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4 responses to “LOCAL ELECTION RESULTS”

1. 

   Concerned Citizen

   November 9, 2016

   I am anxious to see the brand new plans to be legislated on the homeless problem by Gitlin, Berkowitz, and Cowan by the Board of Supervisors. The present H.E.L.P. homelessness committee will no longer be led by Finigan in the county wide efforts for homelessness solutions. Homelessness, panhandling, crime and blight have gotten out of control, and if something is not done to clean out these camps soon, which are in large part only occupied by criminals who are hiding in the woods for a reason, and by choice, not due to hard luck and illness, we will pass the point of no return and the inmates will take over the asylum. These able-bodied, meth using men roam around all night and burglarize homes, businesses, and vehicles while they seize every opportunity to steal even the balls off a brass monkey. Supervisor Gitlin asked to be on the H.E.L.P. committee for homelessness (Homelessness Evaluation Liaison Program) when it first formed, but Finigan would not allow him to be part of it. Now it is time for another approach. The current plan is not working because the homeless criminal population is growing by leaps and bounds!

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2. 

   vickey Stamps

   November 9, 2016

   I really appreciate your help in posting these results and look forward to new faces and life in play, which hopefully will make even better this beautiful community.

   It is also my prayer that we will reach out to one another, putting aside political ambitions and pull together as one entity.

   Hopefully, in the near future, homelessness will not be so overwhelming. I see more and more people wandering the streets and as a senior citizen feel more vulnerable to burglary or physical abuse should that happen. I’d love to see options for those not engaged in drugs and simply be down on their luck. I believe in a hand up but not a hand out. I think we need to look at the generational trend to entitlement and let people find out how wonderful it is to put in a work day and bring home a check. Like I say, if a little help is also needed to supplement the working person, lets find a way, but lets not promote two for nothing entitlement mentality. I hope that makes sense.

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3. 

   Connie Morrison

   November 10, 2016

   Are you sure all the people hiding in the woods are able bodied, meth taking men? Sheriff Apperson spoke of a woman who was stranded many miles from home. She said she had money and no way to get to it. After verifying she had plenty of money. The necessary steps were taken that reunited her with her family and money. And one less homeless person and one or more city and/or county workers were free to perhaps interview another homeless person and assist that person to get back home where they have family, friends, and other resources.

   I was stranded in Baltimore Md. on Jan. 1.1970. I had already been offered an opportunity to go to school at Johns Hopkins. This was a grant program offered to veteran medics to assist in increasing the number of civilian nurses. I was very ill. I went to travelers aid. The Councillor offered me a medical appointment and medicine and $15.00 a week. Within 10 days my school started (I was paid $3.33 hr. to go to school) and I have been independent ever since. To experience the gift of giving as a recipient confirms for me the beauty and importance of Paying It Forward. If I didn’t have a school to go to I would have been offered a Greyhound Bus ticket back home to Calif. It does not necessarily cost millions of dollars to help the homeless. Sometimes a caring sheriff who can think a little out of the box can find a solution that benefits everyone concerned.

   The one thing that would benefit the people in this community and find an appropriate solution for the homeless situation is an acute care hospital that offers psychiatric services. The amounts of money spent on transferring only a few of the many people who need mental health services, does not make sense economically and cannot be considered a feasible “mental health” program. This incredible expense to get one person psychiatric help,is temporary at best. Imagine if our community had 200 undernourished citizens. The degrees of being undernourished went from hungry and slightly under weight to starving and 25 pounds under weight. Suppose a grant of $85,000 was given the county to feed the hungry. One day 12 people past out because their bodies were so undernourished. The hospital reports that they do not have a nutritionist on duty. However their is a restaurant in Berkeley, Ca. called the Chez Panisse. The owner and founder is Alice Waters. The food she serves is the cleanest, freshest, locally grown food in the nation. The county can afford to only fly 6 of the 12 starving people to eat for a week at this super healthy restaurant. So what happens to the other 194 hungry people? The same thing that happens to the many untreated mental health patients. Would it not make more sense to start our own community garden, modeled after Alice Waters food programs with the $85,000? It does not make sense for this poor community to transport people to facilities for treatments. We can not afford those types of luxuries. Especially when we are blessed with Doctors Duncan and Caldwell (newest members elected to the Public Health Board.)

   Read about Alice Waters and her accomplishments at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School: a one-acre garden, an adjacent kitchen-classroom, and an “eco-gastronomic” curriculum. By actively involving a thousand students in all aspects of the food cycle. http://www.chezpanisse.com/about/alice-waters/
   Del Norte County citizens, young and old need QUALITY HEALTH CARE not some glorified first aid station. If you cannot provide the services we need please leave. You are like a 17 year old boy who took 5 Viagra and will not take “NO” for an answer.

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4. 

   Concerned Citizen

   November 10, 2016

   Connie Morrison: You need to read what I said again. I did not say “all the people hiding in the wood are able-bodied, meth taking men”. I said “which are in large part criminals hiding in the woods for a reason”. Big difference! Have you been out to these outlaw camps? I HAVE! I am not talking about the camps near the road visible to the cops and passers-by — I am talking about the camps deep in the woods that are like little towns. They are not the harmless, alcoholic, shopping cart pushing winos. What goes on in those camps would spin your far too liberal head around! Meth labs, huge amounts of stolen items that are brought in nightly and daily, and often in huge pickup truck loads from freshly burgled businesses and homes, meth labs, opium to heroin conversion labs, dump-truck after dump-truck levels of litter and illegal dumping, trees being cut by the hundreds and stolen from private and government owned property, and being sold as firewood and used to build shacks and shanties in the woods on government and private property that the inhabitants do not own, cords and cords of freshly cut stolen trees, split into firewood and stacked and burned in the camps, mountains of litter and used syringes everywhere, human waste, toxic chemicals dumped everywhere, and environmental destruction beyond the pale, huge plywood houses/shacks where drugs are manufactured and sold as well as forced prostitution of very young, under-aged, drug addicted, runaway girls who are being used for prostitution, while the pimps ensure these young girls STAY addicted, and more things than your would believe. I know all about Sheriff Apperson and other compassionate, caring law enforcement officers helping some that are just down on their luck get back home by passing the hat around to deputies and police officers to rent a room for the night and buy a bus ticket back to Arizona. I salute their efforts for going above and beyond the call of duty. As for your experience in 1970, you are comparing apples to oranges. Those were the hippy days in 1970 with hippies and Vietnam vets returning to the earth, with the vets just isolating due to untreated PTSD, not the current times of meth and heroin addiction. That was the Woodstock generation of “Teach your children well” in 1970, not the current Rap/Hip Hop generation of gangsta culture. For that one, and/or very few examples of people being down on their luck needing a hand up, I have seen an extremely overwhelming number hard-core criminals out there for whom the only solution is hard time in prison. As for the homeless veterans, all that want help, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, not the VFW, has programs and housing vouchers through the HUD/VASH program. If vets don’t take advantage of it, it is because they don’t want to get treatment and go along with the very effective Department of Veterans Affairs treatment and housing solutions. Believe me, finding veterans out there is like finding a needle in a hay stack, no matter what spin the current VFW Commander Jerry Johnson proclaims is his reason for spending hard earned, VFW veteran’s funds on feeding those that are not vets, and do not want to change their circumstances, while he tells the public and the VFW members he is “feeding homeless veterans”. This community has a huge amount of disabled, house-bound, elderly veterans that should instead have sack lunches taken to them with VFW funds! Johnson and Finigan are only interested in aggrandizing themselves. Finigan was not re-elected, and Johnson will not be re-elected.

   You left out that Finigan said that initial $85,000 this county has already received of the $200,000 that is not to come for over one more year, was only to be spent studying the homeless problem, and not one penny was to go to feed, house or otherwise help the homeless — committee gets funded, but the homeless get zero.

   Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight — I have studied this issue in depth, been out to the camps deep in the woods, and I have my facts in order. “In large part” most in the homeless in the deep-woods homeless camps need a swift kick in the ass; A few others need a hand up. It is so bad that property owners can’t go on to their own damn property — and forget about ever selling the property! I will bet you also don’t know that non-homeless people are being shot at from these camps? Pimping young girls? Think about it!

   Not many jobs around here, but “in large part” these are people that wouldn’t take a job in a pie factory! While it is true that we can’t arrest out way out of the homeless problem, we can’t fix it by coddling hard core, predatory criminals either. Law enforcement knows that, and you need to learn that too.

   Bernie Sanders is a logical, anti-corruption, well informed liberal, and a champion for the poor and working class — you are talking about 17 year old boys on Viagra.

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