Do you ever feel like you’re just slogging through the news cycle? There’s so much to know, it just keeps piling up! But hey, at least you don’t have to slog through hours-long meetings of minutia and bureaucratic hemming and hawing—that’s our job!
The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors were up to their knees in it at the last meeting regarding the disaster recovery for the Montecito mudslides. County staff are going to be digging up mud for years, literally, as part of a disaster response that has already cost tens of millions of dollars. I’m sure those supervisors are going to keep digging into the rainy day fund as well to attack that problem.
But the county may need some of those funds for legal fees accrued fighting the class-action lawsuit against it and the Sheriff’s Office for poor conditions and civil rights violations at the county jail. Another independent review was conducted by a another firm since the case first dropped, this time contracted by the Sheriff’s Office.
So the Sheriff’s Office paid to for a firm to tell us what several already had: the county jail is a death trap for those with disabilities and other illnesses. It wasn’t enough for Disability Rights California and the Prison Law Office to conduct thorough reviews and investigations and make pages of recommendations to improve conditions, so now two (probably expensive) outside experts dug deep into the mountain of details all over again, and came to the same conclusions.
It’s not like there haven’t been deaths and complaints and reports and litigation and cover stories in the Sun about this problem, for years!
The building is always blamed for the conditions at the Santa Barbara County Jail, but couldn’t things be done differently inside of it? Instead of making recommended changes, why has Sheriff Bill Brown been digging the county even deeper in the hole?
Speaking of digging yourself in deeper, you didn’t really think Lompoc and its adorably buffoonish City Council was going to get out of this metaphor, did you?
Councilman Jim Mosby went full meme-war on Ron Fink, Lompoc’s chief planning commissioner and a prolific penner of opinion pieces (see page 15), with the poop emoji bumper sticker he slapped on his trunk. “Fink happens,” it says next to the grinning poo pile.
While I do feel like Fink is overreacting a bit by calling it a threat—like how he overreacts about cannabis—I know he’s also playing a game that Mosby started with the whole “finger gun” fiasco between him and Mayor Bob Lingl.
Sounds like Lompoc has a lot of shit to dig up and deal with if you ask me.
But who’s going to do it? It’s an election year, and I’m the little birdie telling you it looks like Bob is hanging up his finger gun, and several hopefuls, like possibly Mosby versus Jenelle Osborne, may vie for Lompoc’s mayorship this year.
So who’s better to dig Lompoc out of its pile of, um, dysfunction: the voice of reason or the shit talker?
And hey, Jim, if you have anything to say on the matter, send me a letter or pick up your phone before deadline!
Oh, and if any of you savvy Lompocans who’s not Justin Ruhge want to chime in, I don’t mind digging through your letters either. Something stinks in Lompoc, what do you think it is?
The Canary tries to dig deep. Send your thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 15-22, 2018.