Recent Letters To The Editor – May 30, 2012

Postal erosion

I recently rented a box at the Arcata Post Office. One of the selling points was the 24/7 access. Therefore, I just about went postal when I got a notice in my new box telling me that the lobby now will be closed nights and Sundays due to ongoing vandalism.

I spoke with Gary Scott, the USPS officer-in-charge, who convinced me that they really had no alternative. He showed me urine stains on the carpet and fire scars on a door. He told me stories of having to clean up human feces and replace new carpets and of finding people passed out in their own piss. Portions of the lobby smell like a public bathroom. The people doing this are too wasted or too mentally ill to give a damn about security cameras. They return within minutes of being evicted. It seems the only other solution would be to post a guard at the door during off hours, but the USPS is hardly in a position to finance that.

So here we are once again: The law-abiding, responsible majority is being punished for the actions of a few. The easiest – and sometimes the only – way to prevent lawlessness is to take the opportunity for it away from everyone. Little by little, bit by bit, our rights, privileges, and liberties are eroded or rescinded. We live in a world of locks, passwords, alarms, speed bumps, and countless other safeguards against the unscrupulous. I’m all for societal compassion towards the less privileged, but where’s the compassion for the rest of us? It feels as if we just don’t matter anymore.

The post office situation points to the need for stiffer law enforcement; a better safety net for the homeless and mentally ill; and, perhaps more attainable, a public restroom in downtown Arcata and zero tolerance of anyone who abuses it.

Ken Burton

no fixed residence, Arcata

CHP vs. ducklings

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 23 at about 3:15 p.m., after picking my son up from Union Street Charter school, I saw a mother duck lead her ducklings through the grass and head toward Samoa Blvd. to cross just west of the roundabout. I pulled over to watch and see that they made it across safely. I was not the only one who was so enchanted by the spectacle that I had to stop and watch.

The ducks made it safely across the west bound side of Samoa. Traffic started to slow, and those headed west bound were waving to alert the east bound drivers to the situation. By now, there was quite a hold up in both directions, but no one was in a hurry – except for one CHP officer who was at the end of the line of eastbound traffic.

We continued to watch, and although I couldn’t see them for the cars, I was pretty sure the ducks had made it across the east bound lane of Samoa. As the cars started to clear, I stayed to catch one more glimpse of the creatures. They had only the access road to the CHP station to cross at this point, so I assumed they were pretty safe.

But they had one more danger looming – the impatient officer. He turned down the access road and bore down on the ducklings without slowing. For one horrible moment, I thought he had hit some of them. But after he passed, I was pretty sure there were no dead ducks on the road, so no harm done – to the ducks at least.

However, I watched all this with my eight-year old son. He was ready to go into the CHP office and start yelling at the officer. At his insistence, we went back to the head of the access road to make sure there were no dead ducklings and indeed, there were none.

Thankfully, the ducks were alright, but the reputation of the California Highway Patrol is tarnished in the eyes of an impressionable youth (not to mention his mother). Whoever that officer was, he did not represent his agency well that afternoon.

Katherine Almy and Slate Taylor

Arcata

Note: We received the following response from Humboldt Area Commander Harry Linschoten: “The CHP is in the process of identifying the officer that may be responsible and will determine what action, if any, will be taken based on the facts of the incident.” – Ed.

Cheese mill alternative

   I just read the Cypress Grove article in the Eye. Although I felt it had a disparaging attitude towards those against the Cypress Grove Cheese Factory expansion, the article did show the complex nature of the situation.

I don’t think anyone at the Planning Commission’s meeting was unsupportive of the Cypress Grove Cheese Factory.

What most people did not support was the elimination of Agriculture in the name of “Agriculture.” The proposal is to triple the size of the existing 13,000 sq. feet cheese factory to 37,000 sq. feet. This will put more than .5 of an acre of fertile, self-watering Arcata bottomland under compacted crushed rock and rebar reinforced concrete.

This isn’t a four-inch slab of barn concrete, it is industrial code gravel, rebar, and concrete. If our WPA sidewalks are any indication, it will seal off the soil from food growing for more than a century.

This project was justified because it is “Agriculture.” Here our laws fail us. A better statement of Agriculture would be: The use of sun, soil, and water to produce food (vegetables, grains, milk, meat). What Cypress Grove is doing is “food transformation.” They are taking a basic Agriculture food (goat milk) and transforming it into a different product (goat cheese). The question we all need to ask is: Does “food transformation” have priority over “food production?”

Could the Emmi Corporation find an already impacted Arcata site for a second cheese factory? I suspect they could, if they had the Will to do it. The Arcata Flakeboard site was suggested, as it is large and has excellent truck access. Emmi discounted it because of the hygiene requirements of cheese making. But did they even try to explore this possibility with Arcata City?

The owners of the Flakeboard site, Hambro, owes Arcata $2.2 million. Seems like a deal could be struck, the building razed, and, there you have it; a concrete slab, ready for a hygienic building!

With the human population increasing exponentially (seven-plus billion) and millions of acres of fertile farmland disappearing under “Development” (42,000,000-plus acres since 1982 in USA), our great grandchildren will be hard pressed to feed humanity. New Cypress Grove concrete on Arcata’s fertile farmland will only add to that problem.

 Craig Knox

Arcata

Ag requires buildings

I note Craig Knox’s letter in the May 9th issue in which he is critical of of the Cypress Grove Cheese Factory expansion and suggests that perhaps a disparaging attitude exists about the long-term critics of the entire project as chronicled in these pages. I suggest that perhaps what irks folks about much of the opposition, and what Mr. Hoover was talking about in his open letter to himself, is the appearance of extreme mental contortions to rationalize and camouflage what is essentially just a NIMBY issue. Nobody wants to admit that they are simply exercising their Constitutional rights to just hate it and be agin’ it no matter what some hippies on the City Council once said about conserving and using prime ag land.

Now Mr. Knox has proposed a finely nuanced, hair-splitting, Rube Goldberg mental construction which opposes the physical construction of of a half-acre concrete slab which will expand the capacity of the CHEESE factory which it was clearly billed as from the beginning as Mr. Knox seems to acknowledge. Now, suddenly, after all these months we have the proposition that cheese is not actually an agricultural product (!?!) but is “transformed” from raw goat milk by Cypress Grove operatives. This is bad!?!?

For at least the last thousand years or so, in order to produce food, it has been necessary on farms to devote some of the surface area to a driveway, service roads, barns, storage and, oh, yeah, a home for the farming family. The Romans had excellent concrete and the Appian Way lasted for centuries. It’s simply impossible for humans to live without some impact and some percentage of any given producing acreage will be paved over or built on, no matter how groovy and organic the managers may be.

Mr. Knox wrote: “The question we all need to ask is: Does ‘food transformation’ have priority over ‘food production?’” I don’t know. Does exhalation have priority over inhalation? Does bread have priority over flour? Does pudding have priority over rice? Does yogurt have priority over milk? Does beer have priority over barley, hops, yeast and water? If the California Olive Ranch presses its own olives on their property, have they now “transformed” the ag. olives into non-ag. olive oil? Have they violated some ethical standard? No.

Cheese-making has been a boon for humanity since at least Neolithic times because it allowed for the concentration and preservation of nutritious milk. Does anyone honestly think that the neighbors in the Q Street imbroglio or the current controversy really gave a damn about feeding the masses? Come on. When seven billion starving people show up like a cloud of locusts, they might get to plant something, but not ‘til then.

The rest of the letter may have merit, I don’t know. The dubious introduction puts the entire letter in a bad light. It would seem much more sincere and authentic if the first paragraph was just NIMBY, NIMBY, NIMBY for four or five lines and then on to the Emmi Corp. and Arcata Flakeboard, etc.

I once cared for goats and they are not my favorite animals. I also hate goat cheese, but if others like it, I’m glad they have a state-of-the-art production and dispensary resource.

Well, I thought they did. Why is everybody’s dispensary being hassled?

Timothy Crlenjak

New Writer of the Purple Rage

Livid in the USA

Eureka

Tags: Letters

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Opinion, Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.