Watsonville

Services for Dale Skillicorn will be 4 p.m. Saturday at Mehl’s Colonial Chapel, 222 E. Lake Ave., Watsonville.

Skillicorn, who died Saturday, was Watsonville’s vice mayor and had served on the City Council since 2002, and was known as a staunch advocate of his hometown.

The City Council will meet at 6 p.m. Friday to  appoint a new vice mayor and discuss the process for appointing a new representative from District 7. The council has 30 days to appoint Skillicorn’s replacement or the city must hold a special election for the seat. Friday’s special meeting will be held in the Council Chamber, 275 Main St., 4th floor.

The City Council plans to honor Skillicorn for his public service at a later date.

The sun broke through Wednesday afternoon, highlighting emerald hillsides and a few storm-related problems. As the Pajaro River rose to just short of a foot of the Murphy Crossing bridge east of Watsonville, Monterey County crews considered closing the road, but decided to keep watch instead.

Shawn Atkins, interim maintenance manager for Monterey County Public Works, said the low-lying bridge could close about 6:30 or 7 p.m., when the river was predicted to rise over the roadway. If so, he said it would probably be reopened again in the morning after crews removed concrete barriers and cleaned up any mud on the roadway.

Temporary road closures at Murphy Crossing are common during winter storms, as rain falling farther up the watershed drains down the river, Atkins said.

In addition to measuring the distance between the water and the bridge, Atkins used his laptop computer to monitor the river’s flow as it passed through Chittenden Pass, about three miles east of Murphy Crossing. At 1:30 p.m. 818 cubic feet of water flowed through Chittenden. Atkins said 900 cubic feet of flow would be enough to close the bridge. But, at close to 9 feet,  the river was far from flood stage of 32 feet.

Earlier in the afternoon, public works crews cleaned up a small slide that partially closed Lewis Road.

Here’s the scenario: You show up at a restaurant 15 minutes before closing time and order dinner and drinks. Should you be served? If so, how much time should you get to eat and drink?

The city Planning Commission will be taking  a look this evening at closing times imposed on restaurants as part of a special municipal permit for alcohol sales. Police have been interpreting the closing time as the deadline for lights out, doors locked. But restaurant owners say that’s when they can serve their last customers.

Given the tough economic climate in which restaurants are operating, planners are recommending extending closing times by an hour to give patrons time to finish meals and beverages.

$17 million’s a big number.

And Pajaro Valley school officials are running out of time to figure out how to cut that much from the roughly $180 million budget. They have to have a budget plan for the next three years to the County Office of Education by March 11.

“Chop from the top” is a popular refrain among those who think the district’s top heavy and can afford fewer managers, but even if you eliminated two or three of the four assistant superintendents, you’d only save a few hundred thousand. Say you cut $1 million from administration — a number I picked from the air but would probably come close to the salaries and benefits of the top five district administrators — you’d still have $16 million to go.

Teachers and classified workers will undoubtedly give up pay or benefits or both, though negotiations haven’t yielded concessions so far. But they aren’t going to shoulder the entire burden. One item on the table is furloughs, which would save the district about $250,000 for each day employees take off without pay. Since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed lopping a week off the school year, that’s $1.25 million right there. A 1 percent salary cut across the board would save about $680,000. So pick a  number, $2 million, $4 million, $8 million from employees?

Even at $8 million — and remember, union employees have to agree to the take-aways — you’d still have that much left to cut.

Some have floated the idea of closing schools. The 3-year-old Cesar Chavez Middle School is one school that’s been mentioned. Mar Vista Elementary School, which has the smallest enrollment of the district’s elementary schools is another. Last year, according to the California Department of Education, Mar Vista, in Aptos, had 423 students, compared to Rio del Mar, 601; Bradley, 563; and Calabasas, 699. But neither the board nor administration are inclined to consider the idea because a demographic study showed the current 19,000-student enrollment would grow by more than 1,000 students in the next five years and they want to be prepared for the anticipated influx.

So where do you go? Libraries, sports, counselors … As a parent, as a student, as a teacher, as a community member, what are you willing to jettison?

Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Paul Burdick refused to recuse himself and let a previous ruling in favor of the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency stand Friday.

Lawyers for Pajaro-Sunny Mesa Community Services District, which sued the water agency to overturn an $80 pumping fee, said Burdick should have disclosed a previous professional relationship with one of their witnesses before ruling in the case.

In January, Burdick upheld the water agency’s right to continue charging the fee.

Friday, Burdick denied Pajaro-Sunny Mesa’s motion that he recuse himself and vacate the January ruling.

The judge acknowledged Linda Contreras, the water agency’s former accountant and a plaintiff witnesses, had been his client several years ago, but said he hadn’t realized earlier that she was the same woman he represented in a minor personal injury case before he was appointed to the bench. He said Contreras is a common name. He said even if he had known, there would have been no conflict of interest because the water agency case turned on a legal issue, not on matters Contreras would have raised if she had testified.

Burdick ruled in January that the issue had already been decided in previous cases on similar agency fees, and Pajaro-Sunny Mesa should have joined previous litigation for relief.

Cec Bell, who served as principal of Watsonville High School from 2004 to 2006, died Tuesday.

Bell previously had served as principal at MacQuiddy Elementary School and assistant principal at Rolling Hills Middle School.

She was remembered during a moment of silence at the Pajaro Valley school board meeting Wednesday.

“She was someone who made a huge contribution to this district,” said Superintendent Dorma Baker. “She dedicated her whole life to students.”

A fax from Caltrans caught my attention when it popped out of the machine a few minutes ago.

Caltrans is proposing to build an overpass complete with northbound and southbound entrance and exit ramps at the intersection of Highway 101 and San Juan Road. A stop sign on San Juan Road is the only traffic control at the site now. An overpass seems a bit safer.

Full disclosure: Last March, I was a passenger in a car that was plowed while trying to make a left-hand turn from San Juan Road to enter the northbound lanes of the busy highway east of Watsonville. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but fortunately everyone survived the crash.

I couldn’t reach anyone late Thursday to find out how the agency will pay for the $90 million project given the state’s shaky finances, but I’ll look into it.

In the meantime, there’s a public hearing on the proposed project at 4 p.m. Thursday at the Aromas School Gymnasium, 365 Vega St.

After my story on airships, past and present, ran Sunday, I heard from a few readers, including one who chided me for not mentioning that unlike Airship Ventures’ Zeppelin NT, which uses nonflammable helium for lift, the Hindenburg was filled with highly flammable  hydrogen when it crashed in 1936. The German airship company had no choice since the United States had embargoed the import of helium to Germany.

Another reader wanted to know the difference between blimps and dirigibles. Dirigibles, including zeppelins, have internal frames. Blimps are gas-filled bags.

I was particularly interested in Don Wilson’s e-mail. A Soquel resident, Wilson served as a blimp pilot during World War I and spent time at the Watsonville base.

Here, in his own words, are his memories.

First: Did you know that in World War I, England had two types of Lighter-than-Air ships: They were Type A, Rigid and Type B, Limp (hence the term Blimp).

The U.S. Navy during World War II had a  considerable number of blimps on duty in England, Northern Africa, South America and on both coasts of the United States. They were used principally for anti-submarine patrol, but also served as platforms for graduating students from the Navy’s parachute-packing school at Lakehurst, New Jersey (The final examination in the school was to jump out of an aircraft with a parachute that you had packed.)

There were two major LTA (Lighter-than-Air) centers in California: at Tustin, south of Los Angeles, and at Moffett Field. There were a number of auxiliary fields — up at Eureka, down just north of San Diego and the one you mentioned in your story: at Watsonville.

I was one of the blimp pilots who came down from Moffett Field to man the station and fly blimps out of the Watsonville field. Our principal duty there was to keep an eye and ear out for planes on training flights out of Fort Ord. If one of them crashed  at sea or in Monterey Bay, we were there to pick up the crew members before they “hypered” in the cold bay waters. We also went out early to intercept ships and convoys heading for San Francisco and escort them to points where they could be picked up by airships from Moffett Field, or conversely, take a “handoff” from a Moffett Field crew and continue an escort toward the South Pacific.

Our average flight lasted 12 hours, so we worked, ate and slept on the blimps, then had the next day off (I mostly duffered around the golf course, proud to say that I got to where I could hit 90 — though I was told that that wasn’t too hot a score for nine holes).

At the field at Watsonville, there was no hangar for the blimps, so they had to be hooked to a tall mast in the center of the air field. Someone had to stay in the ship, and sort of fly it with its nose hooked onto the mast and the ship rotating with the vagaries of the wind. One night the winds got so strong they blew the blimp off the mast and onto the Pajaro Valley golf course.

For the most part, the maintenance crews stayed for about six months at the Watsonville field, with the flight crews rotating monthly.

From Moffett itself, we mostly patrolled the coastal waters and escorted ships and convoys in and out of San Francisco Bay. We did occasionally work with a Navy radar-training school (we’d go up somewhere in the area, park in the sky and see if the trainees could find us).

As the war ended and we were mustering out of the Navy, there were plans on the drawing board for a giant zeppelin whose designers envisioned a new type of tourist ship. The idea was that the airship would have a luxury deck with posh cabins, dining room, bar and all the other amenities of a surface liner — except that at some 50 knots airspeed, the zeppelin would be must faster. The plan was to have the airship fly down the coast from Seattle to San Diego, picking up passengers along the way (they would land and take off in small airplanes from the built-in flight deck under the passenger deck) and then sail on to Hawai’I. (I didn’t hear any more about the plan after I got home from the Navy).