He visited the North State and lived to tell about it

The great New York Times sent one of its more courageous reporters on a dangerous mission recently – and he survived.

Thomas Fuller donned his pith helmet, hiked up his boots and headed for the Great North State, which he portrayed in a 1,700-word article earlier this month as the opposite of the San Francisco-Los Angeles California.

The story carried a Redding dateline, but he could have come to the same conclusions if he had visited Yuba, Sutter and Colusa counties.

“When people see you’re from California, they instantly think of ‘Baywatch,’” Eric Johnson, the associate pastor of Bethel Redding, told the Times reporter. “It’s very different here from the rest of California.” Indeed it is. And so the story went from there. Fuller proclaimed he had discovered “California’s Great Red North,” the 13 counties that voted for Donald Trump.

“From Hollywood to Silicon Valley, California projects an image as an economically thriving, politically liberal, sun-kissed El Dorado. It is a multiethnic experiment with a rising population, where the percentage of whites has fallen to 38 percent,” Fuller writes.

“California’s Great Red North is the opposite, a vast, rural, mountainous tract of pine forests with a political ethos that bears more resemblance to Texas than to Los Angeles. Two-thirds of the north is white, the population is shrinking and the region struggles economically, with median household incomes at $45,000, less than half that of San Francisco.”

Jim Cook, a former Siskiyou County supervisor, is quoted as calling the great Red North “the forgotten part of California.”

Says Fuller, “Nowhere else in California is the alienation felt more keenly than in the far north, an arresting panorama of fields filled with wildflowers and depopulated one-street towns that have never recovered from the Gold Rush.”

And who is there to support Fuller’s findings? Well, it’s none other than your assemblyman, young James Gallagher.

“People up here for a very long time have felt a sense that we don’t matter,” Gallagher tells Fuller, who observes that Gallagher’s 3rd Assembly Dis- HaroldKruger isaveteran reporterand copyeditorfor theAppealDemocrat. Call749-4774.

trict is “a shorter drive from the forests of Mount Hood in Oregon than from the beaches of San Diego.

Gallagher continues, “We run this state like it’s one size fits all. You can’t do that.”

All those darn regulations flowing out of Sacramento may be fine for city slickers, says Gallagher, but not up here in the red north.

“In the rural parts of the state, we drive more miles, we drive older cars, our economy is an agriculture- and resource-based economy that relies on tractors and trucks,” Gallagher said. “You can’t move an 80,000-pound load in an electric truck.”

Fuller mentions Colusa County, although no one from there is quoted.

“In the San Francisco Bay Area, unemployment rates hover around 3 percent. In the far north, where many timber mills have shut down in recent years, unemployment is as high as 6 percent in Shasta County and 16.2 percent in Colusa County,” he says.

And there’s even an observation from Rep. Doug LaMalfa, the latter-day Wally Herger.

“They’ve devastated ag jobs, timber jobs, mining jobs with their environmental regulations, so, yes, we have a harder time sustaining the economy, and therefore there’s more people that are in a poorer situation,” LaMalfa fumes.

He then puts a capper on the situation with this proposal: “You have idealists from the cities who say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to reintroduce wolves to rural California?”’ Mr. LaMalfa said. He has a half-serious counterproposal: “Let’s introduce some wolves into Golden Gate Park and the Santa Monica Pier.”

Out here in Trump country, you don’t like the federal government spending money on anything. Drain the swamp!

So it comes as quite a surprise that the Yuba City City Council on Tuesday night will consider opposing – yes, opposing – the president’s proposed cuts in federal housing funds.

Arnoldo Rodriguez, the city’s Development Services director, tells the council in a staff report: “The Trump Administration’s proposed FY 2018 budget includes severe cuts to HUD public housing, which will drastically reduce the available funds for the City’s public housing services. In response, the California Association of Housing Authorities is urging local governments to speak out against these cuts.”

In the attached letter, the city says it is “deeply concerned about the Trump Administration’s fiscal year 2018 (FY18) budget proposal to cut nearly 70 percent ($1.3 billion) from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) public housing capital fund. The public housing program is a critical component of our national infrastructure and provides homes to the low-income seniors, working families, people with disabilities, veterans, and other vulnerable households in the City of Yuba City, CA. Without federal investments, local governments would not be able to shoulder the full costs of this critical component of our housing infrastructure.”

The city’s letter suggests that “cutting the already insufficient capital funding that (public housing authorities) receive would not only halt capital repair work on our public housing units but also create a public health crisis. Health impacts of aging infrastructure including asthma, respiratory illness, and elevated blood lead levels are major public health concerns for public housing residents throughout the nation. Research shows that stable, healthy housing can have a positive impact on public health. When proper investments are made, public housing agencies have demonstrated that they are able to improve the health and wellbeing of their residents.”

The Yuba City City Council is starting to sound pretty darn liberal.