I had the privilege of sitting in on the Fall River High School Senior Oral Boards again this year  and again, I walked away proud  of the students and the staff that taught them. I’m sure that those who sat in on the Burney orals were just as impressed.

I keep hearing about how poor of an education system we have in the Intermountain Area and yet reflecting back this “poor” education system has turned out students that went on to excel at the military academies and have distinguished military careers. Our alumni boast medical doctors, registered nurses, scientists, teachers, athletes that reached the semi pro and pro level, professional coaches, business men and women, successful ranchers and farmers and so much more.

I know an awful lot of the alumni who have been wonderful parents, spouses and children, who have taken over leadership roles in their community and done well.

I’m starting to become part of the Aleve generation, you know, take a pill for this and take a pill for that. Pills generally cure the hurt.

On reflection I can say that the reason I have to take those pills is because I didn’t do the things I should have, when I should have.

The problem is that there are a few things I just can’t take pills for - one of those is being a little too self centered or busy to always remember and treat those who are important to me, in many ways responsible for my being here and having the quality of life that I have, as well as I should.

That’s not to say I don’t love them with all my heart, I did and I do, but I often didn’t and don’t (and in one case no longer can) take the time to tell them just how important they really are to me or how much I love them.

I can’t take a pill to ease the guilt of not showing my appreciation to three very dear women in my life - Each very good mothers - my mother, my wife and my daughter.

I have a couple of things this week.

First, I had questions when the Community Services District accepted Dave Hall as its interim manager.

I need to say right up front that my reservations are unfounded.

Dave, a volunteer, is spending a considerable amount of time on a considerable number of days trying to run a district badly in need of being run. He’s doing it at no pay as a volunteer and he is doing a good job.

Yeah, he came out of private industry so there are a lot of bureaucratic rules and regulations that he isn’t aware of. But if he does something or doesn’t do something according to Hoyle, it isn’t because he was trying to hide something or just do it his way. He corrects the problem and moves on.

I’m impressed and will, for one, say thank you.

Regarding the second issue, Caltrans, the Department of Transportation, on the other hand, is installing new signs state wide. I'm not sure that they mean planting them on posts in the ground or just putting them at construction sites, but it has me wondering. For one thing they cost money when the state swears up and down it is broke.

Cal trans has long been known for hauling out heavy equipment to put in front of construction sites to keep the general public from running over their workers, thus tying up the drivers and equipment at sites where they aren’t needed for productive work and also for putting up signs all over the state, at costs of God only knows how much, telling people to click it or ticket, while refusing to allow towns and businesses from putting any signs on Caltran’s highways.

“Give people or ‘them’ a brake” as the saying on another Caltrans campaign goes that wasn’t free.

I don’t know what I was worried about. The Cataract surgery wasn’t bad at all.

I went into the surgery area around 9 a.m. last Monday and was out by 11 a.m. The surgery only took 10 minutes, didn’t hurt and the coffee and cookies afterwards were great.

Donna drove me down to Lu Lu’s afterwards and we had a great breakfast before heading home.

I wore dark glasses until 3 p.m., drove down to Redding the next morning for my post op exam and was amazed at how much better I could see.

My sight in the eye they had operated on was 20-50 that morning and has been improving beyond that every day.

Editorial

The weather was pretty iffy early Easter morning, but unlike the snow of a few years ago, it didn’t keep the Easter bunnies, with help from the Lions Clubs and other organizations, from hiding Easter eggs for the kids to find and everyone to eat.

For those who didn’t brave the damp weather and wet grass you missed a good time.

Be sure to check out our sports section this week. It’s loaded with pictures and information about athletes from tykes to high school seniors.
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Customers of Fall River Valley should be aware that if they get an offer via phone, e-mail or US mail that sounds too good to be true it probably is. One alert Fall River resident recently received such an offer. She was sent two $850.00 money orders as part of a so called “Mystery Shopper” program, she was to cash the money orders and as her compensation keep $300.00 of it and forward the balance to another address (in the Phillipines). This customer was smart enough to take the money orders to the Fall River Post Office where they where able to determine that they were fake.
Mark Rosenthal, Postmaster, Fall River Mills

Living without a bathroom for a week was an interesting experience, but boy was it worth it.

Contractor Hal Gilmore and Tile man Tony Pelegrino did a magnificent job.

This was not proof for those who accuse me of being full of it,. Actually Lynn Miller loaned us “The Hinchcliff House,” one of her vacation cottages on Main Street in Burney. It was beautiful, comfortable, just everything we could desire and she did it on her own, making the offer when she learned about the project.

Thank you Lynn.

We had planned a trip to the Surprise Valley Hot Springs and were able to work that in also.

Hal, of Dall Construction, gutted the bathroom, removed the old commode and shower-tub combination replacing them with a new, standard size commode and preparing the shower and walls so Tony could do a full-length shower.

 Tony, tiled the shower from top to bottom, including the shower’s floor. He also tiled the bathroom walls and trimmed the shower to really make it pop.

Those two guys went out of their way to not only do a top professional job, but they did it quickly, came in under estimate, were creative, consulted us as they went, cleaned up after themselves, and did it all in an unbelievably short time.

Not only that, Hal and Tony were extremely easy to get along with.
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I need your help. Our hospitals are in trouble. In 2011, the state budget agreement reduced Medi-Cal reimbursement rates for hospitalbased skilled nursing facilities. The budget bill also made these cuts retroactive to June 1, 2011. These cuts are already law. They were passed before I was elected to the legislature.

The Governor and the State Department of Health Care Services has the authority to modify these cuts. We need to make our voices heard to make sure they do not bankrupt our hospitals in Plumas, Lassen, Sierra, Nevada and Modoc Counties. I am working with my colleagues in the legislature to take action to rescind these cuts and to restore reimbursement to fair levels that will keep our small rural hospitals in business. Please support our local hospitals and communities by taking a stand against these ill-advised cuts to our hospitals.

In our rural district the impact could be severe. Such Medi-Cal rate reductions may force rural hospitals to close wings that provide nursing-home care to our most frail elderly, or even worse, close the entire hospital altogether.

Patients and elderly residents will be forced to move, in some cases to facilities far away from family or to care settings that may not be adequate to meet their health care needs. Many healthcare providers already lose money providing services for people who are covered by Medi-Cal. Sadly, this misguided move by the state will end up costing California government more money because the hospitals in our area charge less to provide services to these people than what it will ultimately cost to transfer individuals to service areas with even greater costs.

In many rural communities, the skilled nursing facility or nursing home is an integral part of the community health care system. Without a place to care for people outside an emergency room setting, the hospital infrastructure will fall apart. Significant reductions to skilled nursing facilities will undermine the financial viability of the entire hospital and will result in hospital closures and reductions in available services. That means lay-offs and dangerous delays in getting people emergency services.

Editor: Imagine my surprise when I walked up to my classroom at Fall River Elementary and saw that vandals and thieves had taken the class’ 25 gallon pot, weighing over 100 pounds. I walked around the campus and noticed the theft of the kindergarten classes’ plant containers too.

My students were very upset about the loss. They had been raising vegetables, in the classroom window, to plant in that container. In fact, just the afternoon before they had planted some cold weather vegetable seeds.

I was so proud when my students choose to turn tragedy into triumph. They choose to build their own character instead of getting angry or even. They decided to serve the school by cleaning up the mess left by the thieves. They saved over 100 gallons of dirt, rocks and even a frog. They were proud of what they had accomplished. I was proud that they had learned that character counts.
John King FRE Community Day School teacher

The Community Services District had a fairly uneventful meeting last week and the board started to get a handle on several items.

There was none of the back biting and theatrics which had plagued the meetings in previous months.

Instead they got down to business and stayed focused on business.

They spent a little money they didn’t have to get a financial wizard to tell them where they are financially and how they can get out of the hole they now find themselves in.

They are revisiting the sewer rates trying to find out what it will take to break even, before going back to their customers with another increase proposal.

They are starting to discuss the grants, which are really necessary and whether they can afford them if it takes borrowing money to get them.

They are having a hard time letting go of LAFCO which I suspect will cost them more grief than not in the long run. They haven’t learned that LAFCO has the size, power, and resources and have been reasonably patient.

They also fail to realize that the Fall River CSD is a small district which, because of its own greed spent over $40,000 on an attorney who didn’t win the district anything and $15,000 plus with a consultant who failed to supply LAFCO with the information needed, in the format it needed, to get the job done without using an unusual amount of time to decipher it. Sooner or later the LAFCO board which is made up of professionals and their professional staff will get tired of being lectured by laypeople from Fall River CSD who want to berate LAFCO staff and waste the Commission’s time.

On a positive note the board turned down any current consideration of wage increases because they simply didn’t have the money to pay the employees more. It also appears that with Dave Hall donating his time in the management position, that they might be able to make up some of the losses incurred under the previous manager.

All in all the board listened patiently to members of the audience as they asked questions and submitted ideas.
Comment

This sort of atmosphere is what leads a ranch not too far from that locked gate having an armed guard who patrols the ranch with the butt of a gun in his lap and barrel out the window - a guard who bluntly orders anyone who dares come down the road, for whatever reason, out - now!
Comment

Most of us don’t think about hospitals unless a friend or relative is in one or we are in one.

Most of us have no idea how a hospital really works, how it got where it is, nor do we really care as long as it is there when we need it.

In other words we have the big city attitude and are thinking about big city institutions that are privately run.

Even many of the big cities don’t have public hospitals anymore. In fact if you think back you can remember when Shasta County shut their hospital down because they couldn’t afford it. Modoc Medical Center damned near bankrupted Modoc County.

We are extremely lucky to still have ours and most of us have direct links to Mayers because it was there when we, a loved one or a friend needed it. Many of us have friends or relatives using its services today.

We are lucky to have had those who have gone before us fight for, raise money for, work on and work for Mayers so you and I have a hospital today.

We are lucky to have had intelligent management and boards who have been able to get it through rough patches. Others have brought fine doctors and staff here and found ways to keep them, and to expand its services and partner with others like Mountain Valley Health Centers.

Those people all have a number of things in common, not the least of which is the stubbornness, dedication and energy necessary to keep our hospital alive, functional, and servicing those of us who need the services.

Hospitals are complex businesses, with ever changing laws, improved equipment and methods, not to mention state and federal governments which see numbers, not people, and want to shift as much of that money to their projects and needs as they can get away with.

We can smugly sit around tables without having the knowledge and skills necessary to run or save our hospital and believe that we could do a better job than those who are on the front lines doing it, or we can put our trust in those who have the facts, up to date knowledge, skills and education necessary to do the job right - and help them when they need the help.

They have asked for our help and in recent days that request has been answered 10-fold. Because of the partnership between the hospital and the public Mayers has a chance to get the exemption we need to keep our long-term care.

But it isn’t over. Mayers CEO Matt Rees has been burning up the phone lines and  highways between here and Sacramento. Every time he does, he mails or hand delivers petitions and letters putting pressure on politicians and explaining just how good of a job Mayers is doing on pinching pennies, how much we support our hospital and how critical it is for our community to have a facility like Mayers, providing services and saving lives.

Don’t stop writing letters of support and signing petitions as they become available. They give Rees the sledge hammer he needs to win the battle - public support, our support!
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