Drilling for Dollars

Not good news this week for the Taft Independent! The Not-The-Daily-Midway-Driller got their way and had our adjudication removed by the Kern County Superior Court. Seems the Driller does not want the Indy to print legal notices - something they make a lot of dough on - and lose more advertising dollars to the Indy.
Unfortunately for us, the court agreed with the Driller ruling that since the Taft Independent is not printed in Taft, then we can’t be adjudicated. Ironic since the Driller is not printed in Taft either. And neither are most other newspapers in Kern County. The law is outdated and prevents competition for government advertising dollars.
The Driller gets to keep their adjudication and we don’t? Go figure. But that is what the decades old state law mandates.
In the good old days, newspapers usually owned their own printing press when the adjudication laws were enacted. Today, most newspapers can’t afford a printing press - ie. the Driller - so they contract out their printing, usually outside of town. Both the Indy and the Driller are printed in Bakersfield. So, if you publish a newspaper in Delano, Shafter, Ridgecrest, Tehachapi or Taft, you get it printed in Bakersfield, and thus out of compliance with the requirements for adjudication.
Sound fair to you? The old law provides s an unfair advantage to larger, established newspapers who don’t adhere to the law, keeps other newspapers from entering the cartel, and prevents competition.
The Indy also did not print our legal notice seeking adjudication in the Driller as required by law - can you imagine the Taft Indy paying the Driller for anything ? - and the court said we screwed up. They got us there.
Well, John Watkins must be one happy man. Boy, he showed us. In fact, he told one of our fans who witnessed our butt whipping in court that if we ever said anything bad about him in the WSW again, he would sue us.
AGAIN!?
Well, we are speechless. Well, not really. The WSW still thinks that John Watkins is a bully who ought to concentrate on his own newspaper instead of making his lawyers rich and wasting his subscribers money. Maybe we’ll go to court and see if we can have the Driller’s adjudication removed since they are not printed in Taft.
Anyway, on the advise of some friends and former Driller subscribers, we’re gonna try for adjudication again - as a newspaper of general circulation in Kern County - and help Mr. Watkins spend more of his employees’ Christmas bonus money on his attorney. Why, we might even talk to our favorite legislator Assemblywoman Jean Fuller and ask that she help change the state law so upstart newspapers like ours can be adjudicated. Stay tuned for a big fight - we’ll keep you posted.
Yes, we got the headline wrong, but so did the Driller. Last week on the front page of their Friday issue, the Driller went way out on a limb and speculated that the City of Taft may buy the old hospital site.
Boy, talk about dumb headlines. Everyone on the planet knows that the city is not gonna by the old hospital, but in an effort to attract readers and piss off just about every city councilman and the city manager, the Driller decided that its readers needed a shocking headline to stir the pot.
The truth is - and you know you can count on the WSW - a group of doctors are looking at buying the old hospital from Catholic Health Care West and opening a skilled nursing facility.
Now, unless you’re from Mettler, you would have known about the pending sale to the investors. Of course, city hall and almost everyone else - except any one of the 4 or 5 hospitals in Bakersfield - hope that the deal goes through.
The negotiations have been going on for some time now and everyone has their fingers crossed. But the old hospital needs a lot of expensive work that will cost the investors a lotta dough before they can even open the facility. The city might be able to get a federal grant to help pay for the remodeling expenses and make the purchase more attractive to the buyers. The money could not be used to buy the hospital.
Meanwhile, the Westside Health Care District is also planning to build a brand spanking new health care facility on Center Street in the old Tasco building. Wouldn’t it be nice if the city, the buyers and the health care district worked out a deal where they all worked together to deliver health care to Westside residents and have one and not two separate facilities?
Sounds like a good idea to the Watcher, but what do we know. We can’t even get the headline right.



I’ve been working on the Rail Road

Finally, after years of talk, closed city council meetings and lots of negotiating, the city is moving towards buying the old Midway Sunset rail road property (maybe this is what the Driller was thinking about).
Councilman Cliff Thompson and Councilman Craig Noble confirmed that the city has agreed to offer $1.4 million dollars to buy the property.
The plan is to have the city loan the city’s Redevelopment Agency the money at 12% interest and seek potential developers who would turn the old property into a thriving commercial and residential area that would bring new business and life to the downtown and attract investment to Taft.
We sure hope something happens soon. Taft could use some redevelopment in the downtown that brings more shopping opportunities.
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