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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
Gov. Gavin Newsom has appointed Michael S. Green, 63, of Lakeport, to fill the seat vacated by Tina Scott at the end of July. Newsom’s office said Green is a registered Democrat.
Green will serve out the remainder of Scott’s term, which expires the first Monday after Jan. 1, 2025, based on state election code.
By the time of the late Friday afternoon announcement, the Board of Supervisors’ Tuesday agenda already had been issued.
Johanna DeLong, assistant clerk to the board, confirmed to Lake County News that an extra item will be added to the meeting agenda in order for Green to be sworn in on Tuesday morning.
Green, a former journalist who has been active in the cannabis industry, was president of the Lake County Growers Association from 2016 to 2019, campaign treasurer for Yes on Measure C in Lake County in 2016 and campaign treasurer for Yes on Measure A in the city of Fresno in 2018.
He served on the Lakeport Planning Commission from 2017 to 2021. Green has been a member of the Lakeport City Council since 2021, the same year he began working as a staff services analyst at the Lake County Department of Social Services.
Green will now resign from his council seat, as state Government Code prohibits individuals from concurrently serving as city council member and county supervisor.
Reached by Lake County News on Friday night about his appointment, Green said he will leave his county Social Services job on Monday, ahead of his swearing-in the next day.
Lake County News also asked him what he hoped to accomplish, whether he had plans to take on cannabis-related issues, including those connected to the county’s cannabis tax which has been used to prop up the $21 million in raises handed out during the pandemic, and if he had any solutions in mind to address homelessness.
In response, Green said, “County supervisor is a county job, so my prior county job will effectively end Monday prior to me taking the oath of office on Tuesday. My immediate plans include reading Tuesday's agenda and dealing with the issues of the day with fellow board members. I'll defer comment on your broader questions, which are complex. I certainly hope to contribute to discussions of all the important issues facing the county, but I have lots of homework to do first.”
Asked if he was surprised or caught off guard by the appointment, Green said no. “I worked for it and I’m ready to go to work Tuesday.”
A process delayed
Scott announced her plans to step down in April after she accepted the job of food service and hospitality teacher at Clear Lake High School, making her the first supervisor to resign since the late 1970s.
However, she didn’t leave office until July 31. Scott didn’t publicly give a reason for that date, and while her new job led to an assumption that the date was because of the beginning of the school year, it also pushed the vacancy beyond the deadline that would have allowed the seat to be put on the November ballot as part of a special election.
At the time of Scott’s resignation announcement, the County Administrative Office had reported that a discussion on how to fill the seat was imminent. However, it wasn’t agendized until May 17, then it was pulled.
In the meantime, action was taking place behind the scenes that hadn’t been approved by the supervisors.
In an April 21 letter, which Lake County News obtained through a Public Records Act request, then-County Administrative Office Carol Huchingson wrote to Newsom’s office, stating, “Lake County requests your timely action to fill this vacancy by appointment.” Huchingson left her job for retirement eight days later.
The discussion of how to fill the District 4 seat didn’t make it to the board until July 12, at which point Scott effectively shut down any action by telling the board that the discussion needed to wait until after she was gone.
At that same meeting, the board received letters advocating against them taking action from Gillian Parrillo, a Democratic Party operative who served as campaign manager for Scott and Supervisor Jessica Pyska, as well as from Green who opposed the resolution calling for a special election and asked the board to come back on Aug. 2 and consider a resolution asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to fill the vacancy. At that time, Green didn’t publicly disclose his reasons for that request.
On Aug. 2, after Scott was gone from the board and nearly four months after Scott announced her resignation, the board finally took action, deciding to send a letter to Newsom’s office asking for an appointment.
At that meeting, county officials acknowledged that Scott not stepping down earlier or allowing the county to begin an election process had left them no other option but the gubernatorial appointment.
Well before that point, the Governor’s Office had confirmed to Lake County News that it intended to make an appointment.
Questions about the process
Since the announcement of Scott’s resignation, Lake County News has followed up several times with the Governor’s Office about the appointment process.
Lake County News received information that at least two other Lakeport residents applied for the seat but hadn’t received acknowledgment from the Governor’s Office.
Earlier this week, the Governor’s Office had responded to a request for information but didn’t give much details, other than to report that interested parties are encouraged to complete the appointment application form found online, and that once applications are received, the appointments unit reviews them, interviews top candidates and makes recommendations to the governor.
The Governor’s Office said Newsom may interview candidates and then proceed to make an appointment, but that there isn’t a deadline for filling vacancies.
The statement on Green’s appointment — which was among a total of nine other offices reported by the Governor’s Office — was issued at 4:33 p.m. Friday, and a follow-up request from Lake County News for information about whether other candidates had been acknowledged or interviewed did not receive a response.
Next steps for Lakeport
With Green stepping down from the Lakeport City Council, the city of Lakeport now has to seek applicants for an appointment, said City Manager Kevin Ingram.
He told Lake County News on Friday that he expected the matter will be on the next council agenda.
At the end of August, another council member, Mireya Turner, resigned after being hired as the Lake County Community Development director, as Lake County News has reported.
That led the council to seek out former council members interested in serving out the remainder of Turner’s term, which ends in December. They selected George Spurr.
Before her hire, Turner signed up to run for a third term and is on the ballot for the November election. If she’s elected — and currently there are no write-in candidates — she will need to resign, triggering another vacancy, Ingram said.
In September the city put out a request for applicants for Turner’s seat specifically, but the city was anticipating the potential for Green’s seat to be vacated as by that point he had made public that he had applied for the job.
“Given the news today, we’ll probably send out another notice about it,” Ingram said.
He said the council has 90 days to decide how to fill a vacancy.
Ingram said it’s possible the council could move forward with making two appointments.
He said there already have been a couple of people who have formally submitted applications and there is interest from some others, so he expects the council will have several from which to choose.
However, since the law doesn’t allow for a government body to appoint a quorum of its members, Ingram said that if another vacancy occurs, it could trigger an expensive special election.
“I’m not aware of the county trying to steal anybody else,” Ingram joked.
In any event, Ingram said the city is facing having four council members up for election in 2024, three for four-year terms, and Turner’s for two years, as that appointment will last until the next municipal election.
“I’ve been having to flip to the back of the elections code quite a bit,” Ingram said, adding, “It’s been a learning experience for sure.”
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: LAKE COUNTY NEWS REPORTS
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said that a wind event is expected to lead to a small public safety power shutoff over the weekend and into early next week.
While the company said that the shutoff will begin in some parts of the states on Saturday, power is expected to be shut off to only about 59 Lake County on Sunday and Monday.
PG&E said the northerly wind event, combined with extreme to exceptional drought and extremely dry vegetation, resulted in it sending two-day-ahead advanced notifications to about 5,800 customers in targeted portions of 13 counties and two tribal communities where PG&E may need to implement a public safety power shutoff, or PSPS, to reduce the risk of wildfire from energized power lines.
In several of these counties, fewer than 100 customers are expected to be impacted.
Potentially affected counties and customers in your coverage area are:
Butte: 431 customers, 32 Medical Baseline customers;
Colusa: 559 customers, 37 Medical Baseline customers;
Fresno: 92 customers, 4 Medical Baseline customers;
Glenn: 365 customers, 22 Medical Baseline customers;
Kern: 595 customers, 36 Medical Baseline customers;
Lake: 59 customers, 3 Medical Baseline customers;
Napa: 85 customers, 6 Medical Baseline customers;
San Benito: 2 customers, 0 Medical Baseline customers;
Shasta: 268 customers, 22 Medical Baseline customers;
Sonoma: 3 customers, 0 Medical Baseline customers;
Stanislaus: 29 customers, 0 Medical Baseline customers;
Tehama: 3,159 customers, 297 Medical Baseline customers;
Yolo: 99 customers, 2 Medical Baseline customers;
Other: 5 customers, 0 Medical Baseline customers.
Potential affected tribal areas:
Grindstone Rancheria (Glenn County): 49 customers;
Cortina Rancheria (Colusa County): 8 customers.
Despite the potential for rain in some areas this weekend, PG&E is notifying customers that a PSPS may be necessary if rain does not materialize or if forecasted wind speeds still pose a wildfire risk.
The potential shutoffs could begin Saturday morning in portions of the North Sacramento Valley. Potential shutoffs for the San Joaquin Valley, other portions of the Sacramento Valley, North Bay as well as Kern County could begin Sunday, depending on the timing of the wind event.
PG&E activated its Emergency Operations Center on Oct. 19 to support this weather event.
Customer notifications via text, email and automated phone call began on Friday, approximately two days prior to the potential shutoff.
Customers can look up their address online to find out if their location is being monitored for the potential safety shutoff at http://www.pge.com/pspsupdates.
If customers enrolled in the company’s Medical Baseline do not verify that they have received these important safety communications, PG&E employees will conduct individual, in-person visits when possible with a primary focus on customers who rely on electricity for critical life-sustaining equipment.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
The City of Clearlake Animal Association also is seeking fosters for the animals waiting to be adopted.
Call the Clearlake Animal Control shelter at 707-273-9440, or email
Visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
The following dogs are available for adoption. New additions are at the top.
‘Andy’
“Andy” is a male American pit bull mix with a short gray and white coat.
He is dog No. 48995415.
‘Aoki’
“Aoki” is a male Siberian husky mix with a white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50905477.
‘Babs’
“Babs” is a female Labrador retriever mix with a short black coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 49505856.
‘Baby’
“Baby” is a female American pit bull mix with a white coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 50933640.
‘Bear’
“Bear” is a male Labrador retriever-American pit bull mix with a short charcoal and fawn coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 48443153.
‘Big Phil’
“Big Phil” is a 13-year-old male American pit bull terrier mix with a blue coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 49951647.
‘Bruce’
“Bruce” is a 2-year-old American pit bull mix with a short gray coat with white markings.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50684304.
‘Buster’
“Buster” is a male pit bull mix with a short tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50762164.
‘Eros’
“Eros” is a male Rottweiler mix with a short black and tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50754504.
‘Foxie’
“Foxie” is a female German shepherd with a red, black and white coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 49702845.
‘Goliath’
“Goliah” is a male Rottweiler mix with a short black and tan coat.
He is dog No. 50754509.
‘Hakuna’
“Hakuna” is a male shepherd mix with a tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50176912.
‘Herman’
“Herman” is a 7-year-old male American pit bull terrier mix with a brown coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 51236411.
‘Hondo’
“Hondo” is a male Alaskan husky mix with a buff coat.
He has been neutered.
He’s dog No. 50227693.
‘Keilani’
“Keilani” is a 3-year-old female German shepherd mix with a black and tan coat.
She has been spayed and she is house trained.
She is dog No. 50427566.
‘Little Boy’
“Little Boy” is a male American pit bull terrier mix with a short tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50075256.
‘Luciano’
“Luciano” is a male Siberian husky mix with a short black and white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50596272.
‘Mamba’
“Mamba” is a male Siberian husky mix with a gray and cream-colored coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 49520569.
‘Matata’
“Matata” is male shepherd mix with a tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50176912.
‘Maya’
“Maya” is a female German shepherd with a black and tan coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 50428151.
‘Mikey’
“Mikey” is a male German shepherd mix with a short brown and tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 51012855.
‘Poppa’
“Poppa” is a 3-year-old male American pit bull terrier mix with a short red and white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50773597.
‘Rascal’
“Rascal” is a male shepherd mix with a black and brown coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50806384.
‘Sadie’
“Sadie” is a female German shepherd mix with a black and tan coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 49802563.
‘Snowball’
“Snowball is a 1 and a half year old male American Staffordshire terrier mix with a short white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 49159168.
‘Terry’
“Terry” is a handsome male shepherd mix with a short brindle coat.
He gets along with other dogs, including small ones, and enjoys toys. He also likes water, playing fetch and keep away.
Staff said he is now getting some training to help him build confidence.
He is dog No. 48443693.
‘Willie’
“Willie” is a male German shepherd mix with a black and tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50596003.
‘Zeda’
“Zeda” is a female Labrador retriever mix.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 51108916.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: Robert Sanders
BERKELEY, Calif. — First-time visitors to Yosemite Valley gape in awe at the sheer granite wall of El Capitan and the neatly sliced face of Half Dome, aware, perhaps vaguely, that rain and glaciers must have taken a long time to cut and sculpt that landscape. But how long?
Did it all start 50 million years ago, when the granite through which the valley cuts was first exposed to the elements? Was it 30 million years ago, when data suggest canyons in the southern Sierra Nevada began to form? Did the valley only begin to form after the Sierra tilted toward the west some 5 million years ago, or was it mostly due to glaciers that formed in a cooling climate 2 to 3 million years ago?
Geologists from the University of California, Berkeley, employed a novel technique of rock analysis to get a more precise answer, and concluded that much of Yosemite Valley’s impressive depth was carved since 10 million years ago, and most likely even more recently — over the past 5 million years. This shaves about 40 million years off the oldest estimates.
Rivers performed the initial carving in a preexisting shallow valley, they determined, and then both rivers and ice contributed recently.
While the scientists are unable to be more precise, the new estimate is the first to be based on an experimental study of the granite rocks in and near Yosemite, rather than on inferences based on what was going on elsewhere in the Sierra Nevada.
“Yosemite Valley is one of the most famous topographic features on the planet,” said glaciologist Kurt Cuffey, UC Berkeley professor of geography and of earth and planetary science. “And of course, if you go to Yosemite Park and read the signage, they will give you numbers for when it became a deep canyon. But up until this project, every single claim about how old this valley is, when it formed a deep canyon, was just based on assumptions and speculation.”
Yosemite National Park geologist Greg Stock admits that the story told about the origin of the park’s iconic granite topography has been a little vague, because geologists still do not agree about what has happened since the Sierra’s signature granite formed underground between about 80 and 100 million years ago, up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) under a mountain range that looked a lot different than it does today.
“We know that the Sierra was a high mountain range 100 million years ago, when the granite was forming at depth. It was a chain of volcanoes that might have looked a bit like the Andes Mountains in South America,” Stock said. “The question really is whether the elevation has just been coming down through erosion since that time or whether it came down some and then was uplifted again more recently. At this point, based on studies I've done for most of my career and supported by this study, I see a lot of evidence for recent uplift happening sometime in the last 5 million years.”
That uplift, which happened at the same time that earthquake faulting in the eastern Sierra Nevada created an escarpment several kilometers high, steepened the western slopes and rivers, causing them to incise valleys more quickly.
Cuffey, UC Berkeley geochemist David Shuster and their colleagues, including Stock, published the findings this week in the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin.
Rock cooldown
Shuster, a professor of earth and planetary science, developed a technique 15 years ago that he thought at the time might shed light on the origins of the valley, something that has fascinated both him and Cuffey since they first saw Yosemite as kids. Shuster, a California native, has visited it since early childhood. Cuffey, from central Pennsylvania, made his first trip to the park at the age of 15.
Much of what they remember learning is that the valley was carved by glaciers, giving short shrift to what happened before Ice Age glaciers arrived in the Pleistocene some 2.5 million years ago.
“What I learned from the signage in the valley when I was a kid wasn't quite right, given what the scientific literature said at the time. Nevertheless, the topography has been interpreted to be significantly modified by ice,” Shuster said. “How to quantify that with geochronological tools, rather than just make up a story about it based on geomorphology, is one thing we were trying to do here.”
Shuster’s technique, called helium-4/helium-3 thermochronometry, reconstructs the temperature history of a sample of rock based on the spatial distribution of natural helium-4 in minerals, which is measured by comparison to an artificially-produced uniform distribution of helium-3. Because temperature increases with depth underground, the temperature history can tell when a rock was uncovered as the landscape eroded.
“The temperature of the rock is a function of the surface lowering down into it,” Shuster said. “It's very analogous to removing a down comforter — the rock beneath it progressively gets colder. This progression through time with the rock cooling is what we get from the geochemistry and thermochronometry.”
The expectation is that granite bedrock exposed on the broad uplands of the Sierra should show a long history of cool surface temperatures, since they’ve been exposed for tens of millions of years longer than bedrock more recently exposed on the floor of Tenaya Canyon, which feeds into Yosemite Valley from the northeast.
The experiments, conducted at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, indicated that, while rock from the uplands has been close to the surface for about 50 million years, bedrock at the bottom of Tenaya Canyon has been exposed much more recently. The temperature history of the rock obtained from the bottom of Tenaya Canyon — from an exposed area of bedrock at the base of Half Dome — indicates that it was more than a kilometer underground 10 million years ago, and most likely only 5 million years ago. This means that a kilometer of rock was eroded away since that time.
“This upland surface that people are familiar with from parts of the Tioga Road and Tuolumne Meadows — that's a very old landscape,” said Cuffey, who is the Martin Distinguished Chair in Ocean, Earth and Climate Science. “The question is: What about the deep canyon? Is that also very old, or is it relatively young? And what we found in our study, our big contribution, is that it's fairly young. The best guess for the timing is in the last 3 to 4 million years, but maybe as far back as 10 million years for the start of the rapid incision.”
Bedrock studies
The geologists collected samples of granite bedrock from nearby highlands and the bottom of Tenaya Canyon, but not from the bedrock bottom of Yosemite Valley itself, which lies buried under about 500 meters (1/3 mile) of sediment that today forms the valley floor. But since the two formed at the same time, one can infer the timing of the formation of Yosemite Valley from the time of the scouring of Tenaya Canyon.
“The brief history of Yosemite Valley would be that there was some kind of valley in place for tens of millions of years — a river-carved canyon associated with the ancient Sierra Nevada. And then, in the last 5 million years or so, renewed uplift of the range through westward tilting caused rivers to steepen and deepen the canyons that they were in,” Stock said. “So, that probably carved out more of Yosemite Valley and may have started forming Tenaya Canyon. And then in the last 2 to 3 million years, as the climate cooled and glaciers came down through Tenaya Canyon and into Yosemite Valley, they further sculpted the rock, deepening those valleys. And in the case of Yosemite Valley, widening it out considerably. So, there's some component of an old Yosemite Valley. But I think this recent work shows that much more of that topography is younger, rather than older.”
Stock, who has held the position of park geologist for 17 years and is the park’s first geologist, said the new study will revise how the park tells the geological history of Yosemite Valley.
“The timing of this new study is perfect in the sense that, over the next several years, we’re hoping to completely redo the Geology Hut displays at Glacier Point. I'm very excited to include these new results in those displays,” he said. “It's a perfect place to tell that story, because there's a view straight up Tenaya Canyon.”
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.