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- Written by: LAKE COUNTY NEWS REPORTS
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Wreaths Across America ceremonies will take place at five ceremonies across Lake County this weekend.
Everyone is welcome to the events, which will begin at 8:55 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 17, at the Hartley, Kelseyville, Lower Lake, Middletown and St. Mary’s cemeteries.
Lake County will gather together to honor veterans during the holiday season as part of the annual Wreaths Across America Day.
On this brisk December morning, help to show the veterans and families that they will not be forgotten.
This year the theme is “Find A Way to Serve.”
Youth organizations and veteran organizations have volunteered to conduct the Wreaths Across America ceremony this year at the five Lake County cemeteries.
Eight ceremonial wreaths will be placed to remember all soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who served, honor their sacrifices and teach our younger generations about the high cost of our freedoms.
Wreaths Across America pursues its mission with nationwide wreath-laying events amid the holiday season, and year-round educational outreach inviting all Americans to appreciate our freedoms and the cost at which they are delivered.
Specially designated wreaths for the Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, Space Force and POW/MIA will be placed on memorials during a ceremony that will be coordinated simultaneously at over participating locations all across the country and overseas.
In 2021, more than 2.4 million veteran wreaths were placed on headstones at 3,137 participating cemeteries around the country in honor of the service and sacrifices made for our freedoms, with each name said out loud.
More than 525 truckloads of wreaths were delivered across the country by hundreds of volunteer professional truck drivers.
The truck full of Remembrance Wreaths will be arriving in parts of Lake County on Tuesday, Dec. 13. Another truck will arrive in Lakeport on Thursday, Dec. 15, and will be escorted through the city at noon and on to Hartley Cemetery where 800 wreaths will be unloaded.
Join in and watch from the sidewalks along Main Street. Please bring your patriotic spirit to this welcome.
Every person has something to give, whether it is their time, ideas, compassion, or resources. Mother Teresa said it best, “The greatest good is what we do for one another.”
Take an hour amid the hustle and bustle of this holiday season and bring your families to attend one of these heartfelt ceremonies on Saturday, Dec. 17, where we will remember and honor our veterans, teach our children the value of the sacrifices that have been made and help lay the wreaths.
Editor’s note: The time for wreath delivery has been updated.
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- Written by: Brian E. Roe, The Ohio State University
You saw it at Thanksgiving, and you’ll likely see it at your next holiday feast: piles of unwanted food – unfinished second helpings, underwhelming kitchen experiments and the like – all dressed up with no place to go, except the back of the refrigerator. With luck, hungry relatives will discover some of it before the inevitable green mold renders it inedible.
U.S. consumers waste a lot of food year-round – about one-third of all purchased food. That’s equivalent to 1,250 calories per person per day, or US$1,500 worth of groceries for a four-person household each year, an estimate that doesn’t include recent food price inflation. And when food goes bad, the land, labor, water, chemicals and energy that went into producing, processing, transporting, storing and preparing it are wasted too.
Where does all that unwanted food go? Mainly underground. Food waste occupies almost 25% of landfill space nationwide. Once buried, it breaks down, generating methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Recognizing those impacts, the U.S. government has set a goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030.
Reducing wasted food could protect natural resources, save consumers money, reduce hunger and slow climate change. But as an agricultural economist and director of the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative, I know all too well that there’s no ready elegant solution. Developing meaningful interventions requires burrowing into the systems that make reducing food waste such a challenge for consumers, and understanding how both physical and human factors drive this problem.
Consumers and the squander sequence
To avoid being wasted, food must avert a gauntlet of possible missteps as it moves from soil to stomach. Baruch College marketing expert Lauren Block and her colleagues call this pathway the squander sequence.
It’s an example of what economists call an O-ring technology, harking back to the rubber seals whose catastrophic failure caused the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. As in that event, failure of even a small component in the multistage sequence of transforming raw materials into human nutrition leads to failure of the entire task.
MIT economist Michael Kremer has shown that when corporations of many types are confronted with such sequential tasks, they put their highest-skilled staff at the final stages of production. Otherwise the companies risk losing all the value they have added to their raw materials through the production sequence.
Who performs the final stages of production in today’s modern food system? That would be us: frenzied, multitasking, money- and time-constrained consumers. At the end of a typical day, we’re often juggling myriad demands as we try to produce a nutritious, delicious meal for our households.
Unfortunately, sprawling modern food systems are not managed like a single integrated firm that’s focused on maximizing profits. And consumers are not the highly skilled heavy hitters that Kremer envisioned to manage the final stage of the complex food system. It’s not surprising that failure – here, wasting food – often is the result.
Indeed, out of everyone employed across the fragmented U.S. food system, consumers may have the least professional training in handling and preparing food. Adding to the mayhem, firms may not always want to help consumers get the most out of food purchases. That could reduce their sales – and if food that’s been stored longer degrades and becomes less appetizing or safe, producers’ reputations could suffer.
Three paths to squash the squandering
What options exist for reducing food waste in the kitchen? Here are several approaches.
- Build consumer skills.
This could start with students, perhaps through reinvesting in family and consumer science courses – the modern, expanded realm of old-school home economics classes. Or schools could insert food-related modules into existing classes. Biology students could learn why mold forms, and math students could calculate how to expand or reduce recipes.
Outside of school, there are expanding self-education opportunities available online or via clever gamified experiences like Hellman’s Fridge Night Mission, an app that challenges and coaches users to get one more meal a week out of their fridges, freezers and pantries. Yes, it may involve adding some mayo.
Recent studies have found that when people had the opportunity to brush up on their kitchen management skills early in the COVID-19 pandemic, food waste declined. However, as consumers returned to busy pre-COVID schedules and routines such as eating out, wastage rebounded.
- Make home meal preparation easier.
Enter the meal kit, which provides the exact quantity of ingredients needed. One recent study showed that compared to traditional home-cooked meals, wasted food declined by 38% for meals prepared from kits.
Meal kits generate increased packaging waste, but this additional impact may be offset by reduced food waste. Net environmental benefits may be case specific, and warrant more study.
- Heighten the consequences for wasting food.
South Korea has begun implementing taxes on food wasted in homes by requiring people to dispose of it in special costly bags or, for apartment dwellers, through pay-as-you-go kiosks.
A recent analysis suggests that a small tax of 6 cents per kilogram – which, translated for a typical U.S. household, would total about $12 yearly – yielded a nearly 20% reduction in waste among the affected households. The tax also spurred households to spend 5% more time, or about an hour more per week, preparing meals, but the changes that people made reduced their yearly grocery bills by about $170.
No silver bullets
Each of these paths is promising, but there is no single solution to this problem. Not all consumers will seek out or encounter opportunities to improve their food-handling skills. Meal kits introduce logistical issues of their own and could be too expensive for some households. And few U.S. cities may be willing or able to develop systems for tracking and taxing wasted food.
As the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine concluded in a 2020 report, there’s a need for many solutions to address food waste’s large contribution to global climate change and worldwide nutritional shortfalls. Both the United Nations and the U.S. National Science Foundation are funding efforts to track and measure food waste. I expect that this work will help us understand waste patterns more clearly and find effective ways to squelch the squander sequence.
Brian E. Roe, Professor of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, The Ohio State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
The board will meet beginning at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 13, 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 958 1876 4276, pass code 820080. The meeting also can be accessed via one tap mobile at +16694449171,,95818764276#,,,,*820080#.
All interested members of the public that do not have internet access or a Mediacom cable subscription are encouraged to call 669-900-6833, and enter the Zoom meeting ID and pass code information above.
To submit a written comment on any agenda item visit https://countyoflake.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx and click on the eComment feature linked to
the meeting date. If a comment is submitted after the meeting begins, it may not be read during the meeting but will become a part of the record.
At 10 a.m., the board, sitting as the Lake County Sanitation District Board of Directors, will hold the second reading, consideration of an ordinance increasing sewer use fees for all properties that discharge to the Middletown Wastewater Treatment Plant, excluding Anderson Springs.
At 10:15 a.m., the board will hear Monte Cristo Vineyards LLC’s appeal of the Lake County Planning Commission’s decision earlier this year to deny a major use permit and initially study for 22 acres of outdoor cannabis cultivation at 11250 Cerrito Drive, Clearlake Oaks.
In other business, at 9:15 a.m. the board is scheduled to consider a resolution declaring the intention to renew the Lake County Tourism Improvement District and establishing the time and place of a public meeting and a public hearing.
At 11 a.m., the board will present commendations to retiring county employees, including Sheriff Brian Martin, County Clerk/Auditor Controller Cathy Saderlund, Treasurer-Tax Collector Barbara Ringen and Michelle “Micki” Dolby.
The full agenda follows.
CONSENT AGENDA
5.1: a) Adopt proclamation commending Michelle “Micki” Dolby on her retirement after over 16 years of service to the county of Lake; and b) adopt proclamation commending Sheriff-Coroner Brian Martin for his 15 years of service to Lake County; and c) adopt proclamation commending Treasurer-Tax Collector Barbara Ringen for her 32 years of service to Lake County; and d) adopt proclamation commending County Clerk/Auditor Controller Cathy Saderlund for her 41 years of service to Lake County.
5.2: Adopt proclamation commending Clearlake Police Chief Andrew White for his outstanding commitment and impact to Lake County.
5.3: Approve continuation of proclamation of the existence of a local emergency due to pervasive tree mortality.
5.4: Approve the bylaws of the Lake County Agriculture Advisory Committee.
5.5: Approve closure of Animal Care and Control on Saturday, Dec. 31, to observe the county winter holiday.
5.6: Approve Board of Supervisors minutes for Nov. 22.
5.7: Approve continuation of resolution authorizing teleconferenced meetings during a state of emergency continue to exist.
5.8: (a) Adopt “Resolution Accepting Official Canvass of the General Election held on November 8, 2022”; and (b) accept the “Certification of County Elections Official of Results of the Official Canvass of the Election Returns” with the official Statement of Votes prepared by the Registrar of Voters office.
5.9: Approve continuation of a local health emergency related to the 2019 Coronavirus (COVID-19) as proclaimed by the Lake County Public Health officer.
5.10: Approve continuation of a local emergency due to COVID-19.
5.11: Approve continuation of an emergency declaration for drought conditions.
5.12: Approve amendment four to the agreement between the county of Lake and Quincy Engineering for engineering services for replacement of St. Helena Creek Bridge at Wardlaw Street (14C-0035) and rehabilitation of Cooper Creek Bridge at Witter Springs Road (14C-0102) in Lake County for a revised contract amount of $494,246.46 (an increase of $127,276.46).
5.13: Approve out of state travel for the Public Works director from April 15 to 19, 2023, to Orange Beach, Alabama.
5.14: Approve purchase orders for the purchase of two vehicles for the Central Garage Fleet at revised prices, and authorize the Public Works director/assistant purchasing agent to sign the purchase orders.
5.15: Approve the Department of Boating and Waterways 2023/24 application for financial aid in the amount of $539,085.17; and authorize the sheriff to sign the application and the chair to sign the resolution.
5.16: (A) Approve the FY 2022 Homeland Security application in the amount of $126,761; (B) Authorize Sheriff Brian Martin to sign the grant subaward face sheet, the authorized agent document and the subrecipient grants management assessment form; (C) authorize County Administrative Officer Susan Parker to act as the authorized agent on behalf of the county to sign the standard assurances and initial each page, the lobbying certification and the FFATA Financial Disclosure document; and (D) authorize the chairperson of the Board of Supervisors to sign the certification of the governing body resolution.
5.17: (a) Approve budget transfer allocating money from object code 62.74 to 61.60; (b) waive the competitive bid process under Ordinance #2406, Section 38.2 as it is not in the public interest due to the unique nature of goods; and (c) approve the Special Districts administrator acting as the assistant purchasing agent to issue and sign a purchase order in the amount not to exceed $297,325.00 to DXP Enterprises Inc., the authorized distributor for the purchase and installation of an Industrial Flow Solutions, OverWatch Direct In-Line Pump Systems Model OW28CP/4VV.
5.18: Sitting as the Lake County Sanitation District Board of Directors, a) waive the competitive bidding process, pursuant to Lake County Code Section 2-38.4 Cooperative Purchases; b) authorize Special Districts administrator/assistant purchasing agent to issue a purchase order not to exceed $275,000.00 to U-Rock Utility Equipment for the purchase of a Ford E450 Camera Van and a Rovver X Portable Mainline Camera.
5.19: Sitting as the Board of Directors of the Kelseyville County Waterworks District #3, (a) adopt resolution revising the Fiscal Year 2022-2023 Adopted Budget of the County of Lake by canceling reserves in Fund 293 Kelseyville County Waterworks District #3 O&M Reserve Designation, in the amount of $1,500 to make appropriations in the Budget Unit 8593, Object Code 785.62-74 Capital FA-Equipment/Other for the purchase of an ATV; (b) approve the purchase of a Polaris ATV and authorize the Special Districts administrator/assistant purchasing agent to issue and sign a purchase order not to exceed $10,500 to Twin Rivers Polaris.
TIMED ITEMS
6.2, 9:15 a.m.: Discussion and Consideration of a resolution declaring the intention to renew the Lake County Tourism Improvement District and establishing the time and place of a public meeting and a public hearing.
6.3, 10 a.m.: Sitting as the Lake County Sanitation District Board of Directors, second reading, consideration of an ordinance increasing sewer use fees for all properties that discharge to the Middletown Wastewater Treatment Plant excluding Anderson Springs.
6.4, 10:15 a.m.: Public hearing, consideration of appeal (AB 22-03) of Planning Commission's denial of major use permit (UP 21-14) and initial study (IS 21-15) for 22 acres of outdoor cannabis cultivation. Applicant: Monte Cristo Vineyards LLC; located at 11250 Cerrito Drive, Clearlake Oaks (APNs 006-007-17, 23 & 30).
6.5, 11 a.m.: a) Presentation of proclamation commending Michelle “Micki” Dolby on her retirement after over 16 years of service to the county of Lake; and b) presentation of proclamation commending Sheriff-Coroner Brian Martin for his 15 years of service to Lake County; and c) presentation of proclamation commending Treasurer-Tax Collector Barbara Ringen for her 32 years of service to Lake County; and d) presentation of proclamation commending County Clerk/Auditor Controller Cathy Saderlund for her 41 years of service to Lake County.
UNTIMED ITEMS
7.2: Sitting as the Lake County Watershed Protection District, consider and discuss $5,000 financial commitment to the Risk Reduction Authority.
7.3: Public review and approval of the county of Lake Homeless Housing, Assistance, and Prevention (HHAP) Round 4 application.
CLOSED SESSION
8.1: Public Employee Evaluation: Health Services Director Jonathan Portney.
8.2: Conference with Legal Counsel: Significant exposure to litigation pursuant to Gov. Code section 54956.9(d)(2), (e)(1) — One potential case.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: Janine Smith-Citron
The public is invited to these candle-lighting ceremonies that celebrate the memories of family, friends and loved ones who have gone before us.
Ceremonies will be in Lakeport on Tuesday, Dec. 13, and in Lower Lake on Thursday, Dec. 15.
Community members are invited to participate in the ceremony and reception on Tuesday, Dec. 13, at the Hospice Services Bereavement Center, 1862 Parallel Drive, Lakeport, at 5 p.m.
A special tribute to military veterans will be presented by the Lake County Honor Guard at this event and include a reading by Lake County Poet Laureate Georgina Marie Guardado.
The Lower Lake event on Thursday will include a candle lighting, musical duet with Barbara Christwitz and Jim Leonardis, a message of remembrance presented by Adventist Health Director of Community Wellbeing Don Smith and a reading by the Lake County poet laureate.
Festivities will start at 6:30 p.m. at the Lower Lake Historical School House Museum,16435 Main St.
“Holidays can be extremely difficult for those who have experienced the death of a loved one, especially during the first year after a death,” said Kathleen Bradley, manager of bereavement services for Hospice Services of Lake County. “At a time when we may feel that everyone is supposed to be happy and enjoying themselves, the griever can feel sad, lonely and depressed. Taking time out during these holidays to remember our loved ones, instead of trying just to distract ourselves, can be helpful in reintroducing meaning.
“Through our candle lighting ceremonies, we are connecting to the symbolism of light; a connection to the light that our loved ones brought into our lives and that our memories of them continue to provide,” explained Bradley. “The light of the stars, the log aflame in the fireplace, as well as the flame of the candles that we light in their honor, can all be ways that we can remind ourselves during the holidays of the light of love we share with our loved ones.”
For more information, call the Hospice Services of Lake County office at 707-263-6222 or visit the agency’s website, www.lakecountyhospice.org.
Janine Smith-Citron is director of development for Hospice Services of Lake County.