Pippa is a very sweet Chihuahua who was found as a stray. She had had puppies recently, but they and her owners were never found.

After two weeks in the shelter, her personality is coming out and she is no longer super shy. She loves to be held and to go for walks, and she wiggles those huge ears at every little noise. She is tiny, and may do best in a household with other small dogs and older children.

Pippa is spayed, microchipped, and vaccinated. She is at the El Dorado County Animal Services shelter in Meyers, along with many other dogs and cats who are waiting for their new homes.

Go online to see photos and description of all pets at the shelter.

Call (530) 573.7925 for directions, hours, and other information on adopting a pet.

For spay-neuter assistance for South Tahoe residents, go online.

— Karen Kuentz

In conjunction with the Make-A-Wish Foundations of Hawaii and Northeastern California/Northern Nevada, the Incline Village General Improvement District and the communities of Incline Village and Crystal Bay came together in March to help make 11-year-old Kenny Mercado of Maui’s wish come true.

Kenny has terminal Sarcoma cancer and his wish was to learn to ski in Lake Tahoe, to see snow, to have a snowball fight and to just be a regular kid on a winter vacation with his family.

Kenny and his family stayed at the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe, hit golf balls at the driving range and drove golf carts at the Incline Village Championship Course, took ski lessons and had snowball fights at Diamond Peak and enjoyed a day at the Incline Village Recreation Center, among many other activities throughout the community.

“Kenny is an amazing boy who is being raised by an equally amazing family. It was deeply humbling to have participated in his wish. Our community showed strangers, now friends, what kind of community we have the good fortune of living in – a caring, compassionate, and kind community. It was an honor to share in this experience and, on behalf of IVGID and myself, thank you to everyone who helped“, stated Bill Horn, General Manager of the Incline Village General Improvement District.

The Incline Village General Improvement District would like to recognize and thank the following businesses and individuals who helped make Kenny’s wish come true; IV Coffee Lab, Yoshimi Sushi, the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe, Sierra Nevada College, UC Davis, Incline Village/Crystal Bay Visitors Bureau, Hacienda de la Sierra Restaurant, Diamond Peak Ski Resort, Jean Eick, Rookies, Michelle Lewis of Bowl Incline, Incline Star Follies, Village Ski Loft, Incline Village Recreation Center, Parasol Tahoe Community Foundation, Jen Schmidt Photography, Murrieta Images, Trent Dilfer, T’s Rotisserie and Brimm’s Catering.

Country sensation Tim McGraw kicked off the 2010 Harvey’s Outdoor Concert Series. This year he is kicking off the American Century Championship golf tournament as the main entertainment.

McGraw will be at Harveys on July 16 at 7pm.

The opening act has not been determined. Three years ago it was Lady Antebellum; who helped sell out the concert.

Tickets go on sale April 19 at 10am via Ticketmaster. Prices range from $69.50 to $135.50.

For a limited time, the El Dorado County Animal Services shelter in Placerville is offering $20 adoptions for adult cats now at the shelter to make room for the anticipated increase in felines.

Spring is traditionally the busiest time of the year, with lots of kittens coming into the shelter.

The limited-time $20 adoption fee for adult cats at the Placerville shelter includes a veterinary check, needed vaccinations, microchip, and spay or neuter.

Animal Services is able to offer the significant reduction in the adoption fee (normally $80) through the assistance of the local nonprofit organization People for Animal Welfare in El Dorado County (PAWED).

The shelter is located at 511 Placerville Drive in Placerville and is open Monday through Saturday from 9:30am-noon and 1-4:30pm.

Pictures and information about the cats available for adoption may be found online.

April is nationally and locally proclaimed as Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Child Abuse Prevention Month. Live Violence Free will be hosting events throughout the month to increase awareness of the impact of violence.

Goals are to celebrate survivors and encourage the community to break the silence and become allies in the movement.

Live Violence Free will be hosting a Clothesline Project. The Clothesline Project is a visual display of T-shirts with messages or illustrations designed by survivors of violence or supporters of non-violence.

Shirt-making workshops throughout the month will provide a space for victims and allies to come together and create a shirt. They will be April 11 from 9-noon, April 19 from 9am-2pm, and April 24 (Denim Day) from 9am-3:30pm.

The Clothesline Project display will go up on April 29 from 9am-4pm. All workshops and display will be at the Live Violence Free office at 2941 Lake Tahoe Blvd., South Lake Tahoe.

The nonprofit will also be hosting self-defense training classes in collaboration with the Escobar Training Grounds and the South Lake Tahoe Police Department. They are April 12 and April 19 at the Escobar Training Grounds, 972 Tallac Ave.

To wrap up the month, the 5th annual Bowl-a-Thon fundraiser will be April 26 from 6-8pm at Tahoe Bowl.

For more information, contact Diana Meza Cabrera at dmezacabrera@liveviolencefree.org or (530) 544.2118, ext. 7628.

Do you or someone you know like live theater? Are you looking for a different gift to give mom this year?

Lake Tahoe News has two tickets to the May 16 performance of “Best of Broadway” being put on by the Truckee High School Drama Club.

Dancers from InnerRythms Dance Centre will be performing in a number of songs including “Cell Block Tango” from “Chicago.” Inner Rhythms’ director Elizabeth Archer is the choreographer for the musical.

If you don’t win these tickets, performances are at 7pm on May 10, 11, 16, 17 and 18 and there is a special Mother’s Day matinee at 2pm on May 12.

More info about the play is contained in this story.

The first person to accurately guess the favorite musical of LTN Publisher Kathryn Reed wins the tickets. If no one guesses correctly, the winner will randomly be picked from those who are part of the NEWS Team. Fill out this  paid subscriber form to be part of the NEWS Team.

The State Historic Preservation Office, Nevada Archaeological Site Stewardship Program is sponsoring a workshop May 4 from 9am to noon at the Churchill County Museum in Fallon.

That program will highlight some of Nevada’s WWII resources from an archaeological perspective. Jeffrey Wedding from Nevada Desert Research Institute will discuss the types of resources remaining, how to identify them, techniques on recording them and things to consider when determining their significance in light of the criteria for National Register of Historic Places eligibility.

Millions of men and women joined the armed forces during World War II, moving to huge, newly constructed and rapidly expanded military bases for training. American industry geared up to build those training facilities and provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war including 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks and 2 million army trucks. In four years, American industrial production, already the world’s largest, doubled in size. The output of the machine-tools to make weapons tripled in three years.

The workshop will also present information about Nevada’s Site Stewardship Program. Increased visitation to public lands has overwhelmed archaeologists and law enforcement officers. The Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service have joined with the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office to create a statewide volunteer site stewardship program.

The state office trains site stewards to become vital “eyes and ears” for public land management agencies.

Site stewards are crucial to the preservation of the archaeological, historic, and paleontological resources that are abundant throughout the state. Adults who enjoy being outdoors, like to hike, are willing to collaborate with state and federal agencies and have a love for the past may want to consider attending this workshop.

For more info, contact Rayette Martin at (702) 486.5011 or ramartin@shpo.nv.gov.

The Washoe County Sheriff’s Office has released a Safety Activity Book filled with activities for kids. The book does have an important mission — teaching young children how to stay safe.

“The activity book is definitely a great deal of fun,” Sheriff Mike Haley said. “But more importantly, it provides a format that will engage kids in learning about personal safety and their role in the overall safety of our community. The book provides a wonderful opportunity for the Sheriff’s Office to partner with parents, educators and caretakers to empower our children to stay safe.”

The activity book features information on stranger danger, staying safe at home, safety at school, and safety on the internet. It also features information on bike safety, gun safety, the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and much more.

The Sheriff’s Office safety activity book was inspired by a similar book created by cartoonist and columnist David Fitzsimmons for the Pima County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona.

Mike Griffus, a local Wells Fargo Bank employee, donated his services and spent six months going over the book page-by-page to give it local flair.

PDF copies of the new activity book are available to download from the sheriff’s website or by calling (775) 785.6205.

By Robert D. Dávila, Sacramento Bee

William “Bill” Scott, an innovative lawman who was Placer County’s longest-serving sheriff, died March 27 of lung cancer, his family said. He was 88.

Sheriff Scott was a war hero and Auburn police chief when he ran for Placer County’s top law enforcement job in 1954. At 29, he became the youngest elected sheriff in California history. He was re-elected five times before retiring from office in 1979.

William Scott served at Placer County’s sheriff. Photo/Sacramento Bee

He modernized the sheriff’s department, which was closed at night and had only 11 sworn officers and no patrols or in-house communications when he took office in 1955. He organized patrol beats, introduced radio communications and improved training for detectives. He added the coroner’s duties and introduced forensic pathology to the sheriff’s department.

In 1960, Sheriff Scott was in charge of security for the Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley. He established patrols in unincorporated communities and a substation in Tahoe City.

“That really opened up the mountains to skiing,” Placer County Sheriff Ed Bonner said. “They used to have just constables up there.”

Sheriff Scott, who helped arrest one of the FBI’s 10 “most wanted” suspects near Colfax, was widely known in law enforcement. In 1965, he was elected president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association. He belonged to the California Peace Officers Association and the California State Coroners’ Association.

“Sheriff Scott wasn’t provincial,” Bonner said. “He was always out meeting with law enforcement officials around the state for ideas and best practices to bring to Placer County.”

William Alexander Scott was born in 1924 in Auburn. He was the second of four children born to Ethe and Robert Scott, an opera tenor who gave up a performing career in the Bay Area to sell cars and raise a family in Auburn.

William Scott graduated from Placer High School in 1942 and served in the Army in France, Luxembourg and Belgium in World War II. Injured in the siege of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, he received two Purple Hearts and two Bronze Stars.

He attended Placer Junior College and became an Auburn police officer in 1946. He joined the Placer County Sheriff’s Department as a criminal investigator in 1951 but returned to the Auburn Police Department as chief in 1953.

He lived in Auburn and had four children from two marriages. His 47-year marriage to his second wife, Jean, ended with her death in 1999.

Sheriff Scott “loved the men and women of law enforcement for their dedication and sacrifice,” son-in-law Jim Lott said. He was believed to be the only California sheriff to be photographed by the Soviet TASS news agency.

“During the Olympics, they wanted a picture of the head of security,” Lott said. “Bill didn’t wear a uniform. So he had to go out and get a plaid shirt and cowboy hat, and he stuck a couple of revolvers in his belt, so they’d have a photo of a real Western sheriff.”

He was born June 14, 1924.

Sheriff Scott is survived by children, Sharon Lott of Placerville, Richard of Pocatello, Idaho, Kim of Sacramento, and William Jr. of Antelope; 13 grandchildren; nine great-grandchildren.

Services will be at 10am April 12 at Parkside Church of the Nazarene, 3885 Richardson Drive, Auburn.

Donations may be made to the American Cancer Society or to the Placer County 10-35 Foundation, a nonprofit assistance group for law enforcement officers.

By Ted Long

This week’s session was the most interesting so far and the most troubling. Our instructor, Mike Roberts, is a longtime El Dorado County sheriff’s deputy who began his career in the jail at 19, then moved to deputy status at 21, gave us the patrol officer’s view of the job.

Mike is serious, hard working and in my view a dedicated officer. He is typical of what I call the “type”, not intended as a bad thing, just how it is when the job is handled and hiring year after year from and by the same general view.

Ted Long

Mike told us about the job, often mentioning the boredom and the struggle to continually respond to false alarms at homes and businesses, almost to the point where it is difficult to take them seriously.

He painted a clear picture of the possibility of danger, using examples of obvious bad guys, examples where there is going to be trouble. The traffic stops where the person has a gun, the domestic violence call where the officer is assaulted. In other words, he made it very clear to us that this is a dangerous job, not for everyone. Mike expressed numerous times his willingness to shoot to kill and showed us videos that would justify that position.

I certainly agree, and acknowledged to him, that this is in fact a dangerous job and we all appreciate his and others willingness to take it on. However, on questioning about the potential for abuse, the over use of force and the fact that not all of us are in fact a “bad guy” he had little to offer. Please do not misunderstand me, I know my view has been impacted by my personal experience in handling several police misconduct cases and my concern about those in authority controlling the message, but I do think that the majority of us need to be aware of the potential abuse by those that have the power to lock us up or otherwise silence us. All I ask is that there is an effort, in the quest for safety, a recognition that we also need to be aware of the honest citizen, a courtesy if you will, that needs to be recognized. I am not sure how you maintain that, but I do know, if you are not looking, you don’t find much.

My conclusion, yes, this is a dangerous job, and appreciation of the service is more than warranted, however, we must remember ever society, good or bad, justifies its actions. Even the most extreme examples make this clear, like Nazi Germany. And I am sure King George at the founding of our nation told the English citizen that we were dangerous rebels, bent on disobeying the law. Efforts like this academy help with public input, public oversight, but I am not sure that is the intention?

Next week we will hear a presentation by a deputy district attorney on laws of arrest and search.

Ted Long is a South Lake Tahoe resident participating in the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Citizens Academy.