The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office hosted Search and Rescue volunteers from Northern California at a helicopter training over the weekend. The participating counties besides Mendocino included Alameda, Contra Costa, Glenn, Lake, Marin, Nevada, Placer, San Mateo and Solano. MCSO with Napa County, CALSTAR, and Marin County Search and Rescue, conducted the training that went from Friday through Sunday. It focused on safety training, along with helicopter loading and unloading, hoist training for insertion and extraction, water rescue, and airborne searching tactics and methods, among other activities. The Ukiah Daily Journal says Cal Fire, REACH, the U.S. Coast Guard and Sonoma County provided the helicopters
The State Senate is taking up a bill that aims to extend the life of the Habitat Conservation Fund through 2035. The money from the fund is used to buy land to establish wildlife corridors and keep habitat pristine. Other projects paid for by Habitat Conservation Fund include the trail gateway into Redwood national and state parks, open-space preservation and wetlands restoration across the Sacramento and Central valleys, and the return of ancestral land to tribes in San Bernardino County.
Mendocino County’s Drought Task Force has finalized its report. The committee, which is made up of public water suppliers, the Ukiah Valley Water Authority, different county departments, eleven tribal groups, the State Water Resources Control Board, and more, has fulfilled a state mandate that requires every county to submit a drought resilience plan. The Mendocino Voice says the report, using several criteria and the state’s Department of Water Resources water shortage vulnerability scoring system, came to the conclusion that a major portion of the county is at high risk from future drought and water shortages. That includes 84% of its domestic wells and 93% of its State Small Water Systems. How to solve it? Short term and long term strategies are listed in the report, and those proposals vary. Of course, a lot will be determined by the amount of rain we receive.
Lawmakers in the state Senate are weighing a bill that would allow car dealers to hike the fee they charge for processing documents related to the sale of a car. Currently, when you purchase a vehicle in California, the most the dealer can charge you to process documents for that sale is 85 dollars. But if Senate Bill 791 becomes law, the documents fee could go as high as $500. The bill has already passed several committees and is expected to get a vote in the full state Senate sometime this week.
This week Cal Fire and partners, including CalTrans and the Ukiah Valley Fire Authority, will be conducting a fuels reduction project along Highway 101. Crews will be burning vegetation along the shoulders and center medians from Burke Hill all the way to Howard Forest headquarters. The goal is to reduce the amount of vehicle caused vegetation fires.This project will continue through Friday.
