What were they thinking?

Wimping out on air quality

What reason did some members of the board of the Butte County Air Quality Management District—residents of Biggs, Gridley and Oroville—give for not approving a measure that would have lessened the amount of dangerous wood smoke in Chico’s wintertime air?

They didn’t want to tell Chicoans what to do.

Come again? Isn’t it their job to keep the air county residents breathe as clean as possible? Didn’t the Chico-area members of the board, the AQMD staff and the Chico City Council all support the measure? Isn’t the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency threatening to yank highway funds if Chico’s air isn’t cleaned up?

Writing in the CN&R, board member Angela Thompson explained, “As a council member of the city of Biggs, I could not in good conscience vote to limit the freedom of those who live in Chico.”

What about our freedom to breathe, Ms. Thompson?

Wally Herger, “World’s Worst Person”

Throughout his 23 years in Congress, Wally Herger has been a member of the Obscure Caucus—a genial backbencher who’s taken care of his District 2 constituents, voted the Republican line, and stayed out of the limelight.

Until this year, that is, when all of a sudden he found himself being pilloried on national television for a remark he’d uttered at a town-hall meeting in Redding. It was made in response to comments by a man named Burt Stead, who described himself as “a proud right-wing terrorist”—much to the delight of the crowd of 2,000—and asked Herger to go back to Washington and tell “the self-appointed king and all the king’s men we are fed up.”

Instead of reproaching Stead for playing fast and loose with the word “terrorist” and reminding him that Barack Obama was not a king, but rather the duly and democratically elected president of the United States, Herger praised him: “God bless you,” he said, adding, “That’s a great American, isn’t it?”

Within days, CNBC’s Keith Olbermann had picked up the story and was naming Herger that day’s “World’s Worst Person.” He wasn’t fit to be Redding’s dog catcher, let alone congressman, Olbermann stated.

Herger later insisted Stead was just being facetious.

Rank robber

In 2009, Christopher Babb was the personification of what this whole “What were they thinking?” feature is all about.

In July, Babb held up the Tri Counties Bank on Mangrove Avenue. Later that week, he returned to the same location in the same surgical-mask disguise and robbed the bank again. If at first you succeed, why not try, try again, right?

Babb was arrested a few minutes after the second robbery while discarding his disguise at a gas station.

Out on bail, Babb was arrested once again, this time for allegedly selling bogus raffle tickets for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The forgery charges stemming from the raffle scam were dismissed in October when Babb was sentenced to six years in prison for two counts of felony bank robbery.

WTF?

We understand that Derrick Jensen is pissed off—and rightly so—about the current state of affairs concerning the unsustainable direction in which the planet seems to be heading. We also acknowledge that the widely known Northern California environmental activist is a brilliant thinker and author, and give him his due props.

But why did he feel it necessary at Chico State’s Sustainability Conference in November—at which he was a keynote speaker—to repeatedly drop the F-bomb in a midday talk open to people of all ages (including young children, who were in attendance)?

CN&R readers sent in a number of letters in response to our Nov. 12 article critiquing Jensen’s appearance (see “Open mouth, insert soap”), both in Jensen’s defense and otherwise. Jensen, who recently wrote a book for children (see Dec. 3 Downstroke, “Potty mouth pens kids book”), should consider being a little more sensitive to his audience and tailor his speech accordingly.

Folsom’s finest?

Chico’s reputation for … uh … good times, shall we say, evidently is well known in the suburbs of Sacramento. Why else would two undercover Folsom cops head up here and engage in “inappropriate behavior” with two college-aged women?

At least those were the charges levied against Officers Carl Siegler and Brian Unden, who received pink slips from the Folsom Police Department on Jan. 13, 2009. The men also faced charges of “dishonesty” during their internal-affairs interrogation.

Siegler, a 10-year-veteran, and Unden, an officer for six years, were questioned “as to whether they had been to Chico, whether they’d had contact with any women from Chico, and whether they had arrested any women from Chico for prostitution,” according to a court documents. (The men filed a lawsuit to get their jobs back.)

The city of Folsom and the Folsom Police Department “did in fact base [Siegler’s and Unden’s] termination, in part, on their responses during this interrogation.”

Pulling a gun on a reporter

While Melissa Jones hasn’t been convicted of anything at this point—she goes to court in January—the story surrounding her allegedly pulling a .45 Glock pistol on a reporter is just too sensational to pass up in this section. Apparently in March, when Barry Clausen, a freelance journalist writing for the Sacramento Valley Mirror, went to interview Jones, things took a turn for the worse.

Police reports describe the events thusly: Clausen asked Jones questions about a story he was working on about Tehama County’s juvenile hall, where Jones worked as a counselor. When he didn’t get coherent answers from Jones, he walked back to his truck, heard a noise behind him and turned around to see a handgun pointed at his face.

Not the best move to keep things out of the media, but the jury’s still out on this case. So stay tuned in January to find out what Tehama County’s court system decides on the matter.