The Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 Tuesday to continue a public hearing until December about abatement actions on an illegal cannabis grow where faulty equipment allegedly sparked a wildfire on Mount Knight in late July.

The board decided to continue the hearing after they heard from residents of Mount Knight who disputed county Code Compliance’s parcel numbers and identification of owners in the case. The board had to hold the hearing to determine if destruction of 667 cannabis plants on the property where the fire started was justified under county ordinance code. The owner was invoiced $5,594.96 for administrative and investigative costs.

“I live up in Mount Knight,” a man named William Dunlavy Jr. told the board and county staff in a scheduled public hearing Tuesday afternoon. “You’ve got the parties wrong, and you’ve got the parcel wrong. We reported the fire. We have 20 acres, and the fire was on the 20 acres below us. Right below us. The fire started out of a water pump that malfunctioned at 2:45 in the morning.”

Dunlavy said growers were present on a different parcel, not the one named in paperwork by the county. New property owners were being wrongly impugned by the county, he said, and the grow where county Code Compliance cut down 667 cannabis plants was on a different parcel.

“You have the wrong people,” Dunlavy continued. “I can attest to that. I just met the new owners here today. They haven’t even been on the property. I’m telling you, you’ve got the wrong party.”

Dunlavy’s wife said she knows who hired workers to work on the illegal grows in Mount Knight, and she knows they were seen on game cameras leaving the area when the Knight Fire broke out July 29.

Sharrol Dunlavy said she had photos from a game camera and a neighbor’s game camera showing employees of the owner of the property where the cannabis plants were located leaving in “great excitement” when the fire started.

“All of us up here from Mount Knight know it was his crew who started the fire,” Sharrol Dunlavy said. “These other people are innocent.”

A man named Kurt Wagoner told Code Compliance staff, “I live in Mount Knight. You’re wrong . . . . We’ve been complaining about it for years. It’s not the property you guys are saying it is.”

Another man offered a business card with a surveyor’s name. District 4 County Supervisor Kathleen Haff, the board chair, asked him to share the card with the board clerk. Two people offered to share parcel maps with the county.

District 2 County Supervisor Ryan Campbell said he’s been talking to people in Mount Knight for the past year and a half, he’s been up there at least once and the July 29 fire was a wakeup call.

“This has been a problem for our community for a long time and the only way to address it is code compliance,” Campbell said. “Which is too bad, because we’re not talking about this as the criminal actions they are. If it were not for the work of the people living in Mount Knight working to put that fire out, it could have made the national news. We need to make sure we are going after the correct people who are responsible. If we’re hurting someone who is not the perpetrator, that does not help our cause at all.”

Campbell moved to continue the hearing until 1:30 p.m. Dec. 19. It was seconded by District 1 County Supervisor David Goldemberg. 

Brandon joined Haff, Campbell, and Goldemberg in voting 4-0 to continue the hearing. District 3 County Supervisor Anaiah Kirk, who was present earlier for part of the hearing, had to leave before the board voted to continue.

County staff prepared a background report for the hearing, which included the following:

• On July 31, county Code Compliance investigators and the U.S. Forest Service went out to a parcel located in the Mount Knight area of the county. The parcel in question has no legal address. Its parcel number is APN: 023-490-029 in the Twain Harte zip code 95383.

• This parcel was identified to be the location of a wildland fire — the Knight Fire — that occurred on July 29 and was stopped at about 5.4 acres.

• During the July 31 inspection, multiple violations of county code were found on the premises, including unpermitted cultivation of 667 cannabis plants; structures and equipment used for cultivation, processing, or storing of cannabis for personal use that did not comply with building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and fire code regulations of the county or state; violations of county, state, and federal environmental and water regulations related to water usage, stormwater management, and fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, and rodenticide storage and use; and unlawful disposal of solid waste.

An earlier hearing focused on another case of illegal cultivation of cannabis which was appealed by Irene Jiayi Ouyang, owner of a property at 19279 Second Garrote Ridge Road, Groveland.

The property was among several where authorities seized a combined 2,277 pounds of cannabis worth an estimated $3.7 million, three assault rifles, 11 other firearms, and $6,000 in cash during raids in Groveland, Big Hill, and Columbia on Sept. 19-20.

At the property on Second Garrote Ridge Road in September, state Department of Cannabis Control Law Enforcement Division personnel seized 1,296 plants and a total weight including cannabis flowers of 661 pounds, estimated to be worth $1.01 million.

“One subject booked after evading capture,” a DCC detective wrote in an after-action report. “Located across ridge and picked up by CHP (PC148). Structure red tagged.”

Quincy Yaley, director of the county Community Development Department that handles county Code Compliance, said in September that other cannabis enforcement activities had previously taken place at the property when investigators with county Code Compliance went there in June.

Ouyang appealed the county’s actions in June, and its abatement order that she pay $120,246, but she did not appear at the Tuesday hearing, and neither did her interpreter, Vivien Choy.

“I purchased the property around May of 2019, it has been rented out since,” Ouyang wrote in her request for a hearing. “I live in San Francisco, I am neither involved nor aware of the marijuana cultivation inside the house. I already contacted a licensed contractor, he will help to bring the property into compliance as soon as possible.”

Haff said the property has been on her radar since she took office in January 2021. She said she was surprised the monetary penalty was only $100 per plant.

“That’s at least how long this has been going on,” Haff said. “So I’m glad we finally mustered the forces that we needed to scope the situation out. I have found these violations to be true and accurate. The owner is responsible. The penalties, I don’t think they’re enough but, there they are, I think they are just. I find all of the allegations are true.”

The board voted 5-0 finding violations at the property existed.

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Newsletter

Servando Miramontes via Flickr

by Nick Wing

Brooke Jenkins was appointed as San Francisco’s interim district attorney just over a month ago, following the recall of her former boss, Chesa Boudin. After voters booted Boudin from office, Mayor London Breed installed Jenkins, a “tough-on-crime” prosecutor who became something of a paid spokesperson for the recall campaign. She has promised to support law enforcement and ramp up punishment for certain crimes.

Jenkins and other recall supporters blamed Boudin’s progressive leadership for crime and disorder in the city, with Jenkins going so far as to say that the city’s crime rate was “directly linked” to his reform policies. But, with a “tougher” new DA at the helm, the city’s issues with lawlessness, whatever they may be, aren’t simply disappearing.

“Crimes continue to happen under [Jenkins’s] leadership, ranging from gun homicides and assaults of elderly people in the AAPI community to Walgreens thefts caught on video,” Rachel Marshall, Boudin’s former communications director, wrote in an Appeal column last week.

Jenkins and her supporters might say she needs longer than a month to turn the city around. But Marshall writes that it’s only a matter of time before voters realize the DA cannot prevent individual crimes and “lacks power to substantively tackle” broader issues of “homelessness, dirty streets, and visible substance use.”

Marshall and other reformers argue that more severe punishment is ineffective at addressing these problems and only makes them worse, especially in the absence of more robust investments in treatment, housing, and social services. This may seem like common sense to anyone familiar with how the American legal system actually operates. But the entire recall campaign was structured as a rejection of that argument. With Jenkins’s help, recall supporters pushed the idea that San Francisco just needed a stern hand; an adult in the room to clean up the streets and scare criminals and other undesirables straight.

Jenkins is now appeasing her supporters’ lust for punishment by undoing Boudin-era reforms and rolling out a slate of new “tough-on-crime” policies. Last week, Jenkins announced that her office would seek to punish more harshly people charged with certain drug crimes. This is all part of what she’s branded as a crackdown on “open-air drug markets” in the Tenderloin, a historically high-crime—yet rapidly gentrifying—neighborhood that Mayor London Breed vowed to “take back” in 2021.

Critics of this return to the War on Drugs, including former San Francisco DA and police chief (and current Los Angeles County District Attorney) George Gascón, say it’s destined to fail. Others have noted that the current strategy looks a lot like other ineffective crackdowns in the tenderloin over the past 50 years.

But if critics are correct and “tough-on-crime” policies once again fail to deliver results, will San Franciscans blame Jenkins for persistent crime and disorder, just as they did Boudin? Last week, political strategist and writer Jamison Foser asked on Twitter, “Will the news media that helped [conservative prosecutors] raise the bar for progressives now help them lower the bar for themselves?”

Whatever happens in the coming months, Jenkins will almost certainly benefit from double standards in both media coverage and public opinion, which tend to hold “tough-on-crime” officials blameless for the very same issues that routinely get pinned on reformers. We’ve seen this pattern play out repeatedly in recent years, columnist and Appeal contributor Adam Johnson explained in June.

“If crime and murders increase under reformers, the reform is to blame,” Johnson wrote. “If crime and murders increase under the most well-funded police departments and harshest DAs on Earth, they simply need more funding and to be even harsher.” Following this logic, Jenkins can’t lose.

Although San Francisco remains a remarkably safe city, at least according to historical crime trends, residents who voted for the recall have regularly stated they do not “feel” safe around town. As The Appeal’s Jerry Iannelli wrote in June, this sentiment may be understandable, even if it flies in the face of statistical reasoning. San Franciscans, like residents of many US cities, are living in a place where visible poverty and mental illness are spiking thanks to runaway economic inequality, unaffordable housing, and the complete failure of our social safety net and services.

The resulting fears are real, even if they aren’t directly correlated to hard crime data. Jenkins may be able to use these feelings to her advantage as she campaigns for a full term as DA. By cosplaying as the proverbial “new sheriff in town,” she can send a message to voters that she’s “doing what’s necessary” to protect them from the swirling mass of chaos and insecurity that is American life. When she begins revoking plea deals and demanding harsher sentences for people arrested with over 5 grams of drugs, her supporters can celebrate that “bad guys” are facing a stiffer form of “justice.”

Even if these “tough-on-crime” policies don’t materially improve safety in the city, some residents might at least feel safer knowing that more people—disproportionately those who are vulnerable, lower-income, and Black and brown—are being punished and caged. That is, after all, what so many proponents of these policies want. And if that doesn’t make them feel safer, Jenkins can always crank up the “toughness” until enough of them do.

Former political prisoner Albert Woodfox, who spent more than four decades in solitary confinement, has died at the age of 75. [Ed Pilkington/ The Guardian]

The US Attorney General’s office has announced federal charges against four officers who were involved in securing the warrant for Breonna Taylor’s home. [Emma Bowman/ NPR]

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren. In his executive order, he blasts Warren for his public support of gender-affirming healthcare and his refusal to prosecute abortion providers. Warren called the removal illegal and said, “I’m not going down without a fight.” [Colin Wolf / Orlando Weekly]

Border patrol agents have been confiscating asylum seekers’ turbans and refusing to provide them with their religiously-required vegetarian meals. [John Washington / Arizona Luminaria]

At the St. Louis City Justice Center in Missouri, officers have repeatedly pepper-sprayed people on suicide watch, several times because a person wanted to keep on their underwear, according to use-of-force reports. [Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg/ Grid]

A 17-year-old girl and her mother from Norfolk, Nebraska face multiple multiple felonies after the teen had a medication abortion. Facebook provided data to law enforcement as part of the investigation. [Jason Koebler and Anna Merlan / VICE]

Caleb Brennan writes about the expansion of “assisted outpatient treatment”—or AOT—which usually entails a compulsory regimen of psychiatric medication. People who fail to comply can be detained by law enforcement and face possible involuntary hospitalization.

Heather Tirado Gilligan looks at Advance Peace, a community-based program to stop gun violence without the use of police.

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has “moved quickly to abandon and undo Boudin’s most impactful reforms,” Rachel Marshall, former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s communications director and policy advisor, writes for The Appeal. Marshall was one of more than a dozen people fired since Jenkins took office.

That’s all for this week. As always, feel free to leave us some feedback, and if you want to invest in the future of The Appeal, please donate here.

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By Jessica Wolfrom

Examiner employee author

The city’s sidewalks have started to buckle, crack, and slope in one of the newest neighborhoods in San Francisco, creating stumbling blocks for pedestrians and frustrating local residents forced to navigate the city’s uneven sidewalk.

Sidewalks in some blocks of the Mission Bay neighborhood have sunk 10 to 15 centimeters and in some places even as much as 30 centimeters deep, KPIX first reported.

But not only the sunken sidewalks of the quarter are shifting in this densely built-up area. Almost three kilometers away in SOMA, the tilting Millennium Tower also struggles to balance on the sinking floor that bears the building’s multi-story weight.

A possible culprit could be climate change. As a historic drought continues to dry out the state, it can also worsen the subsidence or subsidence of the soil surface as the city’s groundwater, which usually flows from higher elevations like Twin Peaks or Bernal Heights into the sediments below the lower districts, becomes a trickle slowed down.

“When there is a lot of rainfall, the water goes into the clay. It’s slow, but it builds up the water table, ”said Lawrence Karp, a geotechnical engineer from the Bay Area. “In periods of drought, as we have had for a long time, the water table sinks … and the clay thickens.”

As soft clay solidifies from the loss of groundwater, its weight increases, causing it to carry away structures on top, including the sidewalks and streets of Mission Bay.

The redeveloped waterfront neighborhood was built over an old railway station and reclaimed landfill that historically served as a landfill for industrial waste, including the burned remains of the 1906 earthquake.

Today it is home to a sprawling, state-of-the-art medical campus, high-rise apartment buildings, a hotel, school, and the recently completed Chase Center.

But the sidewalks here have become a dangerous headache for residents and local businesses alike. The gap in front of Cafe Réveille on Long Bridge Street is so steep that two ramps, bright yellow paint and whimsical signs point the way into the cafe and warn the guests: “Please watch your step!”

A man walks past a “Watch your Step” sign on Friday, September 24, 2021, alerting customers to a step from a sinking sidewalk outside Cafe Reveille in Mission Bay. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

It wasn’t always that bad. “There’s been a big change in the last couple of months,” says Aaron Nelson, barista at Cafe Réveille.

Others say the sinking sidewalks are old news. “Since we’ve been here, the streets have been sinking,” said long-time resident Peggy Fahnestock, who moved to Mission Bay in 2009.

A few years ago, a member of her hiking group stumbled in front of Café Réveille and broke his arm. “It’s not been that bad for a long time,” said Fahnestock, board member of the neighborhood association. “I tripped and fell out there … you have to be careful where you go.”

While more research is needed to draw concrete conclusions about the links between the drought and the sloping sidewalks, scientists don’t think this is surprising given the conditions.

“From a scientific point of view, we don’t have any evidence yet, but we do know that (this) process happened elsewhere,” said Manoochehr Shirzaei, a professor of geophysics and remote sensing at Virginia Tech University who did the subsidence in the Bay Area examined in detail. “When we change something in any part of the hydrological system, the chain of events begins,” he said, calling the city’s groundwater a “connected system”.

And at the moment this system is under increasing stress from the persistent drought.

“The drought is affecting groundwater by temporarily reducing its natural replenishment from rain and stormwater runoff,” said Will Reisman, spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. However, he said, “the total amount of groundwater stored in the aquifer remains large and will be replenished in the wet years that follow.”

Still, water is clear in the minds of many in the town hall. To further protect the city’s water supply, the board of directors unanimously adopted a measure last week that more than doubled the amount of water that new large buildings have to collect and reuse on site.

“This summer of intense drought and terrible forest fires reminds us that the climate crisis is now and will not go away by itself,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman. “Although we have zero carbon emissions targets for our city and our world, the reuse and recycling of water is becoming increasingly important to our survival.”

Mission Bay isn’t the only neighborhood suffering from settlement, but it’s one of the newest, which is what makes the crisp infrastructure noteworthy. Other areas built on landfills, like San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and Treasure Island, have also declined as the landfill slowly compacts, according to research, making these areas more prone to flooding and sea level rise .

A cyclist rides elevated pavement slabs outside an apartment building along Mission Bay Boulevard North in Mission Bay on Friday, September 24, 2021. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

Subsidence alone would not cause a building to collapse or a sidewalk collapse, Shirzaei said. What matters, he said, is what is called differential motion, or the uneven speed of subsurface subsidence.

“Differential movements that can seriously damage any infrastructure,” he said. “In fact, there is no man-made structure that can withstand such a load. So, pipelines, concrete pillars, they would all break and eventually lose their integrity. “

So far, however, the buildings in Mission Bay have remained stable because they are built on stilts, Karp said. But for local residents like Fahnestock, the question remains who will pay to repair the damaged sidewalks.

The city said that such corrections fall on local residents. “The maintenance of the walkways is the responsibility of the adjacent property owners as per state and city regulations,” said Rachel Gordon, Public Works spokeswoman. “Public Works inspects the sidewalks and notifies property owners if a problem needs to be addressed.”

The goal, Gordon said, is not a punishment, but a safe path for pedestrians.

jwolfrom@sfexaminer.com

A pedestrian walks across raised pavement slabs outside an apartment building along Mission Bay Boulevard North in Mission Bay on Friday, September 24, 2021. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

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The builder, accused of murdering a doctor and her teenage daughter in her home, tried to put the blame for the deaths on the schoolgirl, a jury heard.

Shahbaz Khan, 51, who died last year for the murders of Dr.

The handyman wrote “Covid-19 house, my mother is angry” and “Help me” on the walls inside the property to blame Ms. Mangrio for her mother’s death, prosecutors said today.

Khan, who previously worked for Dr. Sacharvi had made repairs at home, had arrived at her address near Burnley, Lancashire, just before 11:50 a.m. on September 30, where he was expected to continue further construction, the court was told.

But on October 1st, Dr. Sacharvi, a doctor with the Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust, and her daughter found dead in their smoke and fire damaged home.

Dr. Saman Mir Sacharvi, 49, and her 14-year-old daughter Vian Mangrio were found dead in their smoke and fire damaged home near Burnley, Lancashire, in October

Investigation teams outside the mother and daughter’s property after their deaths

Autopsy revealed that the doctor died of pressure on the neck and the schoolgirl died of suffocation.

David McLachlan QC, who opened the case, said the previous week the doctor picked her daughter up early from school after reporting Covid-19 symptoms.

The clinician emailed colleagues at the NHS on Sept. 28 to inform them that they are self-isolating while waiting for Miss Mangrio’s coronavirus test result, which later turned out negative.

When the police and crime scene investigators received the address, they saw writing on the walls, the prosecutor said.

Mr McLachlan said, “The letter said things like ‘Covid-19 house, my mother is bad”, “Covid home” and “Help me”.

“It is the prosecution’s case that this was a cynical attempt by Shahbaz Khan to break the relationship between Dr. Portraying Saman and her daughter Vian Mangrio as bitter in order to turn the guilt away from him. An attempt to blame Vian Mangrio for her mother’s death. ‘

Khan arrived at the address where he was expected to continue construction work shortly before 11:50 a.m. on September 30, the court said.

A short time later, Dr. Sacharvi emailed a colleague and was supposed to be in a Microsoft Teams meeting between 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m., but didn’t attend and WiFi was down from about 1:50 p.m.

It is alleged that Khan killed the doctor before Miss Mangrio got home from school at 3:25 p.m. and then attacked her daughter.

The two victims’ cell phones were unplugged later that afternoon and Khan did not answer his phone when he left the house at 10 p.m., the court heard.

Vian Mangrio was described by her father as a “loving, caring, intelligent and gifted child”

Flowers left at the Burnley crime scene after mother and daughter died

Two small bottles of Blossom Hill rosé wine and a small bottle of strawberry and banana smoothie that the defendant bought the day before the murders were later recovered from the crime scene, McLachlan said.

Mr McLachlan said when the news of the deaths surfaced in the days that followed, the defendant told a friend that he had Dr the expansion work.

Khan was arrested on October 4th, and police ransacked his home where they found a bag of tens of thousands of pounds worth of gold jewelry in the attic that Dr. Sacharvi belonged to.

Last year, Vian’s father, Dr. Shaukat Mangrio told his daughter how his “loving, caring, intelligent and gifted child” had dreamed of attending Cambridge University.

“She had a bright future, which unfortunately came up short,” he said.

“She was a young lady with a beautiful smile; she was alive and lighting up a room when she walked into it; She had a zest for life, fashion, art and the passion to pursue a legal career.

“It was her dream to be admitted to Cambridge University and I have no doubt that she would have achieved that goal and more.

“I am deeply saddened and heartbroken that she is no longer with us and is unable to lead a life that she deserves.

“I miss my Vian, whose company I loved very much and of whom I would never tire; beyond that there was no joy. She was an innocent child, pure and full of hope, that I lived for; she was my friend, my life, my everything. ‘

Burnley Khan denies that he was ruthless on two counts of murder and one arson incident.

His wife Rabia Shahbaz, 45, also denies having committed an act intended to pervert public justice, namely giving her husband a false alibi.

The trial is expected to take up to four weeks, with the prosecutor’s office opening continuing on Tuesday.

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