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County temporarily closes Lompoc animal facility
Questions raised on election Locals react to statements that California voting software is fraudulent By GRAYCE MCCORMICK NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
Starting in December, C.A.R.E.4Paws will add Sundays at Ryon Park to its weekly schedule of distributing emergency pet food and supplies every Tuesday at the Half Century Club.
By GRAYCE MCCORMICK NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
Santa Barbara County Animal Services decided to temporarily close the Lompoc animal shelter in the wake of operational challenges across three shelter locations. Staffing and animal care are now concentrated at the two shelters in Santa Maria and Goleta, and the Lompoc facility will be closed through Jan. 31. Animal Services will explore new ways of delivering services to the Lompoc area, and is attempting to break free from the traditional brick-and-mortar shelter model. “We were experiencing some operational challenges with coverage and safe coverage across three shelters,” Angela Yates, director of Animal Services, told the News-Press. “We have staff openings we needed to fill, and we have experienced some tremendous changes in how we’re operating due to COVID.” Animal Services is collaborating with C.A.R.E.4Paws and Companion Animal Placement Assistance to offer Lompoc residents mobile veterinary clinics, offsite events for pet food distribution such as a free pet food bank, vaccines, pop up licensing, free microchipping and more. Starting in December, C.A.R.E.4Paws will add Sundays at Ryon Park to its weekly schedule of distributing emergency pet food and supplies every Tuesday at the Half Century Club. Field services are still continuing in Lompoc per usual and an animal control officer is assigned there daily. The full range of services are also being provided by the Santa Maria Animal Center. Ms. Yates said that while Animal Services faces staffing issues like many other businesses during COVID-19, she believes the animal sheltering industry has been stuck for the last hundred years in a model that “disempowers the community” from being a part of it. “That’s the bigger conversation happening in the animal welfare industry,” she said. “There’s pressure in keeping the Lompoc shelter fully staffed during this short period of time, but we will look at and explore and see how this works. “We still have all our animal
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Animal Services is collaborating with C.A.R.E.4Paws and Companion Animal Placement Assistance to offer Lompoc residents mobile veterinary clinics, offsite events for pet food distribution such as a free pet food bank, vaccines, pop up licensing, free microchipping and more.
control operations in Lompoc, so if we did have a lost dog, when the owner is identified, could we make the match over the phone and could one of our animal control officers deliver that dog straight to the owner?” the director asked. “It’s way better for the animals, and it’s way better for the people because they get their animals back quicker.” These are the types of ideas and solutions Animal Services staff will be considering, and the staff members are seeking community input on how they can better serve Lompoc residents. “The animal welfare industry has been meeting via Zoom and collaborating and really talking about how we can serve our community members better,” Ms. Yates said. “What does Lompoc need in terms of animal sheltering? More access to services? More convenient licensing? Low-cost vaccines and neutering?” She added that the conversation surrounding how to better integrate the services into the community can be compared to conversation about law enforcement. “It’s not so different from the conversation that has occurred over the past few months around police forces and communitybased policing instead of enforcement policing,” the director said. “There’s a lot of conversation in the animal welfare industry in serving communities instead of focusing solely on that enforcement side of it.” Now, Animal Services will be holding a series of stakeholder
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Revenue windfall predicted Analyst says state could end up with $12 billion to $40 billion By GRAYCE MCCORMICK NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
Although County Animal Services decided to temporarily close the Lompoc animal shelter, residents of Lompoc can still utilize services provided by C.A.R.E.4Paws.
and community meetings over the next few months to gather input and brainstorm on how to best deliver services to the Lompoc community. Ms. Yates said the first one will likely be in January. “It’s so hard for people to remember the temporary part of it, but it’s really important because we have not made a longterm decision about that shelter,” the director said. “We really want
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to have a conversation with the Lompoc community before we make any long-term decisions.” For the remainder of the year, Animal Services will be offering mobile clinic services, emergency pet food and supplies to Lompoc residents on certain days from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Mobile Clinic Services will be offered at the Half Century Club Please see shelter on A10
In a UCSB Economic Forecast webinar this week, California legislative analyst Gabe Petek delivered some good news for the state. His prediction? “A very large revenue windfall, very large, historically large,” he said during Thursday’s presentation on the 2021-22 Fiscal Outlook for California. If the state had no policy changes, Mr. Petek said there would be a $26 billion windfall, but he added that it could be as much as $40 billion or as little as $12 billion. He said that one of the reasons the state had a better revenue experience this year is because “the state’s fiscal structure worked in its advantage.” Mr. Petek explained further. He said the economic downturn from COVID-19 disproportionately affected people without a college education, who experienced the most job and income loss, but most of California’s tax revenues are generated from its high income taxpayers. Forty-five percent of California’s personal income tax is from the top 1% of people Please see revenue on A10
California legislative analyst Gabe Petek.
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Dr. Peter Rupert, the executive director of the UCSB Economic Forecast Project and a professor of economics at UCSB.
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Santa Barbara County, along with 40 other counties in California and numerous counties in 28 other states, uses Dominion voting systems. Thursday night, President Donald Trump’s legal team told reporters that the software “stole the vote” from Mr. Trump. His attorney, Sidney Powell, said in a press conference that there was foreign interference in the systems. “The Dominion Voting Systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out,” she said. “One of (the software’s) most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden.” According to an Associated Press fact check, Smartmatic is an international company incorporated in Florida by Venezuelan founders, but does not have any ties to Venezuela. In addition, the AP said that there’s no evidence that any of Dominion’s systems switched votes for Mr. Trump to count as
votes for Mr. Biden, based on a statement by the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, which oversees U.S. election security. Joe Holland, the Santa Barbara County registrar of voters, told the News-Press, “None of it is true,” and he said he knows nothing about Venezuela. “We’ve been working with Dominion for years,” he said. “It’s a tried and true and trusted system, and we audit 1% of all the precincts, then cover every contest, and we’ve never had an issue whatsoever.” He said from time to time with votes by mail, parents of a college student will sign their vote-by-mail ballot and officials can tell it’s not the signature of the student, so they don’t count the ballot and inform the students they didn’t count it and why. “That’s about the extent of the problems,” said Mr. Holland, who’s also the county clerk, recorder and assessor. “It just doesn’t exist on any level besides the one-offs like that… We don’t see any fraud whatsoever.” The office utilizes a machine that looks at signatures digitally and compares them to previous signatures. If it’s a very good match, they’re accepted, and according to Mr. Holland, that’s the case for 50% of the ballots. For the other 50% that may not be a good match or high quality, employees look at them to determine their validity. “We’re looking at 100,000 of the signatures with our own eyes,” Please see DOMINION on A9
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