Hmm…where could that story idea have possibly been done first?

Montna made it painfully clear during Agenda Item #26 at last night’s board meeting, which was to take a 429-acre patch of rice farmland between Sawtelle Road and the Sutter Bypass and transform it into giant garter snake habitat.

The proposal passed by a 4-1 vote, the only split vote of the night.

Guess who the no vote was.

Montna basically said he’s fed up with garter snake habitats in the county, which came out when a representative from the firm that’s going to run the place, Westervelt Ecological Services, came up to the podium and uttered the traditional “I can answer any question you have” sentence.

“Yeah, I have a question,” Montna said. “How many playpens are we going to have in Sutter County for snakes?”

Montna’s two main gripes are the first, the snake land could be growing rice and second, the land credits that come from the snake habitat can be bought for non-Sutter County projects. In fact, if the land were to give Sutter County the best shot of buying the credits, he said he might support it.

This whole thing reminded me of two particular moments:

1) The part of “Snakes on a Plane” where Samuel L. Jackson shouts the line, “Enough is enough! I’ve had it with these m***********g snakes on this m***********g plane!”

2) Back when I was covering the Butte County Board of Supervisors, the late Mary Anne Houx expressed her dislike to giant garter snake habitat. Other supervisors tried to explain the snake’s threatened status. Mary Anne’s response was “Well, when I see a snake, I kill it.”

That comment got her the front page of the Chico Enterprise-Record the next morning.

And, as we in the newsroom found out last night, there was a good reason for it.

So, to Chuck I say get well soon and give the insurance company hell for another Prius…

(Los Angeles Times editor Russ) Stanton also said on KCRW that on the list of reasons that ex-readers give for dropping the Times, “too liberal” ranks 4th — and “too conservative” ranks 5th. 

But Sutter County PIO Chuck Smith has been making the rounds with this video, which is a montage of flodding in Sutter County for the past 105 years.

Watching this may give you the urge to buy a small boat. Although I’m sure the county also hopes it gives you the urge for a local levee upgrade match.

This year’s grand jury report was a significant improvement over last year’s.

When I say that, I don’t mean about the findings and determinations the jury made. I don’t give a rip about which “side” those findings come out on, if they even do.

What I mean is they way the put together their findings – and even how they wrote them up – is a lot better over last year, which left the report easily open to criticism, an opportunity the county jumped on like Amy Winehouse on a pack of smokes.

Here’s what they did right (I may continually add more as time goes):

A bunch of exhibitionists- I was pretty shocked when last year’s jury tackled some significant topics – including pensions and the SCTA-related board meeting conflicts – and had a significant lack of evidence exhibits. In fact, they only had two.

Evidence exhibits are important, in my puny little opinion. It lets people see some of the raw material the grand jury used to make their findings.

This year, the grand jury amped up the exhibits. The section on the travel expense policy I detailed in Wednesday’s article alone had 20. I counted 43 total. I think doing so provided a more thorough analysis of the grand jury’s findings.

Picture this- Along with exhibits, the grand jury also included pictures in several of their reports. Some of these pictures were very telling, including:

*A vehicle making illegal u-turns at Encinal School in Live Oak.

* Exposed wires in the control room of the county jail to demonstrate safety concerns.

* Puddles in the Mental Health building’s parking lot to demonstrate a need for repairs.

Pictures provide a lot of information and are a good inclusion in these reports. (Why do you think newspapers employ photographers?)

Die, bar graphs! Die!- Let me be perfectly blunt: I. Hate. Bar. Graphs. I think if people in custody at Guantanamo were required to analyze bar graphs, it should constitute a war crime.

Why? Because they’re ridiculously easy to manipulate. By changing the parameters on a graph axis, you can make differences between pieces of data look startling or minimum. It’s impossible to make any genuine conclusions about data in a bar graph

So what did last year’s grand jury use in analyzing audits, pension costs and pay raises? Yep, bar graphs.

This year, there were no bar graphs. And that’s a good thing.

And, before any members of said grand jury come for my head since there’s this prevailing theory I have something against the grand jury because I dared to be critical of them, I hope to find time to give compliments to the report in the future because (no, don’t adjust your screen, I’ll even bold it) the members of the grand jury deserve compliments on how they put this report together.

So click here.

Of course, this isn’t the first time. Arnold said the same thing last year after the Tahoe fires:

The somebody is former three-term District 2 Supervisor Dennis Nelson.

Nelson (or, more specifically, the Dennis C. Nelson Company) is appealing the planning commision’s approval of a plan by DeSilva Gates Construction’s plan to dig up 1.5 million cubic yards of material south of Nicolaus for the Highway 70 improvement project and reclaim the holes as aquaculture. In other words, catfish ponds.

Nelson argued to the Planning Commission that aquaculture has never been analyzed in the General Plan, could result in water quality issues and mining the parcels in questions for the road improvements would result in a loss of prime agricultural land.

Since the Walnut Avenue Community Center hearing has been postponed until July 1, this is the only public hearing on the schedule for the BoS.