Tesla builds superchargers in rural northern California, and locals have mixed feelings.

I grew up in a small northern California town called Ukiah. A few years ago, I was driving through the streets of Ukiah's small downtown, when I encountered a bright red glow coming from a public parking lot at the center of town. I discovered that the light was emerging from several new Tesla supercharging stations brightening up the parking lot. At first, I laughed aloud: “Tesla” is not a word I have heard often on the streets of Ukiah, and I have never seen an actual Tesla in town.

After more thought, it dawned on me that the chargers aren’t for the locals. They were installed in my quiet northern California community for people traveling through from more urban centers, such as San Francisco and Palo Alto.

When the supercharger installation was proposed, Ukiah’s City Council had some concerns about allowing Tesla to install them downtown. There was concern about having a “billboard” of sorts, advertising only for Tesla, and some council members didn't want to maintain chargers that would not serve any other electric car. Further, these chargers would take up otherwise public parking spaces right downtown. Tesla was not interested in any other location, however, and it argued that the chargers would bring additional shoppers to the community. Petaluma, another northern California town, installed Tesla Chargers and saw about 1000 users per month, which translates into an added $12,000 to the local economy. Tesla paid for the installation and continues to pay for the electricity they use, so financially the installation and maintenance would not be an issue.

Eventually, after some debate, Tesla’s proposal passed in Ukiah, but only narrowly. The Mayor, Doug Crane, argued in favor of the chargers, saying that the city needed to make a “leap of faith” in order to support the growing business of electric cars. Indeed, Teslas are environmentally friendly, but they are also expensive. With available models priced between $68,000 and  $138,000, the choice to purchase a Tesla is not an option to just any passionate environmentalist.  Ukiah has a median household income of $42,237, and 39.26% of the population makes $30,000 or less per year. Hence, purchasing a Tesla is not a decision that most Ukiah residents are able to make, regardless of their commitment to the environment.

After the debate and approval in the City Council, Tesla forum users held an online discussion about Ukiah and about the concerns both the public and council members raised about the superchargers. One user called the resistant city council members “ignorant” and chastised the opposition to the superchargers, saying: “This will be the biggest draw in their city, they should be paying Tesla for the privilege of having it.” Another forum attracted similar comments. “Perhaps money spent elsewhere would be better rewarded.” Said another user, “Never been there and now we certainly won’t.”Yet another user speculated that the parking spots were used by employees from surrounding businesses, and wondered why those employees couldn’t just park elsewhere and walk a little farther to work. This user callously said: “I wonder what the obesity rate is in Ukiah.” Still another user wrote: “Unenlightened people resent the incentives granted to encourage adoption of [electric vehicles]. I thank the visionaries… for leading the way.”

These were not the only unkind comments about Ukiah locals on the Tesla forums. Perhaps these users are just trolling, and I shouldn't take them seriously.  I must point out, however, that just because locals were concerned about Tesla's superchargers in Ukiah does not mean that they are against electric vehicles, innovation, or environmentalism.  Similarly, those who opposed the superchargers are not automatically “unenlightened.” To some, Tesla as a company may even symbolize an affluent group of people who have more resources than those in Ukiah do, locals may fear that their community could be looked down on. All this is to say: this issue is about more than just a few parking spaces. There are a lot of possibilities that could lead someone to oppose Tesla's proposal, many of them specific to the values and the identity of the community.

My Rural Travelogue (Part XX): The courthouses of (far) northern California

I took a multi-day journey through far-northern California a few weeks ago with the purpose of visiting as many county courthouses as I feasibly could in the time that I had.  I wanted to check out their self-help centers and law libraries (mandatory by state statute), as well as to touch base with as many UC Davis law alums and other "rural" lawyers as I could find.  I took lots of photos both inside and outside the courthouses in these counties (in this order):  Butte, Trinity, Siskiyou, Modoc, Del Norte and Mendocino.  (I missed out on Lake County only because my navigator steered me toward a Foster's Freeze and away from county seat Lakeport, and I discovered this diversion only after it was too late to recover the lost time and still make our next commitment).

Those of you familiar with California geography will realize that I covered some territory now under siege by deadly fires--including the stretch of California 299 between Redding and Weaverville and the stretch of California 20 between Ukiah and Upper Lake.

What follows are photos of the exterior of these county courthouses:

Butte County Superior Court, Chico branch, built 2015

Trinity County Courthouse, Weaverville, built 1856

Annex to Trinity County Courthouse, including security screening entrance

Siskiyou County Courthouse, Yreka.  A new Courthouse is
currently under construction. 

Modoc County Courthouse, Alturas, built in 1914.

Landscaping at the Modoc County Courthouse
was the most attractive (and water conservationist)
I saw on this trip.  

Del Norte County Courthouse, Crescent City.  I cannot find the history of this
courthouse online and wondered if the prior one (built in 1958, as best I can tell)
was destroyed by the 1964 tsunami. 

Mendocino County Courthouse, Ukiah, built 1950

On rural lawyering--before and during the pandemic

Earlier this week, I was delighted to welcome 11 lawyers (10 of them UC Davis Law school alums) to my Law and Rural Livelihoods class to talk to the students about their careers and practices.   Four are in private practice, two work in county counsel offices, one is a tribal court judge, and the others do a range of public interest work.  They came to us (virtually, of course) from as far away as Del Norte County on the Oregon state line and as far south as San Luis Obispo County (SLO), specifically the communities of Atascadero and Avila.  

Here are just a few of the takeaways from the conversation. 

• Physical geography matters/can be a barrier:  The "grade" b/w "north county" and "south county" in San Luis Obispo County is significant for many who live there.  Folks in "south county," e.g., San Luis Obispo, Arroyo Grande, don't like to travel the grade, for example, to reach an attorney in "north county," and vice versa.  The attorney in Ukiah, the county seat of Mendocino County, said the same phenomenon (aversion to a "grade") applied there, as between Ukiah and Willets, where there was formerly a courthouse.  
• One attorney practicing in Avila, in SLO County, shares an office with her husband, a vineyard manager.  They have converted the office of an old plant nursery for this purpose.  
• The pandemic brought a 3- month closure to activity in the SLO County.  Then requirements to notice everything twice were imposed.  Now more people are "showing up" for hearings because they can hop on Zoom.  Previously, they would have had to take a half a day (at least) off work to come to the court house. 
• A big issue for estate planning attorneys in rural areas is how to divvy up farm and ranch land; what is a fair way to allocate that sort of wealth?
• The number of appearances by out-of-county attorneys in Lake County has risen since the beginning of the pandemic. 
• A public interest attorney working in the Sacramento Valley said she deals mostly with wage theft issues.  
• A tribal judge talked about the resources he has to allocate to support entire families, not just to "throw the book" of punitive criminal law at them. 
• There is no e-filing in Humboldt County, and it has only recently begun in Mendocino County.  
• In the "emerald triangle," nearly every matter that comes in is touched in one way or another by the marijuana trade/marijuana growing business.  
• Public interest attorneys who serve several rural and frontier counties from a relatively urban locale, e.g., Redding, Eureka, have seen some benefits from digital access to legal services for those living in more remote parts of their service area.  This is because those living hours from the legal aid office are not nudged out by those who live much closer and don't have to get up as early to get in a physical queue.  When all consultations are online, those living in remote and distant locales--assuming they have adequate internet/broadband connections--have equal opportunity for access with those living just down the street from the regional/relatively urban office.  

How feasible are electric vehicles in rural America?

Tesla Superchargers, Mount Shasta, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2021

The headline for Mike Seely's recent New York Times piece asserts that "Rural America's Roads Might Resemble Cuba's in 20 Years."  The crux of the story is, "As the nation shifts to electric vehicles, picture well-kept but long discontinued gas-powered pickups, especially in areas where charging stations may be sparse."  An excerpt follows:  

As the world’s cars become electric, it might be logical to presume that the mechanical wizardry required to repair a classic internal-combustion car within two hours will become a deeply discounted skill. After all, President Biden has announced that he would like to see electric vehicles account for 50 percent of all new U.S. car sales by 2030.  Fully electric vehicles currently account for about 2 percent of new car sales in the United States.

While the cause won’t be trade embargoes but rather this coming generational shift to electric cars, experts say it’s possible that American roads could resemble Cuba for a spell, with older cars running on gasoline engines kept in circulation long after they ordinarily would have been traded in for another fuel-burning model.

“We think there will be Cuba, especially in the rural areas of the U.S.,” said Michelle Krebs, an executive analyst for Cox Automotive. Battery advancements will be crucial to making progress on the number of electric cars on the road, she added. “Range is really important to people in faraway places; you have to drive long distances just to get to the grocery store,” Ms. Krebs said.

This recent Washington Monthly piece by Matthew Metz and Janelle London takes up another angle on adoption of electric vehicles:  how to structure the tax incentives to get more folks--especially folks who drive more--into electric vehicles.  The subhead sums things up, "Bigger rewards to gasoline 'superusers' will reduce carbon emissions more quickly.  Paradoxically, it may also diminish economic inequality."  Here is an excerpt:

Like so many things in the U.S., gasoline consumption in the U.S. by cars and light trucks is distributed unequally. According to our research, the drivers in the top 10 percent of gasoline consumption, whom we call “gasoline superusers,” each burn upward of 1,000 gallons of gasoline per year. Collectively they consume 32 percent of all gasoline. The top 20 percent of drivers burn about half of all gasoline.

Based on National Highway Travel Survey data, we know that about 64 percent of gasoline superusers drive pickup trucks and SUVs, compared to 41 percent of other drivers. Superusers drive about 30,000 miles a year, nearly three times the average for other drivers, and they’re more likely than other drivers to live in rural places. Among metro areas, Houston, Detroit, and St. Louis have the highest concentration of superusers. In the Washington, D.C. metro area, 6.6 percent of drivers are superusers, and collectively they burn 22 percent of the region’s gasoline.

Heavy gas mileage takes a toll on your checkbook. Superusers spend on average 8 percent of their household income on gasoline and up to 20 percent for moderate- and lower-income superusers. But purchase incentives for electric vehicles don’t take gasoline usage into account. Indeed, it’s the lowest-mileage, higher-income drivers who are most likely to avail themselves of such incentives. The median household income of a Prius owner was estimated a few years ago by J.D. Power to be $108,283.

The poorer you are, the less likely you are to own an electric vehicle. Did we mention that cars are expensive?

The obvious solution is a redistribution of electric vehicle incentives toward superusers. An EV incentive of $10 per gallon of past annual average gasoline use would bestow $15,000 on a pickup truck driver burning 1,500 gallons a year. That’s a meaningful incentive for pickup and SUV drivers to buy electric versions of those vehicles now coming on the market.

All of this important analysis reminds me of the related struggle to find charging stations in rural areas.  A student wrote a blog post about this in her hometown, Ukiah, California, a few years ago.  I noticed when I was planning a trip home from Mount Shasta this past weekend that I could not reliably get to all of the places I wanted to go off I-5 (where charging stations are reasonably plentiful).  In particular, I was frustrated that I could not reliably drive home via Plumas and Lassen counties because the only charging stations in the Lassen County seat, Susanville, are not superchargers.  Indeed, it looked as if only patrons of two specific Susanville motels/hotels are permitted to use their so-called destination chargers, and I had no plan to stay at either.  (Destination chargers are like the ones Tesla owners have at their homes; they take hours to full charge a vehicle, whereas superchargers can do so in half an hour).  Adding to my aggravation and uncertainty was the fact that some maps showed a tranche of superchargers at a Susanville casino, but I ultimately concluded it had not yet been built, but was merely at the planning stage.  So, rather than travel home via these northern Sierra and high desert counties, where I wanted to survey the Dixie Fire damage, I just came home via I-5.  

Certainly, I can imagine living and working in Plumas or Lassen County and not being willing to go electric because of the high cost of electric vehicles and the relative lack of charging infrastructure.  These are problems that must be solved if widespread adoption of electric vehicles in rural places is to occur.  

All of this reminds me that one of the upcoming talks in the Rural Reconciliation series will be about transportation. Greg Shill of the University of Iowa will speak on that topic on January 27, 2022.

On lack of services in the midst of (and following) a natural disaster

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning on the Redwood Valley fire, in Mendocino County,, California (population 87,841) which claimed eight lives earlier this month.  One focus of the story is on the lack of services--the lack of warning in this case--as the fire bore down on the valley.  Joe Mozingo writes:

The escape from Redwood Valley began with no evacuation orders, no reverse-911 alerts, no warning whatsoever from authorities. Residents were left on their own to flee for their lives. 

A mechanic trapped by fire on the ground climbed a tree until it passed. An elderly woman raced out in her underwear. A mother and her four children hiked through the brush of a steep mountain ravine to safety. 

Most who survived had to thread a narrow road with trees ablaze on both sides. Burning debris rained down on them as they drove over fallen limbs in the smoke.

And I can't resist including Mozingo's description of Redwood Valley, population 1,729, which is just north of the county seat of Ukiah. He calls it "bucolic" and then continues:

The braided West Fork of the Russian River wends through it from the north as the valley opens from a narrow canyon to a flat bottom-land of vineyards, pastures, modest new homes and old farmhouses.

As for who live(d) in the valley, Mozingo writes of "teachers, firefighters, mechanics, shop owners, contractors, at least one pot grower and several retirees. They had swimming pools, ATVs and backyard work shops."  The story is also chock-full of tales of local, neighborly heroism, just like you would expect in a rural community like this one.

One family hit by the Redwood Valley fire has been the subject of quite a bit of media coverage because they lost their 14-year-old son Kai, the youngest victim of the California fires.  His 17-year-old sister lost both of her legs to amputation below the knees because she was so badly burned in the fire, and the parents are in hospitals in Sacramento and San Francisco with burns over about half of their bodies.  As the family headed down their narrow driveway, their cars caught fire and they scattered on foot.  Read more here.  This story reports that Napa and Sonoma Counties also did not issue Amber alert-style warnings.

And here's a story from last week about a struggle to get relief aid to the more remote parts of Puerto Rico following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria.

The water (infrastructure) crisis in rural-ish coastal California

The Los Angeles Times and New York Times ran back-to-back stories out of Mendocino, California, population 894, with the topic being the town's water shortage.

 Here's the lede for the LA Times story by Hailey Branson-Potts:

The Santa Claus of water rolls through this foggy coastal hamlet in a silver and white truck, bringing joy and relief.

Wayne Jones refills water tanks for residents and businesses whose wells have gone dry. A bespectacled bald man with a majestic white goatee, he moves quickly and speaks sparingly.

Amid Mendocino’s worst drought on record, people are increasingly desperate for the private water hauler’s help.

Mendocino has no municipal water system. All businesses and homes rely upon wells — some hand-dug in the 1800s. But rain has been scant. Underwater aquifers are depleting. Wells are running dry.

The New York Times story by Thomas Fuller includes still more information about the role of infrastructure--or lack thereof--in this rural water crisis. 

 Mendocino’s water shortage is an extreme example of what some far-flung towns in California are experiencing as the state slips deeper into its second year of drought. Scores of century-old, hand-dug wells in the town have run dry, forcing residents, inns and restaurants to fill storage tanks with water trucked from faraway towns at the cost of anywhere from 20 to 45 cents a gallon. Utilities in California, by contrast, typically charge their customers less than a penny per gallon of tap water.  

This past week, residents of Mendocino watched as the Senate passed its $1 trillion infrastructure package, wondering whether some of those funds might reach them. Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from California, has pointed out that the package specifically targets drought mitigation projects such as water storage, water recycling and desalination.

But it can’t come soon enough for many living in the small towns in northern parts of the state.

The drought is revealing for California that perhaps even more than rainfall it is money and infrastructure that dictate who has sufficient water during the state’s increasingly frequent dry spells. The drought, and the effects of climate change more generally, have drawn a bold line under the weaknesses of smaller communities with fewer resources.

Six hundred miles to the south of Mendocino, in a much more arid part of the state, the Lake Perris reservoir, a large artificial lake that provides drinking water to San Bernardino and Riverside, is nearly full.

Lake Skinner, Lake Matthews and Diamond Valley Lake, in the dry hills southeast of Los Angeles, are all around 80 percent full.

I'm reminded that Governor Gavin Newsom declared the first stage of the current California drought several months ago at Lake Mendocino, near Ukiah, the county seat.  That first phase of the drought included Mendocino County, of course.  

I'm also reminded of another coastal town--this one on the central coast--that has been struggling with water woes for a few years:  Cambria. 

In the competition between rural and urban for resources, this pretty much sums it up

The media (Sac Bee and New York Times) have given lots of attention in recent days to the just-revealed cause of the Ranch Fire, one of the fires in the Mendocino Complex that led to the largest wildfire in California's history last summer.  The fire burned through chunks of Lake, Mendocino, and Colusa counties in late summer 2018, destroying more than 150 homes.  Fighting it cost "tens of millions of dollars."  Here's an excerpt (from the NYT story) about the fire generally:

The fire burned 410,203 acres of California wild lands, an area half the size of Rhode Island, and killed a firefighter who was struck by a falling tree. Although it was one of the largest fires, it was far from the deadliest. The fire in Paradise, Calif., in fall 2018 killed more than 80 people.

There's a lot of "rural" in the story, especially if you associate buried wasps nests with rurality, but it was this quote from Jill Cowan, writing in today's New York Times California newsletter, that really caught my eye re rural-urban difference and--more precisely--urban primacy.  Cowan quotes a neighbor (Ms. Parker) of the man who inadvertently started the Ranch fire.  She lives along Highway 20 between Ukiah and Upper Lake: 

Ms. Parker shrugged as she described how Caltrans allows vegetation to proliferate along the side of the highway in front of her house.  

“We are in a rural area,” she said. “Cities are always going to come first.”

By the way, the dateline for the NYTimes story is Potter Valley, population 646.  (I passed near there and took some photos along this stretch of Highway 20 in early July, 2018, a few weeks before that fire).  And the photo caption for the NYT story mentions Ladoga, population 197 (in Colusa County).

As for urban primacy in pretty much all things, see a related post here.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CXV): More vaccine news

Efforts to get the coronavirus vaccine "into arms" has been a big story this week.  I'm going to briefly cover just a few of the news items I consumed on this topic.  

The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday out of Mendocino County, California, population 87,841, where a freezer storing vaccines failed on January 4, 2021.  Anita Chabria reports under the headline, "Its freezer kaput, this NorCal hospital had two hours to give out 600 vaccine shots."  The hospital is in the county seat, Ukiah, population 16,075.

Here's an excerpt about the third of those doses that went to the county because they "belong to the county" and were merely being stored by the hospital.  Specifically they went to the county jail.   

Lt. John Bednar, who helps run the county jail, said his facility received 97 of those doses at about 1 p.m. The jail has been experiencing an outbreak, with about three dozen inmates out of 250 currently positive, he said. About a dozen staff have also fallen ill with the virus.

Faced with only an hour to use the shots, sheriff’s officials decided to administer them to staff and front-line personnel because they didn’t think there was enough time to gain consent and organize a safe protocol for inmates. Four county medical staff began giving the shots, said Bednar.

The story quotes Bednar regarding when the vaccines arrived: 

I was like, ‘Oh, boy, let’s get going.'  I think it went as well as it could.

NPR reported today on how well the immunization scheme is going in one rural Colorado town.  Kirk Seigler reports from Oak Creek, population 844.  He quotes Gene Bracegirdle, a firefighter and EMT in training, who is pleased to have just gotten the shot:  

The fact that it is here is kind of mind-blowing, like, they care enough to reach out to the rural communities. ... It's exciting to see the initiative being taken.  

The story acknowledges the spatial challenges in such places: 

The vaccine arrived in Oak Creek via a blue igloo cooler in a new mobile clinic set up by the local Routt County health department. Officials used CARES Act money to get things going. The task at hand is huge. Health officials must distribute the shots to a population of about 25,000 people spread across 2,300 square miles of northwest Colorado.

Another story yesterday commented on what West Virginia, popularly thought of as a rural state, is doing well in terms of vaccine distribution and immunization.  Yuki Noguchi reports from Morgantown, West Virginia.  She explains that CVS and Walgreens pharmacies, which the federal government has engaged to help with vaccine distribution to long-term care facilities, are not common in West Virginia.  Thus the state has had to look elsewhere for partners in its vaccine roll-out.  Noguchi quotes a pharmacist and clinical professor at West Virginia University, Gretchen Garofoli:  

We have a lot of independent pharmacies or smaller pharmacies that are in the more rural communities, so in order to get the vaccine out to some of those areas, we needed to follow something a little bit different.

The story continues: 

Many long-term care sites in the state already use local pharmacies for other vaccines and medicines as well as twice-weekly coronavirus testing of residents and staff. The state decided to piggyback off those existing relationships. Because those pharmacies already had data on many patients, it was easier to begin scheduling appointments in early December, securing consent forms and matching doses to eligible patients — logistics that are confounding efforts in many other states.

This story in particular features a rural lack-of-anonymity, reliance-on-community angle. 

On the more rural areas of Northern California hit by the deadly fires in October

A few stories this past weekend in major California newspapers have focused on the consequences of the early October wildfires in Mendocino County, as opposed to more populous Napa and Sonoma counties.  The Los Angeles Times reported under the headline, "Wildfires devastate California pot farmers, who must rebuild without banks or insurance," and the San Francisco Chronicle story was headlined "Deadly Mendocino County Fire under the radar of Wine Country devastation."   This lede from the Chronicle story sums up the rural v. urban angle (or at least degrees of rural ....) between these regions/counties:

Like thousands of other North Bay fire victims, the traumatized residents of the bucolic Redwood Valley are sifting through rubble, negotiating with insurance agents and struggling to figure out how they are going to rebuild their fire-scarred lives. 

The only difference is that the hellish inferno that rolled through their community two weeks ago went virtually unnoticed by a world mesmerized by the flaming disasters closer to San Francisco. 

The Redwood Valley Fire was not exactly ignored, but it was a side note during a historic week of calamity in Northern California — subordinate to the conflagrations that destroyed much of Santa Rosa and ripped through Wine Country towns in Napa and Sonoma counties. 

But the aftermath is no less horrible for the 1,759 farmers, vineyard keepers and pot entrepreneurs who live in this rural community between Ukiah and Willits — a place isolated enough for stagecoach robber Black Bart to use as a hideout and, about a century later, for Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple cult to set up shop before moving on to bigger things.

It's interesting that journalist Peter Fimrite refers to Mendocino County as the "North Bay." I'd agree with that characterization for Napa and Sonoma, but not once you get as far north as Mendocino.  Nevertheless, his "per capita" point is well taken (by me, at least):

The fire that swept through the community early in the morning on Oct. 9 killed eight people, blackened 36,523 acres and destroyed 545 buildings, about a quarter of the homes there, fire officials said. It was at least as damaging, per capita, as the cataclysmic blazes to the south.

Fimrite quotes George Gonzaelz, the battalion chief for the Mendocino unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection:

It’s probably the largest modern disaster here in Mendocino County.  But nobody is paying attention.

And that, it seems, is par for the course when it comes to rural America.  I wrote a post making a similar point after the Butte and Valley fires (in Napa and Lake counties) two years ago.

Here's an excerpt from the LA Times story focused on the pot industry's losses.

Because the marijuana culture of Northern California has survived in secrecy for the last 50 years, and mostly still does, no one can know the exact loss to the industry. 

The threat of losing a year’s crop and cash reserves pushes many growers to take risks a grape farmer neighbor might not. 

When the fires broke, farmers thrashed over four-wheel-drive roads with horse trailers full of hastily cut marijuana. Some defied evacuation orders to save the crops. 

Others left, and lost everything.

Lots of posts about California's pot industry--with a focus on Mendocino, Humboldt, and Lake counties (the so-called Emerald Triangle) can be found in this blog. 

Postscript:  "As deadly fires burned Redwood Valley, delays, confusion about evacuation orders" in the Los Angeles Times on November 5.  An excerpt follows: 

But a Times review of police and fire dispatch calls that morning describe a chaotic scene in which officials debated when to send evacuation orders. The recordings provide an overview of communications that night as the fire swept through the valley but do not provide a full sense of what firefighters and law enforcement were doing on the ground. The county so far has declined to provide additional records. 

The dispatches and interviews show the county issued an evacuation order in Redwood Valley more than an hour after the fire was first reported there. During that time, several Redwood Valley residents phoned 911 dispatchers to say they were trapped by fire.

Firefighters struggled with a lack of manpower and equipment in the rural county, which relies heavily on small fire departments and volunteers. State and local engines, including the Redwood Valley volunteer fire department, were sent to battle fires that had started earlier in the night in the adjacent Potter Valley.  

My Rural Travelogue (XXIII): A California summer on the road

Redwood Coast Transit Schedule, Smith River (Del Norte County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Most of my travel this summer has been road-tripping through parts of the Golden State.  I'm on my third trip of the summer now, to Sonoma County.  The other two have taken me farther afield (meaning farther from my Sacramento County home), first to Del Norte County, the state's farthest northwest reaches and then to Los Angeles via the coast, back through the Central Valley.   All told, these journeys have added up to well over 2,000 miles, many of them on Highway 101.  For this post, I'm using photos of post offices and (meager) public transit systems to illustrate my journeys, though I have included in some earlier posts this summer (here) a wider array of photos from Del Norte County.

On these three trips, I have passed through 25 different counties--nearly half of the state's total.  Specifically, I have traversed some part of the following California counties (in order of my passage, and showing county seats and populations in parentheses): 

U.S. Post Office Smith River (Del Norte) County, California, July 2019
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Trip 1:
Yolo County (population 200,849, Woodland)
Colusa County (21,419, Colusa)
Glenn County (28,122, Willows)

Redwood Coast Transit Bus, Del Norte County, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 

Tehama County (63,463, Red Bluff)
Shasta County (177,223, Redding)
Trinity County (13,786, Weaverville)
Humboldt County (132,646, Eureka)
Del Norte County (28,610, Crescent City)
(then heading south again through Humboldt)
Mendocino County (87,841, Ukiah)
Lake County (64,655, Lakeport)

U.S. Post Office Cambria (San Luis Obispo County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

U.S. Post Office Big Sur (Monterey County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Trip 2:
San Joaquin County (685,306, Stockton)
Stanislaus County (514,453, Modesto)
Merced County (255,793, Merced)
San Benito County (55,269, Hollister)
Monterey County (415,057, Salinas)
San Luis Obispo County (269,637,  San Luis Obispo)
Santa Barbara County (423,895, Santa Barbara)
Ventura County (823,318, Oxnard) 
Los Angeles County (10 million give or take a few, Los Angeles)
(the heading north again through Ventura, SB, SLO...)
Kern County (839,631, Bakersfield), though I just nicked the corner on that one
Kings County (151,366 Hanford)
Fresno County (994,400 Fresno)
then back through Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties to Sacramento.

Trip 3:
Yolo County (see above)
Solano County (413.344, Fairfield) 
Napa County (136,484, Napa)
Sonoma County (483,878, Santa Rosa)

So, of the 25 counties through which I traveled, only 8 are classified as nonmetropolitan (population less than 100,000), and 7 of those 8 are in far northern California.  The 8th is San Benito, between Central and Salinas Valleys.

U.S. Post Office, Los Alamos (Santa Barbara County), California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

One striking thing about these journeys:  the incredible variety of terrain and climate across the Golden State, from mist-shrouded redwoods to parched rolling hills dotted by chaparral. 

U.S. Post Office Bodega (Sonoma Co)
California (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Then of course, there's farmland from end to end:  orchards, cattle, and row crops including broccoli, strawberries and wine grapes.  (No doubt I've also driven past some cannabis, though I wasn't aware when I did.)

Sonoma Coast Transit Bus, near Bodega Bay, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

Decades ago, the Republic of South Africa used the tourism slogan, "A World in One Country."  California could readily go with a similar slogan, "A World in one State."

Geography and class mobility, an opinion piece in the Sacramento Bee

Foon Rhee of the Bee's editorial board wrote yesterday in a piece headlined, "To Make it to Middle Class, Location Matters."  Here's an excerpt from his California-oriented analysis:

Moving up happens less often for poorer children in the Southeast and Midwest, while it is more common in the Northeast and West, according to the study by top economists at UC Berkeley and Harvard. (Geographic differences don’t mean that much for well-off children; the rich tend to stay rich no matter where they grow up.) 

Mobility is generally better in California, but just as poverty is worse in the Central Valley than along the coast, there’s wide variation in metro areas across the state. 

The odds of making it to at least the middle class are 8 percent for poor children in the Eureka area and 8.3 percent in Fresno, but 11.2 percent in San Francisco and San Jose and 11.8 percent in Santa Barbara. The number is 10 percent in Sacramento, 10.2 percent in Modesto, 10.4 percent in San Diego and 9.6 percent in Los Angeles. 

The researchers found that mobility tends to be higher in areas where the poor are less concentrated and there’s a bigger middle class, and in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary and high schools and more civic engagement.

Sadly, Rhee's piece is quite metro-centric.  The only place he lists that is rural by any measure is Eureka, population 27,191, and the county seat of (barely) metropolitan Humboldt County, population 134,623.  Many folks think of Fresno as rural because it is in the Great Central Valley amidst California's agricultural economy. However, with a population of half a million, Fresno is the fifth largest city in the state.  So, what if you're from Ukiah or Bishop?  What are your chances of ascending from poverty to the middle class? 

Rhee closes with some policy implications for this data:  

[P]oor children in some places need more of a helping hand up the income ladder – from the religious community, from nonprofits and volunteers and, yes, even from government.

More on the California water crisis

I've written recently about the coastal northern California water crisis, specifically in Mendocino County, a few times, here and here.  Now the Washington Post is also reporting from this scenic corner of the Golden State.  Scott Wilson reports under the headline, "In this California county, one town has no water. Another has enough to share."  Wilson contrasts what is happening in coastal, working class Fort Bragg, which has purchased a $335,000 water desalination plant, with what is happening down the road in Mendocino village the more picturesque tourist draw where residents are being encouraged to install 1000 gallon tanks.  But the bigger distinction is between these two coastal locales and the county seat, Ukiah, population 16,000, which is inland, across the coastal range.  There, water is plentiful, and trucks full of it are being dispatched to help their coastal counterparts. 

Here's an excerpt: 

The vastly different ways these small towns between San Francisco and the Oregon border are managing their water supplies highlight how uneven California’s brutal drought has been across the state — and even within a single county. Traditionally one of California’s wettest, Mendocino County is now a confused mountain-and-valley geography of damp and dry as the climate changes.

This was the first year in memory that Fort Bragg could not sell its surplus water to Mendocino Village, an old lumber town of historic Victorians and homegrown boutiques.

Postscript:  This story, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on October 25, suggests that Marin County, two counties to the south from Mendocino and just north of San Francisco, and sharing a Pacific Ocean fronting, will run out of water by next year.  The story, reported by Bloomberg's Todd Woody, highlights Marin County's wealth--it's the state's richest county.  Here's the lede: 

In Marin County, a $2-million house with an ocean view doesn’t necessarily come with a reliable water supply.

Water managers are taking extraordinary measures to keep faucets flowing should the state enter a third year of a punishing drought this winter. That this affluent redwood-studded ecotopia faces such a possibility, though, is a harbinger of a climate-constrained destiny that is fast arriving.

Woody quotes Newsha Ajami, a hydrologist at Stanford University's Water in the West program:   

These droughts are now on a new timeline. There used to be at least 10 years in between droughts in California, which was time enough for water ecosystems to recover.

Sadly, that's no longer the case.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXV): COVID aid spending trends from urban to rural

Bella DiMarco and Phyllis W. Jordan share this report on K-12 COVID federal aid spending trends with FutureEd:  

The Covid pandemic can look different in a small rural school district than in a big city or suburb. Transportation challenges are often magnified with fewer students spread across wide areas. Internet access is frequently harder to find, and so are mental-health professionals to support students and staff. Such challenges —and shared priorities—are reflected in a new FutureEd analysis of how local education agencies are planning to spend the latest round of federal Covid-relief spending aid.

We used the National Center for Education Statistics’ four classifications of school district settings—city, suburban, towns, and rural—to analyze the spending plans of nearly 2,500 school districts and charter organizations educating some 53 percent of the nation’s public-school students. The information company Burbio collected the local agencies’ plans, which represent about $60 billion of the $122 billion in the third round of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding (ESSER III).

We found that staffing has emerged as a pandemic priority for local leaders nationally. Regardless of classification, more than half of all school districts and charter entities in the sample intend to spend relief funds on hiring and paying teachers and academic staff, and about 40 percent in each category expect to invest in teacher training. Similarly, at least half the local education agencies in every category plan to invest ESSER III funds in summer learning and upgrading ventilation systems.

Mental Health:

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By contrast, Powhatan County Public Schools, a rural district in Virginia with 4,300 students, plans to set aside less than 1 percent of Covid-relief funds for mental-health first-aid training. Most rural districts have designated less than 10 percent of their funds for social-emotional learning and mental-health-related items. A notable exception is Bartow County, Georgia, which plans to spend $13.3 million, nearly 60 percent of its allotment, on mental-health services and supports, in some cases through full-service community schools.

Similarly, rural districts are the least likely to prioritize hiring or paying mental-health staff. About 42 percent of city districts and charter organizations plan to spend on mental-health professionals or psychologists, compared to 29 percent in towns and 25 percent in rural areas.

The pandemic has certainly affected students’ mental health in small, rural communities and intensified opioid addiction and other rural problems. But as Allen Pratt, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, points out, there’s a dearth of mental health counselors in many rural areas, leaving districts unable to hire as many of the specialists as they might like.

Transportation:

A greater share of rural districts remained open during the 2020-21 school year than in other settings, and there's less support for going back to remote schooling in these communities, RAND Corporation researchers found. But getting students to school every day can be complicated by the long distances to school in some sparsely populated areas. Our analysis showed that rural districts are more likely to propose spending on transportation than education agencies elsewhere. About 38 percent of rural districts in the sample are earmarking ESSER III funds for transportation, compared to 21 percent in the suburbs, 28 percent in cities, and 32 percent in towns. The shortage of school bus drivers affecting schools across the country may lead to more spending in this category in the months ahead than is reflected in agencies’ current plans.

In one instance, Marietta Public Schools in Oklahoma, a remote rural district serving about 1,100 students, is planning to spend roughly 21 percent of its allotment on transportation-related items. This includes $540,000 to purchase additional buses and $25,000 to purchase a van to transport food to a new building for middle and high school students. The district also plans to spend an additional $140,000 on new camera systems for its buses.

Academic Spending:

Rural educators appear less inclined than educators in other settings to spend ESSER III dollars on extended-day programs and more likely to spend the money on instructional materials and student assessments, the FutureEd analysis found.

Pratt from the National Rural Education Association says that transportation challenges can sometimes limit the ability of rural school districts to offer afterschool programs, because it’s harder to arrange bus transportation after hours. He wasn’t surprised to see the proposed investments in instructional materials and software, and observes that with earlier rounds of federal funding putting mobile devices in the hands of more students and broadening internet access, rural educators now have more ways to reach their students.

For example, Hennessey Public Schools in Oklahoma, a remote rural district serving 833 students, is planning to spend almost $400,000 on classroom curriculum materials and textbooks, or about 13 percent of its ESSER III funds. In the town of Russellville, Arkansas, the 5,400-student school district intends to invest $1.4 million, also about 13 percent of its allocation in instructional materials.

Having grown up about 60 miles from Russellville, I will go on the record as saying i certainly do not consider it rural. By contrast, the 450-student district where I was educated is dwarfed by comparison.

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HVAC:

At least half of the local education agencies in each category are planning to spend ESSER funds on updating and upgrading heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. RSU 25, a small rural school district in Maine, plans to spend half its ESSER III allotment, about $1.3 million, to install a mechanical HVAC system in one of its four schools that previously did not have a system throughout the building.

In the town of Ukiah, California, the school district intends to devote about half its ESSER funding, $6 million, to upgrade and replace aging systems. Similarly, the Newport News Public Schools in Virginia plans to spend $40 million, or nearly half its allotment, to replace HVAC systems in several the city’s schools and add air purifiers and filters. Suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, by contrast, has earmarked $6.6 million of its $262 million in ESSER funds for improving and upgrading ventilation systems.

Rural school districts and charter organizations plan to spend $559 per pupil on HVAC systems, compared to $495 for towns, $378 for cities, and $340 for suburbs. The cost differences could reflect the economies of scale for education agencies in less-populous communities