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On November 9th the Fort Bragg City Council recognized various volunteers serving on city wide commissions, committees, and advisory boards. The council continued the Stage 3 water emergency and approved a land swap for eight acres of land on the former Georgia-Pacific mill site. Any of those items would normally be significant matters on their own merits, but the story in Fort Bragg continues to circle around a ballot initiative aimed at restricting the use of social services in Fort Bragg's Central Business District (CBD); more specifically the target of the proposed ballot measure is the Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center's mental health services and transitional housing units within the Old Coast Hotel on the northwest corner of Franklin and Oak Streets.
     The immediate headline is that the Mendocino County Registrar's office has confirmed at least 469 signatures on the petition that calls on the city government to forbid all social service organizations within Fort Bragg's Central Business District that were not in place prior to January 1, 2015. That 469 number crosses the 15% barrier of registered voters in Fort Bragg, thus creating the need for an up or down election on the measure. The proponents of said initiative want to go ahead with a special election as soon as possible. Indeed, the leaders of the initiative drive wrote to Fort Bragg's City Clerk and Elections Officer last week, requesting that the City follow government codes that supposedly mandate a special election for either the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March, 2016 or the second Tuesday in April, 2016.
     However, Fort Bragg's City Manager, Linda Ruffing, and the five member City Council is not having it. They brushed aside requests for a special election in March or April, citing election codes that provide for consolidating the local initiative with the June 7, 2016 presidential primary.
     As has become the norm in the past few months for only a small number of citizens in favor of the initiative to appear at city council meetings. This time they numbered three: Rex Gressett, Judy Valadao, and Jay McMartin-Rosenquist. Apparently the actual authors of the initiative and many of the signatories to the petition are boycotting City Council meetings at present.
     The Council itself voted 5-0 to accept the certification of the signatures by county election officials. They also concurred 5-0 to accept the advice of city staff to consolidate the election in June, 2016. The City Council chose not to write an official ballot argument against the initiative. All five councilmen, in one form or another, expressed the belief that they had previously announced and recorded their disapproval of the initiative.
     Councilmember Doug Hammerstrom reasoned that members of the town's current social service organizations might offer the most persuasive arguments against the initiative. Vice-mayor Lindy Peters did make a brief, but rather adamant statement, more or less directly aimed at the three proponents in attendance, to the effect that the initiative proposal, if passed, would preclude veteran's assistance groups from opening up shop in Fort Bragg's Central Business District.
     The initiative's backers appear heedless to such scoldings, believing it is their god given, patriotic right to question the establishment of mental health services at the Old Coast Hotel site. Meanwhile both proponents and opponents of said initiative largely ignore the prior and ongoing problem of serving forty meals a day to every type of homeless person at the Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center's (MCHC) flagship enterprise, Hospitality House. The Board members of MCHC seem convinced that simply by serving meals to the hungry and homeless they have done their good deed for every day, their neighbors be damned because MCHC has for years refused to monitor the folks it serves meals to;  refusing even to keep the late afternoon diners on campus at Hospitality House. The long running inaction and inability of MCHC's Board to control its own clientele for an hour or so each day is the root cause of much of Fort Bragg's homeless (large subgroup = mentally ill) problems. Those behind this ill-fated initiative would do better to document the messes (human, animal, food) created by the unmonitored clientele of Hospitality House dinners, then file a class action suit against said MCHC. At this late date in this fiasco, only undeniable legal action will wake up the MCHC Board from their fantasy world of do-goodiness, in which the aforementioned Board gives no appearance of real world understanding regarding the unintended consequences brought about by their one good deed, feeding the homeless. 

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Willie Fisher was born in 1903 at Benwell, Newcastle upon Tyne, the second son of a man who had been a revolutionary agitator alongside Vladimir Lenin in the 1890s in Saint Petersburg. Charged with sedition, Willie's father, Heinrich, fled to England, arriving in the Newcastle area in September, 1901.
     Heinrich found work at the Armstrong Whitworth Company, manufacturers of naval craft and their heavy guns. He joined the Newcastle Socialist Institute and purportedly started smuggling rifles to Russia.
     Willie displayed not only an aptitude for math and the sciences, but also for learning languages and the arts. His parents provided piano lessons while Willie picked up the guitar on his own. Both he and his one year older brother, Henry, earned scholarships to high schools.
     World War I interrupted Willie's education. He took a job as a draftsman's apprentice  while attending evening college courses before being accepted at London University in 1920. However, the relatively high costs of a college education caused Willie to drop out.
     Reading and hearing about the early successes of the Russian Revolution provoked Heinrich to pack up the family for a move to Moscow. There were many "returneee" families in Moscow during the summer of 1921. As older teenagers Willie and his brother Henry's first working positions were something akin to counselors at a summer camp for younger children of "returnee" parents. The brothers accompanied a group of children about twenty miles northeast of Moscow to the banks of the Klyazma River, a tributary of the Volga. The kids slept in cabins and huts amid the piney woods and open meadows of the area. One afternoon, as they swam in the river an undertow dragged one of the smaller boys away. Henry jumped in to help, but the current swept both under.
     The loss more or less destroyed Willie and Henry's mother. She could or would not overcome her grief and most damaging she directly and indirectly blamed Willie for the loss of her first born.
     Willie sublimated his grief and survivor guilt through his ability to speak Russian, English, German, Yiddish and Polish. By the fall of 1921 the teenager took a position with the Comintern as a translator.
     Even in London Willie had been fascinated by rudimentary radio transmitters. In Moscow he received more definitive training and by the mid 1920s he was serving in a radio battalion of the Red Army. Returning to Moscow in 1927, he was recruited by the secret police unit known as OGPU, a forerunner of the KGB. During this period Willie also met, courted, and wed harpist Elena Lebedeva, whom he first heard playing at the Moscow Conservatoire.
     The couple had one child, Evelyn, born in October, 1929. Perhaps the chances for more were cut short when the OGPU stationed Willie, as a radio operator, in Norway, France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. He did not return to the Soviet Union until 1936.
     Thereafter, he worked for the NKVD, which had replaced the OGPU in 1934. Willie trained other radiomen and women for positions around the globe, essentially as spies. Heinrich Fisher died during this period, possibly saving Willie from Stalin's "Great Purge," which claimed the lives of most of Lenin's cronies, and their families, from the early years of Bolshevik rebellion in czarist Russia.
     During the last year of World War II, Willie took part in Operation Berezino (sometimes called Operation Scherhorn). The Red Army captured the German Lieutenant-Colonel Heinrich Scherhorn in the summer of 1944, but the Germans did not know it. Men like Willie Fisher, as part of Operation Berezino, fed radio information to the Germans that Lt. Colonel Scherhorn was leading a large armed group behind the Soviet front lines. The deception prompted the Germans to send scores of commando units to assist Scherhorn. Dozens were captured by the Red Army almost as soon as they crossed the lines. Using these authentic voices in radio transmissions, the Germans were lured into continuing to send more commandos through the lines up until the closing hours of the war.
     As a result of his highly praised work in Operation Berezino, Willie was granted one of the plum postings from within the Soviet foreign intelligence community: the United States. Under the codename MARK, he took up residence in New York City in 1949 using the passport of Emil Goldfus, an infant who died in 1902. Somehow, the NKVD had acquired Goldfus' birth certificate in the confusing aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.
     For more than a year "MARK" traveled the U.S., with money provided through Soviet embassies, reorganizing a network of so-called "Volunteers" who had been trying to acquire diagrams from the Manhattan Project. Indeed, one of Willie's radio operation trainees from the '30s, known as Kitty Harris, had lived in New Mexico during much of the war, accumulating material from American physicists then passing the information on to Soviet couriers.
     Willie/MARK also had some contact with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the accused, and condemned, atomic spies. After their executions he expressed relief that they had seemingly not mentioned him to U.S. Authorities, though at some point in the early 1950s the FBI began compiling a file on a Soviet spy they alternately called “the Colonel” or Rudolph Abel, but the agents on the case could not match a face to the file.
     In late October, 1952, Moscow sent MARK a new assistant. The confirmation of the assistant's arrival was his posting of a thumbtack on a specific sign in Central Park. The new assistant, Reino Hayhanen went by the alias Eugene Maki. Unfortunately for Willie/MARK, Hayhanen/Maki was a chronic alcoholic prone to slipshod spy work.
     With the KGB now supplying money for Willie's network of spies, too often Hayhanen spent much of the funds on booze. By early 1957, Willie had had enough. He demanded that Moscow recall Hayhanen. This panicked Hayhanen, who thought he would be sent to Siberia or executed upon his return to the Soviet Union.
     Instead of traveling directly to Moscow, Hayhanen cut his return trip short in Paris, where he entered the U.S. embassy to make the best deal possible for himself. Because he was inebriated at the time, CIA officials at the Paris embassy initially dismissed Hayhanen as mentally unstable. Eventually, however, Hayhanen/Maki's tales of espionage bore too many truths to be ignored. He was turned over to the FBI and the jig was up for Willie. Early in the morning of  June 21, 1957 he answered a knock at his door in Brooklyn's Hotel Latham. It was FBI agents, come-a-calling. One of the agents addressed MARK as Colonel Abel.
     It was under the name Rudolph Abel that the rest of the story was spelled out in James B. Donovan's written account, Strangers on a Bridge. Mr. Donovan's experience with the so-called Rudolph Abel is currently the subject of Steven Spielberg's film version of Willie's later years, Bridge of Spies (screenplay by Mark Charman, Joel Coen, and Ethan Coen).
  *Malcolm Macdonald's website is malcolmmacdonaldoutlawford.com

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On Friday October 16, 2015, the Clerk of the City of Fort Bragg received a petition for a ballot initiative entitled “Prohibiting Social Services in the Central Business District.” On October 19th the City Clerk made a prima facie count of the signatures. Her estimate of valid signatures: 659. Current number of Fort Bragg, CA registered voters: 3,124. That makes the number of signatories to the proposed initiative approximately 22% (more precisely: 21.8%) of the voting populace of Mendocino County's second largest municipality.
     Near the end of the October 26th Fort Bragg City Council meeting its five councilmen voted unanimously to send the petition on to the County Registrar of Voters for an official tally of the signatures. If the number of valid signatures remains above 15% of Fort Bragg's registered voters then the City must call for a special election on the initiative to ban social services from the central business district (CBD). However, if the date of that potential special election falls within 180 days of a regularly scheduled election the special election will be conjoined with the regular election. That appears to be the situation, so that the earliest a vote on this initiative could take place would be in the June, 2016 presidential primary election.
     The initiative is a reaction to the City Council earlier in the year approving transitional housing units and office space for mental health assessments at the site of the Old Coast Hotel at the corner of Oak and Franklin Streets in Fort Bragg's CBD. Money for the purchase of the Old Coast Hotel was funded through a Community Development Block grant (CDBG). In September, the City of Fort Bragg's attorney, Samantha Zutler, stated that consistent with other provisions of the zoning code, if the initiative passes, the facility [Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center's new offices within the Old Coast Hotel] and other targeted social service organizations will become legal non-conforming uses, but the uses will not be prohibited.
     The City Attorney went on: If Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center's right becomes vested before the measure takes effect, the retro-activity provision in the initiative would likely be subject to challenge as an improper interference with MCHC's vested right to operate the facility. The killer blow came in this Zutler legal opinion: Using a zoning ordinance to target a specific facility that exists to provide housing to low income persons, persons with disabilities, or persons receiving public benefits could be challenged as discriminatory and unlawful under state and federal laws.
     That message was received loud and clear by all five council members in September, including Vice Mayor Lindy Peters, the lone vote against the Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center move to the Old Coast Hotel site. At that September 14th meeting each of the five councilmen spoke against the proposed initiative, citing two main reasons: 1) the potential high costs to the city in litigation, and 2) the measure could also deny central business district locations to other, unquestioned, social service organizations.
     Potential litigation attaches to the initiative's main clause. “This initiative clarifies and amends Title 18, Chapter 18.22 of the Municipal Code (Commercial Zoning Districts) to not allow by permit or otherwise specific land uses in the CBD, as that District is shown and described by Title 18 as of January 1, 2015.”
    At the October 26th City Council meeting Peters said that he had approached some of those behind the initiative petition and told them retroactive enforcement would not stand up to legal actions. The City Council and staff, on October 26th, also discussed the potential cost of the special election. Having the petition signatures counted by the Mendocino County Registrar this past summer did not cost the city because the petition fell short by a single valid signature of reaching the 10% minimum of registered Fort Bragg voters to qualify for the ballot. However, if anything close to the 22% number of signatures holds up this time (the County has until December 2nd to verify) then the City of Fort Bragg will be charged for the count. City Council and staff estimated added election costs at anywhere between $10,000 to $35,000.
     Apparently, those who organized the petition drive for the initiative are still intent on going forward. I say “apparently” because only a single supporter of the initiative showed up for the October 26th City Council meeting, but even he left well before the council voted 5-0 to send the petition and its 659 signatures to the County Registrar.
     All that's left is a mess, a civic ballot measure that not a single current city council member supports, unknown amounts of litigation costs if the initiative should pass, the side issue of privatized mental health care and services (as of this writing Ortner Management Group, the private providers of adult mental health services in Mendocino County is not yet a tenant at the Old Coast Hotel site, but its subcontractor, Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center, is the new owner of the Old Coast Hotel property, subject to CDBG guidelines), and the literal mess that accompanies the daily meals served at or outside the Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center's flagship entity, Hospitality House. No short or long range solution has been proposed by “Hospitality” or the city fathers for the continual trashing of the CBD by some of the homeless who are served daily at Hospitality House. “Hospitality's” management and board are still pretty much in denial about the problems caused by dozens of loiterers on the streets, alleyways, and parking lots nearby the Hospitality House prior to, during, and after meals are served late each afternoon. There is very little monitoring of the meals served, so food, plates and utensils often end up as messes to be cleaned up by neighbors for several blocks around Hospitality House on any given day.
     I've seen the photos. Food, trash, and worse on the front and back steps of Hospitality House's neighbors. Homeless who are served food by Hospitality House, but for whatever reason are not allowed to spend the night there can be viewed in photos taken by neighbors; homeless persons curled up on the front steps or porches of businesses in the neighborhood of Hospitality House, sometimes curled up with their Hospitality House food and plates scattered across those same porches, steps, lawns. You can find the Hospitality House meals strewn anywhere from Purity to Safeway, McPherson [sic] Street to Main Street.
     Providing services for mental health clients at the Old Coast Hotel property may bring minor problems from time to time, but the real problem, the simple monitoring of those fed at Hospitality House has been largely ignored for years. You can't change that with a petition to ban social services in the central business district.

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The Mendocino Coast District Hospital (MCDH) is in turmoil. Sure, if you go in for a routine blood draw, you will get prompt, positive service, and you won't even notice the pinprick. However, the administration of the hospital is an entirely different matter.
     Longstanding members of the Board of Directors don't know who the managers of individual departments are. The Finance Committee summoned department heads before the committee. The department heads refuse to be summoned. The  relatively new CEO, Bob Edwards, appears to be in open opposition to two physicians on the Board of Directors. The brand new CFO contradicts one of those doctor's statistics at the most recent meeting of the hospital's Finance Committee on October 20th, and nobody outside hospital employees bothers to attend.
     Admission is free to such events. Many of the MCDH Board of Directors and committee meetings possess more tension and angst than any reality show. Do the doctors, administrators, and other employees at MCDH need to race big rigs across frozen tundra while pulling each others' hair out to get the attention of the public?
     In August, supporters of Dr. Diane Harris filled the MCDH's Redwood Room when it seemed that their physician was going to be summarily dumped from her position at North  Coast Family Health Center (NCFHC) after an insulting contract offer from CEO Edwards and NCFHC administrator Ilona Horton. In subsequent MCDH meetings, attendance by the general public has dwindled to almost nothing.
     As good as the Board meetings have been for entertainment purposes alone, you can't beat the Finance Committee. You can almost count on Board of Directors chair Sean Hogan to show up, flaunt the Brown Act, and go on a ten minute rant concerning everything from agenda issues to his Irish ancestry. After completing his most recent red-faced ramble at the Finance Committee, Hogan ambled by my seat, leaned over and whispered, “Of course, this entire meeting is off the record.”
     The retired attorney may have a poor grasp of civic meeting rules, but he still displays a self-deprecatory sense of humor. The problem is, as much as everyone loves a show, there's serious bid-ness at hand. MCDH owes a boatload of money in bankruptcy payments, will be making those payments for years to come; it has done very little, if any, planning toward building a new hospital (which it will be required to do in fourteen years time); and is not breaking even many months of this year. In fact, MCDH's own figures show a net loss from operations in September, 2015, amounting to $187,121. At the end of that month the hospital's debt service ratio computed out at .86. In the words of the hospital's Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Wade Sturgeon, this is a number "no longer in compliance with the bond covenant ratio requirement of 1.25."
     The debt service ratio is a requirement of Cal-Mortgage, chief amongst MCDH's bond insurers. A ratio of 1.0 would mean that the hospital had precisely enough money to cover operating costs and current debts. A ratio of 1.0 is more or less a bare minimum. Cal-Mortgage is asking/requiring that MCDH show a positive side, ongoing 1.25 ratio. Get the picture of what a .86 ratio means? It means that Cal-Mortgage would be within bounds to pull the plug on Mendocino Coast District Hospital.
     Let's get back to the October 20th Finance Committee meeting where the most promising item on the agenda was the long promised appearance of MCDH's department managers. First up, the Emergency Room (ER). CEO Bob Edwards stepped in for the ER Dept. manager, stating that she was refusing to appear before the committee. He added that other department managers at MCDH would take a similar stance. Several of these department managers were present in the back of the room. Most acted like they'd never attended a civic meeting before, though many have been seen, if not heard before. The managers interrupted the agendized proceedings of the Finance Committee, insisting they be heard from. When the committee finally relented NCFHC administator Ilona Horton spoke first, essentially saying that she felt disrespected by the committee and potentially intimidated. Her sentiments were more or less repeated by a couple of other interruptive department managers.
     Keep in mind that Horton was a party to the contract offer, or lack thereof, to Dr. Harris earlier this summer. She doesn't have a lot of respect ground to walk on.  As for the other managers, no matter how disrespected or semi-innocent they might be, how can someone managing an entire department at a hospital that has just barely survived bankruptcy proceedings expect to appear even slightly reasonable while rejecting the request of that hospital's finance committee to hear specific details about their department? To this outside observer, these department managers appear as whiny, spoiled brats, whose body language at such meetings is somewhere on the ultra defensive side before the meetings even commence.
     The doctors on the MCDH Board of Directors who are also chairing the Finance Committee are very assertive fellows, but that does not excuse each and every department, and their managers, from explaining as best they can what's going on. This hospital will not survive without a detailed accounting about what works in the terms of making money for the institution and what must be pared in order to continue. It's as simple as that. Anyone balking at participating in this practice should be deemed expendable.
    That's probably what these defensive managers are afraid of, losing their jobs. But it's not the explaining of potential money losses in their departments that would or should cost them their jobs, it's the refusal to explain anything at all that is tantamount to insubordination. Taxpayer money provides a healthy chunk of these managers' salaries. This writer is a taxpayer who helps support MCDH. MCDH department managers, how dare you display such arrogance in refusing to tell the publicly elected officials of MCDH's Finance Committee what's going on in each and every one of your departments.
     The problem here is that new MCDH CEO Bob Edwards sided with these managers at the Finance Committee meeting. Edwards is one of thse smily faced liars who cannot be trusted. He seems intent on aome sort of power play battle with the two physician members of the MCDH Board, William Rohr and Peter Glusker.
     Reportedly Edwards has continued to engage in public lies about the Dr. Harris scenario. A reliable source states that Edwards appeared before a local non-profit group recently, claiming that Dr. Harris had retired voluntarily before the whole contract kerfuffle hit the fan. Included in this tale as backup information, according to Edwards, was a "misstatement" (polite word for prevarication) that Harris had a retirement party before the contract brouhaha occured. The opposite was true: Once Harris was unceremoniously refused a contract extension by Edwards, her supporters gave her a "retirement" party.
     Dr. Harris has decided to move on to the Fort Bragg Rural Health Center (FBRHC), presumably taking a large percentage of her clientele with her. Readers of coastal weekly newspapers may have noticed the half page ad taken out by MCDH andNorth Coast Family Health Center (NCFHC) last week celebrating Dr. Pankaj Karan's practice at NCFHC. The problem is Dr. Karan is leaving to practice elsewhere. Currently, NCFHC is three physicians short. Reportedly, administration is requesting the remaining NCFHC physicians bear an ever increasing patient/work load.
     The powers that be at MCDH seem to think the way out of their self-inflicted economic  debacle is another attempt at a parcel tax. A previous attempt, approximately a decade ago, failed. What cognizant taxpayer would pony up more money to an organization whose physicians are abandoning ship, who have to outsource bill coding jobs at $71 per hour, and whose managers refuse to tell the public what's going on in their departments?