LAKEPORT, Calif. – The Lakeport City Council will meet new staff and begin the process of looking at goals for the coming fiscal year at its upcoming meeting.
The council will meet Tuesday, April 2, at 6 p.m. in the council chambers at Lakeport City Hall, 225 Park St.
The council chambers will be open to the public for the meeting. Masks are highly encouraged where 6-foot distancing cannot be maintained.
If you cannot attend in person, and would like to speak on an agenda item, you can access the Zoom meeting remotely at this link or join by phone by calling toll-free 669-900-9128 or 346-248-7799.
The webinar ID is 973 6820 1787, access code is 477973; the audio pin will be shown after joining the webinar. Those phoning in without using the web link will be in “listen mode” only and will not be able to participate or comment.
Comments can be submitted by email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. To give the city clerk adequate time to print out comments for consideration at the meeting, please submit written comments before 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 2.
On Tuesday the council will meet new city employee Melissa Carpenter and present a proclamation designating April 2024 as Arts, Culture and Creativity Month.
Under council business, City Manager Kevin Ingram will ask the council to authorize him to execute a professional services agreement with Willdan Financial Services for a comprehensive citywide cost of service fee study in an amount not to exceed $28,000.
Ingram also will lead the council in a strategic planning workshop to determine the citywide departmental goals for fiscal year 2024-25.
On the consent agenda — items considered noncontroversial and usually accepted as a slate on one vote — are ordinances; minutes of the City Council’s regular meeting on March 5; the March 22 warrant register; approval of the continuation of the proclamation declaring a local state of emergency due to severe weather conditions including heavy rain and extreme wind; approval of application 2024-013, with staff recommendations, for the 2024 Memorial Day Pancake Breakfast; approval of application 2024-015, with staff recommendations for the 2024 Autism Advocacy and Awareness Spring Carnival; authorization for out-of-state travel for two utility staff members to attend the California Rural Water Association’s Annual Expo.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Rep. Mike Thompson (CA-04) and Democratic Woman’s Caucus Chair Rep. Lois Frankel (FL-22) have introduced a resolution to support the goals and ideals of National Women’s History Month.
Thompson introduces this resolution each year to mark March as Women’s History Month and celebrate the diverse history of our country’s women.
The theme of National Women’s History Month 2024 is “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.”
The resolution resolves that, “The House of Representatives (1) supports the goals and ideals of National Women’s History Month; (2) recognizes and honors the women and organizations in the United States that have fought for, and continue to promote, the teaching of women’s history and the women’s suffrage movement; and (3) recognizes and honors the unique intersectional experiences of Black, Hispanic, Asian, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Native American, and LGBTQ+ women and women with disabilities in the United States throughout history, the women’s suffrage movement and in the ongoing fight for equality.”
“Every year, we come together to highlight the extraordinary contributions of women throughout our nation’s history and the continued need to push for equality,” said Thompson. “The history of America cannot be told without women’s history. Women’s History Month, which originated in our district, provides an opportunity to highlight the incredible contributions of American women. I am proud to introduce this resolution every year to elevate the stories of women from our nation’s history.”
“Each March, we celebrate and honor the trailblazing women who have fought for a better future for women everywhere,” said Chair Frankel. “In every field — from medicine and math, to education and politics — women have often led the charge in pushing America forward and advancing the ideals of equity and justice for all. As we reflect on their legacy, we take inspiration to continue our fight for women’s equality. They never backed down and neither will we.”
Until the late 1970’s, women’s history was rarely included in K-12 curriculum and was virtually absent in public awareness.
To counter this, the Education Taskforce of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women initiated a “Women’s History Week” celebration in 1978 centered on International Women’s History Day.
With the help of the National Women’s History Project, founded in Sonoma County, thousands of schools and communities joined in the commemoration of Women’s History Week.
In 1981, Congress responded to the growing popularity of Women’s History Week by making it a national observance and eventually expanding the week to a month in 1987.
The National Women’s History Project is based in Santa Rosa and chooses the theme of National Women’s History Month each year.
This year, National Women’s History Month celebrates “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.”
The resolution was cosponsored by 53 members of Congress.
On Monday, Representatives Mike Thompson (D-CA) and Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) introduced the Disaster Resiliency and Coverage Act of 2024 (H.R. 7849), legislation providing homeowners in disaster-prone regions with broad incentives to harden their properties against wildfires and other risks.
The legislation is intended to help address the ongoing insurance crisis in California and other states, as the rising frequency and intensity of natural disasters has led insurers to raise rates and, in several cases, exit certain markets entirely.
“Property insurance has quickly become one of the single biggest issues I hear about in my district. People can’t get covered: either the available options are completely unaffordable, or there are no options available at all. It’s an untenable situation — which is why this legislation is necessary,” said Thompson. “By incentivizing homeowners to mitigate disaster risks on their property, we aim to bring insurers back into the market and bring rates back into more affordable territory.”
“Homeowners must be able to harden their property as they see fit, especially as the risk of wildfires due to poor forest management escalates,” said LaMalfa. “With this bill, we’re bolstering resilience, but this will also hopefully reduce overall insurance rates and bring back suppliers that have left California entirely because of the risks.”
The legislation includes four main provisions.
The first creates a grant program, administered through state governments, through which individual households in designated disaster-prone regions (with certain limitations) are eligible for up to $10,000 for specified disaster resiliency work on their homes.
The second and third provisions (Sections 3 and 4 of the legislation) mirror existing legislation (H.R. 4070) stipulating that payments from state-run disaster resiliency programs and payments from various federal emergency agricultural programs are not considered income for federal tax purposes.
The final section, which also mirrors legislation previously introduced by Rep. Thompson, provides a 30% tax credit for qualified disaster risk mitigation activities conducted by individuals or businesses. The credit is meant to complement the grant program by providing meaningful assistance to larger property owners for whom mitigation activity costs would far exceed $10,000.
The U.S. national poverty rate declined significantly to 12.5% during the 5-year period from 2018 to 2022, according to American Community Survey, or ACS, 5-year estimates.
The rate was down from 14.6% during 2013-2017, the most recent nonoverlapping 5-year period.
Comparing the 2013-2017 and 2018-2022 5-year estimates offers a longer-term look at national and local economic trends.
The ACS 5-year estimates differ from the 1-year estimates released in September because they pool five consecutive years of 1-year ACS data, allowing Census Bureau researchers to estimate poverty rates for areas with smaller populations and all 3,144 U.S. counties.
How poverty is measured
Poverty status is determined by comparing annual income to a set of dollar values (called poverty thresholds) that vary by family size, number of children and the age of the householder.
If a family’s before-tax money income is less than the dollar value of their threshold, that family and every individual in it are in poverty. For people not living in families, poverty status is determined by comparing the individual’s income to their poverty threshold.
The poverty measure excludes children under age 15 not related to the householder and people living in institutional group quarters, college dormitories or military barracks.
The poverty rates in this article are based on the official poverty measure and are different from the Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM.
The SPM differs in a number of key ways such as the factoring in of additional resources and expenses not included in the official poverty measure as well as geographic variation in poverty thresholds.
County poverty rates
During the 2018-2022 period, county poverty rates ranged from 1.6% to 55.8% (Figure 1).
Counties with the lowest poverty rates in 2018-2022 included: Borden County, Texas (1.6%); Morgan County, Utah (1.7%); Sterling County, Texas (1.8%); Falls Church independent city (considered a county equivalent), Virginia (2.3%); McCone County, Montana (2.4%); Kenedy County, Texas (2.6%); Douglas County, Colorado (3.0%); and Stanley County, South Dakota (3.2%) among others. These estimates are not significantly different from one another at the 90% confidence level.
Three counties in South Dakota – Oglala Lakota County (55.8%), Todd County (52.2%) and Mellette County (49.1%) – were among those with the nation’s highest poverty rates. All three are in the western part of the state and are home to American Indian reservations. These estimates were not significantly different from one another at the 90% confidence level.
Figure 2 shows the share of total counties per census region along with the percentage of counties in the high and low map categories. The total counties category indicates the percentage of U.S. counties in the region.
Of the 172 counties in the highest poverty category (poverty rates of 25% or more), 142 (more than 80%) were in the South, compared to 45% of total counties.
The 219 counties in the lowest poverty category (poverty rates of less than 7.0%) were more evenly dispersed around the nation. Approximately 44% were in the Midwest, compared to 34% of total counties; 28% were in the South.
Just less than 10% of all counties in the South were in the high poverty category. No other region had more than 3.1% of its total counties with poverty rates of 25% or more. The four regions had a range of 4.4% (South) to 9.6% (Northeast) of its counties in the low poverty category.
Change from last five-year period
Changes in county poverty rates from the last 5-year period (2013-2017) to the most recent (2018-2022) show where and what economic changes have occurred over a longer period.
The national poverty rate decreased 2.0 percentage points to 12.5% and 1,144 counties — more than 36% — had a significant change in poverty rates (Figure 3).
Poverty rates decreased in more than one-third (1,042) of all counties. Only 102 counties experienced an increase in poverty rates compared to 2013-2017. It should be noted that counties that have had geographic changes over this period were not used in the comparison and are identified in Figure 3 as counties with no data available.
Where did changes occur?
Of the 1,042 counties that had lower poverty rates in the recent time period (2018-2022) 466 were in the South, 303 in the Midwest, 191 in the West and 82 in the Northeast.
In the West, 42.7% of all counties had lower poverty rates, while in the Northeast poverty rates decreased in 39.2% of all counties, 32.8% in the South and 28.7% in the Midwest.
Among the counties where poverty rates increased, 49.0% were in the South and 30.4% in the Midwest. There was less of a regional difference where poverty increased. In all regions, between 2.9% and 3.5% of counties experienced poverty rate increases from the 2013-2017 to 2018-2022 period.
Craig Benson is a survey statistician in the Census Bureau’s Poverty Statistics Branch.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has a new, big group of dogs waiting to be adopted this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Alaskan husky, American blue heeler, Anatolian shepherd, border collie, Chihuahua, German shepherd, Great Pyrenees, Labrador Retriever, pit bull terrier and Rottweiler.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Congress has once again been making headlines for all the wrong reasons, with multiplenews outlets in recent months touting the current 118th Congress as possibly the least productive in the institution’s history. In 2023, Congress only passed 34 bills into law, the lowest number in decades.
As a result, House Speaker Mike Johnson’s gavel seems to be hanging in the balance yet again, as conservative Republicans revolt over his support for the bill.
Even so, the dire warnings from the media, and even from members of Congress, about the legislative branch’s lack of productivity frequently lack context and are often misleading. Let’s drill down into the numbers and see what political science has to say about it.
What makes Congress productive?
Historically, there’s been significant variation in the amount of legislating Congress does from year to year. There are a few well-understood factors that influence this, and all help explain why 2023 wasn’t ever likely to be a banner year for congressional productivity.
One obvious factor is party control of Congress and the presidency. If the Senate, House and the presidency are controlled by the same party, then there is typically more policy agreement between them, smoothing the way for easier passage of bills. Both Democrats and Republicans enjoyed what political scientists like me call “unified government” control during the most productive initial years of the Biden, Trump and Obama administrations.
There’s also evidence that election yearsspur more, not less, legislative productivity. Members of Congress know each other better in the second year of their term; they have dispensed with many of the ceremonial duties that begin a congressional session; and members are eager to demonstrate their legislative action to constituents during their reelection campaigns.
It’s possible that Congress will pick up its pace in 2024. Last year, Congress passed a number of stopgap funding bills, along with smaller legislation on veterans and environmental issues. But crucial issues like foreign aid, social media regulation and immigration are still on the table.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, Congress is in the best position to succeed when it’s led by competent and experienced legislators with lots of political capital.
This hasn’t been the case so far in the current Congress. The House has had two brand-new speakers in the span of a year, and both lacked the political power, experience or acumen to command the chamber and produce passable legislation.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, was ousted in October 2023 due to lack of support within his own party. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has scant experience, having only served three complete terms in office.
Johnson’s job has been made even more difficult by the continually shrinking majority that Republicans have in the chamber. And rampant polarization between the two parties has made finding legislative agreement increasingly difficult.
How you measure productivity matters
Most of the media coverage of Congress’s historic lack of productivity tends to focus on the number of bills passed into law as a key measure. But this is a simplistic approach because it treats all bills as equally important regardless of substance.
Using the raw total of bills passed and enacted into law treats all of these as the same. More accurate counts might give less weight to, or remove, nonsubstantive legislation from the count, and give extra weight to landmark legislation.
A related issue is that the size and scope of the average piece of legislation has changed dramatically in recent decades. Congress increasingly engages in what’s called “omnibus legislating,” which combines multiple, sometimes unrelated, pieces of legislation into one megasized bill that receives one vote.
This process has led to fewer, and larger, substantive bills rather than a higher number of smaller pieces of legislation.
For example, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – price tag, US$800 billion – or the 2021 American Rescue Plan – price tag $1.9 trillion – only count as two bills. In prior decades, their substance would have been divided into dozens of bills.
There are other ways legislators can be productive. When today’s members introduce bills, hold committee hearings and advocate for their legislation, these actions can matter even if the bills don’t pass in the current Congress. Legislative effort undertaken today can lay the groundwork for legislative progress achieved in the future.
2023 was still a low point
All of this context is crucial for understanding whether Congress is doing an effective lawmaking job. Even so, it looks like the Congress of 2023 — particularly the House — was historically unproductive, no matter how you slice it.
Lawmakers introduced about as much legislation as usual, but due to 2023’s leadership chaos, along with the seemingly never-ending battles over the federal budget, very little of this legislation is getting any attention, much less votes on its final passage.
The 118th Congress lasts from January 2023 through the first few days of January 2025, so it still has time to make up this historic deficit. But at this point, it seems unlikely that Congress will be much more productive in the upcoming nine months than it has been for the last 15.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The East Region Town Hall, or ERTH, will meet on Wednesday, April 3.
The meeting will begin at 4 p.m. at the Moose Lodge, located at 15900 Moose Lodge Lane in Clearlake Oaks.
The meeting will be available via Zoom. The meeting ID is 830 2978 1573, pass code is 503006.
On Wednesday ERTH will discuss the general plan and Shoreline Area Plan update.
Other agenda items include an update on the Clearlake Oaks Consolidated Lighting District update, crosswalk safety at East Lake School and Highway 20, Spring Valley, commercial cannabis and the Cannabis Ordinance Task Force, and reports from Northshore Fire Protection District Chief Mike Ciancio and Supervisor EJ Crandell.
ERTH’s next meeting will take place on May 1.
ERTH’s members are Denise Loustalot, Jim Burton, Tony Morris and Pamela Kicenski.
For more information visit the group’s Facebook page.
Travel nurses take short-term contracts that can require long commutes or temporarily living away from home. Time and again, they have to get used to new co-workers, new protocols and new workplaces.
So why would staff nurses quit their stable jobs to become travel nurses?
Many of the people I interviewed disclosed that they left permanent positions to combat burnout. Although they welcomed the bump in pay, travel nursing also gave them the autonomy to decide when and where to work. That autonomy allowed them to pursue personal and professional interests that were meaningful to them, and it made some of the other hassles, such as long commutes, worth it.
On top of earning more money, travel nursing “gives you an opportunity to explore different areas,” said a nurse I’ll call Cynthia, because research rules require anonymity. “When you actually live there for three months, it gives you a chance to really immerse yourself in the area and really get to know not just the touristy stuff, but really hang out with the locals and really be exposed to that area.”
Other study participants said they enjoyed the novelty and educational opportunities.
“You don’t get bored or stuck in a routine,” Michelle said. “You’re always trying to learn new policies at the new hospital that you’re in, learning about the new doctors, nursing staff, new ways of doing things, where things are located. That helps keep me from feeling burned out so quickly.”
Said Patricia: “I want to see how other operating rooms across the country do things and how they do things differently. I do learn a lot of things going from place to place.”
But nurses with permanent jobs can get aggravated by this arrangement when they learn how much more travel nurses earn for doing the same work, as I found through another research project.
While travel nurses can help hospitals, nursing homes and doctors’ offices meet staffing needs, there are signs that patients don’t always fare as well with their care.
And a Canadian study found that when hospitals let staff nurses work part time and offer other alternative arrangements, their retention rates may rise.
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Board of Supervisors this week will consider memberships to a new municipal advisory committee and forming area plan committees to support the general plan update process.
The board will meet beginning at 9 a.m. Tuesday, April 2, in the board chambers on the first floor of the Lake County Courthouse, 255 N. Forbes St., Lakeport.
The meeting ID is 861 4314 8024, pass code 367719. The meeting also can be accessed via one tap mobile at +16694449171,,86143148024#,,,,*367719#. The meeting can also be accessed via phone at 669 900 6833.
In an untimed item, the board will consider making appointments to the newly formed Big Valley Advisory Committee, formed March 12 to serve the Kelseyville Planning Area.
There are five seats and one alternate. Applicants are Angel Acosta, Brian Hanson, Flaman McCloud Jr., Greg Panella, Joy Merrilees, Megan Lankford, Rachel White, Rick White, Sabrina Andrus and Stephanie Moranda.
In another untimed item, the board will consider forming eight local area plan advisory committees to support the “Lake County 2050” general plan update process.
The full agenda follows.
CONSENT AGENDA
5.1: Adopt proclamation designating April 2024 as Poetry Month in Lake County.
5.2. Adopt proclamation appointing Brenda Yeager as Lake County Poet Laureate for the years 2024-2026.
5.3: Adopt proclamation designating the month of April 2023 as Sexual Assault Awareness Month in Lake County.
5.4: Adopt proclamation designating the month of April 2024 As Celebrate Diversity Month.
5.5: Approve continuation of local emergency by the Lake County Sheriff/OES director for the 2024 late January, early February winter storms.
5.6: Approve continuation of proclamation declaring a Clear Lake hitch emergency.
5.7: Approve continuation of proclamation of the existence of a local emergency due to pervasive tree mortality.
5.8: Approve continuation of emergency proclamation declaring a shelter crisis in the county of Lake.
5.9: Approve continuation of proclamation of the existence of a local emergency due to low elevation snow and extreme cold.
5.10: Approve continuation of the second reading of ordinance amending Article XXVII of Chapter 2 of the Lake County Code to address membership of county of Lake Health Services in the existing Partnership Health Plan of California Commission to the April 9, 2024, Board of Supervisors meeting.
5.11: Adopt proclamation commending Christine Smith for her 23 years of service to the county of Lake.
5.12: Adopt resolution to establish two extra-help classifications – certified law clerk and legal intern – for the District Attorney's Office, Budget Unit 2110.
5.13: Adopt proclamation designating the week of April 1 to 7, 2024 as Public Health Week.
5.14: Approve waiver of 900-hour limit for extra-help accountant, Cindy Silva-Brackett.
5.15: (a) Waive the formal bidding requirement under Lake County Code chapter 2, section 2-38; and (b) authorize the IT director to issue a purchase order in the amount of $64,470.83 to ECS Imaging Inc. for Laserfiche Cloud renewal .
5.16: (a) Waive the formal bidding process under section 2-38(b) because the competitive bidding process would produce no economic benefit in this case; and (b) authorize the IT director to issue a PO to Berkeley Communications in the amount of $49,846.19 for the NS224 disk shelf, support and services.
5.17: Sitting as Board of Directors of Big Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency, approve agreement between the California Department of Water Resources and Lake County Watershed Protection District for technical support services and license for groundwater monitoring station in order to drill groundwater monitor wells on county owned land within the Big Valley Basin to further monitor groundwater conditions and authorize chair to sign.
5.18: Adopt resolution expressing support for the Lower Lake Daze Parade and Street Fair and temporarily authorizing a road closure, prohibiting parking and authorizing removal of vehicles and ordering the Department of Public Works to post signs.
5.19: Approve amendment one to equipment repair and service contract between the county of Lake and Peterson Tractor Co. in the increased amount of $150,000 for a total not to exceed $450,000 for FY 23/24 and authorize the chair to sign.
5.20: (a) Approve amendment 13 to agreement between the county of Lake and Sun Ridge Systems Inc. for the purchase and installation of Timekeeping Systems software interface in the amount of $7,360; and (b) authorize the chair of the board to sign.
TIMED ITEMS
6.2, 9:03 a.m.: Pet of the Week.
6.3, 9:05 a.m.: Presentation of proclamation commending Christine Smith for her 23 years of service to the county of Lake.
6.4, 9:10 a.m.: Presentation of proclamation designating the month of April 2023 as Sexual Assault Awareness Month in Lake County.
6.5, 9:15 a.m.: Presentation of proclamation appointing Brenda Yeager as Lake County Poet Laureate for the years 2024-2026.
6.6, 9:20 a.m.: Presentation of proclamation designating April 2024 as Poetry Month in Lake County.
6.7, 9:25 a.m.: Presentation of proclamation designating the week of April 1 to 7, 2024 as Public Health Week.
6.8, 9:27 a.m.: Presentation of proclamation designating the month of April 2024 As Celebrate Diversity Month.
6.9, 9:30 a.m.: Presentation of update on 2024 drought conditions and drought-related projects.
6.10, 9:45 a.m.: Consideration of continuation of an emergency declaration for drought conditions.
6.11, 10 a.m.: Hearing, consideration of request for post-abatement hearing on account and proposed assessment of summary abatement – action of recreational vehicle on Feb. 2, 2024; located on State Highway 20, Clearlake Oaks.
6.12, 10:15 a.m.: Consideration of a letter of support for inclusion of Calpine’s The Geysers Facility in the California Leg of the Biden Administration’s “Investing in America” Tour, with U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm.
6.13, 10:30 a.m.: Consideration of an oppose unless amended position letter on SB 964 (Seyarto).
UNTIMED ITEMS
7.2: Presentation of Lake County Behavioral Health Services' external quality review organization report for fiscal year 2022-23.
7.3: Consideration of first amendment to the at-cost project reimbursement and indemnity agreement between the county of Lake and Lotusland Investment Holdings Inc. for county permit processing of the Maha Guenoc Valley Mixed-Use Development Project.
7.4: a) Consideration of changing seat designation from crop grower to organic farmer for committee member Bruce Merrilees on the Lake County Ag Advisory Committee; and b) consideration of appointments to the Lake County Ag Advisory Committee.
7.5: Consideration of appointments to the Big Valley Advisory Council and the Middletown Cemetery District.
7.6: Consideration of proposed formation of eight local area plan advisory committees to support the “Lake County 2050” update process.
7.7: Consideration to adopt resolution to approve the CalPERS 180-Day wait period exception for CalPERS retiree Richard F. Hinchcliff in order to hire him as an extra help deputy district attorney, senior.
CLOSED SESSION
8.1: Public employee evaluation: Air pollution control officer.
8.2: Public employee evaluation: Community Development director.
8.3: Public employee evaluation: Public Works/Water Resources director.
8.4: Conference with legal counsel: Significant exposure to litigation pursuant to Gov. Code section 54956.9(d)(2), (e)(1) – One potential case.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County 2050, the update to the Lake County General Plan and eight local area plans, is set to begin and community members are being invited to participate in helping plan the county’s future.
Lake County 2050 will guide county decisions on land use, circulation, safety, natural resources, environmental justice and other important topics through the year 2050.
In the first round of community workshops, participants will learn more about the project and discuss key issues in each local area plan planning area.
A community workshop will be held for each area plan, hosted by the established town hall or advisory group in that area, or by county staff. In-person meetings will feature small group discussions and Spanish translation will be available.
The schedule for that first round of meetings, with information on locations, dates, times and Zoom access, is below.
Shoreline Communities 2, East Region Town Hall Wednesday, May 1, 4 p.m. *Abbreviated meeting. No breakout groups or Spanish interpretation Clearlake Oaks Moose Lodge, 15900 Highway 20, Clearlake Oaks https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83029781573?pwd=KZYEE4bdvQ2Oh81VAFaCMSqOVylXec.1 Meeting ID: 830 2978 1573 Passcode: 503006
BERKELEY, Calif. — An orbiting space telescope approved by NASA last month and scheduled for launch in 2030 will conduct the first all-sky survey of ultraviolet, or UV, sources in the cosmos, providing valuable information on how galaxies and stars evolve, both today and in the distant past.
The $300 million satellite mission, called UVEX or UltraViolet EXplorer, will be managed by the Space Sciences Laboratory, or SSL, at the University of California, Berkeley.
The mission’s principal investigator is Fiona Harrison, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. recipient who is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
The telescope’s all-sky UV survey will complement ongoing or planned surveys by other missions over the next decade, including the optical and infrared Euclid mission led by the European Space Agency with NASA contributions, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an infrared telescope set to launch by May 2027. Together, these missions will help create a modern, multi-wavelength map of our universe.
“When UVEX launches, for the first time we'll have the entire sky covered from the UV all the way through the infrared,” said Daniel Weisz, one of the science team leaders for the UVEX mission and a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy. “Having ultraviolet coverage of the entire sky, which has never really been done before, is groundbreaking.”
UV emissions come from hot objects, but these wavelengths are blocked by Earth's atmosphere and must be studied from space.
The survey will focus on hot, massive blue stars — many of which are thought to be members of binary star systems — as well as exploding stars. In binary star systems, the most massive of the stellar pair often strips material from its companion, which exposes its hot UV-emitting core. UVEX will map the distribution of these “stripped” stars in galaxies around the Milky Way.
The telescope also will carry a UV spectrograph, jointly built by UC Berkeley and Caltech, to record detail about the UV wavelengths emitted by massive stars and during stellar explosions. These observations will provide new details about how stars and galaxies form and how they die.
“One of the things we're going to produce is a chart of the whole pathway from the genesis of these binary stars all the way to what happens when they explode and interact with whatever materials around them that they've lost over time,” he said. “UVEX will just completely change the field.”
UVEX will also be able to quickly point toward newly discovered sources of UV light in the universe. This will enable it to capture the light that follows bursts of gravitational waves caused by merging neutron stars in binary systems, events that are regularly recorded by three large collaborations around the globe, including the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
“A lot of transient events are best seen in the ultraviolet,” said Bill Craig, UVEX project manager. “Having a wide field of view to follow gravitational wave events is a really strong reason for selecting this mission now, so that as LIGO goes through its next campaigns, UVEX will be up there to zero once they see a merger. We then can zip over and see the aftermath of that.”
Low-mass galaxies today and in the early universe
Weisz is particularly interested in low-mass galaxies — those that are about one-tenth the size of the Milky Way.
The most famous of these are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — satellites of the Milky Way that are one-tenth and one-hundredth the mass of the Milky Way, respectively — but there should be millions of smaller galaxies within our galactic neighborhood. Only about 50,0000 have so far been seen, and few have been studied spectroscopically at UV wavelengths.
“Our sensitivity limits extend to galaxies that are 10,000 times less massive than the Milky Way,” Weisz said. “That's about a million solar masses.”
Such small, but faint, nearby galaxies are hard to identify using optical or infrared telescopes, he said, because they look nearly identical to very distant galaxies whose UV emissions have been redshifted to optical and infrared wavelengths. But if they also emit UV light, they're likely our near neighbors.
“When you see a galaxy that has UV, optical and infrared, it has to be nearby,” Weisz said. “We're trying to map out the structure of these millions of low-mass galaxies across the entire sky in order to better understand how mass, which is mostly made of dark matter, is distributed in the local universe.”
A better understanding of nearby low-mass galaxies will give insight into the nature of many low-mass galaxies now being discovered in the very early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.
“These nearby low-mass galaxies are pretty small, but also very deficient in metals. Some of them may only have 1% of the metals of the sun or less,” said Weisz. “And it turns out that these very metal-poor, but very active, star-forming galaxies are analogous to what people are finding with JWST at very high redshift.”
Metals, to astronomers, are anything heavier than hydrogen and helium, the primordial material of the universe. A low metal content implies that a galaxy has not had enough cycles of star formation and explosion to seed the galaxy with many of the heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen and iron.
Capturing UV from a supernova
Another UVEX science team leader from UC Berkeley, Raffaella Margutti, along with Ryan Chornock, associate adjunct professor of astronomy, are interested in what UV data can tell us about exploding supernovae.
“Our goal is to acquire the first UV spectra of very young supernovae less than two days after they explode,” said Margutti, professor of physics and of astronomy. “If we can get the first time sequence of UV spectra from a supernova, it can help constrain the chemical composition of exploding stars and help us understand their behavior in the last moments of their evolution before core-collapse.”
Other UC Berkeley members of the UVEX team are Wenbin Lu, assistant professor of astronomy, and Miller Research Fellow Yuhan Yao, who focus on high-energy transient phenomena, and Joshua Bloom, an astronomy professor who works on ways to combine data from multiple satellites and telescopes in order to respond quickly to transient events.
NASA selected the UVEX Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) concept to continue into development after a detailed review of two proposed MIDEX missions and two Mission of Opportunity concepts, and after evaluating the proposals based on NASA’s current astrophysics portfolio and the agency's available resources.
The UVEX mission was the only proposal selected, but its launch was pushed back two years, to 2030, because of budgetary reasons. The two-year mission will cost approximately $300 million, not including launch costs.
Craig, who has managed several other NASA-funded missions, including the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, which launched in 2019, noted that UVEX is a much larger satellite and has about twice the budget as ICON.
SSL has also been mission control for numerous other space missions, including the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, and NuStar, an X-ray observing satellite that was also a collaboration with Fiona Harrison of Caltech.
“I think you could say that this represents a sort of validation of the fact that Berkeley and the Space Sciences Lab have built up a core competency in implementing missions that allow us to do the science that people want to do,” Craig said.
The UVEX satellite will have an elongated shape, like a shed, to accommodate the optical components of the telescope. It will measure 20 feet tall, 9 1/2 feet wide and 8 feet deep and will weigh about 2,200 pounds.
Its intended orbit, which requires one loop around the moon to establish, will at its farthest point be about 310,000 miles from Earth — closer to the moon than to our planet. This allows it to avoid the thermal stresses associated with entering and exiting Earth's shadow many times a day, which is typical of stationary satellites in low-Earth orbit.
While Craig focuses over the next six years on bringing the many pieces of the satellite together, the scientists have their own intense prep work.
“We have a ton to do because this is a two-year mission, and we're supposed to deliver everything within six months after the prime mission ends,” Weisz said. “If our job is to go find 100 million galaxies, we basically have to know how to do that before we even launch. No one's ever tried to find 100 million galaxies before across the entire sky because we've never been able to do it. So as soon as we launch and get calibrated, we're going right into science mode.”
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.