Highway 299 east of Cedarville is showing the effects of heavy truck traffic

Ruby - Don't Take Your Pipes Through Town

    Residents and business owners in Cedarville can expect to see at least 1,400 trucks using County Road 1 -- the town’s main street -- for a 30-day period as sections of 80-foot-long pipe and materials for the Ruby Pipeline are transported from Gerlach to Vya.
    The trucks are being routed through Surprise Valley instead of using Nevada State Route 34 because of threats to air quality, according to a spokesman for El Paso Corporation, the parent company of Ruby Pipeline.
    “Because of extremely dry weather on the original routing and the dust conditions, our alternatives are limited,” Ruby Pipeline spokesman Richard Wheatley told the Modoc Independent News.
    “Our permitting with the state of Nevada does not allow us to generate such a high volume of dust and the cost for dust suppression, water and chemicals, is estimated at $20,000 per mile,” Wheatley explained. “We must stay in compliance with our permits in Nevada.”
    Rockford Corporation, the company contracted to work in the Vya area, will be laying 42 miles of pipe at 70 joints of pipe per mile for a total of 2,800 joints or sections. At two sections per truck that amounts to 1,400 trips on CR 1 and California State Route 299 east to the Nevada state line, according to Wheately.
    Wheatley said El Paso Corporation is aware of the community’s concerns about traffic and the impact on local roads.
    “We are coordinating with local officials, but without any available alternatives we’re looking at 30 days of truck traffic through Cedarville,” Wheately said, adding that Rockford representatives recently met with the Modoc County road department to discuss the impact of increased truck traffic.
    Because Modoc County Road Department offices are closed on Fridays no one was available to answer a media query. It is not known if the county has set any conditions mitigating the trucks’ impact on county roads.
    “The last thing we want is to not be a good neighbor,” said Wheatley. “We will do everything in our power to minimize impacts to Modoc County and its citizens. When we walk away we will not leave the roads in bad condition. We understand the community’s concern.”
    Several months ago Supervisor Dan Macsay, sounding at the time like a spokesman for Ruby Pipeline rather than a county official concerned with road conditions, told members of the Surprise Valley Chamber of Commerce that Ruby Pipeline trucks loaded with pipe would be traveling up Nevada State Route 34. While over enthusiastic, Macsay was correct.
    But on Wednesday, Sept. 22 Macsay emphatically told chamber members Ruby Pipeline officials never said they would not haul pipe through California, according to a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
    Macsay repeated several times that SR 299 from Cedarville to the Nevada state line, “will not be re-done, no one is going fix that road,” according to the source.

-- Barbara March

Letter to Our Bloggers


We love reading your mail. Or, more accurately, the exchanges between bloggers on a variety of Modoc-gate related subjects and sub-subjects.

But it troubles us when someone makes an unfounded declaration such as a recent one that stated, “First no one has cited the law which is alleged to have been violated.”

Not true. Perhaps this person has not been following the Modoc-gate story closely, or only recently joined in the energetic and constructive dialogue.

There has been considerable coverage on this blog and in its sister newspaper the Modoc Independent News of the Modoc County Board of Supervisors’ misappropriation of nearly $20 million.

One way to catch up on our coverage is to use the “search” window on the upper left corner of the blog’s home page. We tried entering “penal code 424” and came up with a story we wrote titled “Woolverton Open to Investigation.” The article was posted Feb. 10, 2010.

There are also numerous exchanges between bloggers on the subject of the law as it pertains to the misappropriation, and there is coverage of each of the letters of complaint filed with the Modoc County District Attorney, Attorney General’s Office and State Controller’s Office.

-- Ray A. March

Editorial

An Open Letter to the
Modoc County Grand Jury


Dear Wesley Cook, (foreperson); Frank Carter, Carol Irwin, Jim Massey, Jr., Terry McChesney, Gary Slinkard, Bob Zane, Barbara Boyd, Loretta McGiffin, Leta Bethel, and alternates Patricia Budmark and
Jerry Schliesser.

When it comes to your duties as grand jurors there are a few people in Modoc County who continually want to muddy your waters.

A case in point are your duties as  Modoc County’s grand jury. There is a vagueness that verges on contrivance to keep you in the dark when it comes to the extent of your broad and powerful authority.

Not a single grand jury to date has managed to get to the truth of who was responsible for the illegal misappropriation of the millions of dollars of tax payers’ money from the county treasury.

Please remember: The responsibility for investigating and bringing to a legal resolution -- whether civil or criminal -- is a local one, and not that of the state, as some have suggested.

One might ask, should anyone be held accountable for this travesty of justice? By that we mean the travesty of taking someone else’s money without asking, and the travesty of past grand juries' failure to do anything about it.

You should know the answer to that question, and if you don’t we suggest you immediately resign. Too many people are watching you.

The Modoc County Board of Supervisors has officially stated it knew nothing, we repeat, nothing, about the illicit transactions that supposedly were meant to keep Modoc Medical Center open for business.

If that is the truth, that the money was used to keep MMC operating, how does the Board of Supervisors know that? And if the board knows in any detail how the money was taken from the treasury, the board also knows who did it.

So, why hasn’t the board come forth with hard evidence that the motive for taking money that belonged to someone else was merely an altruistic move on the part of well-meaning county officials?

And, if it’s true the Board of Supervisors, especially Dan Macsay, Dave Bradshaw and Patricia Cantrall, did not know of the misappropriation are they not guilty of dereliction of duty?

Come on, folks. The money didn’t just voluntarily jump out of one account and into another.

We encourage you to do your homework and answer your legally-given duties to represent the people of this county. Don’t rely only on what you are told by one or two so-called experts. Do your own research by going beyond the borders of Modoc County thinking.

And please, do not delay your investigation. We were stunned when we learned the last grand jury waited over nine months before it started investigating the most serious and embarrassing scandal this county has ever witnessed.

As one former grand juror said, “The whole world is watching.”

-- Ray A. March