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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
The wind advisory, which will remain in effect through 11 a.m. Friday, warns of northeast winds of between 20 and 30 miles per hour, with gusts of up to 50 miles per hour expected, the forecast said.
The forecast said winds were expected to shift easterly, with gusty winds beginning in Trinity, Mendocino and Lake counties tonight beginning overnight.
Forecasters said wind gusts will intensify Thursday, peaking in the afternoon.
The National Weather Service said gusty easterly winds will affect much of the area, but especially in Lake County and ridges bordering the Sacramento Valley.
The agency said the wind gusts could make driving challenging.
Temperatures will drop into the 40s at night and rise into the 60s during the day, with the forecast anticipating daytime temperatures to be in the 70s by the weekend.
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- Written by: Lake County News reports
Floods, drought, wildfires and severe weather are just a few of the hazards of concern to the district.
While natural hazards such as these cannot be prevented, an LHMP forms the foundation for the community service district’s long-term strategy to reduce disaster losses by breaking the repeated cycle of disaster damage and reconstruction.
Additionally, jurisdictions with a FEMA-approved LHMP are eligible to apply for both pre- and post-disaster mitigation grant funding.
Community members are invited. The district encourages the public and all interested stakeholders to attend and participate in the upcoming project kickoff meetings.
An initial public meeting will explain the LHMP development process, the benefits of hazard mitigation planning and how you can be involved.
In addition, Hazard Mitigation Planning Committee meetings to develop the plan with the district and other stakeholders are open to the public.
Community members are urged to select the time that works best for them.
Hazard Mitigation Planning Committee
Tuesday, March 26: 1 to 4 p.m.
Hidden Valley Lake Community Services District Conference Room, Hidden Valley Lake
Public meeting
Tuesday, March 26: 5:30 to 7 p.m.
Hidden Valley Lake Community Services District Conference Room, Hidden Valley Lake
For more information on this project, please visit https://www.hvlcsd.org/local-hazard-mitigation-plan.
You may also contact Hannah Davidson at
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- Written by: Elizabeth Fernandez
The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, is the first scientific inquiry into whether infants are at increased risk of neurodevelopmental impairments as a result of maternal vaccination.
The landmark study of more than 2,200 infants from across the country found that in utero exposure to the vaccine caused no abnormal delays when the infants were tested at 12 months and again at 18 months.
“This is a very reassuring finding — pregnant women have been facing unanswered questions around COVID vaccinations for several years,” said first author Eleni Jaswa, MD, MSc, a reproductive endocrinologist and fertility specialist at UCSF Health, noting the investigation started in April 2020. She is also an assistant professor in the UCSF Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences.
First meaningful evidence of maternal vaccination safety during pregnancy
Although pregnant women are considered at increased risk of severe illness with COVID-19, some chose not to get the COVID vaccine due to safety concerns around potential risks to their unborn children.
Some 34% of the participants in the study were vaccinated in the first trimester, about 45% in the second trimester, and nearly 21% in the third trimester. They were asked to complete a 30-item questionnaire assessing whether their infants performed expected milestones.
After adjusting for such factors as maternal age, race, ethnicity, education, income and maternal depression, the researchers found no difference in the risk of infant neurodevelopment at either 12 months or 18 months. They noted an increased risk of delay among male infants at 12 months but the difference was not observed at 18 months.
The study is ongoing.
“Understandably, there’s been concern about the potential impact of maternal vaccination on offspring,” said senior author Heather Huddleston, MD, a UCSF Health reproductive endocrinologist and director of the UCSF Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Clinic, or PCOS.
“Despite early safety data as well as recommendations from physicians and health organizations, vaccine hesitancy is still preventing universal use,” she said. “To this day, misinformation continues to abound. People are concerned about such issues as brain development and conditions like autism in children. This is the first meaningful evidence into the safety of vaccination from the standpoint of early offspring neurodevelopment.”
Co-authors: All from UCSF, the paper’s co-authors are Marcelle Cedars, MD; Karla Lindquist, PhD; Somer Bishop, PhD; Young-Shin Kim, MD, MPH, PhD; Amy Kaing, MD; Mary Prahl, MD; Stephanie Gaw, MD, PhD; Jamie Corley, BS; Elena Hoskin, MS; Yoon Jae Cho, MD; and Elizabeth Rogers, MD.
Elizabeth Fernandez writes for the University of California, San Francisco.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
In a unanimous vote, the supervisors approved creating the “Big Valley Advisory Council,” which is scheduled to hold its first meeting on April 17. The supervisors are expected to come back in two weeks to approve applicants, who are urged to submit their applications by March 27.
There will be five regular members and one alternate, serving two-year staggered terms.
Applications can be found here.
Due to being created by the Board of Supervisors, the new council will be required to operate in accordance with the Brown Act. It is scheduled to meet at the Kelseyville Event Center, also known as the senior center, which the county of Lake is in the process of buying, a plan Supervisor Jessica Pyska promoted.
The council will not represent the entire Kelseyville area, but will cover the Kelsyville planning area, which also includes a portion of Lakeport.
It will not include the Kelseyville Rivieras, as Sabrina Andrus, a business owner and part of the steering committee for the creating the council, said the Rivieras already have representation through their homeowners associations. Pyska said she is encouraging the Riveras to form their own municipal advisory council.
While the board originally was to consider naming the new organization the Kelseyville Advisory Council, at the suggestion of the Citizens for Healing — the group that applied in the fall to the U.S. Board of Geographic Names to rename Kelseyville to “Konocti” — the supervisors chose to name it the Big Valley Advisory Council.
Supervisor Michael Green, whose district the council will partly cover, brought the suggestion forward to the board.
Lucerne resident Alan Fletcher, a Citizens for Healing member, thanked the board for accepting his suggestion to name the council “Big Valley” rather than “Kelseyville, a move which he said is more inclusive.
However, while board members like Moke Simon said he considered the name more inclusive and open, it’s also likely to be more confusing, considering that, based on the Kelseyville planning area map, Big Valley only covers about a quarter of the larger Kelseyville planning area that the council is supposed to represent. It runs from Merritt Road in the south to the lakeshore in the north.
Fletcher’s suggestion appeared to have been submitted on Monday night to the board through its ecomment section on the county website.
“I endorse the formation of a MAC, to remove the discussion of area matters from the members-only Kelseyville Business Association (KBA ) and a private Facebook page. As a participant in citizensforhealing.org, we noted the lack of a MAC in our proposal to ‘Rename Kelseyville to Konocti,’ wrote Fletcher.
“The proposer is surely aware by now that the name of ‘Kelseyville’ is being reviewed by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, and has just been referred to the California Advisory Committee on Geographic Names,” Fletcher wrote. “I therefore believe that it should have a less specific, and potentially less provocative name.”
In an earlier version of the comment, Fletcher wrote, “Save the Name of Kelseyville (SNK) and the Kelseyville Business Association (KBA ) seem to be determined to stamp the offensive name on everything (a new sign, and fund-raising for an arch) … and will then quote the expense of changing them.”
Fletcher also asked the board to consider changing the area plan’s name to Big Valley instead of Kelseyville.
He was accompanied to the meeting by fellow Citizens for Healing group members Verge Belanger, an Upper Lake resident, and Lorna Sue Sides, who manages the Kelseyville Event Center. Belanger and Sides also spoke in favor of that council’s name change and conflated that action with the overall proposal to change the name of Kelseyville.
Group works to establish council
“The community has decided that it is time to establish a municipal advisory council in the Kelseyville area,” said Pyska.
Andrus and Brian Hanson are part of a group that got the effort off the ground.
“The hope for the group from the get-go was to provide an additional space for Kelseyville residents to come together, talk about issues that impact the community,” said Andrus, adding that the catalyst was the timing with the general plan and Kelseyville area plan, which needs to be updated.
In response to questions from Lake County News, Andrus said the effort started Jan. 12 when she sent out an email to a group of Kelseyville residents to discuss forming the council. The group that actually drafted the bylaws included Sabrina Andrus, her sister Caitlin Andrus, Brian Hanson, Greg Panella, Joy Merrilees, Megan Lankford, Rick White, Weston Seifert and Angel Acosta.
Hanson said they reviewed the bylaws of the six other municipal advisory councils in the county.
Those include the Middletown Area Town Hall, the first to be established in December 2006, as well as the Cobb Municipal Advisory Council, Scotts Valley Advisory Council, Western Region Town Hall, East Region Town Hall and the Central Region Town Hall, formerly known as the Lucerne Area Town Hall, which Supervisor EJ Crandell disbanded and reformed after community pushback over a homeless shelter plan for the historic Lucerne Hotel proposed by the Scotts Valley Pomo that came to light in December 2022.
Board Chair Bruno Sabatier said he found it “awkward” that the majority of the area is in District 4 but is titled as an advisory council to District 5. He also urged them to add a seat specifically for the Big Valley Rancheria.
“Because of the thousands of emails that we have received with what’s going on in Kelseyville, and I’ll leave it at that, this also covers the Big Valley area, the sovereign nation of Big Valley, and I would say, offer a seat, because everything that happens in that area has impact to our neighboring communities,” he said.
Pyska suggested working with Green to collaborate with the group. “I always believe that these municipal advisory councils come organically up from the community and I would like to respect that this is what they want to do and I feel like the two supervisors could join together and work collaboratively. We could both support the meeting. We could both be there to report out on what’s going on,” she said.
Rick White, one of the drafters of the bylaws, told the board he supported the Big Valley name for the group and said they have a lot of young people who want to be involved.
Sides thanked Pyska for putting forward the council plan and Green for bringing up its name change, adding she wanted to push out the western border to include more of the Big Valley Rancheria.
The Scotts Valley Pomo also asked for a seat, with tribal leader Gabriel Ray saying they own property and have tribal members who live in the area.
“We’re working on the name change,” he said, referring to the larger Kelseyville name issue, and said he was concerned the group’s formation was a backdoor way of getting around the name change.
Jeanine Pfeiffer, another member of Citizens for Healing, complained about not knowing about the advisory council proposal until that same day and that more public outreach was needed.
Ron Montez Sr., a Big Valley elder and historic preservation officer, also supported naming the council for Big Valley. He said inclusivity is something they have been seeking for years and that it’s been a stumbling block in the Kelseyville community and around the lake.
Sarah Ryan, environmental director for Big Valley Pomo, wanted them to waive the residency requirement because it would limit who the Big Valley tribal leadership could select to represent them on the council. Ryan also said the map seemed “arbitrary,” with multiple tribal-owned parcels not on it.
“We have to start somewhere and so this is the starting point,” Pyska said.
“Or the starting point that is proposed,” Sabatier said.
Andrus said the Kelseyville name change has not been a part of the conversation for the group that put together the council’s bylaws. Rather, she said their goal has been to draft a resolution, create bylaws and get them to this point.
Sabatier said they will be looking at diversity and inclusion in selecting council members.
Simon warned the group that the Brown Act “is a pain in the butt” to deal with. “It complicates things as much as it helps things out with these advisory committees.”
Pyska offered the resolution, with the name amended. The board approved it 5-0.
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