SANDRA P. LANDERS IN TROUBLE AGAIN!!
			(Sandra P. Landers has a long history of activist endeavors.  Go to the “old” Albany Central sometime and check out her activity on behalf of people taking up chewing tobacco in the wake of the Solano smoking ban.  The article is called EXCITING ALTERNATIVE FOR SOLANO AVENUE SMOKERS--it's down a ways.). But now for her current troubles.......... As a passionate environmentalist Sandra is especially fond of birds in general, and burrowing owls in particular. For reasons we will explain she took it into her head to climb the fence surrounding the $100,000 (your tax dollars at work) burrowing owl habitat located on the Plateau and shortly after this picture was taken this somewhat flawed plan landed her in a legal imbroglio of serious proportions. Someone had spotted her doing this and reported the transgression to the authorities.  Rangers and police quickly descended upon the crime scene and immediately took her into custody.  But why was Sandra doing this?  Read on.
		As she explained to authorities, she had simply been attempting to salt the plateau with stuffed owls in the hopes that they would attract some real ones (like duck decoys).  She also thought that the stuffed ones would at least provide some photo opportunities for disappointed naturalists who currently couldn’t see any real owls there at all.  She just wanted to create sort of like an outdoor version of the dioramas you see in museums where wildlife specimens are presented in their natural surroundings. She said she was aware of alternative plans if the burrowing owls never did show up there.  The Rangers had told her they would convert the habitat to accommodate some other type of endangered species.  She said she thought that a couple of the current city council members might qualify, but she didn’t think the rangers would build any single family dwellings (far from public transportation) on habitat land, and that the council members would certainly not want to live in the little tunnels the park people had dug out there.  Anyway, she concluded, she was just trying to attract owls and make things nicer for photographers. As noted above, the park rangers and police quickly detained Sandra and confiscated her stuffed owl.  They even called her a “perp”, which is cop talk for “perpetrator”.  But like the experienced activist she is, Sandra wasn’t about to take this lying down. “Where’s your search warrant?” she kept asking them in a very forceful tone of voice.  “If you don’t have one, charge me, or let me go!”  The authorities immediately got on their cell phones but couldn’t come up with much.  “Trespassing” didn’t cut it since she never did actually get over the fence, and “conspiracy to trespass” required a group of people, not just one.  And the City Attorney could find no statutes on the books or precedents in the common law about “Salting empty habitats with stuffed animals.”  But the clincher came when the city staff checked out the status of the Plateau in the Voices To Vision document and discovered that the habitat land and the fence around it actually belonged to Tom Bates, Mayor of Berkeley.  So Albany didn’t have jurisdiction over the whole thing anyway.  Calls to the  Berkeley Mayor’s office were not returned and as a result authorities had no choice but to (very reluctantly) release Sandra into the custody of her husband, Sanders P. Landers, at which point the relieved and happy couple went away and had a delicious sandwich and a smoothie at the Tay Tah café.  Later, the owl was returned to her, no charges were pressed, and in the end Sandra skated clean on the whole caper.  (back)