News

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — A housing project for formerly incarcerated individuals will be the subject of a public meeting to be held next week.

The Lake County Probation Department and Rural Communities Housing Development Corp., or RCHDC, will hold the community meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 23.

It will take place from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Board of Supervisors chambers at the Lake County Courthouse, 255 N. Forbes Street, Lakeport.

The Board of Supervisors gave the go-ahead to the project in August.

The Lake County Probation Department reported the project is needed for “justice-involved individuals to deal with the large amount of this population that are homeless in Lake County following incarceration.”

Chief Probation Officer Wendy Mondrans told Lake County News that the project has a cost of over $24 million and will be a new build, not a retrofit of an existing building.

At the Oct. 23 meeting, topics will include the housing project plan, potential locations for it and the resources that will be available for individuals who will be housed in the project.

Mondrans will be at the meeting, as will Ryan LaRue, chief executive officer for RCHDC. The organization also is building an apartment complex for Behavioral Health clients and low-income families on Collier Avenue in Nice.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has dozens of dogs deserving of new homes.

The shelter has 39 adoptable dogs listed on its website.

This week’s dogs include “Rain,” a 3-month-old female American pit bull terrier mix with a gray and white coat.

The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.

This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

The California Department of Public Health, or CDPH, reports a total of 13 human bird flu cases have been confirmed in California.

All 13 cases are Central Valley individuals who had direct contact with infected dairy cattle and were confirmed after additional testing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC.

Beginning next week, CDPH will report newly confirmed cases on its bird flu website. The website will be updated three times a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Given the amount of exposure individuals with bird flu infections have with infected cows, evidence continues to suggest only animal-to-human spread of the virus in California.

Additionally, based on CDC’s genomic sequencing of three California bird flu cases, there is no evidence to suggest an increased ability for the virus to infect or spread between people and no known reduced susceptibility to antiviral medications.

All individuals have experienced mild symptoms, including eye redness or discharge (conjunctivitis), and have been treated according to CDC guidance. None of the individuals have been hospitalized.

While the risk to the general public remains low, additional, sporadic human cases of bird flu are expected to be identified and confirmed in California among individuals who have regular contact with infected dairy cattle.

CDPH continues to work closely with local health jurisdictions to identify, track, test, confirm, and treat possible and confirmed human cases of bird flu.

Additional Information on bird flu

Risk remains low: The risk to the general public remains low, but people who interact with infected animals, like dairy or poultry farm workers, are at higher risk of getting bird flu. CDPH recommends that personal protective equipment, or PPE, such as eye protection (face shields or safety goggles), respirators (N95 masks), and gloves be worn by anyone working with animals or materials that are infected or potentially infected with the bird flu virus. Wearing PPE helps prevent infection. Please see CDPH’s Worker Protection from Bird Flu for full PPE guidance.

Pasteurized milk and dairy products continue to be safe to consume, as pasteurization is fully effective at inactivating the bird flu virus. As an added precaution, and according to longstanding state and federal requirements, milk from sick cows is not permitted in the public milk supply.

What CDPH is doing: CDPH has helped coordinate and support outreach to dairy producers and farm workers on preventive measures that have helped keep human cases low in other states with bird flu outbreaks. CDPH continues to support local health departments in distributing PPE from state and federal stockpiles directly to affected dairy farms, farmworker organizations, poultry farm workers, those who handle raw dairy products, and slaughterhouse workers. To protect California farm workers from bird flu, during the last four months CDPH has distributed more than 400,000 respirators, 1.4 million gloves, 170,000 goggles and face shields, and 168,000 bouffant caps.

In addition, CDPH is working closely with local public health laboratories and local health departments to provide health checks for exposed individuals and ensure testing and treatment are available when needed. As one of the 14 states with infected dairy herds, California also received 5,000 additional doses of seasonal flu vaccine for farm workers from the CDC. Those doses will go to local health departments with the highest number of dairy farms.

CDPH has been tracking bird flu and making preparations for a possible human infection since the state’s first detection in poultry in 2022. CDPH partners closely with the California Department of Food & Agriculture (CDFA) on a broad approach to protect human and animal health. CDPH and the CDC use both human and wastewater surveillance tools to detect and monitor for bird flu, and work closely with local health departments to prepare, prevent, and lessen its impact on human health.

What Californians can do: People exposed to infected animals should monitor for the following symptoms for 10 days after their last exposure: eye redness (conjunctivitis), cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, diarrhea, vomiting, muscle or body aches, headaches, fatigue, trouble breathing, and fever. If they start to feel sick, they should immediately isolate, notify their local public health department, and work with public health and health care providers to get timely testing and treatment.

CDPH recommends that all Californians — especially workers at risk for exposure to bird flu — receive a seasonal flu vaccine. Although the seasonal flu vaccine will not protect against bird flu, it can decrease the risk of being infected with both viruses at the same time and reduce the chance of severe illness from seasonal flu.

For the latest information on the national bird flu response, see CDC’s Bird Flu Response Update.

A decedent’s child is his or her heir, along with any surviving spouse/registered domestic partner, and as an heir may — or may not — be entitled to a portion of their deceased parent’s estate.

California law does not require a parent to include a child as a beneficiary under the parent’s estate planning.

However, in the absence of effective estate planning (that is, without executing a valid will, trust and death beneficiary forms) a child may be entitled to a portion of the deceased parent’s estate.

Estate planning documents, of course, may alter that situation. An omitted child may then choose to litigate whether they are entitled to a share of the estate.

A disinheritance clause is included in an attorney drafted will and a trust instrument to show the decedent’s intention to exclude any unintended surviving heirs, including children, from inheriting under the decedent’s will or trust.

A general disinheritance provision is legally sufficient to disinherit any heirs, even though the heirs’ names are not specifically mentioned as being disinherited (Rallo v. O’Brien (2020), 52 CA5th 997).

California law, however, does provide certain protections for surviving children who are omitted in a will or trust, but provides for much stronger protection for those omitted children who were born or adopted after the execution (signing) of the will or trust; unless such instrument was later updated after the child’s birth. That is, after born and adopted omitted children are generally entitled, unless an exception applies, to receive a share in the decedent’s estate (section 21620 of the Probate Code).

This is why people are advised to update their estate planning after the birth or adoption of a child to specifically provide for or disinherit such children.

Children who were already alive when the decedent executed their estate planning documents, however, only receive some minimal protection in California. That narrow protection only applies, “… if the decedent failed to provide for a living child solely because the decedent believed the child to be dead or was unaware of the birth, then the child shall receive a share in the estate … (Section 61622 Probate Code).”

Recently, in Carla Montgomery versus Benita Williams, the Fourth Appellate District on Aug. 24, 2024, ruled in a case where the decedent’s will only benefited the decedent’s two children from his two marriages but did not include his four other biological children, including one child, the plaintiff Carla Montgomery, whom the decedent did not even know he had fathered when he signed his will. The court found that Carla had failed to show that her biological father had failed to provide for Carla “solely because …. [the father] was unaware of her birth.”

Even though the will did not include a “Disinheritance Clause,” the court strictly interpreted section 62622.

Looking at the facts, the court held that, “Benjamin’s omission of four known pretermitted children and his naming as beneficiaries only the two children resulting from his marriage shows his intent that only those two children should receive a share of his estate.”

Regardless of whether an omitted child was born before or was born after the decedent executed the testamentary documents, an omitted child will not receive an inheritance if any of the following apply: (1) the decedent’s failure to include the child was intentional and apparent from the testamentary instrument; (2) the decedent left substantially all of their estate to the other parent of the omitted child; and (3) the decedent otherwise provided for the omitted child outside of the estate passing under the testamentary instrument and the decedent’s intention for such other gift(s) to be in lieu of an inheritance under the testamentary instrument is shown by statements of the decedent, evident from the amount of the transfer, or otherwise evident (Section 61621 Probate Code).

The foregoing each requires a facts and circumstances analysis which may lead to litigation.

The foregoing is not legal advice. Anyone confronting the issues addressed should consult with a qualified attorney.

Dennis A. Fordham, attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and 707-263-3235.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes have identified a supermassive black hole that has torn apart one star and is now using that stellar wreckage to pummel another star or smaller black hole, as described in our latest press release.

This research helps connect two cosmic mysteries and provides information about the environment around some of the bigger types of black holes.

This artist’s illustration shows a disk of material (red, orange, and yellow) that was created after a supermassive black hole (depicted on the right) tore apart a star through intense tidal forces. Over the course of a few years, this disk expanded outward until it intersected with another object — either a star or a small black hole — that is also in orbit around the giant black hole. Each time this object crashes into the disk, it sends out a burst of X-rays detected by Chandra. The inset shows Chandra data (purple) and an optical image of the source from Pan-STARRS (red, green, and blue).

In 2019, an optical telescope in California noticed a burst of light that astronomers later categorized as a “tidal disruption event”, or TDE. These are cases where black holes tear stars apart if they get too close through their powerful tidal forces. Astronomers gave this TDE the name of AT2019qiz.

Meanwhile, scientists were also tracking instances of another type of cosmic phenomena occasionally observed across the Universe. These were brief and regular bursts of X-rays that were near supermassive black holes. Astronomers named these events “quasi-periodic eruptions,” or QPEs.

This latest study gives scientists evidence that TDEs and QPEs are likely connected. The researchers think that QPEs arise when an object smashes into the disk left behind after the TDE. While there may be other explanations, the authors of the study propose this is the source of at least some QPEs.

In 2023, astronomers used both Chandra and Hubble to simultaneously study the debris left behind after the tidal disruption had ended. The Chandra data were obtained during three different observations, each separated by about 4 to 5 hours. The total exposure of about 14 hours of Chandra time revealed only a weak signal in the first and last chunk, but a very strong signal in the middle observation.

From there, the researchers used NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) to look frequently at AT2019qiz for repeated X-ray bursts. The NICER data showed that AT2019qiz erupts roughly every 48 hours. Observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and India’s AstroSat telescope cemented the finding.

The ultraviolet data from Hubble, obtained at the same time as the Chandra observations, allowed the scientists to determine the size of the disk around the supermassive black hole. They found that the disk had become large enough that if any object was orbiting the black hole and took about a week or less to complete an orbit, it would collide with the disk and cause eruptions.

This result has implications for searching for more quasi-periodic eruptions associated with tidal disruptions. Finding more of these would allow astronomers to measure the prevalence and distances of objects in close orbits around supermassive black holes. Some of these may be excellent targets for the planned future gravitational wave observatories.

The paper describing these results appears in the October 9, 2024 issue of the journal Nature. The first author of the paper is Matt Nicholl (Queen’s University Belfast in Ireland) and the full list of authors can be found in the paper, which is available online at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02181

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission at https://www.nasa.gov/chandra and https://chandra.si.edu.

LAKEPORT, Calif. — The Lakeport City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday night in favor of the proposal to upgrade the police department’s body-worn camera system with a five-year service contract that will cost about $100,000.

The Lakeport Police Department has been using body-worn and in-car audio/video devices, often referred to as BWC and MAV, respectively, from the company Waterguard as their vendor since 2006.

Motorola Solutions Inc. acquired the company in 2019 and will “no longer support our current system,” Police Chief Dale Stoebe said in his presentation at the council meeting.

While the police department will continue to use the current MAV, it began to review upgrade options on BWC in early 2024.

This week, Stoebe proposed to the city to engage in a five-year service contract with Motorola Solutions Inc. paid in annual installments which will cost a total of $99,892.35 over five years with a first year expense at $27,728.37.

Some of the contract benefits include 12 body-worn cameras with access to evidence library services, wireless transfer hardware, and accidental damage coverage. It also includes a refresh of all BWC devices in the third year and an $8,500 credit for turning in the department’s current Waterguard devices.

The agreement does not include any new mobile audio/video, or MAV, devices — in-car cameras in the police vehicles. MAV units can be purchased separately at about $11,000 each.

Stoebe mentioned another option they had considered but dropped, also from Motorola Solutions Inc. — the city may purchase equipment and services from the company as needed instead of entering a five-year contract. That would cost $103,077.74 for wireless transfer hardware with a year-one service subscription, plus $9,000 for each new body-worn camera.

Stoebe concluded that the five-year service contract option was “the most financially prudent option.”

Stoebe acknowledged that continuing using the current MAV and BWC equipment remains an option to save costs. “However, the lifespan of both the equipment and software is uncertain,” he said, adding that it would present “significant risks” as outdated MAV and BWC systems may result in increased legal, administrative and training costs, reduced public trust and negative impact on prosecution of criminal offenses.

Mayor poses questions about proposed contract, existing equipment

After Stoebe’s presentation, Lakeport Mayor Michael Froio asked if the department’s current MAV devices are still in good shape, out of the context that the proposed contract does not include any new MAV units.

“I believe so,” Stoebe responded, explaining that unlike the MAV that stays in the car, the BWC is the “workhorse” that wears out faster as it’s “exposed to the elements” — the heat and cold, the rains and occasional snows.

“Also they are worn by an officer conducting their work and sometimes they take a fair amount of brutality in that work,” Stoebe added. “That’s why they tend to be the ones that fail first.”

“I have a smile on my face tonight so don’t worry,” Froio said. “I like your approach that you’re looking to reuse as much of the equipment as we can.”

Froio has been a firm proponent of city staff bringing multiple bids for contracts, whether it be for equipment purchases or consulting services.

He then went on to ask why Motorola Solutions Inc. appeared to be the only bid in Stoebe’s presentation. “Should we have in the future looked at other systems?” Froio asked.

“It’s not that we have not looked at other bids,” Stoebe responded.

“We have solicited both Axon and Lenslock for bids for various elements,” Stoebe said of the two other major BWC and MAV makers besides Motorola Solutions Inc.. But those bidding prices were not included in Stoebe’s presentation.

“It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison,” Stoebe said of the technology involved. “There are just a lot of complexities in presenting multiple bids.”

Stoebe also suggested that it’s better to “stay with one platform” for all devices than to have two platforms. Since the current Waterguard MAC integrates easily with Motorola Solutions,

He said that to be the best stewards of the taxpayers money, the city should continue to use the MAV equipment until it fails. Stoebe also implied that it’s best to use the BWC from the same company rather than getting it from a separate vendor.

In response to Froio’s question, Stoebe also mentioned that Axon is the leader in the industry, which is reflected in their high bidding prices — $101,183.58 just for body cameras, another $150,651 for MAVs and they require onboard computers in the police vehicles that will incur extra costs.

“You’re doing a good job,” said Froio.

Stoebe also mentioned that body-worn cameras are standard in California and “definitely a hiring and retention concern.”

The Lakeport Police Department now has 12 officers including the chief, one short of full staff, Stoebe told Lake County News later in a phone call. Two more officers are going to leave the department by the end of the year, he said.

During public comment, Lakeport Police Officers’ Association President Todd Freitas spoke against a “bifurcated system.”

“As somebody that has to respond to quite literal life and death situations, me being able to touch one thing and have all my whole system work is invaluable to having critical decision making,” Freitas said.

Email Lingzi Chen at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..