Redwoods Tower Over Two Tall-Timber Spats

The redwood wars are raging on two coasts.

Preservationists want coast redwoods added to Palo Alto’s list of protected trees. The mania for building million-dollar mega-mansions, they worry, will doom some of the redwoods unless the city stays the chain saws.

In Washington, two California congressmen have crossed saws over tree politics.

In the death-rattle days of the go-go 1980s, financier Charles Hurwitz’s Texas S&L; went belly-up, costing taxpayers $1.6 billion in bailout bucks. So far, the Feds have recovered only $18 million. The FDIC, the federal bailout agency, and the Office of Thrift Savings have $1.1 billion in claims against another Hurwitz company, Maxxam.

Now a congressional task force is investigating whether the agencies are trying to recoup some of that by pressing for control of thousands of acres of old California redwoods owned by yet another Hurwitz company, Pacific Lumber.

John T. Doolittle, a Roseville Republican, was furious: “This case is government corruption at its worst. The heavy hand of government should not be used to extort private property from anyone.”

But George Miller, a Concord Democrat, sounded tickled: “If the agency gets creative and is able to get around the statute of limitations that would bar the public’s right to recover this, we’re supposed to lament that and feel sorry and ashamed . . . ? No, no. That’s called justice. That’s pursuit of justice.”

And in case you were putting candles on its cake, the world’s heftiest tree, the General Sherman in Sequoia National Park, is not as old as you thought. A research ecologist used a new tree-ring estimate to trim as much as four millenniums off the tree’s birth certificate, making it a youngster of perhaps 2,000 years, give or take a few centuries.

We should all be so lucky.

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A bitter pill: One upside of Viagra was that the little blue impotence remedy was supposed to save endangered species from being slaughtered for body parts which, according to folklore, contain aphrodisiacs. After all, it’s easier to get a prescription than a bear gall bladder.

Not so fast . . . Viagra’s benefits to animals are still problematic. A California wildlife official told a hearing on the matter that poachers still kill an estimated 1,500 black bears each year in the state.

“Sometimes we find the bears dead--shot, and just the gall bladder taken,” said Fred Coale, deputy chief of California’s wildlife enforcement branch. Poachers sell one for $200 to $400, merchants mark up the illegal organ to $2,000, and an enterprising felon can mark that up 10 times for sale in Asia.

But even if Viagra did eliminate the gall-bladder market, Coale pointed out, it’s no substitute for bear-paw soup.

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Street value: Give the gift of signage.

With mega-stores and other firms getting the company name put on streets, the city of Dublin is making names make money for good causes. Local nonprofit agencies work with developers to auction off the names of new streets. Dublin’s mayor forked over $8,000 to name a quarter-mile street after his toddler, Glynnis Rose.

In Berkeley, it wasn’t the name that mattered--it was size.

The city scuttled plans to rename a small street “Cesar Chavez Drive” after the labor leader’s nephew said the honor was too meager for a man he compared to Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Chavez’s nephew and others are working to rename some larger street for Chavez, although in 1994, Berkeley’s business owners objected to rechristening the very large University Avenue for Chavez. The city settled on bestowing Chavez’s name on a park, which nephew Chavez called “a consolation prize.”

Backto the Mall

Hitting the shops today for the post-holiday sales? Here are the biggest malls in California:

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MALL SQUARE FEET 1. Del Amo Fashion Center, Torrance 3,000,000 2. South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa 2,022,000 3. Lakewood Center Mall 1,804,489 4. Fashion Valley Center, San Diego 1,697,162 5. Great Mall of the Bay Area, Milpitas 1,600,000 6. Northridge Fashion Center 1,526,500 7. Ontario Mills 1,483,575 8. Eastridge Mall, San Jose 1,378,000 9. Montclair Plaza 1,360,371 10. Stanford Shopping Center, Palo Alto 1,350,000

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Source: International Council of Shopping Centers, New York

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Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times

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One-offs: At a San Diego police conference, guns, uniforms and badges from six Colorado State Patrol officers were stolen from a van . . . A helium blimp has been hovering over the San Joaquin Valley, collecting air pollution data in a region now classified as a “severe” violator of clean air rules . . . Vallejo is broadcasting classical music into its streets to drive away drug dealers.

EXIT LINE

“I’ve had really good success placing dogs with Cal State San Bernardino faculty and staff.”

--Kevin Lamude, a Cal State San Bernardino communications professor who has given up golf to spend his weekends rescuing and finding homes for unwanted dogs.

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California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.