Downstroke

BEC reorganizes: In recognition of its growing advocacy role, along with concerns about how finances have been tracked, Butte Environment Council is reorganizing itself to include a larger board and a full-time office manager position. The 30-year-old nonprofit also hopes to add to its list of dues-paying members and encourage them to become more involved.

A more-involved membership and additional board members will bring “more energy and more diverse backgrounds,” said Barbara Vlamis, BEC’s longtime executive director.

BEC had been considering a reorganization for some time, and then, Vlamis said, “We encountered some problems in our bookkeeping so it accelerated the process. She said “something upsetting” was found and personnel changes were made, including switching to an outside bookkeeper.

BEC started out as a recycling organization but now includes environmental education and advocacy.

Most recently, on Jan. 11, BEC joined other environmental groups in announcing a partnership with ranchers to protect rangeland in the Central Valley while allowing the lands to continue to be used.

Not belly itchers: Two Chico Outlaws pitchers have been snagged by the Chicago Cubs.

The Major League team has purchased the contracts of both Grant Gregg and Alex Perez, Outlaws leaders announced Jan. 10. They will go to spring training in Mesa, Ariz. in the spring and will play on one of the Cubs’ minor league teams.

“I think this represents the team’s and the league’s ultimate goal—for players to go to the next level,” Bob Linscheid, Outlaws general manager, stated in a press release.

Manager Mark Parent called Gregg, 25, and Perez, 23, “the two top lefties in the Golden Baseball League.”

Indian wars: Forty Concow-Maidu Indians who were shut out of gaming revenues when Mooretown Rancheria tribal leaders reclassified them in March 2005 are bringing the matter before the federal government. John Velie, a Norman, Okla. attorney, lodged a complaint this week with the Office of Indian Gaming Management. He said his clients were reclassified so the money they got—about $1.5 million altogether—could be redistributed among the rest of the tribe members.

Velie said the decision of a few tribal members to reclassify the descendants of children born by Ina Jackson before she married distributee Robert Jackson was “unreasonable and arbitrary and in opposition to the [tribe’s] constitution”—all things that could prompt the feds to step in if they determine there were violations of the revenue allocation provisions of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

Descendents of Kate Archuleta dominated the tribe, which operates Feather Falls Casino in Oroville, when it hired an anthropologist who determined that Ina Jackson’s children were “nonlineal.” Velie said that report “was incorrect on a lot of different levels” and he has hired another anthropologist to prove his clients’ case and affirm their cultural identity.

Tribal leaders who supported the reclassification have said they were just honoring the intent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1958 when it named three distributes, including Robert Jackson, but also made reference to Jackson’s wife.