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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
The council will meet at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 19, at Clearlake City Hall, 14050 Olympic Drive.
The meeting will be livestreamed on PEG TV’s YouTube channel.
On March 12, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-25-20, which allows council members to attend city council meetings telephonically.
Community members may observe the meeting in person, but given the health risks associated with COVID-19, the city said people can submit comments and questions in writing for the council’s consideration by sending them to the City Clerk Melissa Swanson at
To give the City Council adequate time to review your questions and comments, please submit your written comments prior to 4 p.m. Thursday, March 19.
Those who have traveled internationally, who may have been exposed or who have symptoms are asked not to attend in person.
On the agenda is the ratification of a proclamation of a state of emergency in the city due to the threat of COVID-19, which as of Wednesday had no confirmed cases in Lake County.
City Manager Alan Flora, who also serves as the city’s director of emergency services, issued the proclamation on Friday, the same day that similar actions were taken by the city of Lakeport and the county of Lake, as Lake County News has reported.
If approved, the proclamation will next be considered during the council’s regular meeting on April 2.
Also on Thursday, the council will discuss a proposal to purchase the Austin Resort property, located across from City Hall on Lakeshore Drive.
Flora is seeking the council’s authorization to sign the proposed letter of intent with Bailey Building and Loans.
In other business, the council will consider awarding a construction contract for the Pearl/Emory/Mullen Avenue Pavement Rehabilitation Project to Lamon Construction. The bid award is for $1,164,209.26, with the authorization for the city manager to approve up to 10 percent for additional unforeseen contract amendments.
On the meeting's consent agenda – items that are not considered controversial and are usually adopted on a single vote – are warrant registers and the annual housing element progress report.
The council also is set to hold a closed session about a potential case of litigation.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
031920 Clearlake City Council agenda by LakeCoNews on Scribd
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- Written by: Edward Lempinen
On Monday, six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area issued a shelter-in-place order, effectively closing all non-essential enterprises.
In the Bay Area and beyond, employees are being assigned to work remotely, using technology to stay connected to their work and co-workers.
But others — in restaurants and service industries, for example — have to be on the job in person. Those vulnerable workers may face slowdowns or shutdowns with little or no access to sick pay or unemployment insurance. Those who fall ill may be confronted with an impossible choice between their income and their health.
The workplace is a defining focus for many Americans, a place where they spend much of their lives earning an income, exercising creativity and connecting with colleagues and customers. This health emergency is sending shock waves across the working world, an impact with no precedent in modern times and no quick end in sight.
For those reasons, UC Berkeley experts said, an extended campaign against COVID-19 amounts to a vast experiment, undertaken in conditions of extreme uncertainty, that could bring temporary and permanent changes, large and small, to American working life.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved a measure last week to provide broad new support to workers affected by the health crisis. Some food and restaurant companies already have reversed longstanding practices and now are providing paid sick leave for their workers, said Saru Jayaraman, director of Berkeley’s Food Labor Research Center.
Still, millions of workers are “absolutely nervous” about their income, their families and their health, she said. “They’re not making enough money to stay home, even if they got minimum wage for every hour that they’re off sick,” she explained. “It’s not enough to pay rent and bills.”
For white-collar workers, orders to work from home will raise a host of questions about motivation, productivity and the impact of isolation. But it may also inspire workplace innovation, said Clark Kellogg, a lecturer at the Haas School of Business.
“As it goes on longer and longer, there will be a rush to do workarounds,” Kellogg said. “When what we usually do doesn’t work anymore, we invent something new. And that innovation is usually done by line workers who just have to get the job done. They get out the proverbial baling wire and duct tape and make something happen.”
Service workers, knowledge workers: a troubling divide
At many workplaces, the reality of the crisis has only begun to hit home in recent days, as the number of infections rises and health experts promote social distancing to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
This is forcing owners, managers and staff to fundamentally re-evaluate what works at work. And it has created a jarring new perspective on the gap between the working poor and workers in more secure positions.
Service workers are essential to the economy: They cook in restaurants, take care of our children, drive sick people to medical appointments and deliver food from farms to distributors. If they can’t they get sick, or if they are laid off, their families struggle, and so do their companies. If too many can’t work, the whole economy suffers.
Jayaraman said there are 14 million restaurant workers in the United States and another 10 million to 15 million in retail. “You’re talking about at least a third of the working population,” she said. “That’s low-wage workers, working full-time and living in poverty.”
Many are working poor, some holding down two jobs. In California, they have at least three sick days, but in other states they may have none. Often they lack health insurance. They can’t afford to be sick, and if they are, they often go to work anyway. But if they’re cooking or providing childcare while ill, they risk transmitting illness.
A teacher can work from home, said Jesse Rothstein, director of Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, or IRLE, and formerly chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor.
“But you can’t tell the store cashier to work from home. You can’t tell the food service worker to work from home,” he said. “It’s disproportionately the lowest income people, and they can’t live for a couple months without income.”
In a March 10 op-ed in the Washington Post, Rothstein and co-author Jared Bernstein warned that “avoidance, social distancing and panic may have enormous economic consequences,” especially for low-income workers. They proposed a solution: a temporary program under which employers would continue to pay idled employees, with reimbursement from the federal government.
Days after the op-ed was published, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a coronavirus-response measure that Rothstein described as “very similar” to what he and Bernstein proposed. It would provide two weeks of paid leave to people who get sick or quarantined, and to those caring for a sick family member or for kids whose schools are closed. If that runs out, the measure would pay up to three months of family or medical leave. Employers would pay those benefits but would be reimbursed by the government. The U.S. Senate is expected to consider the bill as early as this week.
Jayaraman urged even broader support for low-wage workers. Paid sick leave and long-term disability leave will be essential to get through the crisis, she said. But such workers also need higher wages and health insurance, to assure that they can stay home and get care if they get ill.
“This crisis should tell us that it doesn’t work to have some people with access (to health care) and some people who don’t,” she said.
Navigating risk in a white-collar world
For workers in technology and communication fields, the idea of working remotely is well-established. But the coronavirus crisis forces further change, said Don A. Moore, the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair in Leadership and Communication at Berkeley Haas.
Tools such as video conferencing are already in place to support the shift. But a basic question remains hard to assess: What will the impact be on productivity for individual employees, or whole workforces when they’re suddenly moved to the digital realm?
“You can imagine that, for some jobs, that facilitates people’s productivity, but it undermines productivity in other ways,” said Moore. “Tech workplaces like Pixar, for instance, where its facilities (in Emeryville, California) were specifically designed to facilitate face-to-face interaction — that gets lost when people are collaborating online, each one working from the café or from home or the vacation spot where they’re most comfortable. … The magic of collaboration is sometimes lost.”
Isolation brings other risks, both to the employee and to the business or organization, said Cristina Banks, director of Berkeley’s Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces.
“One of the basic human needs is the need to belong, to have social connections,” Banks said. “What we’ve done through social distancing is break those social connections and basically scattered people to the wind. … It could lead to people caring less about their connection to the institution.”
In Banks’ view, the leaders of a business or organization must respond with strategies to preserve connection and esprit de corps. “The operative principle here is certainty and predictability, making conscious efforts to connect people and maintain those connections,” she said. “Management just has to make it happen with great diligence, with great discipline.”
What if this lasts awhile?
Opinions are divided on the impact of extended social distancing. Experts predominantly believe that as governments act to restrict peoples’ movement, as they have in China and Italy, that might effectively slow the advance of COVID-19; others worry about the cost to businesses, workers and the larger economy. At Berkeley, some say that changes imposed by the crisis could spark lasting innovation.
This may be a black swan event; the future, even a few months away, is unpredictable. But Kellogg expressed a cautious hope for the innovation that arises from American workplaces. “How creatively can we think in responding to this?” he asked. “What opportunities does this hand us for thinking differently for teaching and for building communities of learning and living life?”
Edward Lempinen writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
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- Written by: Lake County News reports
The National Guard has been directed by the governor to be prepared to perform humanitarian missions across the state including food distribution, ensuring resiliency of supply lines, as well as supporting public safety as required.
“As Californians make sacrifices over the coming weeks and stay home, we are immensely grateful for medical providers, first-responders and National Guard personnel who are assisting those who are most vulnerable to COVID-19,” said Gov. Newsom.
Tuesday’s announcement, made in the governor’s capacity as the commander-in-chief of the California National Guard, is consistent with duties routinely performed by the California National Guard during natural disasters and other emergencies within the state.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
Officials said Lake County Public Health Officer Dr. Gary Pace is preparing to issue the order.
The news of the potential order, issued just after 5:30 p.m., came within half an hour of the county of Sonoma ordering its residents to shelter in place beginning at 12 a.m. Wednesday, March 18. That health order in Sonoma County – where there are confirmed cases – will be in place for three weeks, until April 7.
Dr. Pace confirmed to Lake County News on Tuesday evening that no COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in Lake County so far.
However, he had told the Board of Supervisors during a Tuesday morning update that about two dozen county residents have been tested for COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
Sheriff Brian Martin said in a Tuesday evening message on social media that neighboring counties are doing shelter in place orders, which appears to be one of the most effective ways of spreading COVId-19’s spread.
Martin said plans for the shelter in place order for Lake County came about as the result of some observations that were made in the community, specifically, residents from Bay Area counties – where sheltering in place has been ordered – are coming to Lake
“It doesn’t make sense that we don’t respond in kind as well,” he said.
That issue also was raised during the Board of Supervisors’ meeting on Tuesday, when Supervisor Rob Brown pointed out that, “When the Bay Area shuts down, the people come to Lake County.”
Brown added, “That’s the concern I have.”
Martin told the board that he was seeing that in his own neighborhood, where Bay Area residents with vacation homes in Lake County are showing up. “This is already happening.”
In his Tuesday evening message, Martin said he wanted to let residents know what a shelter in place order will look like, and that local leaders are working together to tailor it for Lake County.
What it isn’t, said Martin, is locking people in their homes.
He said it is enforceable. “It does carry the weight of law with it.”
However, there will be a list of exceptions.
The list of activities that will be allowed under the order include attending medical and veterinary appointments; traveling to essential businesses such as grocery and hardware stores, pharmacies and restaurants for pickup/delivery; compliance with court orders such as child exchange; conducting business with banks; gas stations for fuel; outside activities with immediate family while adhering to social distancing; picking up school lunches; and private patrol operators working for planned communities such as Hidden Valley Lake.
He said it also won’t stop people from going outside to exercise.
Martin said it also won’t apply to the homeless, who are encouraged to find shelter. “Obviously, you can’t shelter in place if you don’t have a home.”
He said it isn’t applicable on tribal lands and won’t apply to essential workers such as those in government, health care, firefighters, police officers and deputy sheriffs, and banks.
Email Elizabeth Larson at