One of the Mendocino Coast”s most distinctive business names, the Fools Rush Inn, is no more. New owner Samir Tuma has remodeled the business and renamed it the “Cottages at Little River Cove.”
The change is part of a broad change in which tourists have sought out the Mendocino Coast because it was unique and eclectic to those who want the very best, with little regard to price.
Many motels have become inns and many hotels have moved upscale. A new condo hotel is even planned north of Fort Bragg on the property where the Hi-Seas Motel was torn down last week. Little River Inn was once a collection of low-priced and very downscale cottages and has moved substantially upscale over the years.
Heritage House in Little River, which once prided itself in not having telephones, went upscale in a big way in 2005 when Lantana Mendocino LLC paid $26.5 million for the property. The sale price had been improperly kept secret at one time by the county, but was revealed at the most recent request of the Advocate-News.
Remodeling to make the interior of the Heritage House match the complex”s spectacular exterior, along with plans for upscale condos was all more expensive and time consuming than foreseen. The real estate market collapse and mortgage crisis further exacerbated the situation.
Heritage House has been able to stave off foreclosure so far. A July sale date was postponed to Aug. 15. That date, for the sale of the property on the courthouse steps has now been postponed until Sept. 15 at the request of the bank. Heritage House owner David Wilk, who told this reporter earlier he was negotiating a sale of the grand blufftop hotel, did not respond to the most recent emails seeking comment.
Some say only fools are rushing into the nascent wave energy industry, but the numbers of agencies, investors and scientists increases daily.
An Alaskan story with relevance in Fort Bragg is the effort to resist the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) by a power company that serves the Indian village of Eagle and the city of Eagle, which exist side by side on the Yukon River. The two communities had endorsed an effort by the company that provides power to rural Alaska to install small power turbines to provide electricity, which has become spectacularly expensive in the area.
However, the company was denied permission to do so by FERC, which granted a three-year preliminary permit to a Houston Company that has claimed much of the Yukon River and its estuary for “hydrokinetic” river flow and tidal energy study. The Indian chief and city clerk both told this reporter the FERC permit came as a complete surprise, while the other proposal was developed in public.
So the local power company has gone forward in defiance of FERC”s authority to regulate “wave” energy, getting permission from other state, federal and local agencies.
The FERC process and authority is identical to that approved for study of waters off Fort Bragg by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company.
In Europe, laws have been passed to ensure local control and reward for alternative energy development. Not so in the United States, the federal government has had a hands-off approach, leaving the funding, leadership and regulation to corporate and utility developers.
Super-sized wind energy farms located about 15 miles offshore, to be combined with wave energy and possibly even new oil rigs are the latest talk in alternative energy publications.
Burton Hamner, president of Grays Harbor Ocean Energy Company told the Bellingham Herald he has identified a 60-mile long, 30-mile wide shelf in the Pacific stretching north from the mouth of the Columbia River to Long Beach that could be ideal for offshore wind farms. The company already has a FERC preliminary permit to study wind and wave energy together off Washington state.
The winds blowing 15 miles or even farther off the U.S. coast potentially could produce 900,000 megawatts of electricity, or roughly the same amount as all the nation”s existing coal, nuclear and gas-fired plants, dams, co-generation, terrestrial windmills and solar projects combined, according to U.S. Department of Energy estimates.
