Page 2: Bionic squirrels
I was talking to Tom Cage the other day and he wondered why I hadn’t made fun of the whole power-outages-caused-by-squirrels excuse posited by Southern California Edison.
“Are you telling me that we’ve bred a new type of bionic, suicide bomber squirrel?” asked Cage. “That after years of lying in some dormant, transitory genetic stupor, they’ve risen from their tree cavities and now have a maniacal appetite for power lines?”
Cage said that he knows of at least one power outage that may not have been caused by our local, rabid rodents.
In August, one near 24-hour outage occurred serendipitously enough while the Town was repaving the Main Street frontage road in front of Mammoth Chevron. According to Cage, it was an extremely hot day and the asphalt wouldn’t cool, so the crew began hosing it down.
The incident report indicated that an underground vault housing a power transformer accumulated water, overheated and blew.
That or a rabid squirrel must have burrowed through the searing asphalt to attack the transformer.
At least three businesses filed claims with the Town, which has denied responsibility for causing any outage.
One way to get people back to work
Speaking with my father last week, he told me a story about hiring a Vietnamese refugee in the late ‘70s.
My father owned a small structural steel/building supply business at the time. Iran had ahold of 52 American hostages. The economic recession was deepening. Unemployment was rising and would eventually reach double digits during Reagan’s first term. It was a grim period.
Anyway, the state of New Hampshire approached our family’s church and asked if it could take on a Vietnamese family and find it housing and employment. As an incentive, the state offered to pay 40 percent of Panat’s (head of household) salary for two years.
“He couldn’t speak a lick of English at the outset,” recalls my father, “but he was good with numbers. After all, in Vietnamese, nine times six is still 54.
The point is, if you want to employ people, as opposed to just talking about it, make employers offers they can’t refuse. I think we’d be a lot better off incentivizing hiring as opposed to extending unemployment benefits.”
From Kirkner’s coverage of Wednesday’s Mammoth Lakes Planning Commission meeting:
1. Planning Commission Chair Tony Barrett said he had been receiving calls from upset community members who had been forced to buy special bear proof containers for their curbside trash pickup. It seems the bears are simply picking up the $200-$300 containers and throwing them onto the ground in order to break them open and retrieve the goods inside. Dan Dawson, who happened to be at the Wednesday meeting, said the item had come before the Wildlife Subcommittee, which had originally discussed eliminating curbside pickup, but decided to give the containers a try first. Dawson says the problem isn’t the containers so much as those using them were putting them out for pickup the night before. Dawson said if the containers don’t work then curbside pickup will need to be eliminated.
2. Jim Demetriades received recognition from the Planning Commission for the great landscaping job he has done at the Rafters and the Sierra Nevada Lodge. Demetriades said his faux ice rink is set to open Nov. 15.
3. Bill Cockroft, Bill Manning and John Helm updated the Commission on the public/private transit partnership between MMSA, TOML and ESTA. The partnership’s mission is to create a year-round, free, scheduled, fixed route transit system. So far the partnership has produced a complete overhaul of bus stop signage, a reworking of bus routes, and updates to the Red’s Meadow Shuttle. Going forward the partnership would like to continue to grow its ridership (it already increased 11 percent over last year), upgrade bus shelters, create one transit authority for the community, create a fixed schedule, incrementally improve the Town’s transit routes, and create a means for transit services to be operated under ESTA only so that the partnership can leverage ESTA’s ability to procure capital.
4. The Commission had staff conduct noise readings during Mammoth Rocks and the Mammoth Festival to see how the readings compared to those of the Jazz Jubilee event. The studies were done in response to a letter from the Mammoth Knolls Homeowners Association that claimed that some concerts in the Village seemed to be exceeding allowable noise levels and caused some people to have to “go indoors and shut their windows to be able to converse in a normal voice.” When the noise readings were taken the levels were found to be above what is allowed in the Town’s Noise Ordinance (55 dBA before 10 p.m. and 45 dBA after 10 p.m.), however, these events are exempt from the Noise Ordinance because they are operating under a special permit. The Noise Ordinance specifically exempts “occasional outdoor gatherings, public dances, shows and sporting and entertainment events.”
