Don’t worry: They’ve got another bucket. More about that later.

 

The SLO City nincompoops are trying to figure out how to dredge Laguna Lake without bankrupting the city. So far they figure it will cost about half a million per year to clean up the lakebed, and they think it will take about 10 years. If arithmetic serves me right, that’s $5 million to dredge a lake.

 

Think of it—that’s more money than most people will ever earn in several lifetimes, all used to fix up the parts of a lake no one will ever see. If they wanted to replace the water with bourbon, I might be onboard. And that’s not just wishful thinking. Remember, this is the same place where the city spent a cool half mil to fix up the crappers.

 

They’re worried that, left unattended, the lake will turn into a swamp—or a marsh, if you’re asking a politically correct official like City Councilman Andrew Carter. No one’s saying it outright, but if they left the lake alone and it got all mushy, all those pricey waterfront homeowners will lose their idyllic view.

 

This is, of course, an unnatural body of water and probably one of the more polluted places in the city, aside from the particularly pungent pee-smelling areas of SLO Creek.

 

Almost never has the phrase “dug your own grave” fit more perfectly. It’s an artificial lake that left alone would probably turn to a sopping fake wetland—less pristine than a lake, but not necessarily worse. It seems that upsetting the status quo out there is enough to warrant the rest of us footing the bill, despite the fact that most of us don’t live near the lake nor would we particularly mind if it goes a bit more natural.

 

Worst-case scenario: They start dredging and things go as bad as they did in Morro Bay.

 

The Army Corps of Engineers went in with a bucket scoop in addition to the usual suction method. Turns out that the scoop method still sucked, metaphorically. This type of dredging involves a bucket that slowly scoops sediment one scoop at a time. Guess what? The bucket broke, sank to the bottom of the bay, and spewed streams of hydraulic fluid all over the place in the process. It was just vegetable oil in the lines rather than diesel, but it threatened wildlife all the same—on the plus side, all that wildlife is prepped for the deep fryer. Don’t worry, though, they’ve got it covered. They’re getting a new bucket to dig out the old bucket. What could possibly go wrong?

 

Time out time

 

Surprise! Dan DeVaul’s motion for a new trial was tossed out. This was the motion his melodramatic lawyer Jeff Stulberg made after one of the jurors changed her mind about voting DeVaul guilty of two misdemeanor code violations. More accurately, she said in a letter to Stulberg that she didn’t want to vote guilty, but the other jurors and the judge badgered her into it. Afterward, wracked with guilt, she decided to change her mind … again.

 

Kind of cruel, if you ask me. On the one hand, she gave DeVaul a glimmer of hope at dismantling all the charges brought against him. Then again, there was probably never much chance he’d get a new trial because one juror couldn’t stick to her guns and decided instead to blame the judge.

 

But that’s the DeVaul case for you, full of unnecessary thrills and chills that garner it more attention than it’s probably worth. Maybe that’s why at the latest court date a KSBY reporter sent a cameraman to cover the trial without her because she was getting her hair done. Considering the sparse scraggly collection of gray whiskers on DeVaul’s dome, that’s just a low blow. To be fair though, TV journalists don’t have the same luxury to go frumpy like us schlubs in the humble world of print.

 

Even The Trib sent a reporter to the trial in between their ad-nauseam coverage of the Edge-Wilcox sex scandal. (Can’t judge them too much considering this probably makes the New Times’ millionth DeVaul piece.) Not too far back, they published yet another angle on the story of former county administrator David Edge. This piece showed how he shuffled some paper to put every employee at his beck and whim, which begat the downward spiral that coalesced in a juicy sex scandal between his former underling Gail Wilcox and former sheriff’s union leader Tony Perry. That’s a lot of formers.

 

It’s been months since county government became a 24-7 chronicling of Wilcox’s various dear-diary moments. But the juiciest morsel of gossip still waiting to be suckled up is the identity of the Adonis. If it’s been too long for you to get that reference, remember that among Wilcox’s various schoolgirl crushes, she referred to a county employee known simply as the Adonis, like a Sex and the City character. Sure, there was the Sacramento guy and Perry—who never got a nickname—but the Adonis has so far eluded identification.

 

Sorry, grandpa

 

Here’s the sales pitch: “During Move for a Cure, taking place from Oct. 22 to Nov. 30, 2009, a $100 donation will be made to the American Cancer Society on behalf of each new resident who moves in to a Holiday Retirement Community.”

 

You may want to read over that again. I sure as hell did. If it slipped by, let me try to break this down: Send someone to one of these retirement homes, and they’ll donate money to fight cancer.

 

For the family that wants to send grandma or grandpa away but just can’t think of a good enough excuse, help is on the way. “Sorry, Grandpa. Do you want to go to a home or do you want people to have cancer?”

 

This is cancer research to the extreme. The fine folks from Holiday Retirement Communities could have had, I don’t know, a bake sale, or something that didn’t involve turfing old people. But that’s how dedicated they are. If this doesn’t work, they may have to step it up a notch—God help us all.

 

The Shredder is working to fight cancer. Schedule a pickup of your elderly at shredder
@newtimesslo.com.