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- Written by: LAKE COUNTY NEWS REPORTS
LAKEPORT, Calif. – The four candidates in the District 5 supervisorial district took part in a forum on Wednesday in Lakeport.
Kevin Ahajanian of Cobb, Bill Kearney of Kelseyville, Jessica Pyska of Cobb and Lily Woll of Kelseyville took part in the forum, hosted by Lake County News and moderated by Editor and Publisher Elizabeth Larson.
The four are running in the March primary to succeed retiring incumbent, Supervisor Rob Brown.
The video of the forum is featured above.
The questions and the times when they appear in the video area published below.
QUESTIONS:
Opening statements: 2:29
1. To start off, I’d like to understand more about your thinking process and what motivates you. Please take us back to your “lightbulb” moment – when it was you made the firm decision that you were going to run for local office, and some of the background to that decision. Has this been something you had looked at doing for some time, or was there a particular event or an idea that encouraged you to take the step of putting your name on the ballot?
Answers begin: 6:32
2. Here is a multipart question from a Cobb resident: What do you know of our county's Community Wildfire Protection Plan laid out in 2009, with recommended updates for every five years – and the failure to implement it that led to the recent wildfire disasters each of the past four years? What are you going to do about our county's apparent inability to keep track of its critically important plans, convene the proper entities to make them effective, ensure timely updates with proper public input, and get the funding for the implementation of these plans?
Answers begin: 13:24
3. The county of Lake has had ongoing friction and disagreements with the city of Lakeport over the city’s plans to annex the remaining portion of South Main Street that has been part of its sphere of influence for decades. Key issues are water service and public safety, and a large amount of sales tax from what is reported to be the most lucrative commercial corridor in the unincorporated county. While Lakeport is not in your district, the issue of the annexation is an issue that the board has discussed as a whole, with the county having recently agreed to a good faith negotiations process requested by the Lake Local Area Formation Commission. Do you have an approach to this situation that you think is fair and equitable and could bring the county and city into partnership, rather than opposition?
Answers begin: 19:58
4. Do you support the Middle Creek Flood Damage Reduction and Ecosystem Restoration Project? How would you help move this long term project forward?
Answers begin: 24:12
5. The city of Clearlake has raised issues with the county’s sales of tax-defaulted property, asking for a greater number of sales to be held annually and pointing to less-than-consistent scheduling of the sales in recent years, which in the past have been held on an annual basis. The Clearlake city manager has argued that the failure to hold these sales regularly contributes to blight, harms local agencies and governments, and hampers development. Do you agree with the city’s stance on this issue? If you do agree that it’s a problem, how would you address it as a member of the Board of Supervisors?
Answers begin: 29:42
6. How will you address the updating of the county's legal plans (general plan, area plans, community wildfire protection plan, watershed and stormwater management plans), outdated ordinances and missing links to available state and federal funding for which these are critical documents?
Answers begin: 34:08
7. Last year, the nonprofit humanitarian organization Direct Relief created a map of communities that are especially vulnerable to wildland fire and could be the hardest hit based on a number of factors that make up what they call “social vulnerability risk.” That risk assessment is based on things like income, age and mobility. There were a number of California communities shown on that map, and three of those communities are in Lake County: Clearlake, Lower Lake and the Clearlake Riviera in Kelseyville. What plans do you have as a District 5 supervisor to tackle this threat for the Kelseyville area?
Answers begin: 39:24
8. How will you address invasive species infestation threat from mussels that could destroy our surface water infrastructure systems and ruin the recreational water bodies in Lake County? Do you think the county is doing enough under its current prevention program?
Answers begin: 46:21
9. Four years ago this month, the supervisors hired Carol Huchingson as county administrative officer. Huchingson’s tenure has been marked by a number of controversies, including her interference with other department heads, most notably the registrar of voters, which destabilized that critical county department for more than a year. The board gave her control of the Human Resources Department and now she in her individual capacity and the county are facing a multimillion-dollar tort claim from the former HR director who has made 19 allegations – including retaliation, wrongful termination and race discrimination – and is demanding a jury trial. A year ago this month, Huchingon tried to convince the board to make her county chief executive officer in a meeting that was not recorded and had no minutes. Huchingson has also led the effort to push through a classification and compensation study that, if followed, is expected to hand out hefty raises to the county’s highest-paid employees – including her – and could lead to the county becoming financially insolvent. Unfortunately, indications are that the study isn’t going to be released publicly until after the primary election. So far, the board has not taken decisive action to reel her in. Do you have concerns about Huchingson and how will you approach resolving what is becoming a growing problem in county leadership?
Followup question: Has Huchingson reached out to any of you to offer you an orientation on county government as she has with past supervisorial candidates?
Answers begin: 51:26
10. Are you opposed to or of supportive of banning law-abiding citizens from owning the AR15 rifle in California? What features do you know of (if any) that make it more dangerous than any other rifle, pistol or revolver? Would you be supportive of approving indoor shooting ranges in Lake County?
Answers begin: 56:26
11. Recently in the area of Staheli Drive and Gold Dust Drive in Kelseyville, very close to many homes, a large amount of hemp was planted in various fields. Due to this, the residents are subjected to a foul odor for much of the growing season. At times the odor is so strong that they cannot keep doors and windows open. With the presence of this odor, there are concerns that it would make it very difficult to sell a property. What will you do to help the citizens of Lake County with this?
Answers begin: 1:00:41
12. What is the proper role of the Board of Supervisors to preserve, protect and defend Lake County agriculture? In conflicts over water use between agricultural and residential interests, what are your priorities?
Answers begin: 1:06:20
13. Many District 5 residents speak Spanish as their primary language. Will you be able to represent those residents?
Answers begin: 1:11:36
14. What role should the Board of Supervisors take in regards to addressing the fire insurance crisis in Lake County?
Answers begin: 1:14:00
15. How will you address the dismal funding for life-sustaining programs serving the very poor, elderly and caregivers federally funded (but just barely) by the Older Americans Act?
Answers begin: 1:19:42
16. The candidates come from three distinct neighborhoods – Cobb, Big Valley and Buckingham. All three have different demographics, issues and concerns. How will you be able to represent the vast majority of District 5 residents?
Answers begin: 1:24:14
17. In recent years the Board of Supervisors has been considering department consolidation or reconsolidation. Last summer, the board voted to reconsolidate Water Resources with Public Works and last year they requested state legislation, AB 632, which was passed to allow them to consolidate the auditor-controller with the treasurer-tax collector at some point in the future. So far, these consolidations have appeared to be more of a matter of the inability to retain employees, and the result is that more responsibilities are being placed on fewer people. While the county has said consolidation offers efficiencies and cost savings, they’ve offered no evidence that that is the case. Do you think consolidation is the right approach? If so, why? Or do you have alternative ideas you would pursue as supervisor?
Answers begin: 1:29:40
18. Last year we didn’t have huge fires causing us to have to evacuate, but we had a manmade issue, public safety power shutoffs, which impacted Lake County heavily in the fall. Share what your experience was, if any, in those protracted shutoffs, how would you sum up the shutoffs’ impacts on your community and, as a member of the Board of Supervisors, what would you want to try to do address the issue?
Answers begin: 1:33:31
Closing statements: 1:40: 39
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- Written by: Robert Sanders
It’s no coincidence that some of the worst viral disease outbreaks in recent years — SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg and likely the newly arrived COVID-19 virus — originated in bats.
A new University of California, Berkeley, study finds that bats’ fierce immune response to viruses could drive viruses to replicate faster, so that when they jump to mammals with average immune systems, such as humans, the viruses wreak deadly havoc.
Some bats — including those known to be the original source of human infections — have been shown to host immune systems that are perpetually primed to mount defenses against viruses. Viral infection in these bats leads to a swift response that walls the virus out of cells. While this may protect the bats from getting infected with high viral loads, it encourages these viruses to reproduce more quickly within a host before a defense can be mounted.
This makes bats a unique reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly transmissible viruses. While the bats can tolerate viruses like these, when these bat viruses then move into animals that lack a fast-response immune system, the viruses quickly overwhelm their new hosts, leading to high fatality rates.
“Some bats are able to mount this robust antiviral response, but also balance it with an anti-inflammation response,” said Cara Brook, a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley and the first author of the study. “Our immune system would generate widespread inflammation if attempting this same antiviral strategy. But bats appear uniquely suited to avoiding the threat of immunopathology.”
The researchers note that disrupting bat habitat appears to stress the animals and makes them shed even more virus in their saliva, urine and feces that can infect other animals.
“Heightened environmental threats to bats may add to the threat of zoonosis,” said Brook, who works with a bat monitoring program funded by DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) that is currently underway in Madagascar, Bangladesh, Ghana and Australia. The project, Bat One Health, explores the link between loss of bat habitat and the spillover of bat viruses into other animals and humans.
“The bottom line is that bats are potentially special when it comes to hosting viruses,” said Mike Boots, a disease ecologist and UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. “It is not random that a lot of these viruses are coming from bats. Bats are not even that closely related to us, so we would not expect them to host many human viruses. But this work demonstrates how bat immune systems could drive the virulence that overcomes this.”
The new study by Brook, Boots and their colleagues was published this month in the journal eLife.
Boots and UC Berkeley colleague Wayne Getz are among 23 Chinese and American co-authors of a paper published last week in the journal EcoHealth that argues for better collaboration between U.S. and Chinese scientists who are focused on disease ecology and emerging infections.
Vigorous flight leads to longer lifespan – and perhaps viral tolerance
As the only flying mammal, bats elevate their metabolic rates in flight to a level that doubles that achieved by similarly sized rodents when running.
Generally, vigorous physical activity and high metabolic rates lead to higher tissue damage due to an accumulation of reactive molecules, primarily free radicals. But to enable flight, bats seem to have developed physiological mechanisms to efficiently mop up these destructive molecules.
This has the side benefit of efficiently mopping up damaging molecules produced by inflammation of any cause, which may explain bats’ uniquely long lifespans. Smaller animals with faster heart rates and metabolism typically have shorter lifespans than larger animals with slower heartbeats and slower metabolism, presumably because high metabolism leads to more destructive free radicals. But bats are unique in having far longer lifespans than other mammals of the same size: Some bats can live 40 years, whereas a rodent of the same size may live two years.
This rapid tamping down of inflammation may also have another perk: tamping down inflammation related to antiviral immune response. One key trick of many bats’ immune systems is the hair-trigger release of a signaling molecule called interferon-alpha, which tells other cells to “man the battle stations” before a virus invades.
Brook was curious how bats’ rapid immune response affects the evolution of the viruses they host, so she conducted experiments on cultured cells from two bats and, as a control, one monkey.
One bat, the Egyptian fruit bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus), a natural host of Marburg virus, requires a direct viral attack before transcribing its interferon-alpha gene to flood the body with interferon.
This technique is slightly slower than that of the Australian black flying fox (Pteropus alecto), a reservoir of Hendra virus, which is primed to fight virus infections with interferon-alpha RNA that is transcribed and ready to turn into protein. The African green monkey (Vero) cell line does not produce interferon at all.
When challenged by viruses mimicking Ebola and Marburg, the different responses of these cell lines were striking. While the green monkey cell line was rapidly overwhelmed and killed by the viruses, a subset of the rousette bat cells successfully walled themselves off from viral infection, thanks to interferon early warning.
In the Australian black flying fox cells, the immune response was even more successful, with the viral infection slowed substantially over that in the rousette cell line. In addition, these bat interferon responses seemed to allow the infections to last longer.
“Think of viruses on a cell monolayer like a fire burning through a forest. Some of the communities — cells — have emergency blankets, and the fire washes through without harming them, but at the end of the day you still have smoldering coals in the system — there are still some viral cells,” Brook said. The surviving communities of cells can reproduce, providing new targets for the the virus and setting up a smoldering infection that persists across the bat’s lifespan.
Brook and Boots created a simple model of the bats’ immune systems to recreate their experiments in a computer.
“This suggests that having a really robust interferon system would help these viruses persist within the host,” Brook said. “When you have a higher immune response, you get these cells that are protected from infection, so the virus can actually ramp up its replication rate without causing damage to its host. But when it spills over into something like a human, we don't have those same sorts of antiviral mechanism, and we could experience a lot of pathology.”
The researchers noted that many of the bat viruses jump to humans through an animal intermediary. SARS got to humans through the Asian palm civet; MERS via camels; Ebola via gorillas and chimpanzees; Nipah via pigs; Hendra via horses and Marburg through African green monkeys. Nonetheless, these viruses still remain extremely virulent and deadly upon making the final jump into humans.
Brook and Boots are designing a more formal model of disease evolution within bats in order to better understand virus spillover into other animals and humans.
“It is really important to understand the trajectory of an infection in order to be able to predict emergence and spread and transmission,” Brook said.
Other co-authors of the eLife paper are Kartik Chandran and Melinda Ng of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City; Andrew Dobson, Andrea Graham, Bryan Grenfell and Anieke van Leeuwen of Princeton University in New Jersey; Christian Drosten and Marcel Müller of Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany; and Lin-Fa Wang of Duke University-National University of Singapore Medical School.
The work was funded by a National Science Foundation fellowship, the Miller Institute for Basic Research at UC Berkeley and a grant from the National Institutes of Health (R01 AI134824).
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
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- Written by: NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, under a grant from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, is running a public challenge to develop an obstacle avoidance sensor for a possible future Venus rover.
The "Exploring Hell: Avoiding Obstacles on a Clockwork Rover" challenge is seeking the public's designs for a sensor that could be incorporated into the design concept.
Venus is an extreme world. With a surface temperature in excess of 840 degrees Fahrenheit and a surface pressure 90 times that of Earth, Venus can turn lead into a puddle and crush a nuclear-powered submarine with ease.
While many missions have visited our sister planet, only about a dozen have made contact with the surface of Venus before quickly succumbing to the oppressive heat and pressure.
The last spacecraft to touch the planet's surface, the Soviet Vega 2, landed in 1985. Now, engineers and scientists at JPL are studying mission designs that can survive the hellish landscape.
"Earth and Venus are basically sibling planets, but Venus took a turn at one point and became inhospitable to life as we know it," said Jonathan Sauder, a senior mechatronics engineer at JPL and principal investigator for the Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) concept. "By getting on the ground and exploring Venus, we can understand what caused Earth and Venus to diverge on wildly different paths and can explore a foreign world right in our own backyard."
Exploring and studying different geologic units across the surface of Venus could help us understand the planet's evolution, and could contribute to a better understanding of Earth's climate.
Powered by wind, AREE is intended to spend months, not minutes, exploring the Venus landscape. AREE could collect valuable, long-term longitudinal scientific data. As the rover explores the planet, it must also detect obstacles in its path, such as rocks, crevices and steep terrain.
And NASA is crowdsourcing help for that sensor design. The challenge's winning sensor will be incorporated into the rover concept and could potentially one day be the mechanism by which a rover detects and navigates around obstructions.
The difficulty of this challenge is in designing a sensor that does not rely on electronic systems. Current state-of-the-art electronics fail at just over 250 degrees Fahrenheit and would easily succumb to the extreme Venus environment. That is why NASA is turning to the global community of innovators and inventors for a solution.
"This is an exciting opportunity for the public to design a component that could one day end up on another celestial body," said Ryon Stewart, challenge coordinator for the NASA Tournament Lab at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "NASA recognizes that good ideas can come from anywhere and that prize competitions are a great way to engage the public's interest and ingenuity and make space exploration possible for everyone."
Participants will have an opportunity to win a first-place prize of $15,000. Second place wins $10,000; and third place, $5,000. JPL is working with the NASA Tournament Lab to execute the challenge on the heroX crowdsourcing platform. Submissions will be accepted through May 29, 2020.
"When faced with navigating one of the most challenging terrestrial environments in the solar system, we need to think outside the box," Sauder said. "That is why we need the creativity of makers and garage inventors to help solve this challenge."
For more information about the challenge and how to enter, visit https://www.herox.com/VenusRover.
AREE is an early-stage research study funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, or NIAC, program within the agency's Space Technology Mission Directorate, or STMD.
NIAC is a visionary and far-reaching aerospace program, one that has the potential to create breakthrough technologies for possible future space missions; however, such early-stage technology developments may never become actual NASA missions.
NASA Tournament Lab is part of NASA's Prizes and Challenges program within STMD. The program supports the use of public competitions and crowdsourcing as tools to advance NASA R&D and other mission needs.
Learn more about opportunities to participate in your space program at www.nasa.gov/solve.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
Judge Shanda Harry sentenced Krystina Marie Pickersgill, 29, to three years’ felony probation in a court appearance last week, said District Attorney Susan Krones.
Krones said Pickersgill was sentenced for one human trafficking count, depriving a female victim, Jane Doe No. 1, of her personal liberty with the intent to obtain forced labor or services.
The case had a total of five victims, but the plea agreement involved just one of them. Seven other charges for human trafficking and prostitution dropped were dropped as part of the agreement, Krones said.
In June 2018, at the end of a two-month-long investigation by the District Attorney’s Office, Pickersgill and her husband Sam Massette were arrested and charged with human trafficking after investigators concluded the couple had been selling local girls into prostitution in the Bay Area, as Lake County News has reported.
That spring, a young woman who has been the victim of a human trafficking operation run by Massette and Pickersgill approached a California Highway Patrol officer Krones was with at a production of “Jane Doe in Wonderland,” a play about human trafficking presented at the Soper Reese Theater in Lakeport.
“So that just basically fell into our laps,” Krones said of the case.
The victim came to the District Attorney’s Office the following week to speak to investigators, and that began the case, Krones said.
District Attorney’s Office offers same plea agreement twice
In October 2018, as the result of a plea agreement with then-District Attorney Don Anderson, Pickersgill pleaded guilty to one count of human trafficking.
That original agreement offered Pickersgill – who had no previous criminal record – three years of probation, credit for the four months previously served in the Lake County Jail following her arrest and mental health treatment. Anderson said at the time that if she failed to complete the probation terms, she faced up to 12 years in prison.
Anderson made the agreement based on the conclusion that Massette had taken Pickersgill off of medication for mental health issues and coerced her into prostitution. Later, Anderson said she became a willing participant in recruiting high school girls who were taken to the Bay Area, where they were coerced and threatened to perform acts of prostitution.
Anderson also made a plea deal with Massette, who Judge Michael Lunas sentenced in December 2018 to 20 years in prison for human trafficking for the purposes of prostitution and two counts of pimping women in prostitution, along with ordering him to register as a sex offender for life. With credits and time served, Massette is expected to serve a total of nine years in prison.
In January 2019, however, Judge J. David Markham refused to accept Pickersgill’s plea, which she later withdrew.
What followed last year was a series of rescheduled hearings and ongoing consideration of the defense request for mental health diversion, which Krones said the court ultimately denied.
Krones said she had reviewed the entire case file because of previous court proceedings in regard to the mental health diversion program. Judge Harry also reviewed the file.
“We offered the same previous offer that we had made,” Krones said, referring to the original plea agreement that Anderson had offered Pickersgill about a year and a half ago.
At the Feb. 14 court appearance, Pickersgill accepted the offer by pleading to one charge of Penal Code 236.1(a), depriving Jane Doe No. 1 of her personal liberty with the intent to obtain forced labor or services. It was the same charge she had pleaded to previously, Krones said.
As a result of that plea, Krones said the other seven counts were dismissed.
Krones said Judge Harry used a sentencing report that had previously been completed by the Lake County Probation Department as the basis of the sentencing, since there had been no changes in the case.
That report – as well as the investigative report on the case – indicated that Pickersgill had started out as a victim. Krones said that even though Pickersgill later had begun participating in the crimes, she was under Massette’s control.
“He really manipulated her in many different ways,” Krones said, noting Massette was profiting from and directing the human trafficking.
Krones said Pickersgill gets no credit in the probation for the 240 days of time served in the jail. Pickersgill’s probation began on Feb. 14, the day of the sentencing.
Pickersgill has to follow numerous probation terms, Krones said, and as such is subject to search and seizure, has to go to counseling as ordered by the Probation Department, has to get services they determine she needs, she can be drug tested and she has to fill out monthly reports about where she is living and if her situation has changed, among other requirements.
Lake County News spoke with one of the five victims in the case, Jane Doe No. 2, about the outcome of Pickersgill’s case.
“I really don't have much to say when it comes to her involvement. I know people that are the best of friends with her and portray her really as a naive victim with a heart of gold. Personally I feel there is no way that you don't understand what you're convincing these young women to do, even if you feel it's their free will choice,” she said of Pickersgill.
The young woman, who had opposed Massette’s sentencing agreement, said her “true feelings of disgust with the justice system, or better yet injustice, lie solely” with Massette’s sentencing.
Krones said her office continues to track human trafficking cases, with her investigators constantly following up on leads.
She said it’s sometimes not easy to get individuals to come forward, change their lives and get out from under the main perpetrator.
The District Attorney’s Office is currently investigating several human trafficking cases, but Krones said none are ready to charge yet.
Email Elizabeth Larson at