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Tuesday is always my busy day, but because the Board of Supervisors had no meeting this week, I was able to do enjoyable things. A welcome change.

It started with an outdoor socially distanced visit with someone I love at Brentwood skilled care facility. Brentwood has gone out of its way to make limited visiting safe for everyone. It helps the residents who have been suffering by not having regular visits with family members. Meeting in a large tent outside felt like a clandestine exchange of espionage information. I brought a giant bag of leftover Halloween candy for the residents and staff to share. Better them than us.

I met a friend for lunch at From the Hearths sidewalk cafe. Black and Bleu Salad for both of us. Yum. While walking back to the car, I ran into another friend and we caught up, not having seen each other for months. He didnt even know I had a column tsk tsk.

While we were chatting, three very friendly women approached us and said, Thank you for wearing a mask. You have just won $50. They were from the United Way and are walking around Redding, Red Bluff and Chico handing out $50 gift cards to people wearing masks. Score.

I went grocery shopping and was home in time to watch the early election returns with a nice martini. Congratulations to John Leach for winning the District 5 supervisor seat. He has promised to listen to the citizens. Wont that be nice?

And now for something you will rarely read in this column. Thank you, Code Enforcement. Yep, I am thanking the people whose prime directive for the past five years has been to violate the Fourth Amendment rights of its citizens by conducting warrantless searches of their private curtilages.

Apparently someone called and complained about a property in Manton Im not sure what the issue was, but it was probably too much junk in the yard or people living in RVs, goddess forbid. When they came up the hill to serve an abatement notice to the hapless residents, a hard working local gal asked why they were always up here handing out citations, but never offering to help the economically and often physically challenged populace in our town?

She must have struck a nerve, because Officer Clint Weston offered to bring up a couple huge dumpsters, leave them at a central location, and people could clean up their places and CE would haul it away. He also offered to tow away old cars. And none of it would cost people a dime.

This is precisely the kind of thing Code Enforcement should be spending its $848,000 a year on. As of this writing there were at least nine cars ready to be towed and the dumpster for metal appeared to be almost full. Thank you, Officer Weston and everybody over at CE and Environmental Health. Maybe this is the start of a beautiful new relationship.

A little caveat about my column from last week. I had written on Thursday about the COVID-infectious person who had been in a bar for several hours. My deadline is Friday morning and I dutifully sent the column off to the editor.

I had learned about the incident at the supervisors meeting on Tuesday morning and was under the impression that the person was in the bar, which turned out to be The Roundup, the weekend prior to Tuesdays meeting, Oct. 23-25. That would have meant the person, who did not cooperate with contact tracing, had only been exposing people for a few days.

What a rude awakening Saturday morning when everyone read that the COVID Drink-along had occurred the weekend before, Oct. 16-18. Whose decision was it to withhold information about this potential super-spreader event for 10-14 days? Anyone with a basic understanding of exponential math can figure out a boatload of people were exposed because of it.

Since the infected person wasnt cooperating with contact tracing, you can be sure he wasnt telling his buddies or anyone he ran into at Walmart. And without knowing it, those people could have spread it and so on and so on.

Releasing the name of the person would violate his HIPAA rights and nobody wants that, but the name of the bar should have been well publicized immediately so other patrons could get tested and isolate themselves. Shame on you, Public Health.

The office of the County Counsel sent me the information I had requested about the almost half million dollars spent yearly on investigating welfare fraud. Social Services receives federal, state and local funding which they give to the district attorneys office to catch welfare cheats. The program is mandatory and necessary, but are we getting our moneys worth?

The total dollar amount of fraud overpayments identified in investigations in 2019 was $125,304. However, part of that total was later found not to be fraud. I couldnt figure out how much, but it appears that 33 people who were prosecuted were not disqualified from receiving payments while one person was. Some people were disqualified in administrative hearings after being investigated by the DAs office, and there is no way to know how many were disqualified by Social Services employees before they received payments. Certainly more than the DAs office found.

Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and say they saved $125,000 by spending almost four times that amount, is that a good plan?

But Liz, says the Straw Man, most of that money comes from the state and federal government, not county coffers. Right, but its still our tax dollars. Waste is waste. This program was started during the previous DAs tenure, so maybe its time to take a look at it.

Maybe well know who will occupy the White House for the next four years by the time you read this. Patience and martinis will get us through. Ill be drinking the good stuff thanks to United Way.

Liz Merry has been half of Merry Standish Comedy for 30 years and is a former downtown Red Bluff business owner. She now has a home-based business and is locked and loaded in Manton. She can be reached atlizmerry58@gmail.com.

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Election day in and around Red Bluff - Red Bluff Daily News