Social Engineering On The Boardwalk

Eureka's move to ban smoking is a ridiculous waste

Editorials
Humboldt Sentinel Editorial Board

The Eureka City Council will be looking to revise an ordinance on June 17 which would ban smoking on the Boardwalk in Old Town. This is the only place in the area to provide a refuge for prospective smokers who don’t wish to pollute the air for those enjoying the Old Town retail and café scene.

The council really needs to call this what it is, an attack on the homeless whom often congregate on the benches which line the boardwalk. But what good will this do? The city has done precious little to address the problems surrounding homelessness in the area and this will only force them to go elsewhere. Which elsewhere in particular? More likely than not, right where the last place the homeless haters want to see them, on the doorsteps of their desired shopping location or eatery, or at the Gazebo.

Needless to say, this law wouldn’t only affect the homeless, but would be a putative measure against people of all social classes who enjoy smoking cigarettes. The socially engineered herding of smokers away the boardwalk towards the middle of Old Town makes no sense whatsoever as the vitality of the area is dependent upon economic success of the businesses which operate in it. Ensuring that the middle of the bustle is the only place for one to smoke will only drive away people who would like to spend some money, yet are offended or sickened by the smell or the pollution from the smoke.

Does the city truly have the resources to enforce this ordinance? Last time we checked, City Manager Dave Tyson is freezing the re-hiring of seven positions in the Eureka Police Department. It’s difficult to imagine that the average citizen in Eureka would rather see someone popped for having a smoke on the boardwalk over the police not being able to respond to a vehicle break in, or busting up a meth deal somewhere across town.

Not only would this draft revision punish smokers in Old Town, but would enforce a ban in other public places such as Sequoia Park. This is a ridiculous waste of time and money, and a dishonest and misguided attempt to justify the tough economic circumstances of those businesses in the city's most tourist-dependent area.

Supervising Our Supervisors

The avarice of our local elected leaders continues unabated, regardless of the unwinding national economic disaster or yet another budget crisis engulfing all levels of government. Naturally, the local establishment media has been silent on the causes and consequences of unfettered greed.

Even though the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors is already the highest-paid county governing body per capita in California, these career politicians have voted themselves a 6% pay increase, along with similar increases for other county employees. They will now make nearly $80,000 a year, four times the median wage of the average county resident.

We would have thought these multi-term incumbents (or the spouse of such, as is the case for Second District Supervisor Johanna Rodoni) would have learned their lesson on this subject after the Humboldt Sentinel was the only local news outlet to expose in 2005 how the Supervisors had voted themselves a series of massive salary hikes, from $60,688.14 to $74,661.67 in just two years. Yet the voters have, thus far, failed to hold them accountable, re-electing Bonnie Neely in 2006 as well as John Woolley's hand-picked successor, Mark Lovelace this year.

To his credit and his credibility as a voice for budgetary restraint, recently re-elected First District Supervisor Jimmy Smith has already said he will refuse his pay hike. Given their unanimous declaration of a budget emergency on the same day they approved the new pay scale, it is downright unseemly for these politicians to ratify any more taxpayer largess to line their own pockets with. This fall's run-off candidates for the Second District will face this issue, as will Neely and Geist in 2010. Will the real fiscal conservatives please stand up?

Living Wage Long Overdue

Usually, newspapers wait for ballot initiatives to come to the voters, or at least go into circulation amongst them, before taking an editorial stance one way or another. Such is not the case for the establishment media in Eureka this spring, where both the Times-Standard and The Eureka Reporter came out strongly against the idea of a $10 minimum wage for Eureka workers. These less-than-thoughtful corporate press polemicists didn't even wait for Sheryl Schaffner, the city attorney of Eureka, to come back with her impartial analysis of the points, purposes and possible costs of the legislation.

With the esteem of the media at record-low levels, should readers be surprised? After all, both of these pro-Bush publications are owned by out-of-state billionaires with a clear and consistent track record of crushing unions and laying off their own workers. They don't need the facts to come up with a position; if it's on behalf of the working class, it's an automatic "no" vote from these fat cats.

Facts, of course, point to the real value of the minimum wage, which in 1968 dollars would be well above the $10 level proposed by Bill Holmes, Maria Hershey and the Alliance For A Fair Chance. For single mothers trying to raise children in an increasingly hostile employment market, the real living wage would be over $14 an hour. The idea that anyone can be expected to support themselves in a dignified manner on only $8 an hour is an ignorant insult to the intelligence of voters -- another mindset all-too-common to people who've never had to truck themselves down to the food bank to make ends meet.

These well-fed psuedo-journalists should avail themselves of the opportunity to visit Food For People on 14th Street any given Friday: They'll see how women with children and the elderly make up the vast majority of clients just trying to make it through the month on surplus canned food and old potatoes. These people aren't reading the real estate section or buying classified ads to sell houses and sports cars, and are thus rendered irrelevant to media institutions which long ago subsumed any sense of fairness to the dictates of the almighty dollar.

A living wage for workers in Eureka, and greater Humboldt County, is long overdue, and would result in a paltry two percent raise in prices for the rest of us, according to studies of a comparable wage increases' outcomes in San Francisco. Only greed and callousness prevents the right-wing reporters and editors from demonstrating the least bit of compassion for the baristas, waitresses and dishwashers who serve them every day. Unlike them, we still know what it is to work for a living, and we're not fooled by yuppie scare tactics foretelling economic doom for their eminently profitable enterprises. Thus, the Sentinel proudly stands with the workers of Eureka in support of the $10 living wage, and we call upon the other cities and the county to do the same. It's just the fair thing to do.