montana. In 2021, California sent firefighting equipment and personnel to assist Oregon’s response to the Bootleg Fire.
This request for aid comes through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, a national inter-state mutual aid agreement which allows states to request and send personnel, equipment and commodities to assist with response and recovery efforts in other states.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
LAKEPORT, Calif. — Fifty years and thousands of swimmers after it first opened, the Westshore Pool is set to be demolished.
The Lakeport Unified School Board on Wednesday night voted to award a $248,000 demolition contract to R.O. Construction, which later in the meeting was awarded a $59,340 contract to R.O. Construction for cobblestone work in the Terrace Middle School quad area.
The R.O. Construction bid was the lowest of two the district received on the pool project. The second was for $250,000 from Dillsaver Construction.
In its five decades, the Westshore Pool has entertained thousands of adults and children, including the Channel Cats and the Clear Lake High and Kelseyville High swim teams.
The competitive swimming program that the pool hosted resulted in many local students getting full ride swimming scholarships to colleges.
However, Jennifer Hanson, a Lakeport Unified School Board member and former Channel Cats president, said without a pool that can offer competitive swimming, the Channel Cats are now at about 40 members, rather than 300 as it had been when Westshore Pool was still open.
The city of Lakeport funded a complete renovation of the pool in 2007 and took the lead in operating the pool during the summer season.
But a series of events stretching back several years that included district leadership claiming it found that the pool wasn’t up to state standards, followed by the discovery of leaking pipes under the pool resulted in 2017 being its final summer and its closure in 2018.
Now, after years of languishing empty and vandalized, the pool is expected to be removed very shortly.
Lakeport Unified Superintendent Matthew Bullard informed the board that there will be some asbestos removal as part of the demolition process.
Board members Carly Alvord and Phil Kirby, and Board President Jennifer Williams-Richardson voted to approve the contract following a brief discussion that consisted largely of answering questions from Lake County News about the pool.
Absent for the meeting were board members Dan Buffalo and Jennifer Hanson.
Hanson, a passionate advocate for the pool who was the Channel Cats’ president for 26 years, said that had she been at the meeting she would have voted to approve the demolition contract.
She said she’s been advocating for a few years to finally fill in the damaged and abandoned pool.
“The pool is a danger,” she said. “Because they let it deteriorate as much as they have, it’s time to demolish it.”
Hanson’s viewpoint is understandable after seeing the pool. Following the Wednesday night meeting, this reporter visited the site. The buildings had been gutted, the pool was filled with garbage, bleachers, a damaged soda machine and other kinds of debris.
The pool and its buildings are covered with graffiti featuring every imaginable profanity and vulgarity, with the exception of one spot in which someone wrote “Be Kind” in black spray paint.
“It’s an open wound,” Hanson said.
It wasn’t always that way. At one point, it was a thriving and busy community facility.
“You remember the good times,” Hanson said.
The saga of the pool
In 1972, the county of Lake, city of Lakeport and the Lakeport Unified School District entered into an agreement to construct the Westshore Pool on school district property, with construction completed in 1973. It was designed by well-known Lake County engineer Cliff Ruzicka.
During its years of operation, the pool wasn’t just a place of summertime fun and a site for swimming competitions, it also fulfilled the critical function — being a place where children could safely learn to swim. The importance of that use is one Hanson has emphasized both as a Channel Cats leader and a school board member.
In 2004, the pool was closed due to the need for repairs. That same year, the city and school district entered into a 20-year memorandum of understanding in which the the city of Lakeport would operate the facility during the summer, with the district contributing funds.
In 2005, the Lake County Channel Cats approached the city to ask it to become the sponsor for a State Parks grant. In November of that year, the city received the State Parks grant in the amount of $168,000.
In May 2007, the city of Lakeport completed renovation of the 4,300-square-foot pool at a cost of about $380,000. Most of that money came from Measure I sales tax funds, along with the State Parks grant.
The following year, the school district informed the city that, due to budget cuts, it could no longer provide the financial support it previously had promised.
In the years that followed, the city raised concerns that the county and school district were not sharing the costs of running the facility. The county had provided one-time funding of $5,000 but didn’t offer other support.
The pool saga took another twist in January 2014, when — following separate discussions by both the city and the district about finding ways to fund needed upgrades — district officials said they were not going to open the pool.
That was due to then-Superintendent Erin Smith-Hagberg reporting that, over the holiday break, she had discovered an 11-year-old letter from the Division of the State Architect — the agency that provides design and construction oversight for facilities including K–12 schools — raising issues with the pool’s conditions and accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Later in 2014, the school district approved a contract with a consultant for soils stability testing. Ruzicka offered his services to help upgrade the pool for free and even went into his archives to give the district his original plans for the pool, which he gave to Hanson who, in turn, handed them off to the district.
By June of that year, the report on soil and slope testing found the pool was built on stable soil and allowed for the district board to approve an agreement with the city of Lakeport to operate the pool for recreational swimming that summer.
The year 2014 was important for another reason: Lakeport Unified launched its plans for the Measure T bond, which voters approved that November.
The $17 million bond measure was intended to fund the building of a number of new facilities, chief among them a new pool.
Hanson said the pool was prominently featured on fliers the district circulated in support of the bond measure, which passed with 65.9% of the vote. It needed 55% voter approval to pass.
However, Hanson said that the district had to finish a cafeteria and library promised in a previous bond before doing the pool.
In a 2016 interview, Smith-Hagberg told Lake County News that the district was planning to move ahead with full construction of a new pool with the bond funds, as the costs of refurbishing the Westshore Pool was considered to be too expensive.
Hanson said she recalled Mike Adams, the district’s consultant on bond projects, presenting a design of a new 10-lane pool to her at a bond oversight meeting. “It was this gorgeous pool.”
At a bond oversight committee, she said they were told that the fitness/tennis court/pool complex would break ground at the end of 2018.
It turned out that the pool’s last summer of operation was 2017. In December of that year, Hanson and her daughter discovered a leak in the pool, which she said was down by about 3 feet in depth from where it should have been.
It was determined that there was a leak underneath the pool. “Nobody ever knew for sure why it sprung a leak,” said Hanson, adding that it was believed to be an issue with a pipe.
Hanson recalled that Smith-Hagberg and Dave Norris — then the district’s director of maintenance, operations and transportation — said they didn’t plan to pay the $10,000 that a pool repair consultant told them it would cost to fix the leak because they were planning to build a brand new pool with the bond funds.
“That’s exactly what they said,” Hanson said, adding that she believed they knew full well that they weren’t going to build a pool.
While district officials maintained there were plans for a new pool facility, those plans never advanced to the point of building the new facility. Smith-Hagberg left to take a job in Calistoga and her successors also didn’t appear to support the project.
Community dissatisfaction got to the point where in 2018 the school district board was confronted by a room filled with residents angry that the pool they thought they would get with the bond hadn’t materialized.
Hanson said the situation with the pool led to her running for the school board, and that the handling of the bond was “the No. 1 issue” in that 2018 election.
She, Buffalo and Carly Alvord ran in 2018 as a slate with a platform that focused on issues like the pool and how the bond money was spent, which resulted in longtime board members Dennis Darling and Tom Powers being voted off the board. Norris later took a job out of county and left the district. Alvord, Buffalo and Hanson were reelected in 2022.
Board, superintendent respond to questions about pool
At the school board meeting on Aug. 9, Lake County News asked several questions about the pool and what comes after the demolition.
In response to a question about whether the district had researched renovating and upgrading the existing pool, Bullard said he had inquired with some organizations and they said the cost was prohibitive.
Board member Phil Kirby said the costs to fix the pool’s plumbing were exorbitant. That’s in addition to the Division of the State Architect having so many demands on schools, which Kirby would make a pool renovation more expensive than the district could afford.
Regarding what led to the damage to the pool, Kirby said it simply needed a lot of maintenance.
As for where the money to demolish the pool will come from, Bullard said it’s slated to come from facilities money associated with a grant. He said the demolition is appropriate for bond dollars but that a discussion of actually using bond funds to cover removing the pool would come later.
Asked if the demolition would trigger a requirement that the city of Lakeport repay the grant funding it received from State Parks to restore the pool, Bullard said he participated in a discussion with the State Parks Board and did not get the impression that would be required, as the board never brought up repayment.
Regarding what the district plans to do with the pool site going forward, Bullard said they will remove the existing pool structure and return it to usable space.
He said they could remove the pool and grade the hillside down but the district wants to return the site to its original condition. That will allow for a future board to use the space to put in a structure with a foundation.
Later in that meeting, Bullard updated the board about his discussions with Lakeport City Manager Kevin Ingram regarding a joint powers agreement, or JPA, involving the cities and the county for recreation facilities and a pool.
He said polling so far shows that a recreation center has only a 56 or 57% approval rating, which is not high enough to pass as a ballot measure for projects that are not school related. So now the JPA members are looking at grants.
Bullard said he and Ingram spoke about funds for a project. While the board set aside $1.2 million for it, Bullard said he doesn’t believe the remaining bond funds could be an approved use for a recreation center that is located off campus.
However, Bullard — and in the separate interview, Hanson — said the district’s proceeds from the sale of the former Natural High property, now the location of the new Lakefront Park, could be used for the project.
The city paid the school district $660,000 for the 6.9-acre property.
Bullard said he assured Ingram that Lakeport Unified is still interested in a pool solution. “We would absolutely be a partner in that.”
Right now, Bullard said they are in a holding pattern to see what the JPA might do. Then, they can readdress the bond funds that have been set aside. Bullard added that they need to finish the projects on the bond list.
Hanson said that she feels the district needs to reach out to the community and apologize for not building the pool, and own it.
“I always believed they were going to build a pool,” she said.
Remembering the good times
The decision by Lakeport Unified to move forward with the pool’s demolition came within a week of the publication of an article by Slate magazine on the closure of public pools.
The article pointed out that the nation's deteriorating public pools have led to drowning becoming a public health crisis.
It’s a concern Hanson herself has raised for years. “We’re not called Lake County by some whim.”
She said it comes down to the haves and have-nots — unless you are rich and have a pool in our backyard, you’re not going to learn to swim and you will be in danger of drowning.
With the public unhappy about the district not building another pool, Hanson is concerned. “We’re screwed. We’re never gonna get to a pool.”
As for those pool plans Adams showed her, Hanson said they weren’t seen again until Dan Camacho, Norris’ successor as director of maintenance, operations and transportation, found them tucked away in a file drawer.
Hanson said she told Bullard that she wants to be there for the Westshore Pool’s demolition.
“There comes a time when you just have to do it, for the safety of the children,” she said.
She said Bullard didn’t give her an idea of when it’s supposed to happen, but she believes it’s soon.
For Hanson, it’s been gut-wrenching to see the well-loved pool deteriorate into its current condition.
“Maybe eventually it won’t be sad anymore,” she said.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: LAKE COUNTY NEWS REPORTS
Overdoses are life-threatening. Last year, 105,258 people died due to overdose in the United States. Tragically, 79 were Lake County residents.
Overdose Awareness Day is a solemn reminder of the devastating impact overdose has on our communities, and brings awareness to the risks of illicit drug use.
This day of remembrance encourages communities, health care professionals, policymakers, and each of us to bring an end to prevent overdoses, related injuries and deaths.
Education and harm reduction make a difference
Lake County Behavioral Health Services finds education and harm reduction are among the best tools to help prevent overdoses.
Recognizing potential signs of an overdose can help save a life. Signs of overdose may differ based on the substance consumed, but common symptoms include difficulty speaking, lowered heart rate, trouble breathing, and loss of consciousness. If you suspect someone is experiencing an overdose, immediately call 911.
Last year, alone, almost 90,000 of those who died from overdose had fentanyl in their system. Fentanyl is a potent and dangerous drug, and can be found in a variety of other narcotics. Many who die from fentanyl overdose do not know they have consumed fentanyl.
Narcan (Naloxone) saves lives
Narcan is a medication used to rapidly reverse the effects of opioid overdose by blocking opioid receptors in the brain. Narcan is safe, effective and can be life saving! It has no significant effect if opioids are not in the treated individual’s system. Narcan can be prescribed by a medical provider or obtained free through SafeRx.
Please contact Sarah Weber, an AmeriCorps Vista serving with SafeRx,
Free International Overdose Awareness Day event planned for Aug. 19
SafeRx will host a free event in observance of International Overdose Awareness Day on Aug. 19 at Austin Park in Clearlake, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Participants will have the opportunity to create posters to honor loved ones lost to overdose and receive education and training on how to administer Narcan.
Those who complete this training can also be provided Narcan, increasing the chances this life-saving drug will be available where and when it is most needed.
This is also a great opportunity to meet staff from a variety of local organizations engaged in harm reduction work and substance use disorder treatment, such as Lake County Behavioral Health, SafeRx, and Tribal Health.
Struggling with substance abuse? Help and support are available
Lake County Behavioral Health is committed to raising awareness of the signs of overdose, risks associated with substance abuse, and the critical need for those at risk of overdose to seek help and support.
Please contact Lake County Behavioral Health Services offices to find out more information regarding harm reduction strategies and treatment options. Behavioral Health staff can be reached at the North Shore (Lucerne) office, 707-274-9101, or the South Shore (Clearlake) clinic, 707-994-7090.
If you or a loved one is experiencing a behavioral health crisis, call the 24-hour crisis line, 800-900-2075.
If someone close to you is experiencing an overdose or other physical and/or behavioral health-related medical emergency, immediately call 911.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
Gov. Gavin Newsom, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom and the California Museum on Monday announced the 16th class of trailblazers in public service, sports, music, entertainment and more into the California Hall of Fame.
This posthumous class will be inducted into the California Hall of Fame at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 22, in a virtual ceremony — joining over 100 inspirational Californians previously inducted for embodying the state's innovative spirit.
The California Hall of Fame 16th Class inductees are:
• Carrie Fisher: Actress and screenwriter;
• Maggie Gee: Pilot and physicist;
• Etta James: Singer;
• José Julio Sarria: LGBTQ rights activist and pioneer;
• Vin Scully: LA Dodgers broadcaster;
• Shirley Temple Black: Actress and public servant;
• Archie Williams: Olympic gold medalist and educator.
“We are thrilled to announce the newest class of inductees joining some of our state's most revolutionary, innovative, and brightest in the California Hall of Fame,” said Gov. Newsom. “The outstanding legacy of this group has and will continue to embody what it means to be a Californian. There is no doubt their legacies will continue to live on and inspire millions across our state for generations to come.”
“The governor and I are delighted to honor the contributions of this remarkable group of visionaries,” said Siebel Newsom. “Each one of these pioneers has uniquely impacted California through their boundless creativity, perseverance, and courage — encapsulating the California dream through their lives and legacies."
“We are honored to join the Governor and First Partner in recognizing this extraordinary group of inductees. Through their talent, creativity and courage, they embody the best of California,” said California Museum Board of Trustees Chair Anne Marie Petrie.
Launched in 2006, the California Hall of Fame honors history-making Californians who embody the state's spirit of innovation and have changed the state, the nation, and the world.
Inductees are selected annually by the Governor and First Partner for achievements in arts, business and labor, entertainment, food and wine, literature, music, public service, science, and sports.