Life for seniors is good at TreVista

TreVista is a warm and welcoming community that focuses on ensuring a vibrant and engaging lifestyle for all residents.

TreVista offers both assisted living and memory care, along with short-term respite stays. Residents of the community are encouraged to live as independently as they wish, with a caring, expert team close by to lend a hand whenever needed.

The staff is concerned with ensuring residents’ physical, intellectual, social and spiritual health and wellness, offering engaging activities and events specifically to address these needs. Managed by a family-owned company, Agemark Senior Living, TreVista is focused on treating all in their care, as well as employees and members of the community-at-large, like family. ing. The programs were termed “life changing” and “my family” by current students and grads from over two decades ago who continue to support the program. The Pioneer was unable to get a comment from MDUSD officials by deadline about their plans for the academies, which reportedly need to submit letters of intent to the California Partnership Academy by the end of the month to retain their funding. Both the Mt. Diablo hospitality and digital academies have forever grants that are grandfathered in by the State and which will go away should they not be renewed this year.

In 2020, renovations at TreVista in Concord brought improvements to common areas, all apartments and added amenities such as a bistro and spa with a whirlpool tub and an in-house beauty salon with a manicure station.

Learn more about TreVista at trevistaseniorliving.com or stop by for an in-person tour at 1081 Mohr Lane, Concord.

Instructor David Pintado and students from the Mt. Diablo High School Medical and Biotech Academy listen to speakers imploring the MDUSD Board of Education to keep funding the area’s oldest school’s academy programs.

DART, from page 1

Coordinatingfood

DELIVERY

Izzak Garcia of Pittsburg, a pilot trainee and ground worker at Buchanan Field Airport, joined Grimes, who was preparing to fly out of Concord.

“I was notified a day before my departure from Concord,” Garcia said. “I packed a day or two worth of clothes and snow gear. I then met with Mike Grimes the following day to board his personal aircraft and head for San Bernardino. We arrived around mid-day to find the helicopters still making their rounds and CalDART, along with the police, highway patrol, firefighters and volunteers from local churches, still packing helicopters.”

The helicopters stocked the local hospitals with medicine and needed resources.

“We had helicopters available to take food, but no food,” said Grimes. “They had no driver for a big flatbed. So, I jumped in the truck and picked up a load of food from a local church. We loaded the food into a helicopter, along with snow shovels.”

Incident Commander Ron Lovick of San Diego DART tirelessly kept things organized in the air and on the ground. CalDART President Paul Marshall also had boots on the ground to help wherever possible.

RESIDENTSPULLTOGETHER

Susie Newman Harrison, a Lake Arrowhead resident, told the Pioneer she had about 12 feet of snow in front of her house. The roads to her home were impassable for 16 days, and even longer in some areas, as many smaller roads to people’s homes remained blocked after the main roadways had been cleared.

Harrison, along with Lisa Griggs and other locals, started messaging each other when they found themselves snowbound. With Griggs as the driving force, it took about a week to develop Operation Mountain Strong – which united about 500 residents.

“People came together to help organize getting food and medication. They also helped the elderly with shoveling snow,” she said. “Nothing like this has been done before. We don’t have an airport nearby, so everything had to come in by helicopter.”

That’s where CalDART and pilots like Grimes came in. Harrison called the volunteers “pretty impressive.”

Harrison can see the nearby hospital helipad from her property but could not get there due made

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Clayton Valleyteachers Unhappy Withnegotiations

Jim Corcoran, president of the Clayton Valley Education Association, spoke to the board after rallying his members in the school quad before the meeting speaking over a bullhorn. He told the Pioneer that only 13 of the teaching staff at CVCHS remains from 2012-13 when the school converted to charter status and left MDUSD.

“We have had a serious and persistent turnover issue; some years have been very bad. Many of our younger teachers have struggled to afford to live in the immediate area. By best count, 250 or so teachers have been at CVCHS in the last 11 years,” Corcoran said. He’s been at the school teaching government and economics since 2015.

The general understanding is that Clayton Valley Charter teachers have been the highest paid in the county for several years.

Corcoran says, “CVCHS was to unplowed roads. One of her neighbors made the arduous trek to get supplies by foot. It took 2½ hours.

With power out at many homes, the situation became desperate. Snow accumulation on rooftops was so heavy that some collapsed.

The CalDART volunteers dove in to help where they could. “We heard there was a local supermarket whose roof hadn’t caved in yet,” said Grimes. “I met David, another CalDART guy. We jumped on the roof and started shoveling. We had two snow blowers but couldn’t get them on the roof as they weighed 300 pounds. A couple of locals – a deacon of the local church named Ali and another guy named Ruben –helped us find a place to stay and drove us there for the evening. In the morning, they picked us up and brought us back to the roof.

“Some angels from SoCal Recovery showed up in Jeeps with big winches and asked how they could help. I yelled down from the roof: ‘Get those two snow blowers up here.’ ” And they did, working as a team.

Creating A Contactlist

Meanwhile in Concord, Stephen Tucker was trying to get more aid to the snowburied community. Tucker works with Pacific States Aviation CEO Rashid Yahya, who provides pilots, fuel and other support for Contra Costa’s DART volunteers.

Tucker spent three weeks making calls to politicians and local authorities to try to get help where it was needed. He worked diligently to find names and contact numbers to help with the flow of communication for those directing critical help and asking politicians throughout the state to do anything and every- the highest paid district, though direct comparisons are hard because salary schedules don’t align perfectly. In general, we have the best starting salaries and slightly less competitive as you go furtherdown the schedule.” He explains that Acalanes and Antioch will surpass CVCHS if they sign new contracts on the table and that several other districts would also be above the Concord school even if the teachers get an 8% raise. thing that would facilitate collecting that data.

He says the state this year increased school funding in two ways: a 6.56% Cost of Living Adjustment and additional ongoing funding per AB 181. “Meaning Clayton Valley saw an increase of something like 1315% increasein continual state funding. One of our concerns is that we are not even being offered that statutory Cost of Living Adjustment,” he said. The two sides first met in December, but the teachers feel that not much progress has been made since.

Tucker gathered many contacts and hopes his efforts will be useful for future incidents. “We all really need to work together.”

While snowbound, Harrison got the word out to help bring attention to the crisis. She is also a pilot and has now joined CalDART. Tucker says they’ve had a wave of new members looking to join.

As the snow in the region finally begins to melt, Tucker said many locals, though still digging themselves out from the string of storms, expressed their thanks to the volunteer pilots.

One told Tucker: “When we heard the helicopter blades coming closer, we had hope.”

For more information on CalDART, visit www.CalDART.org.

If you are interested in joining Contra Costa DART, contact Stephen Tucker, executive director CC DART/Concord and Byron airports, at 925-586-5977 or Stephenf4e@gmail.com. You can also connect by email at pilots4DART@gmail.com. For more information about Pacific States Aviation, visit http://www.psa.aero.

Mike Bonifay

20 Years, from page 2

2010 U.S. bobsled team in Vancouver.

The greatest local Olympian of all, Clayton resident Don Bragg, celebrated the 50th anniversary of his 1960 pole vault gold medal with Pioneer readers in 2010 when he returned to Rome to renew old friendships with his competitors.

CONCORD, HERE WE COME (TWICE)

Rutledge left The Pioneer for a job with the Sacramento Bee, and Pete Cruz took over the design and production of the twice monthly paper one year after its first issue.

Jill Bedecarré was with the paper for over four years until she died of breast cancer in 2007.

“She was more than an employee – she was the sunshine in every morning,” Steiner said. “She left a hole we still can’t fill.”

Jay Bedecarré covered sports as The Pioneer was established during its first year and returned to assist Steiner after his wife’s death. He is still writing sports, education and features.

Bev Britton, another Contra Costa Times alum, took over the editing when Jill Bedecarré was sick. Britton now also writes news and features.

Eventually, Cruz and Steiner started a website for The Pioneer that had basic information on the paper and a static copy of each issue the public – locally and around the world – could read.

PIONEER ON FACEBOOK

The Pioneer is a year older than Facebook, and the newspaper started its Facebook page with a 2010 Christmas Cookie Contest. The page morphed into the Concord Clayton Pioneer page in 2013.

In 2008, Steiner started a separate monthly tab newspaper, The Concordian, in Concord with a partner. “We came out of the box 30% ahead of projections,” she noted. “Then the recession came, and we hit a wall.

“As with The Pioneer, all revenue for free papers comes from advertising. The economy continued to free fall for the next 19 months and The Concordian just couldn’t generate enough to support two owners. In 2010, I transferred the paper to my partner and turned my full interest to saving The Pioneer.”

In October 2014, Steiner wrote a front-page column announcing that the company would publish The Clayton Pioneer early each month and The Concord Pioneer two weeks later. The Concordian had since folded, and she was eager to be in Concord again. The first Concord Pioneer was delivered to about 25,000 homes in Contra Costa’s largest city. In January 2019, the two papers combined into a monthly Pioneer mailed to Clayton residents and home delivered in Concord.

PANDEMIC PIVOT

The paper continued that way until a little matter of the pandemic hit in early 2020. Like virtually every other business on the planet, The Pioneer was severely impacted. For the first and only time since May 2003, there was only a digital edition of The Pioneer in April 2020 and no edition at all in May.

“For a free community newspaper, sustainability is and will always be the challenge,” Steiner said. “In the first three months of the pandemic, more than 30 independent news sources in Northern California went dark. They didn’t have enough cash in reserve to last even one month without revenue.”

The Pioneer went dark in May 2020 while, as Steiner quipped, Cruz “took our website into the 21st century.”

“We cut our free circulation to alternate months in Concord, sought a broader advertising base by expanding coverage into Pleasant Hill and emerged in June with a robust website and daily content,” Steiner added. Cruz posts new content daily at www.PioneerPublishers.com. More than 1,000 unique visitors are on the site every day. Cruz wrote an April’s Fools story in 2021 about a hiker finding gold on Mt. Diablo that garnered 89,963 views during a month where traffic to The Pioneer website was more than 150,000.

“I have the most fun working with others,” Steiner said.

“In June 2015, I joined with colleagues from the Community Focus to publish the Diablo Valley Yum Guide, then with Lamorinda Weekly, Community Focus and Valley Sentinel to publish two years of the Contra Costa Homes Guide.

“Those times were the most fun I’d had at work in years. Sadly, in 2021 the Focus fell victim to the pandemic and in 2022 Denise Rousset, publisher of the Valley Sentinel, died of breast cancer.”

Concerns About Socialmedia

As Steiner looks back over the first 20 years of The Pioneer and the current state of affairs in the region, she has some sobering thoughts.

“Local politics, like politics everywhere, have become exceedingly divisive – brutal and Trumpian. Social media has given everyone the same platform, spotlight and equal time to say anything they want no matter how false, no matter how personally damaging, no matter how toxic.

“Sites like Nextdoor are a cesspool. The issues/social problems have only gotten bigger and harder. Solutions to the big problems (economic disparity, homelessness, housing) continue to be out of reach.”

Pioneer has

Steiner says local journalism is fighting for its life.

“Whole communities exist in a news desert. Facebook, Google, TikTok, Twitter are poor substitutes for a local paper that hits everyone’s front porch at the same time and is filled with familiar faces, city politics, high school football scores and news that connects us all. The local paper is ‘social media the oldfashioned way.’”

Pioneer news stories in recent years have included struggles about charter and public schools and housing that have literally and figuratively divided the local communities.

Clayton was the site of two Black Lives Matter rallies in June 2020 which uncovered deep-seated feelings among local residents. Concord is still grappling with the development of the Concord Naval Weapons Station property more than 20 years after it was first offered to the city. Through it all, The Pioneer has and will continue to chronicle the life and times in our area.