Please don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.  

In the recent press release from Danco’s Dan Johnson (always a credible source of information) he credits Supervisor Virginia Bass with having put together this pending deal to finally get something done with the Downtowner Motel in Eureka.

These are last minute shenanigans and a desperate attempt to paint over the biggest political blunder in Humboldt County politics.  What I’m talking about here is the report that Danco has expressed interest in buying and refurbishing the blight that is the Downtowner Motel in Eureka. In a press release, Danco Group President Dan Johnson credited Bass with “helping the project come together”.

Now if you don’t know the whole story you might wonder what is a county supervisor doing meddling in a private sector real-estate transaction, but of course most readers do know that the Downtowner Motel has long been owned by recent Planning Commission appointment Kevin McKenny.   McKenny was of course appointed by Supervisor Virginia Bass in what was the most blatant pay back to those who financed Ms. Bass’s political career since her nomination of HumCPR founder Lee Ulansey to the Planning Commission a few months previous.

Did Virginia feel confident that she has so much political capital that she could afford to squander it this lavishly on these crony appointments?  We’ll never know for sure, but it seems the political cost of the McKenny appointment may have been just a bit higher then she’d estimated and so now she and Kevin have been scrambling for a solution, or at least a cover story that would get her past election day, which brings us to this moment, two weeks before the election when they are miraculously able to get a another developer (and friend) to claim they’ll be buying this long blighted property and finally fixing it up.  In fact I bet they’ll have work crews out there today, kind of like we saw on the balloon track before her last election (remember that campaign promise?)!

Of course none of this changes the fact that Virginia Bass would have thought that it was ever appropriate to make yet another appointment of an industry insider onto the Planning Commission.  A commission that is already stacked with members of HumCPR, land speculators and developers.  These people serve their self interest and those of their industry colleagues but they do not serve the interest of average working voters of Humboldt County.  

In fact Kevin McKenny’s judgment is so poor that he’s had all three of his own proposals for the Downtowner rejected by Eureka’s planning department, according to the Times-Standard. They must have been pretty awful as Eureka city government has never met a development project it didn’t like! The idea that anyone would appoint this guy to a county planning commission is outrageous, but I guess it would be one way to get a commission to approve otherwise unacceptable projects?!

This has been a classic example of putting the fox in charge of the hen house and the pending sale of the Downtowner Motel is akin to putting lipstick on a pig.

Richard Salzman represents applied artists from around the world who work as illustrators in the communicating arts.   Recent clients include, America Airlines, Variety Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. You can view their work at www.salzint.com or email richard@richardsalzman.com.