Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/81459
A 15-year-old boy was approached around 5 p.m. Thursday by an unshaven man in his 60s and offered an illegal drug at the TRAX bus station on Rio Street in Red Bluff. RBPD seeking suspect in unwanted advances The gray haired man began rubbing the boy on the shoulder during the confrontation and asked the boy whether he would go home with him, according to a press release issued Saturday by the Red Bluff Police Department. The boy refused and boarded a bus. The day before, around 3:30 p.m., the boy had seen the man on a TRAX bus and the man had greeted the boy, the release said. When the boy's mother asked the man his name, he was unintelligible and slurring his words. FIRE Continued from page 1A test run of FPA, which included data from 46 of the nation's 139 fire planning units — all that was avail- able at that time, said Stephen Botti, who led the Fire Program Analysis pro- ject for the National Park Service before he retired. Under the parameters, no The man is described as an unshaven 60-year-old man with grey hair standing about 5 feet 5 inches tall with a skinny build. He walks with a cane. Anyone with information regarding the man's iden- tity is asked to call the Red Bluff Police Department at (530) 527-3131 CHASE Continued from page 1A behind Sacred Heart Parish School and stopped pursuit due to the rough terrain, which almost caused the truck to lose control, according to a press release from the Red Bluff Police Department. Continuing at about 50 ARTIST Continued from page 1A color represents the surre- al, while the mythological figure of the goat sucking Chupacabra oddly is the link to mortality and the real, rescuing the audience from the fanciful dream." Visitors are encouraged to stop by and meet Bourke-Girgis. She is nor- STATE Continued from page 1A request mailed copies of these forms, call the Tax- payer Information Section at 800-400-7115, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, except state holidays. Tehama County repre- sentatives to be at Thurs- day's event include: Ani- mal Control, Assessor, Community Action mph, the truck eventually became stuck in a deep ditch and the driver fled on foot southbound toward Derby Road. Tehama County Sheriff's Office and California Highway Patrol, including a search helicopter, the suspect was able to escape. Despite assistance from investigation. The case is still under mally in the gallery noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Bourke-Girgis will pre- sent her work, and accom- panying drawings and notes at the First Friday Art Night reception on Friday, Sept. 7. She will return to Dublin, Ireland to begin her graduate studies at the National College of Art in Dublin. Agency, Environmental Health, Landfill Agency and Planning and Building and CalFire Resource Management Vital Records. providers include CalE- MA, American Red Cross, Waste Connection, PG&E, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, DMV, Department of Insurance, Contractors State License Board, and Franchise Tax Board. Other participating Top retirees benefited from cash out unit's budget would change by more than 5 percent to minimize disruption and allow for long-term plan- ning, he said. Tuesday, September 4, 2012 – Daily News 7A There's no way.' And that was the beginning of the end." Jim Hubbard, deputy chief of the Forest Service, paints a different picture. Hubbard said complaints poured in from across the county — from both Forest Service and Interior bureaus — that the test results "just didn't make sense." Even units with the largest num- ber of fires recommended a closer look at the model, he said. are evident in a chart dubbed "The Christmas Tree," because the red-and- green list of units deserving more or fewer resources resembled one. The winners and losers ernment consultant and the Department of Interior men- tioned these flaws: The new version doesn't The test recommended putting more resources in the West — including units in Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Califor- nia — as well as fire-prone areas of central Florida and southwest Texas. Areas warranting fewer resources included other parts of Texas, the South and Midwest. Colorado would have been impacted minimally. "It was more a matter of the feedback we got from the planning units," said Hubbard, a former Colorado state forester who authored the seminal firefighting strategy report that led to FPA's creation. "The politics just didn't come into it." John Phipps, a Forest Service official working on the revised model, has said agency field officers feared "they'd become victims of some scientist's planning model." The model also suggest- ed taking money out of Alaska and putting more into the Sierra region in Cal- ifornia. Botti said the Ton- gass National Forest in Alaska, the nation's largest, "had a very large budget and almost no fires." spokesman, the Alaska for- est has a $775,700 wildland fire budget this year and four five-person engines. The largest fire there in the last 22 years burned 600 acres, he said. The Denver Post in July requested a 10-year history of wildfire budget amounts for each of the Forest Ser- vice's nine regions. To date, the Forest Service has not provided any numbers in response to that request. Botti said FPA develop- ers emphasized the results were preliminary. "No one was saying, 'This is going to be your budget,'" Botti said. Even so, the prospect of According to a nia's top-paid school administrators got to collect six-figure lump sum cash payments in addition to their pensions by taking advantage of a little-known legislative provision that was intended to help retain and recruit teachers during the dot-com boom. SACRAMENTO (AP) — For nearly a decade, Califor- option, was approved by the state Legislature in 2000 to boost the state's teaching ranks at a time when California was projected to face a teacher shortage. The benefit, which is allowed in some form in about a dozen states, lets retiring educators tap into their pension accounts for a large cash payment in exchange for a reduced monthly pension check. Yet many who took advantage of the benefit from the California State Teachers' Retirement System turned out to be highly paid administrators who already stood to receive generous monthly pension checks, according to data obtained by The Associated Press under a California Public Records Act request. According to the AP's analysis, approximately 180 par- ticipating retirees receiving $100,000 or more a year in pen- sions took home an average additional lump-sum payment of $147,000 when they retired between 2002 and 2010. In the largest such payout, Alan Nishino took a lump sum payment of $421,000 when he retired in July 2009 as superintendent of the Morgan Hill Unified School District in Santa Clara County. He continues to draw a $200,000-a- year pension. ''That wasn't our target audience, I can guarantee you The program, known as the ''partial lump sum'' payment budget shifts proved unac- ceptable to Forest Service officials, he and others said. "As soon as the prelimi- nary run was seen by the persons in authority, it went hyper-political," Botti said. "The answer from the lead- ership was, 'Politically unacceptable.'" He said one Forest Ser- vice official "blatantly told me that the Forest Service cannot accept even a 5 per- cent shift, even within the Forest Service, even between one forest and another." Asked Botti: "Then what was the point of running an analysis?" Joy, the retired GAO expert, said the initiative "got strangled in the crib." He said the Forest Ser- that,'' said Jonathan Lightman, executive director of the Faculty Association of Community Colleges, after being informed about the AP's review of the program. The faculty association sponsored the bill that estab- lished the enhanced benefit. A legislative analysis from that time showed it was intended to encourage educators to work an additional three years to age 60 because the state was projected to need 300,000 teachers within the next decade. ''When Wall Street was performing really, really well, the whole idea was, 'How do you use the gains in the stock market as a way to incentivize people to either enter or to stay in education when private-sector salaries were far out- stripping that in education?' That really was the question,'' Lightman said. You DO have a choice in the Red Bluff area. Caring & Compassionate Service Full traditional burial service or cremation Red Bluff Simple Cremations & Burial Service 722 Oak Street, Red Bluff, FD Lic. 1931 527-1732 vice was unwilling to take on Sen. Ted Stevens,the Alaska Republican who served as chairman of the powerful Senate Appropria- tions Committee. In Interior, "the Bureau of Land Management was on board. The BLM was willing to do it. The Forest Service sunk it," Joy said. "The Forest Service responded, 'There's no way we're taking this to the Hill. did convene a team of scien- tists for a technical review of the original FPA model. The group questioned its ability to deal with fire conditions that deviate from expecta- tions, among other items. The original FPA's methodology, however, passed a peer review in a scientific journal last year, said Rideout, the CSU econ- omist. Wally Josephson, the FPA project leader in 2005 and 2006, said when the test of the new system was run, "I think it worked. It was a good start." The agencies involved differentiate between highly valued resources, such as houses and endangered species, and acres in remote forests. And it allows feder- al agencies to tinker annual- ly with the factors that deter- mine how wildfire dollars should be spent, potentially enabling them "to justify a predetermined outcome." Hubbard, the Forest Ser- been the least deadly. One firefighter died in a para- chute training jump, and 27 were entrapped in three incidents. There have been no fatalities or entrapment reports in Alaska since 2006. vice's deputy chief, said it has other methods of weigh- ing those questions, and the FPA model will be able to produce comparisons that evaluate the most important places to protect. FPA "took longer than we thought and cost more than we thought, but we think it's now becoming a useful tool," he said. As 11 years of debates and delays have demonstrat- ed, there is no easy formula for deciding how to reduce catastrophic wildfires. Fire seasons vary with the weather. This year's dis- asters were fueled by extreme drought and record- breaking heat. And some of the data that might be help- ful in determining where to focus resources — numbers of houses burned and civil- ians killed, for example — simply are not tracked by the Forest Service or other federal agencies. This fire season has been the worst in a decade. Two weeks ago light- ning ignited the Rush fire on the Modoc plateau in northeastern California. Because firefighters were deployed elsewhere to battle large wildfires from Idaho to California, the firefighting force "wasn't really adequate" when the wildfire began, said Jerry Wheeler, fire management officer for the Bureau of Land Management there. The fire grew to 315,000 acres, the second largest in California history, destroy- ing sage grouse habitat and prime mule deer and prong- horn hunting grounds. The Modoc plateau also was identified in the FPA test run as an area in great need of additional firefight- ing resources. Yet over the past decade, the number of BLM fire- fighters per truck has been has been cut from seven to five, Wheeler said. Big fires erupt farther east and south earlier in summer, and "by the time we get to the north, we're strapped for resources," he said. The original model was intended to get maximum results for the money, regardless of which federal agency owned the land. The new version lets agencies look at "a number of national budget alterna- tives," according to a report this year from a consultant hired by the government to review FPA. But it is more limited in scope and designed for fire suppres- sion, not other uses of wild- fire dollars, such as reducing hazardous fuels. Two reviews of the new system this year from a gov- A risk management com- mittee of the National Wild- fire Coordinating Group in Boise does track firefighter fatalities, entrapments and serious accidents. A Denver Post review of 20 years of those reports, from 1992 to mid- summer 2012, found that California is by far the most dangerous place for firefighters: 90 died in the flames or of other causes ranging from crashes to heart attacks, heat exhaus- tion, falls and electrocu- tion, plus one murder and one suicide. In 44 wild- fires, a total of 267 fire- fighters were entrapped or injured when flames burned over them. The Alaska region has No unit in the Fire Pro- gram Analysis test run was found to be more in need of help than south central Idaho, a predominantly grass and sagebrush ecosystem prone to big fires. fires have burned almost 2 million acres on BLM land alone in the district since 2006, and officials there say firefighting resources have declined slightly dur- ing that period. More than 1,000 wild- David Olinger: 303-954- 1498, dolinger@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dolingerdp Eric Gorski: 303-954- 1971 or egorski@denverpost.com or twittter.com/egorski Through the Newspapers in Education program, area classrooms receive the Red Bluff Daily News every day thanks to the generosity of these local businesses & individuals. 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