To the community,

As some of you already know, I helped start the Tahoe Victims of CPS in 2007. We are a Child Protective Services (CPS) reform group. CPS is a good organization of good people but due to funding cuts and high case overloads, they have been unable to keep pace with their required “system improvements”.

As a result, their system has become flawed and 90 percent of all the parents, grand parents, friends and relatives involved in dependency court cases are complaining.

Most of these complaints are about the errors in the CPS reports being entered into the court records. Because Judge Proud in Placerville and Commissioner Shepherd in Tahoe base their decisions on these erroneous reports their decisions are flawed. These flawed decisions end up devastating families, sending cases to the court of appeals and leaving El Dorado County vulnerable to lawsuits.

The purpose of this letter is to publicly ask our Presiding Judge Suzanne Kingsbury to remedy this situation. I have met with CPS managers Jan Walker Conroy, Mark Contois and their boss Director Daniel Nielson three times in the last nine months with zero progress. Our group has gone before the Board of Supervisors 20 times in the last year with zero progress. Now we are going up the chain-of-command to the Honorable Suzanne Kingsbury.

We will continue to exercise our constitutional right to picket in front of the courthouse at 495 Main St. in Placerville and on Highway 50 in Tahoe until “system improvements” are made. Our numbers continues to grow with each picketing event. We are now over 50 strong. This month we joined forces with fathers-4-justice.us. This is a nationwide organization asking the state, local and Federal governments to focus on efforts to reunify families.

Here are some statistics:

43 percent of USA children live with one parent. (US Department of Census)

71 percent of pregnant teenagers live with one parent. (US Department of Health Human Services)

90 percent of homeless and runaways are from homes with one parent. (US Census)

85 percent of youths in prison grew up in homes with one parent. (Texas Department of Corrections)

71 percent of high school dropouts are from homes with one parent. (National Principals Association)

Each statistic by itself is not alarming, but when they are viewed together, a very ugly picture comes to light that says, “No one is hurt more than the children”.

The solution is to counsel, train, teach and supervise the parents, without removing the children from the home, so the family can eventually reunify. More than nine states have adopted this in-home-reunification process. This process is financially beneficial; court costs, foster care costs, juvenile detention costs, jail costs, welfare costs, lawsuits against the County, court of appeals costs, the crime rate and law enforcement costs all go down when this process is employed.

Please help us Judge Kingsbury. Let us put an end to the pain these children suffer.

Respectfully,

Ernie Claudio, South Lake Tahoe

By Andy Rooney, CBS

I have good news for you tonight. According to an American Gaming Association report, revenue from casino gambling fell by almost two billion dollars last year.

A lot of people are out of work and it turns out that when people are unemployed, they gamble less. You’d think they might gamble more but they don’t. There’s some good things about everything, I guess.

Andy Rooney

In 2008 the casinos earned $32.5 billion. Last year they earned only $30.7 billion. I use the words “earned” and “only” loosely but casino income was down a lousy little two billion dollars last year. It’s enough to bring tears to your eyes.

Read the whole story

To the community,

As Bread & Broth observes the first anniversary of its Second Serving – a program that provides a second weekly hot meal – we’d like to thank all those who’ve made it possible.

To Pastor Steve Blocher of Lake Tahoe Community Presbyterian Church for providing a place to serve, and to his parishioners who volunteer weekly. Also, to Bill & Sally Wilke, Jim & Betty Duke and John & Wilow Barton for coordinating the dinners as well as the South Tahoe High School students.

A special thanks to our local restaurants that provide the soup: Freshies, Blue Angel Café, Café Fiore, Nepheles, Rockwater Grill, Tep’s Villa Roma, Fresh Ketch and Ridge Tahoe. We’d also like to thank Levon Touryan of Lake Tahoe Pizza Company for baking fresh bread every Friday. Please consider one of these restaurants the next time you go out for a meal. Make sure to thank them for their support.

For those who need a hot meal, join us every Friday from 4-5pm at Lake Tahoe Community Presbyterian Church on Lake Tahoe Boulevard next to the original Red Hut and at St. Theresa Church on Mondays from 4-5:30pm.

For more information about Bread & Broth or Second Serving, visit www.breadandbroth.org or contact Bill Horning (530) 542.3100 or Diane Weidinger (775) 588.3993.

Bill Horning, Second Serving coordinator

To the community,

Bueno and Marty Kettleson of Bert’s Café recently hosted a Spaghetti Night fundraiser for Tahoe Arts Project. It was a wonderful evening enjoyed by many.

All of us at Tahoe Arts Project would like to thank Crystal Dairy, Bonanza Produce, Sara Lee and of course the staff at Bert’s for helping to make this fundraiser a success.

A big thank you to all of you who had dinner with us that evening and to the TAP board members and volunteers who helped serve our guests. Tahoe Arts Project is a nonprofit organization that brings professional performing arts into the schools and community of South Lake Tahoe.

Event proceeds will benefit more than 5,000 K-12 students who see our programs. If you would like to know how you can support Tahoe Arts Project, please call (530) 542.3632.

Thank you,

Peggy Thompson, executive director Tahoe Arts Project

Publisher’s note: The following is El Dorado County’s letter to South Lake Tahoe regarding redevelopment.

Dear Mayor Lovell and Councilmembers:

The County of El Dorado continues to object strongly to the proposed Redevelopment Plan for the South Tahoe Redevelopment Project Area No. 2 as outlined in previous letters [April 6, 2010 and May 3, 2010].

The County must respectfully request that the City not adopt the Redevelopment Plan at this time. Furthermore, the County requests that the Council direct City and Redevelopment Agency staff to meet with the County to discuss its concerns and explore opportunities for negotiation rather than leaving the County with no option but to pursue litigation.

We were disappointed to learn that you did not revise the recommended boundary of Project Area No. 2 as we had thought you would. While the County does not wish to impede the City’s planning and development goals in the proposed Project Area, the documentation prepared by the Redevelopment Agency does not provide sufficient evidence that the proposed Project Area is blighted, as defined by California State Community Redevelopment Law (CRL).

We incorporate all our previously stated objections, but emphasize the following three areas:

• Remove the Airport area from the project area. The Airport area is not blighted, and in fact, improvements to the runway were recently completed and staff is confident of securing federal funds for other airport needs. The Agency fails to demonstrate that the Airport suffers from physical or economic blight.

• Remove other industrial property included in the project area.

• Provide assurance that the City, under the Teeter Plan, will bear the cost of project area property taxes that go delinquent.

The County continues to express concern that the primary purpose of forming the proposed project area is not to address blight conditions, but simply to capture tax increment, which will have a detrimental effect to the County and other agencies.

The County’s Auditor and Controller estimates that, even with statutory pass-through payments, the County is likely to lose between $4,660,176 and $16,953,025 in property tax increment over the life of the proposed Redevelopment Project, depending on the success of the Project. This loss of tax increment would put a severe strain on the County’s ability to provide needed public health and safety programs throughout the region.

The CRL is a powerful and extreme tool to be used only when extraordinarily serious problems cannot be remedied by use of regulatory authority and available financing methods.

The proposed Project area does not meet the requirements of the law and will serve only to disrupt viable businesses and put an undue burden on the rest of the community.

For the reasons cited above and set forth in previous letters and incorporated herein, the County objects to the formation of the Proposed Redevelopment Project Area No. 2 and urges the City not to adopt this plan.

Sincerely,

Norma Santiago, chair Board of Supervisors County of El Dorado

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To the community,

We, Maestra Diana’s kindergarten class at Bijou Community School, would like to thank Pet Station for its generosity. This week, we learned about the different classes of animals in science … and to make it more real, we got to see real animals from each group. We were able to see a fish, a turtle, a frog, a hamster, and a chicken (we even got to touch a few).

This was so much better than just seeing pictures.

Thank you so much Pet Station.

Bijou Community School

To the publisher,

Praise be for the words of caution. Know that every company exploring and producing offshore will do everything to find answers and solutions to prevent this from happening again.

The U.S. stopped almost all research and development for nuclear power as a result of the Three Mile Island accident and “The China Syndrome” movie.

Japan experienced two nuclear bombs; yet, since 1973, nuclear energy has been a priority for Japan. It’s advances in nuclear recycling and “closed cycle” production is of interest to many developed countries.

Know that green energy will be subsidized and expensive — well into the future.

Know that gasoline and diesel will power our vehicles — well into the future. We must not burn food for fuel.

Know that oil spills can kill birds, but so can wind turbines.

We should pursue, reasonably and safely, all sources of energy below the water and the ground.

Merlyn Karst, Denver

By Rebekah Rast, Fresno Bee

When you buy a head of lettuce at the grocery store in the next couple of months, you might notice a higher price tag at checkout.

This isn’t the first time the cost of lettuce has increased. In late 2009, in a supermarket in Queens, New York, a customer noticed a head of iceberg lettuce went from 89 cents one month to $2.49 the next, according to an article in the New York Daily News. Why?

The article attributes the shortage of lettuce to a cold front in California. The real reason, according to Sarah Woolf of California’s Westlands Water District, is that lettuce production in California has been cut in half due to lack of water reaching the Valley.

Read the whole story

Publisher’s note: The following editorial is from the May 13, 2010, Sacramento Bee.

Where is the outrage?

In the week or so since Attorney General Jerry Brown filed a civil lawsuit charging two former high-level officials of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System with massive fraud, there’s been hardly a peep from public employee union leaders whose members’ retirement fund was allegedly defrauded.

There’s been no loud complaint registered by the state’s Democratic establishment that usually walks in lockstep with union leaders – no press release from Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg or Assembly Speaker John Pérez. There’s been no word from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger either, even though recent large pension fund investment losses have added enormously to the state’s massive budget deficit.

Read the whole story