The Editor's Desk

A commenter on Jason Smith’s story about the financial problems of the Barstow Humane Society mentioned having a negative experience with the staff there and said others have reported the same.

I’ve heard this as well, but I have to say they were pretty accommodating to me when I adopted my dog, Xander, from there a little more than a year ago. They were no-nonsense about the whole thing, but I wouldn’t call them rude. I have a reputation for being pretty blunt myself, though, so it’s possible I just am not sensitive to that sort of behavior.

They were also very helpful when, not two weeks after I adopted Xander, he figured out how to unlatch the gate and escaped from my backyard. One of the employees recognized him a couple of days later out on the street, brought him back to the shelter, and I was able to bring him back home.

I’ll have an editorial in tomorrow’s paper about the Humane Society’s issues, but it should pop up online after 5 p.m. here in the editorial section if you don’t want to wait.

When nearly everything you do in your line of work involves communicating, suddenly not being able to do so really makes you feel kind of useless.

The Desert Dispatch got hit pretty hard in the communications outage today. Our phones went out, our Internet went out, and our company cell phones went out. We couldn’t access our customer service database to deal with problems. We couldn’t even post about the telecommunications problems on our Web site (not that most Barstow residents would have been able to read it anyway). We were as cut off as everybody else.

I thought I’d be able to work around the issue because I have a cable modem and phone service at home, but when I ran home to post a quick news story about the communications outage, I discovered cable phone/Internet service was out as well.

So for four hours I simply sent Aaron Aupperlee and Jason Smith loose on the city to get all information that they could and then … just kind of sat here. I couldn’t call the two of them, so I trusted them to come back with good information. I couldn’t do anything. We were supposed to have a teleconference regarding a redesign of our Web site, but I couldn’t call in. Everything on my to-do list was shot. There is hardly anything I do as the editor of the newspaper that doesn’t incorporate telecommunications of some sort. Fortunately, some people on our staff had personal cell phones that still worked so we were able to contact a few folks outside Barstow to plan.

If you care at all, if we’re in a situation where we can’t design the Desert Dispatch here (and with communications down, we can’t — all our work is saved on a collective server and we can’t access it or print it), we send our page designers and sometimes even reporters to our sister paper the Daily Press in Victorville to make sure a newspaper comes out as usual. We’ve had to do so once before a couple of years ago due to a power outage. Fortunately our services came back around 2 p.m. and (knock on wood) don’t have to do so today.

Reporter Jason Smith took a look at local primary activism and found little to speak of, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of interest.

We have been tracking visits to the Desert Dispatch on days when we have our live primary results, and we are noticing significant increases in both the number of page views and the number of distinct visitors. The state is reporting a recent jump in voter registration to the tune of 700,000 people over the 2004 presidential election. It’ll be very interesting to see how Tuesday turns out.

Also, because of the change in the voting system yet again, we’re being warned about slow result tallies. We may not be able to declare winners for Wednesday’s Desert Dispatch, but we will have our live vote counter online as we’ve been doing throughout the primaries so visitors can keep track.

The city’s Jeanette Hayhurst has pointed out (as well as a commenter on my latest editorial) that many of the rules the city is proposing for rental units in Barstow are no different from the HUD guidelines for Section 8 housing.
This may be true, but there are some very important differences that need to be understood to explain why landlords are coming out against the city’s draft plans.

HUD’s Section 8 guidelines:
• Participation in the program is completely voluntary. If landlords do not want to follow the strict guidelines to be a Section 8 household, they do not have to become part of the program.
• Compliance is encouraged through an incentive program. The federal government subsidizes the rents of landlords who follow the guidelines.

City of Barstow’s proposed rental program:
• Participation in the program is mandatory for all rental units with the city. If landlords do not want to participate, the city will attempt to force them to do so with court orders and search warrants.
• Compliance is demanded under threat of fine. The city of Barstow penalizes landlords who do not follow the guidelines.

Neither program is very good, as they both rely on wasteful and often capricious bureaucracy to enforce, but reading the comparison, it’s easy to see why exactly landlords are so upset. Rather than creating incentives, the city is creating punishments.

An interesting casino-related issue is playing out that may or may not have an impact on Barstow’s future efforts to bring an off-reservation Indian casino to town.

Various interests have managed to force the gaming compacts Gov. Schwarzenegger has signed with four tribes to a referendum vote. They argue that the agreements, with four wealthy gaming tribes, are a sweetheart deal for these particular tribes to greatly expand at the expense of the state and other needy tribes. You can read the details for yourself on the opponents’ site.

How does this relate to Barstow? Well, these folks are trying to force a vote in order to block four compacts from approval. Would the reverse be possible? The compacts between Big Lagoon and Los Coyotes (two of the tribes who want to build in Barstow) were held up in the state legislature until they expired. Would it be possible for supporters to circumvent the legislature and force it to a public vote in order to try to get it passed?

There are a number of issues to consider:

• It would be an extremely expensive endeavor. Millions and milions of dollars would be spent by both sides, and that’s not even counting the costs of trying to gather the necessary signatures statewide to put it on the ballot. This is a fairly modest casino project that’s been proposed for Barstow. If the effort succeeds, how long would it take for the casino to actually earn back the money spent in this effort?

• It would be an extremely nasty fight. This would make the Measure H conflict look like a playground shoving match. If one of the major talking points against off-reservation casinos is that California residents didn’t approve Indian gaming with the expectation it would crop up just anywhere, you better believe opponents would be warning voters these compacts will result in casinos in their backyards. We can’t even say such an argument is factually wrong, because as it stands, it’s simply the current governor’s policy to limit possible off-reservation casinos to non-urban areas. It’s not set in stone.

• Even if successful, the federal government could overrule the whole process. There’s another whole battle with getting federal approval to put the tribal land in trust, and initiative or not, they could reject it because of the lack of ties to the land by the tribes involved (though the Los Coyotes claim they do have ties to the area). All the effort could come to naught.

At the moment, the issue is moot, as the compacts have expired and the tribes don’t have new ones negotiated as yet.
But if they got new compacts, it raises the question as to whether a ballot initiative (not a referendum, as the compacts never got approved) could deal with the legislative logjam. If nothing else, we’d get a better look at what Californians really think about off-reservation casinos.

And of course, I have to add as a libertarian, if gambling were legal, all of this nonsense wouldn’t be an issue, but the tribes certainly wouldn’t want to have to deal with that kind of competition.

I was disturbed and a little sad to read a letter from the Mojave Valley Volunteer Hospice board that they were getting angry or harassing phone calls because they had to cancel Thanksgiving meal deliveries due to the ultimately fatal illness of administrator Donna Zeller.

First of all, I was sad to hear of Zeller’s passing. I volunteered one Christmas to help deliver meals and it was a wonderful experience. I’ve also interviewed Zeller for news stories in the past. She was a wonderful woman and will be missed by this community, particularly given the challenges of fighting deadly illnesses in this isolated desert town with limited resources.

I should be surprised that people would respond to the cancellation of the delivery service so negatively, but I’m not. We received calls alerting us to the problem that Desert Manna not having enough food to give baskets to every family who requested help this season and having to restrict the donations to families of at least four.

One of the people who called us was angry and clearly expected us to write something critical of Desert Manna for not giving everybody baskets. Of course, we did no such thing. We reported about the situation in the hopes of encouraging community assistance (which apparently helped to some degree), but we certainly had no intention of pointing the finger at Desert Manna.

This is one of the results of living in an entitlement culture. The more we are given, the more we come to believe that we are entitled to these things we have not earned. I know that sounds callous, but is there any alternative? It’s certainly not acceptable to treat gifts from charitable organizations as though they’re something we’re owed.

It’s disturbing how pervasive the idea that somebody else will provide for us has become in our culture. I’m well aware that there are needy and helpless people within our community — I met several of them doing these deliveries a couple of years ago. But it’s disappointing that some folks immediately went to a place of entitlement, rather than helping look for solutions, when a problem arose.

Apparently reporter Jason Smith got a rather chilly reception from BarWest Spokesman Tom Shields at Monday’s City Council meeting following his reporting of internal troubles with the BarWest/Los Coyotes/Big Lagoon casino project.

Ah well — I’m not sure if there’s anybody left for us to alienate on the casino project. I’ll probably write an editorial using this as a reason why the city needs to step back and make the tribes and developers fight for the project themselves. I’m sure that will endear me further to them.

I must confess, despite the leaking of internal information, I’m not exactly sure what BarWest is so angry about. To me, they come off as the victim in this conflict. They’ve committed all this money and it turns out there’s an internal struggle among the Los Coyotes about who to partner with and people trying to cut BarWest out. On the other hand, it does show how fragile this agreement is, which undercuts their PR campaign of solidarity. Frankly, I think they need to think up a new message now that the cat’s out of the bag there. The amount of money they’ve spent already is a sign of their commitment to the project, so letting folks like Larry Halstead try to spin it like it’s bad for a developer to put their money behind a project is a bit strange.

We get calls every couple of months from anonymous folks who want us to “investigate” the Michigan bankrollers of the project, who have a less-than-gleaming reputation back home. I’m guessing for some, that we haven’t done so is a sign that we support them as the developer.

Editorially we support the project as we support pretty much any legal business that wants to come to Barstow. It’s not a judgment call over the worth of anybody involved with the efforts. I’m not going to make a decision over who would be the best developer (we’ll leave that for the people involved to decide, like any marketplace decision), and I don’t care who is the most “deserving” (an irrelevant distinction).

However, on the news side, when the casino was first announced — long, long ago when the only opposition was religious leaders who objected to gambling — we sat down and decided how we would go about covering the casino, given our limited resources as a small community newspaper. Once we learned about the lengthy process of actually getting this casino built, we decided that we would focus on the stages as they came to pass (or did not, as the case may be).

So, our first coverage was focusing on the city level for the agreements with the tribes, and then the state level to get the compacts approved. Our reasoning here was pretty simple: If the tribes couldn’t get permission from the state for the off-reservation casino, nothing else mattered. The BarWest backers’ reputations as developers weren’t particularly important if the tribes couldn’t get past the opposition from the other gaming tribes.

If the compacts ever did finally get approved, we actually discussed plans to send a reporter all the way to Michigan to explore the relationship between the developers and their home community. But if the casinos never move beyond the legislative stage, we can’t exactly justify all that work and expense.

So that’s the explanation why we don’t have more about Michael Malich and the Ilitches. It’s not time to take a look at them until the casino moves forward. Some folks want to claim it’s because we received ad money opposing Measure H from these folks in 2006. However, the reality is that gaming tribes have spent far, far more money in our newspapers advertising their events in our Weekender section, long before a casino was ever even announced for Barstow. (For that matter, the Chemehuevi advertised in our newspaper in 2004 as part of a PR campaign). If my views were for sale (which they’re not), the existing gaming tribes would have owned them long ago. We’ve jeopardized more advertising money by going against the Southern California tribes than we stand to gain from this one project.

It looks like I spent too much time thinking about what the Supreme Court might say about rental inspections and didn’t bother to look to see if lower courts had already addressed the matter.

They have. Attempts to implement rental inspections in Illinois and Texas have been successfully fought off as Fourth Amendment violations. The description of how the inspections bore out in Garland, Texas, is especially eye-opening. Those who voluntarily participated ended up having to deal with improvement demands that went far above and beyond the safety of the tenant. And of course, the landlords who were actually the cause of the problems didn’t even bother to register.

This rental inspection proposal is doomed. I know that a number of folks are planning to come forward to speak out against it. We can only hope the city listens before it brings an ordinance into play that will likely cost the city a lot of money when it’s inevitably challenged in court.

Incidentally, I rent my home, and I already warned a city staffer that I’m not going to agree to an inspection unless my landlord wants it.

Much to my surprise, I’ve received a much stronger reaction to the proposed local rental inspection ordinance and my editorial expressing my opposition. And it turns out quite a number of Barstow residents are equally concerned about the violation of privacy and search and seizure protections.

I’ve received several calls and a couple of e-mailed comments about the issue, all in opposition to the city’s ordinance. A couple of days ago in the blog, I figured folks would support the ordinance as a way to (allegedly) help clean up Barstow.

As it was time for a new front page poll, I’ve put one up to gauge attitudes toward the proposed ordinance. Feel free to vote!

My editorial today took a fairly predictable libertarian position that the City of Barstow lacks the constitutional authority to order door-to-door inspections of rental units.

Though I’ve already gotten one supportive comment online, I’m not holding out much hope that Barstow residents will speak out against the ordinance, given the community’s dislike of some the really run-down properties in town.

The ordinance appeals to people on both the left in the right in the way it uses government authority to achieve wanted ends. On the left, the ordinance speaks to the desire to use the government to protect the consumer from some of the abuses of the marketplace — in this case, poor tenants stuck in uninhabitable homes, afraid to contact authorities for fear of being evicted. It appeals to the right as a tool of law enforcement to deal with a difficult problem — typically drug abusers/dealers/gang members who allow their homes to decay and affect the neighborhood negatively.

Whether or not any actual changes will occur is something of which I’m extremely suspect. I asked Jeanette Hayhurst, city project manager for housing, whether the city was having luck getting absentee landlords (the target of this proposed ordinance) to respond to existing code enforcement efforts. She said that the responses were improving, which sounds like they have a long way to go still. I have doubts that absentee landlords are going to respond to this ordinance or care about the city’s threats.

Before writing the editorial I contacted Patricia Neal, the consultant helping the city with the rental studies and the formulation of the ordinance. I asked her about legal challenges to the ordinances in other communities. She said the ordinance has survived a challenge on the state level over the forced fees. However, she wasn’t aware of any challenges on the federal level on the basis of the inspections violating the Fourth Amendment (the crux of my argument). She doubted whether the Supreme Court would even take up a challenge in this situation, and after the Kelo vs. New London decision (authorizing abuse of eminent domain) I’m sadly inclined to agree.