Ooh this looks like fun!!

Mmm mmm! We love the smell of vacuous campaign platitudes first thing in the morning!

Just the first line of the invite to Neely’s presser this morning is enough to get the ol’ laugh-meter kicked into gear:

A press conference will be held at Bonnie Neely’s new headquarters in Old Town Eureka announcing her campaign as a call to voters to choose the candidate whose values we share.

Yeah, uh, quick question:

What values?

But bygones! There’ll be refreshments!!

Hopefully of the fresh-baked aromatic variety.

To drown out the stench.

So please join the Bon Bon at 11:00 today, Tuesday morning, at 426 Third Street. She wants to lie talk about united community, rise to challenge, win election, blah blah blah.

Neely unveils new fundraising mailer

"Sure, we all have needs. You could spend your money feeding Pakistani flood victims, but just an FYI on that--they'll be hungry again tomorrow. If you send your money to my campaign instead, I won't be hungry again for like another four years. Beat that, UNICEF!"

‘This election is about Humboldt County’

Or it should be, anyway. 

But as a recent fundraising letter from the Virginia Bass campaign points out, non-local money is arriving by the sackful to compensate for Bonnie Neely’s  inability to raise money from the people she has ostensibly represented for the last 24 years.

The Bass letter states in part:

My opponent has already taken checks from an Orange County developer ($10,000), a California Coastal Commissioner from Menlo Park ($2,000), a contractor from Portland. Oregon ($2,000),  a Beverly Hills Realty firm ($2,500), an Orange County public relations firm ($1,000), a hydrologist from Ripon, CA ($1,000), an owner of a bowling alley (Lucky Strike Entertainment) in Los Angeles ($1,000), a personnel firm from Half Moon Bay ($1,000), and a New York talent agent ($2,000). 

Why are these people and corporations from out of the area donating to a Humboldt County election?  Your guess is as good as mine.

This election is about Humboldt County and will be decided by the voters of the Fourth District, not special interests from around the country.

The latest 460s are now in, and representative democracy fared no better in this cycle. Of the $10,645 in contributions Neely reported to the FPPC, 73 percent came from outside Humboldt County.

Neely’s efforts are starting to look less like a campaign and more like an extraordinarily well financed cry for help.

Graphics Dept. up and grosses our shit out

A man with many hats.

WTF?

Neely and Gallegos have now resorted to making campaign appearances with Fat Pat Cleary?

Think maybe they needed a designated driver?

Judge deflates Baykeeper Balloon Track lawsuit

If this lawsuit fails, I can always resort to selling t-shirts and giving boat tours around the bay!

With nary a peep from any of the normally vocal environmental groups since his ruling last week, U.S. District Court Judge Jeff White dismissed the Humboldt Baykeeper’s major claim in its lawsuit against Eureka’s Balloon Track owners.

Baykeeper and its parent organization, the equally litigiously crazed Ecological Rights Foundation, filed the suit in 2006 claiming, among other things, that past and present owners of the property failed to secure the required discharge permits and allowed toxic stormwater to run into nearby Humboldt Bay.

Their lawyers have spent untold thousands of dollars (millions?) trying to sway the court into buying into a stinking pile of unconstitutional feces that the Balloon Track’s owner should be fined $32,500 per day for more than 3,000 separate Clean Water Act violations going back to early 2001.

That’s roughly $97 million, or just enough for any owner to abandon any thoughts of development on the property, right? That’s surely what wetlands advocate and California Coastal Commission buddy Bill Pierson was counting on anyway.

Not so fast said White, who ruled the laws don’t actually allow fines for discharge violations when there isn’t any discharge. Seems simple enough to us, but what the fuck do we know? Baykeeper and the other environmental elite know what’s best for us all. The court was more likely to believe there were less than 60 days during that nearly decade period when significant Northcoast storms delivered enough water to flush any potential toxins into the bay. White ordered the parties back to mediation.

With September nearly here and what may well be another record wet year, how much longer will Baykeeper pursue its seemingly ironic plan to block the only real cleanup of the property that has been sitting idle for decades?

Brother can you spare an empty lot (for real this time…)

So when California’s Department of Housing and Community Development politely asks for an accurate inventory of available housing to build on in a particular jurisdiction and you happen to be Humboldt County’s Community Development Director Kirk Girard, you just make shit up. For a long, long time.

When that doesn’t work, you just lie, lie, lie.

And when that shit doesn’t work? Hmmmm.

Housing Elements are like quantum physics. Developable land can both exist and not exist at the same time.

Well, you probably have to proceed with Plan Z, which is to actually provide a real and accurate inventory of available housing to develop in Humboldt County. Go figure. It’s not like the state, several advocacy groups and a bunch of very concerned citizens have been asking for this sort of data for many years. Girard, who you may remember helped squander several million taxpayers dollars on a pile of shit plan for countywide redevelopment that pissed off everyone from Redway to Manila, is also known for his highly questionable “scientific” modeling that pinpoints ravines, swamps, gullies and already occupied homes for future development. Brilliant!

So, “once the [housing] element has been revised to address these requirements, it will comply with State housing element law.” It can’t be much, right? Girard and crew must have been busy doing some of this work over the past decade while they were racing to complete the General Plan Update. Let’s see… What is the state asking for exactly?

“Include an inventory of land suitable for residential development, including vacant sites and sites having the potential for redevelopment, and an analysis of the relationship of zoning and public facilities and services to these sites (Section 65583(a)(3)). Identify adequate sites which will be made available through appropriate zoning and development standards and with public services and facilities needed to facilitate and encourage the development of a variety of types of housing for all income levels, including rental housing, factory-built housing, mobilehomes, and emergency shelters and transitional housing. The housing element shall contain programs which “address, and where appropriate and legally possible, remove governmental constraints to the maintenance, improvement, and development of housing” (Section 65583(c)(3)).”

I’m sure county staff can whip that up over the weekend and get back to the state by Monday.

Just so you know, when you re-elect Bonnie Neely for the 437th term, this is the sort of shoddy shit you get from a department head who has been protected from getting his sorry ass canned for far too long.

Dismal Primary Election results force Neely braintrust into desperately negative runoff campaigning

Fuck you if you don't vote for me!

When the most recent (yet baseless) negative press release distributed to one blog from the quarter-century incumbent didn’t gain sufficient political traction with voters, Fourth District Supervisor Bonnie Neely’s campaign has decided to go even more negative against challenger Eureka Mayor Virginia Bass.

The message is simple: “Fuck you if you don’t vote for me!”