Editorial

Supporting McCaffery

Two years ago, I was elected to a third term on the Healdsburg City Council by 2,276 citizens. Housing was certainly one of the most critical concerns of our citizenry. Given my educational and professional background, I was confident that I had much to offer in an effort to develop some solutions.

What the county’s Board of Supervisors hoped would be a sleepy little single-issue election on June 2 for the Measure A county sales tax increase is turning out to be anything but.

It’s hard for me to imagine what it is like to be a young black man and to be the object of suspicion, fear and harassment for being myself, for being young and black. Our president says he knows what it’s like and that Trayvon Martin, the black teenager killed by a white neighborhood watch volunteer could have been him when he was a teenager. The boys assailant, George Zimmerman, was tried and acquitted and as far as I’m concerned, that is legally the end of the matter. But I can’t help wondering what it was like for Trayvon Martin, what it was like for Barack Obama, and what it was and is like for millions of young black men.

Newspapers and journalists have many jobs. Gathering the news, covering public meetings, publicizing community events, helping to find lost dogs and defending  the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment are just some of them.

Thousands of people visited last weekend’s Steelhead Festival at Warm Springs Dam and Lake Sonoma. The people outnumbered the fish — and that has been our problem in the Russian River watershed for the last 60 years. The epic winter runs of spawning steelhead that once numbered over 50,000 are now down to a very few thousand, if that many.

Throughout the United States the week starting on the third Monday of September is recognized as National Pollution Prevention Week. Pollution prevention is reducing or eliminating waste at the source by modifying production processes, promoting the use of non-toxic or less-toxic substances, implementing conservation techniques, and re-using materials rather than putting them into the waste stream.