KZYX News

December 3, 2020 — More than 90% of the electorate turned out to vote in the race for board members in the Mendocino City Community Services District, which oversees sewer, water, and streetlights in the town of Mendocino. Given the famous saying about whiskey and water, it’s not hard to see why.

December 2, 2020 — For years, the Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center has worked with local faith groups to run a winter homeless shelter, which houses 15-24 people in addition to the year-round shelter and the transitional housing programs. This year, with pandemic safety measures in place, the year-round shelter has reduced its beds from 24 to 17, and the center is scrambling to find staff to ope...

December 1, 2020 — Last week, retired sheriff Tom Allman announced on Facebook that he would start serving as a peace officer in Humboldt County, where he was born and raised. The Humboldt County sheriff, William Honsal, wrote in his own statement that Allman would end a nearly decade-long vacancy in the Lost Coast Resident Deputy position, which includes the Shelter Cove, Whitethorn and Mattole V...

For church choirs, vocal ensembles and professional musicians, one of the hardest sacrifices of the pandemic is not being able to sing together. Jim Culp explores how one local church choir has implemented unfamiliar technologies to create an even better choir, virtually.

November 30, 2020 — Earlier this month, the Board of Supervisors approved a six-month contact for a Promotores de Salud, or Spanish-speaking community health worker program with Nuestra Alianza, a non-profit organization in Willits. The contract, for up to $158,700, includes one lead community health worker and five part time promotores, who will provide Spanish-language education about covid-19 t...

November 26, 2020 — Assessor Clerk-Recorder Katrina Bartolomie has something to be thankful for this week, with all the votes tallied as of late Tuesday afternoon. Glenn McGourty and Maureen Mulheren won their supervisorial races decisively, with McGourty claiming 57.7% of the vote in the first district and Mulheren winning in the second with 60.64%. But Steve Scalmanini, who was the second-highes...

When Ed Keller opened a letter from his home insurance company announcing that his policy had been cancelled and that purchasing a new one would cost four times what he had paid in the past, he was sure there had been a mistake. Bewildered, he picked up the phone and called his provider, Mark Davis Insurance, to clear things up, only to hear from a company representative that it was not an error a...

November 24, 2020 — Mendocino County is solidly in the purple tier, which means that most schools are closed, with narrow exceptions for extracurricular activities and students facing certain hardships. But some small schools got their waivers in over the summer and received the nod from the state to provide in-person instruction. We’ll hear from Sandy Peters, the administrator at Deep Valley Chri...

A long contested plan to remove four hydro-electric dams on the Klamath River is moving forward, creating a path for restoring the river's decimated salmon fisheries and cleaning up a waterway that has long been central to local Native American tribes. The process of physically removing the four dams, which are owned by energy company PacifiCorp, is set to begin in three years. The agreement was a...

November 23, 2020 — Between August 19 and August 23, as the August Complex fire was working towards becoming the state’s largest wildfire, almost fifty earthquakes were measured eleven miles east southeast of Willits. The first one was a magnitude 4.2, and most of the aftershocks were tiny, with just four of them above a magnitude 3. Cynthia Pridmore is a senior engineering geologist at the Califo...

November 19, 2020 — Current local election results have not been completely tallied yet, but a new batch of ballots has been freshly counted, bringing the percentage of counted votes up to just over 68%. Maureen Mulheren and Glenn McGourty’s leads in the supervisorial races have grown over their opponents, Mari Rodin and Jon Kennedy, but in the Ukiah City Council race, Steve Scalmanini and Josefin...

November 18, 2020 — Surveillance testing programs in Mendocino County have come and gone, as the global pandemic has lasted much longer than anyone expected. The contract with UCSF to process tests from the clinics expired on the fifteenth of this month, and yesterday, Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren reported that the state had approved the county’s application for a mobile Optum Serv site, i...

November 17, 2020 — With most of California back in the purple tier, public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren has updated the county’s health order to limit outdoor gatherings to 12 people instead of 20 from three different households. He told the board of supervisors today that he does not expect the county to get out of the purple tier for the next six to eight weeks. On the consent calendar, the bo...

November 16, 2020 — Last week, when the county was still in the red tier, school boards met to discuss plans to reopen schools for in-person instruction. We caught up with Michelle Hutchins, the Superintendent of the Mendocino County Office of Education, about an hour after the governor’s address on Monday afternoon.

November 16, 2020 — Coronavirus infections are rising again in Mendocino County, but for the moment, schools are still eligible to reopen for in-person instruction. The Ukiah Unified School District board met Thursday night to discuss the plan. The board voted last July to authorize Superintendent Deb Kubin to decide which option to implement. If the county is still in the red tier on December 1,...

Yesterday, the Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency had their second public meeting, where they discussed how their mammoth project of sustainably managing the groundwater in the Ukiah Valley Basin is coming along.  The Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) is in charge of creating a plan to regulate all groundwater (well water) in the Ukiah Valley Basin for decades to come. Basi...

November 12, 2020 — The county has been in the red tier, for substantial rather than widespread presence of covid-19 for just over two weeks. The percentage of positive test cases, over a seven-day average with a seven-day lag, is low enough to qualify the county for the orange tier, but the numbers, at an average of 6.57 per day, just barely come in below the average of seven per day that qualifi...

November 10, 2020 — Not quite half the ballots from the recent election have been counted, assuming all of Mendocino County’s 53,651 voters participated. Both courthouses in Ukiah and Fort Bragg will be closed all week, due to two unrelated covid exposures last week. And if you see smoke in Anderson Valley tomorrow, chances are it’s the Anderson Valley Fire Department conducting a training burn at...

10/9/2020 -- For years, the Willits Unified School District has struggled to keep their aging facilities in good repair. There are eight school buildings in the district. The newest one is from the late ‘80s, and the oldest from almost a century ago. At Willits High School, the parking lot is badly in need of an upgrade, and at Blosser Elementary, the roof is leaking. Despite the urgency of these...

People in Mendocino Village are notoriously left of center politically. On November 4th, they shared their feelings of disappointment and frustration, optimism and hope.

November 4, 2020 — The entire country kept a long-awaited appointment with its democratic destiny yesterday. In Mendocino County, not quite half the ballots from 53,651 registered voters were counted by midnight. A huge amount of confusion resulted from the all mail-in procedure, with the majority of election-day voters casting provisional ballots because they lost track of the ballots they receiv...

November 2, 2020 — Since the county entered the red tier on Tuesday, a few restrictions have been loosened. On Friday, Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren addressed what will be allowed in the new tier, how to celebrate the holidays safely, and talked about plans to improve testing capacity, especially now that UCSF has canceled its lab contract with the county.

October 29, 2020 — The Measure B committee reviewed the first draft of its strategic plan, went over some financial information, and discussed the training center in Redwood Valley at Wednesday’s meeting . Some commissioners were surprised that Measure B is now paying for services that have not appeared on previous budgets, but Commissioner Carmel Angelo said this is the beginning of the commissio...

The city of Ukiah’s newest employees have floppy ears, hooves, and will eat almost anything you put in front of them, which makes them the perfect fit for their job: eating the invasive species and flammable material on the Ukiah section of the Great Redwood Trail. Most years, the City of Ukiah hires contracts inmate crews from Chamberlain Creek Camp, a prison in Mendocino, to remove excess brush...

October 29, 2020 — The Measure B committee reviewed the first draft of its strategic plan, went over some financial information, and discussed the training center in Redwood Valley at Wednesday’s meeting . Some commissioners were surprised that Measure B is now paying for services that have not appeared on previous budgets, but Commissioner Carmel Angelo said this is the beginning of the commissio...