It’s a sad fact of life that when people and wild animals collide, the animals usually lose.

There are reasons for that, good ones. I understand that.

What I don’t understand, what I’ll never understand, and will continue to rail against, is when government treats us mere citizens as if we don’t have any rights.

In the case of the recent bear attack in the Piute mountains, I’m having a big problem with the fact that the Department of Fish and Game has withheld key information about the attack.

They had the victim’s statement last week describing the attack, including a description of the bear, but refused to release it.

“It’s an ongoing investigation,” I was first told by Fish and Game public information officer Steve Martarnao in the Sacramento office.

The game wardens who were tracking the bear are just like cops, he said.

Really? Such investigatory documents typically are withheld under a specific exemption to the California Public Records Act so suspects don’t change their appearance or flee the country.

Were they worried the bear would get a dye job?

It turns out the real reason Fish and Game withheld the information was in deference to the family of the victim which asked Fish and Game to keep it under wraps,  Martarnao said.

The search for the bear has been called off. I wonder if releasing the statement immediately would have improved the chances of finding the bear. We’ll never know — since we can’t be trusted with that information.

I feel bad for the victim. She was horribly injured and I’m amazed at her presence of mind to be able to drive, bleeding and scared out of her wits, to a fire station. I hope with all my heart she comes out of this OK and is able to overcome it.

But if I lived in that area —  and people do — I’d want to know as much about exactly what happened, where and when so I could protect myself.

I mentioned that to Martarnao, since the reason Fish and Game was hunting this bear was for “public safety.”

No dice. He wouldn’t release the statement nor provide any legal authority for keeping it secret.

Fish and Game was trying to be sensitive to the family’s wishes, he said.

I’m sorry for the family. I am.

But Fish and Game doesn’t work for the family. They work for the taxpayers and we have a right to know how this attack happened. It may have happened on private property, but it was a public issue involving a lot of man-hours at taxpayer expense.

Some people have protested the need to kill the bear at all. Even if the bear had stalked this woman and attacked her in her kitchen, there would be some people who wouldn’t want it killed. I’m not one of those people.

Fish and Game’s policy, which seems reasonable, is that when a normally skittish wild animal attacks a human, there’s something dreadfully wrong with that animal and to prevent further attacks, it must be put down.

Keeping the process secret only fuels the belief of some people that Fish and Game is up to no good.

When will government learn that?

Instead, they just want us to trust that they’re doing the right thing.

I say trust is earned when they actually do the right thing, such as honoring state law with regard to public records.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

OK, so we suck.

By just about every measurable standard, the southern San Joaquin Valley is hardly a garden spot.

We’re either tops at the bad stuff (air pollution, teen pregnancy, pedestrians getting run over in crosswalks) or we’re at the bottom of the heap for the good stuff (income, education and, I’m not making this up, romance).

The latest entry in this never-ending parade of “why do we live here?” reports was “The Measure of America,” which came out earlier this month and looked at human development in terms of income, education and life expectancy.

In a nutshell, we’re poor, ignorant and shouldn’t make plans past the age of 77.

This report was somewhat more notable than all the rest in that it broke out its findings by congressional district. District 20 (represented by Jim Costa, D-Fresno, covering western Fresno and Kings counties then squiggling south through Delano and over to Lamont) was dead last of the nation’s 436 congressional districts. Dead last!

To be fair, the surrounding valley districts weren’t quite as bad, coming in at between 235 and 403. Collectively, though, we have lots of room for improvement.

The kicker is that Costa was right when he told the paper this latest report didn’t offer many new insights.

We’ve known for years how bad things are in the valley. If we didn’t know it anecdotally, a 2005 Congressional Research Services study commissioned by Costa and his fellow valley representatives put it in cold, hard numbers. The study was specifically designed for the valley reps to use as leverage to get more federal money for local programs.

We have squeezed more money out of the feds here and there, going from $3 billion to Kern for education, job training and health care programs in 2003 to $3.9 billion in 2006, according to Congressional Research Services. That seems like a decent chunk of change until you consider our demographics.

I’m talking about illegal immigration, so hold onto your hats.

First, some basic numbers:

Between 1995 and 2003, more than 104,000 foreign-born people came to the southern San Joaquin Valley, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. More than half of those people hadn’t finished high school and about half were poor, according to the institute.

Using Census figures from 2000, the most recent numbers, about 43 percent of Kern children living in poverty were foreign born.

So, we have a large influx of new people, many needy and many of them children, every year and it looks like a lot of them are settling here.

Back in 2005 The Californian took an exhaustive look at the cost of illegal immigration.

Studies are often tinged with politics so we hunted far and wide for objective numbers and did a lot of our own crunching. The bottom line was that illegal immigrants are a drain on resources — schools and health care mostly —even though the vast majority are working hard and paying taxes. The flip side, of course, is that illegal labor keeps costs low for consumers, people like you and me.

Even Marc Grossman, spokesman for the United Farm Workers union, agreed that a large illegal immigrant population also keeps wages low because they’re afraid to unionize and demand more. They also don’t climb the economic ladder as readily because employers with better paying jobs are more likely to check citizenship status, according to  Steven P. Wallace, a professor at the UCLA School of Public Health who studies immigrant issues.

I asked Costa about the “Measure of America” report and illegal immigration and he told me that he and other valley reps have been working hard to get more federal money but the Bush administration has been tough on social programs.

When I pressed on the issue of illegal immigration, Costa chose his words carefully.

“Any region with a large population of immigrants is going to have more social and economic challenges,” he said. “But there is also a level of energy and dynamics that are beneficial. So, it’s always a two-sided coin with short-term challenges and long-term benefits.”

I disagree that these are “short-term” challenges. As Costa himself pointed out, the numbers in the “Measure of America” report aren’t new. In fact, they’ve been about the same — bad — for decades.

Illegal immigration was the news du jour for a brief time in Washington, D.C., but the issue proved too intractable.

Costa hoped a new administration would bring new energy to the problem.

I wish I shared his optimism, but I’m betting next year, and probably the next and on into the future, about all we can expect are more reports with more dismal numbers.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

Back in February, I wrote a column about turf wars between the Sheriff and Fire departments.

Well, as of today (Wednesday, July 23) they're heating up and, as I predicted back then, it's all about air ops.

Read James Burger's story on what went down in the Supes today.

MY COLUMN FROM FEBRUARY (Note: I bolded a couple of particularly prophetic portions)

I’ve been hearing rumblings for some time about turf battles between the Kern County Fire and Sheriff’s departments over search and rescue.

Huh?

Search and rescue? Hey! That could be me someday. I don’t want the people who are supposed to be haulin’ my behind out of the river or off a mountain squabbling over who’s in charge.

When I asked Chief Dennis Thompson and Sheriff Donny Youngblood, they acknowledged it was true.

But, they both said, they’re working on it. In fact, they’re going to put together a group of their top people to focus on communications between the agencies.

I might find that reassuring — except they already have an agreement about river rescues that spells out exactly who gets called first and who’s in charge.

Still, problems have persisted.

At a drowning in Lake Isabella last summer where the victim had been under water for more than half an hour, the fire department helicopter suddenly arrived. No one from the Sheriff’s department knew it was coming. On occasion, both the Sheriff’s helicopter and Fire’s have been called and neither knew the other was coming. Danger! Danger!

During a river rescue where Fire’s helicopter was called, it hovered unused for more than five hours, even having to refuel once, awaiting instructions while a man clung to a rock in the water. Finally, as the sun was setting, Search and Rescue asked Fire to hoist the victim to safety.

If they don’t figure this out and soon, someone’s going to get hurt, maybe even killed.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, the departments work great together. But not always on search and rescue. (Chief Thompson was quick to point out two searches over President’s Day weekend in which the agencies worked extremely well together, saving a stranded hiker and off-roader in two separate incidents. “That’s the way we want it to work every time,” Thompson said.)

Both Thompson and Youngblood stressed that they have a very strong working relationship.

In general, however, other fire personnel feel the sheriff’s department leaves them out of the loop and needlessly endangers the public by not enlisting their help and  equipment. And they worry the sheriff is angling to take over air operations for the entire county.

Sheriff’s staffers feel Fire is butting in when help isn’t needed, creating confusion and needlessly increasing costs. And they fear Fire is on a quest to take over search and rescue.

Friction over search and rescue isn’t new, but tensions seemed to escalate after the fire department got a new helicopter with hoist and night vision capabilities.

Why not use that resource for river rescues, missing ATV riders or downed planes, many in Fire ask? Makes sense to me. Believe me, if I were in any of those situations I’d want everyone called out — Fire, Sheriff’s, heck, get Mayor Hall out of bed and slap some binoculars in his hands.

Sheriff Youngblood had a slightly more restrained approach.

You can’t just stampede out the door with good intentions.

The Sheriff’s department, he said, needs to plan and coordinate the effort so everyone knows his job, for the safety of the missing person and rescuers. Youngblood has more than 200 volunteers who train in everything from mine rescues to river rescues. His officers work with the Civil Air Patrol, which has night vision capabilities of its own and come July, the department will have its own helicopter with the same bells and whistles as the Fire department.

And, he added, the sheriff’s department does call in Fire — when needed.

“If they can rescue someone before we get there, great,” Youngblood said. “It’s about saving lives.”

Once the sheriff’s department is on scene, though, they are in charge; their responsibility is set by Kern County charter.

Fire staffers I talked to were totally cool with the sheriff being in charge, that’s not their beef. They want to be called more often.

OK, everyone sounds like they want to play nice. So what’s the problem?

I hate to think it’s the usual “Ps” — power, politics and posturing. But people close to the situation tell me those, in fact, are the true culprits.

While Youngblood said he absolutely has no interest in taking over all air operations for Kern (as is the situation in Ventura County), others pointed out the new Huey ordered by the Sheriff will have firefighting capabilities and Youngblood offered to let Fire use it.

That may sound like an olive branch, but it is also being seen by some as a step on the road to consolidation of air operations, which I think would be a bad idea.

I talked with folks in Ventura County where the Sheriff is in charge of air ops and Fire is clearly second on the priority list for helicopter use. We must keep operations separate here so neither agency has to wait for permission to use a helicopter when there’s an emergency.

And while Chief Thompson told me search and rescue absolutely is the purview of the sheriff, people in his own department insist Kern would do better to model Los Angeles or other counties where Fire is a partner in search and rescue.

The two supervisors whose districts are most likely to need search and rescue, Jon McQuiston and Don Maben, both told me they see no reason to change the status quo: Sheriff keeps search and rescue and both agencies keep control over their own aircraft.

I totally agree when it comes to aircraft, though I’m not sure about search and rescue.

That’s something for those with far more expertise to sort out.

But I know this for sure: Someone will get hurt if Fire and the sheriff’s department don’t work this out, and soon.

Lois Henry’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. E-mail her at lhenry@bakersfield.com or call her at 395-7373.

I’ve been trying, really, I have. But I just cannot see eye-to-eye with some environmental groups that are dead set — lawsuits and all — against forest thinning.

You’ve probably never had occasion to consider forest thinning and even now are won
dering why they heck you should care.

Heard of the Piute fire?

So far, it’s burned up 37,000 acres and cost me, you and all the rest of us taxpayers about $23 million to fight.

A portion of that acreage was set to be thinned as part of a Forest Service program to reduce fire danger.

If the Sequoia Forest Keeper and Earth Island Institute environmental groups hadn’t sued late last year, at least some of the thinning would have been done by the time fire hit earlier this month. Not all the work would have been done, but a lot, said Sequoia National Forest Ecosystem Staff Officer Jim Whitfield.

“I can’t say it would have definitely been better,” he said. “But obviously, we wanted to change the fuel conditions.”

We’ll never know if thinning would have stemmed the Piute fire, but it sure worked at Lake Arrowhead last fall, saving countless homes. And thinning work continues around Frazier Park communities with the devastating 2006 Day fire still fresh in residents’ minds.

“There’s no question from a firefighting standpoint that a thinned forest is a much better proposition,” agreed Tom Kuekes, district ranger for the Mount Pinos District of the Los Padres National Forest.

Even so, he said a planned thinning project to take out dead and hazardous trees along roadways in the Los Padres is already tied up in litigation and the Forest Service has received an “intent to sue” notice regarding another project that would thin the forest back two miles from communities.

After talking to the two environmental groups that sued over the Piute thinning project, it’s clear their concern is that the Forest Service is more interested in kowtowing to the timber industry than watching out for the forest.

“In this administration, the impetus is on getting more areas logged, period,” Rachel Fazio with Earth Island Institute told me. “Ecology takes a back seat to that.”

The groups aren’t against all thinning, she said, just trees larger than 12 inches in diameter. They felt the project would cut too many bigger trees.

I read the Forest Service’s environmental assessment, which painstakingly pinpointed the types, sizes and amounts of trees allowed to be cut in which portions of the project area, and it repeatedly stated the purpose was to bring the area back to a more natural state. One in which fire could play a helpful role rather than devastating habitat, watershed and threatening homes and lives, as it ultimately did over the last three weeks.

The fact that a commercial logging company, Sierra Forest Products of Terra Bella, was contracted to do the thinning also seems to be a major sticking point for the environmental groups.

I have no problem, whatsoever, with it and I don’t get the angst.

Sierra Forest is a lumber mill (the last remaining one south of Sonora, by the way). They aren’t selling ammo to Al Qaida, for cripes’ sake!

They paid the Forest Service for the timber. They would have used their own equipment and people to do all the work. Then they would have had to pay the Forest Service to come clean up the slash. And, yes, even after all that, they probably would have made a profit on the wood. The devils!

Fazio contended they paid pennies, $25,000, for the timber in comparison with the actual project costs, which she said was $1.6 million.

Even Ara Marderosian, executive director of Sequoia Forest Keeper, though, acknowledged project costs are so high because of the extensive planning that goes into them, which would have to be done regardless of whether a private company did the thinning or it was paid for by taxpayers.

And the lawsuits, of course, also increase costs, Marderosian said. Um ... yeah.

Despite my disagreement on this issue with Sequoia Forest Keeper and Earth Island Institute, they’re doing exactly what they should, reading the documents, asking questions and demanding better.

I just think, at some point, there oughta be a little give and take.

Too bad the fire got all the take on this one.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

Back from two weeks of R&R and here's what I found on my voice mail.

Seems some of our fine citizens took exception to my last column saying we should ban personal fireworks.

Everyone IS entitled to their own opinion...but what do corn dogs have to do with this??

This gentleman thinks I'm an idiot liberal .

According to this caller, I'M out of control and should be banned.

My column was the MOST "stupidest" article this fellow has ever heard.

Here's the corndog comment, which I still don't get.

This very nice and obviously intelligent lady appreciates me. (No, it's not my mom!)

And, lastly, this man takes my logic one leap too far and believes I might also advocate killing Christmas.

I can come up with a number of words to describe what I saw riding along with one of the special fireworks enforcement teams in southwest Bakersfield on the 4th of July.

But it boiled down to these three: OUT OF CONTROL.

Ordinary people of all walks of life had clearly lost their minds.

The air was filled with explosions and smoke. Some fireworks went off like tracer rounds screeching toward the stars, others were rockets that shot up and deployed explosives dangling from little parachutes wafting down over shake-shingled roofs, blasting as they fell. All of it was mixed in with the so-called “safe and sane” stuff popping and showering sparks on nearly every street. And we were only in one small corner of the city.

Effectively policing the illegal stuff was near to impossible.

Between the city and county there were 30 teams of extra personnel all working on overtime chasing illegal fireworks all over the metro area.

These are dedicated, highly professional firefighters and law enforcement people. They know what to look for and, believe me, they get after it.

However — and I say this with all respect — it was like watching children trying to bail out the Titanic with sand pails. The problem is overwhelming.

We must ban all personal fireworks in the city and county.

“That way if anything goes off there’s no question, it’s illegal no matter what,” agreed Bakersfield arson investigator Capt. Ed Watts, who I tagged along with Friday night.

I could only find one local politician who agreed with me about a ban. The rest cited tradition, nonprofits’ reliance on fireworks sales to raise money and not wanting to squelch people’s freedom as reasons for not supporting a ban.

That’s bull.

Our so-called leaders need to get some spine, grow it, borrow it, tape a table leg to your back if you have to, but ban personal fireworks! It may not be popular with the boom-boom crowd but the alternative is just too costly.

Enforcement teams wrote more than 60 citations Friday night. That doesn’t include citations issued by regular engine crews.

Six people were arrested.

There were five fireworks-related fires, including two houses. One home lost the entire roof and suffered $95,000 in damage.

An Oildale man may lose an eye.

And a 19-year-old girl had a gun shoved in her face by a man who stole the cash box at a fireworks booth. I saw her right after the robbery. She was traumatized, doubled over, crying and about to be sick. Happy Fourth of July!

In response to the robbery, all the southwest enforcement teams plus dozens of BPD officers rushed to the scene to catch the loser, tying everyone up for more than an hour while illegal fireworks and who-knows-what kinds of crimes went untended.

Most people cited by the team I was with Friday night were cordial and accepting — even those who were dead drunk, which was most of them.

But at one of our first stops (not even 8:30 p.m.) a man rushed Watts, firefighter Kevin Johnson and BPD officer Nicolas Gospich as they searched a truck. The gentleman, attired in the classic wife-beater T-shirt, yelled at them to get away from the truck.

I’m no criminal mastermind, but antagonizing men with guns and badges, especially when, yup, there were illegal fireworks in the truck, doesn’t seem like the smartest strategy.

That’s how OUT OF CONTROL (see above) the situation is.

As Watts and Gospich calmly and firmly dealt with Mr. Wife Beater, a neighbor came out to ask me what was going on. He shook his head and said they’d been shooting stuff off for two days. He and his wife had been to a barbecue/pool party but cut their visit short to come back and protect their house. A few streets away, we saw a man on his roof hosing it down.

The neighbor didn’t want to give his name but said I could quote him on this: “They should just ban ’em. Ban ’em all.”

You said it, brother.
 

Well, well, well.

Turns out all the hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over whether it would be worse to choke on a cloud of modified hydrofluoric acid or a cloud of sulfuric acid may have been all for naught.

According to the latest environmental document on the proposed expansion of the Big West of California refinery on Rosedale Highway, there’s another refining option that uses no acid.

Huh. Isn’t that interesting?

I wondered why that option, being called Alternative D, hadn’t been put on the table in the first place.

I asked Gene Cotten, the vice president of refining at Big West.

He told me Big West still believes modified hydrofluoric acid (HF) is the best alternative for their project, but they wanted to give the Kern County Board of Supervisors a look at all the options out there.

OK, then why wasn’t Alternative D in the first EIR?

Pause.

“I guess we were a little...caught unaware on the uproar that would be generated,” he said.

An understatement if ever I heard one.

The only downside to Alternative D, from the refinery’s perspective, is that it’s more expensive than modified HF and doesn’t produce as valuable a product. Alternative D will produce gasoline and diesel but not alkalyte, a blending component for cleaner burning fuels.

Will it still do the job? I asked.

“It provides an alternative avenue,” Cotten said.

Translation: Yes.

I’ve said before that I favor the Big West expansion. I still do.
But these little “informational lapses” can’t continue if refinery officials want to gain the public’s trust and approval of their project.

Though Cotten told me Big West presented Alternative D to the county, it was only after the county Planning Department pushed them relentlessly to find more options than the two nasty acids we’ve been arguing over for months.
County planners gave Big West credit for coming up with Alternative D.

But why did it take more than a year and a whole lot of community strife before Alternative D surfaced?

Here’s why. Big West is in business to make money. OK, nothing illegal about that. But they were apparently so attached to the cheaper HF or modified HF options that they dragged the process out, eroding the public’s trust and threatening their own deadlines for taking advantage of EPA air credits.

Despite the turmoil, I do think this was ultimately a healthy process.

For example, one of the best ideas in the EIR includes a zone change proposed by the Planning Department that will force Big West to come to the Board of Supervisors for any substantive future changes to the refinery. That means increased public scrutiny.

Another is a requirement that Big West install real-time video cameras that will feed to a public website, increase notification to local agencies if there’s a spill or leak of any kind and place sensors at nearby businesses to detect any gases being released.

That will make refinery operations more open to the public and the public will be more aware of what’s cooking over there.

Since the 1930s, the refinery has been a fixture in this community.

It needs to be a member of the community as well.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com