County Council Report

It’s the day after the County Coun­cil meet­ing, and I’m sit­ting here in my yurt in the jun­gle of South Puna lis­ten­ing to John Lennon on the stereo as I write this. All these years after his death he still shines on as he said we all would. Just imag­ine if we really had a world like he imag­ined. What would it be like? Could we make it hap­pen? Are we will­ing to live our dreams?

I am, and I’m happy to meet oth­ers who live here and are doing the same. I would say there is a higher per capita num­ber of per­sons in this area who share a dream sim­i­lar to mine, than any­where else I lived for many years, and that’s why we moved here.

There was some very mov­ing tes­ti­mony yes­ter­day by per­sons who are directly affected by the cur­rent anti-cannabis pro­gram. There was also excel­lent tes­ti­mony by a teen court judge in favor of legal­iza­tion and reg­u­la­tion, a sup­port­ive sub­stance abuse coun­selor and oth­ers who spoke knowl­edge­ably about the detri­men­tal effects of sup­press­ing cannabis production.

Coun­cil­man Bob Jacob­sen, a nurse who expe­ri­enced first hand the dev­as­tat­ing effects of ice and a Green Party mem­ber, was very recep­tive and voted to put our ini­tia­tive on the bal­lot as did Coun­cil­man Angel Padillo (?). Coun­cil­man Gary Saf­farik more or less abstained mak­ing his vote auto­mat­i­cally go with those block­ing the ini­tia­tive. The County Attor­ney was less sup­port­ive than I expected from what Roger had said. I don’t know of any plan to pur­sue this in the courts at this time.

The vote actu­ally came down to whether a tech­ni­cal­ity actu­ally exists which would allow us to put the ini­tia­tive on the bal­lot with only five sig­na­tures. Some coun­cil mem­bers expressed sup­port for what we want to do but did not want to set a prece­dent of allow­ing an ini­tia­tive on the bal­lot with only five sig­na­tures. Any­how, there were all kinds of obsta­cles put up.

Now we know we have to find out how coun­ties like Men­do­cino, CA did it and get the nec­es­sary sig­na­tures to put it on the bal­lot in two years. The coun­cil knows they’re play­ing defense but that we don’t have our act totally together yet.

After­ward, a group of us who stayed to the end went to the lagoon for a smoke and debrief­ing ses­sion. We agreed that one of the best out­comes of all this is that we got to come together and know each other and these rela­tion­ships will con­tinue. My wife and I met doing orga­niz­ing work and she was there tes­ti­fy­ing too yes­ter­day speak­ing from her nurs­ing expe­ri­ence with ice addicts. Today, I want to call Bob Jacob­sen and find out more about what the Green Party is doing here since I am more philo­soph­i­cally aligned with them than any other party. Aloha.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 08:20 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.