Downstroke

Butte coach fires self: In July, Butte Community College named head football coach Craig Rigsbee to replace the school’s longtime Athletic Director Mike Liddell. This week, Rigsbee announced the school had hired an interim head football coach to replace Rigsbee, who is stepping down to concentrate on his new position. After 16 years and a 136-33-2 record, 10 conference championships and 15 bowl appearances with nine wins, Rigsbee is hanging it up.

His interim replacement will be offensive coordinator and quarterback coach Jeff Jordan until a permanent replacement can be found via a nationwide search.

“It’s no secret that Jeff has been my top choice to lead our football team until a permanent replacement can be found,” Rigsbee said in the press release, adding he “would be hard pressed to find a better choice.”

Butte’s success under Rigsbee has been tempered with the off-field trouble perpetrated by some of his players, including the beating death in 1998 of a homeless man in Chico.

Rigsbee has maintained that a school like Butte provides kids a second chance by getting them out of bad environments and giving them something to strive toward. He said the successes at the school have far outnumbered the bad behavior. And indeed, at least seven former players, including Aaron Rodgers and longtime Dallas Cowboy offensive lineman Larry Allen, have made it to the NFL.

Dam you DWR! Butte County leaders took turns lambasting the state Department of Water Resources at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting over DWR’s management of Oroville Dam. Stopping just short of calling the department “the source of all evil in the universe,” county officials let it be known that they plan to take the department to the mat in the ongoing federal relicensing process.

While a DWR employee in the audience took notes, grimaced and tried not to squirm, top county lawyer Bruce Alpert told the board that, according to a new county study, the dam costs the county at least $500,000 a year in law enforcement, public works and other impacts. The 41,000-acre complex would generate more than $11 million in property tax if it weren’t owned by the state, Alpert noted, and the county would be taking in another $1.5 million annually had the waters of Lake Oroville not flooded a PG&E power plant.

On top of that, Alpert claims, the state is using Butte County’s land and resources to generate almost a half-billion dollars worth of electricity a year, along with sending enough water south to prop up the entire economy of Southern California.

“It boggles people’s minds when we tell them that such a huge facility can be such a drain financially,” he said. “They don’t want people to understand their economics. They’re producing billions of dollars that flow south and we’re getting nothing. We’re getting less than nothing—we’re getting a negative.”

The rhetoric was in advance of a new study the county has put together that it hopes will convince the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), to force DWR to compensate the county when it renews DWR’s license to operate the dam.