Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

Our family huddled by NCTV on Tuesday night to watch the Grass Valley City Council meeting.

It was exciting to see Mount St. Mary’s Academy receive an honor for its 150th anniversary in May. Many teachers and students were present, and as I’ve said before, the City Hall and Council were professional and gracious in honoring the school. Thanks for that.

Next on the agenda was whether the “human figure” (AKA Downtown Association chief Howard Levine) could stay on the Del Oro Mural though it was not originally approved. “Any” change to the mural was supposed to be approved by the Council, according to a previous decision.

The speakers included the Del Oro’s buildings owners and former Mayor Dee Mautino. The Council members also spoke.

All agreed that the rules probably were not followed, but they agreed unanimously (Swarthout, Arbuckle and Cookson) to let the “human figure” stand, and they urged everybody to do better next time. (Miller missed the meeting, and Poston abstained).

Was it a political end around? You can decide.

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I was pleased to hear that The San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com won a Pulitzer Prize for veteran Mark Fiore’s animated political cartooning.

The jurors said that Fiore’s “biting wit, extensive research and ability to distill complex issues set a high standard for an emerging form of commentary.”

The SFGate writeup is here. A list of Pulitzer winners and finalists is here. The Washington Post writeup is here.

Mark and his editor, Vlae Kershner, are former colleagues and friends from my years at The Chronicle and as a board member of the Online News Association. Mark won an ONA award back in 2002, an early indication of his efforts. I’m very proud for both of them (Vlae was a “true believer” in Mark’s work from the get-go) and for The Chronicle. I’m also glad to see the Pulitzer Prize board — now becoming more Web-focused — recognize Mark’s unique style of online cartooning.

Here’s one of Mark’s cartoons, the year 2009 in review:

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The county’s Tea Party Patriots are gearing up for Thursday’s “tax day” rally in Sacramento on Thursday, with busses going to the event.

But for $20, the group is offering a “high quality” webcast that you can see from home. The webcast lasts from noon to 3:30 p.m. on Thursday. A “reduced quality” free webcast also is being offered (see below).

The Sacramento rally is part of a nationwide “tax day” Tea Party protest — including one in Washington D.C. — to coincide with tax filing day. The protests are expected to draw hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Some background about the group’s competing agendas and strategies is here.

“The tea party seems united only in some kind of inchoate anti-government anger that has little to hold it together,” University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis told the Boston Herald. But tea party members say the disputes merely reflect the growing pains of groups formed by people new to the political process and committed to their mission, the newspaper added.

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Grass Valley is proposing to spend $4,500 of the city’s Redevelopment Agency money for “logo” water bottles, aluminum reusable water bottles, banners and brochures to promote the city during the AMGEN Bike Race and California Preservation Conference in May.

The item will be discussed at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting.

Redevelopment Agency money is typically reserved for longer-term redevelopment projects, though a pact between the Agency and Grass Valley Downtown Association technically allows for the promotional funding.

In December, Grass Valley Mayor Lisa Swarthout voted against using city redevelopment money for artwork at the Idaho-Maryland Road roundabout, citing the recession and the city’s financial woes. Now is not a good time to spend money on public art, Swarthout argued.

The artwork also was timed to be completed in time for the AMGEN Bike Race.

As for community redevelopment with plastic water bottles, homes made of recycled water bottles are here. Water bottle public artwork is here.

Here’s “Earth Tear” by Marta Thoma, made of recycled plastic bottles:

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The county’s blogs continue to redefine the media landscape here, with original reporting, “scoops,” commentary and multimedia.

The county-wide political races now underway provide an ideal case in point. Candidates including Sue Horne, Rolf Kleinhans and Gregory Diaz are linking to the questions posted on this blog on their Facebook pages and election websites. Examples are here (see posts 4-6 down the page), here, here and here.

In addition, the candidates are linking to a video produced by local blogger Anna Haynes (whose site is NCFocus) at the recent candidate’s forum. Anna also created NCVoices, a news and commentary aggregation website for our county.

Anna’s video was well received, because KNCO’s sound quality was so poor in some segments that it could not be archived. “Accesors [sic] Office Candidates were eliminated due to poor audio. Our apologies to those candidates,” KNCO’s website reads.

The front-page story in The Union on Tuesday on pay cuts at the Rood Center was reported on this blog back on April 2. The controversy swirling around the Del Oro mural addition, also in Tuesday’s edition of The Union, also was reported here first.

In addition, locals and out-of-towners people ranging from Will Hearst (whose grandfather was William Randolph Hearst) to Tom Dalldorf (who publishes a respected trade publication) all are commenting — and signing their names.

Some other examples:

•The blog “Sierra Voices” by resident Don Pelton was instrumental in providing original reporting on the proposal to outsource management of the library system, as I reported previously. The “grassroots” objections helped kill the proposal.

•Our community also received up-to-the-minute reports from the popular “tech-geek” show “South by Southwest” (SXSW) in Austin on Jesse Lock’s Facebook page.

•The blog “weather guru” provides detailed updates on our local weather via posts and “tweets.” The site includes a live local weather station and webcam.

All told, the blogs are helping to reshape a decades-old media monopoly held by The Union and KNCO in our small media market. Over the years, yubanet.com and a new newspaper, the Nevada City Advocate, have entered the market too. KVMR remains a stalwart of “citizen journalism,” with its corp of resident volunteers who help provide programming.

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