Take a photo walk from Redwood and Main to Lions Hall with me, and celebrate local creativity and the city awarding contracts locally, like we USED to do

A huge swarm of men armed with heat guns and trowels used ladders today to attack the Fort Bragg Police station’s roof, ripping, tearing, gouging until there was nothing left.

Thankfully, it was the crew from Redwood Roofers, a local business.  The city has been reroofing its main buildings, each costing more than $100k. 

It’s terrific that the city has hired a LOCAL contractor to do these big jobs. The contractor on the Town Hall job is from Ukiah, also local in my book.  It seems the city is working harder to make the process work for local bidders. Redwood Roofers had the lowest bid, good for them.  If they hadn’t?  Rebid or start over. We need our workers to be people who live and spend here and pay the sales and other taxes that keep the city going. They are paid prevailing wage, which means roughly $26- $33 per hour for the lowest pay grades, according to state figures. The rate goes up on June 30, by chance.

Come walk with me in this photo story through unique local businesses and sites along Redwood Street going east from Main Street up to Fort Bragg Lions Hall, where we had a business meeting Wednesday night.  You will see the creativity that we still have here. Most of the towns where I grew up in (as we traveled a lot), are now nothing but chains, although some have begun to come back as people are finally tiring of sameness, terrible processed food and cheap stuff from China that the chains give us. Give us American-made and locally crafted and imagined!

The stretch we will walk together includes a number of professional offices, vibrant non-profits, an d art studios combined with learning, dancing, and real estate. 

How do we keep local going? We just need to keep some tariffs going  in my view, and take back our local economies from the globalist 1 percent ruling class.

Local was once a conservative value in America. Now, people who call them conservatives lead every charge for any chain store that appears on the scene to make money here and ship it elsewhere. These outfits usually pay minimum wage, offer little or no opportunity and put better-paying local endeavors out of business. 

For most of the 20th century, Mendocino County was very conservative about local, local, local. Then the right and many others went wildly liberal for chains starting in the early 2000s. Oddly, the left took over promoting local farming and local-local-local.   An  Advocate News article from the early 1900s revealed that people got mad when our county wanted to build a steel building and use a contractor from Santa Rosa. The chambers were stormed with angry Mendoites, who pointed out that the county had an ordinance to always use wood from Mendocino County first, to support the product we created here. And they were outraged that the board would dare truck in some out-of-towners when there were out-of-work men right here who could do the job!

This ethic has been lost. Local banking is the backbone of any viable local community. Most people use the chains that finance factories in China with locally deposited dollars. Use Savings Bank and the credit union! Not banking locally is a worse choice than any choice anybody has made in any election in my view. I know its more convenient. But we actually need you to bank locally so we can all survive!

Redwood Roofers also won a contract in 2024 to replace the roof of City Hall, amount not to exceed $130,732.00 and one in 2023 to replace the public works  yard main building’s roof up on Cedar Street. That job from 2023 was for $105,841.00.  I couldn’t seem to find the award for the police station and I was told on Thursday they are doing the fire station too..

The city is renovating almost all of its buildings this year, with interior and exterior renovations and restroom upgrades at Town Hall, City Hall and the police station all going on for several months now. Check out the bricks that the mission-style facade of Town Hall covers. Town Hall used to be the Ten Mile Courthouse and next door, the library, which burned in a series of arson fires that were never officially solved. Bruce Anderson and the Anderson Valley Advertiser documented the level of nastiness that gripped the city at that time, from official corruption and insider scams with local moneymen.