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Ambitious Rebuilding Underway

in School of Business 

Humboldt State University's School of Business is in the midst of an ambitious rebuilding effort designed to boost enrollment and respond to a frequently cited need for more business graduates in the regional economy.

Read more about this.

 
One of the fun things about my job-and there are a good number of them-is that occasionally I get to take some cool tour.  Last month, the Green Diamond Resource Company took a couple dozen people on a tour of its forest lands near Korbel.  They imparted a ton of information about lumber, fish, other species, clear-cutting, the economics of growing timber and various other things.  Green Diamond owns 400,000 acres in and around Humboldt and Del Norte Counties, so any way you look at it, the company is hugely important. 

There's no doubt that Green Diamond has a point of view that a number of folks wouldn't share.  For example, they maintain that clear-cutting  is a good forest management practice, and the areas they showed us appear to provide evidence for that view.  I'm guessing that they pay less attention to biodiversity overall than to the species that governments specifically monitor.  As a long-time conservationist, however, I found them to be forthright, with excellent people in their "ology" disciplines.  Of their 400,000 acres, they describe 100,000 acres as being highly protected, much of it along waterways.  The other 300,000 are unapologetically managed for timber production but not without an eye on conservation.

The high point of the tour had to be observing a mated pair of spotted owls.  (There turn out to be a bunch of spotted owls on Green Diamond's property.  For an interesting recent article by the North Coast Journal, click here).  A few of the guests got to hold a mouse-on-a-stick offering to the owls, who swooped in across the party and grabbed the first three mice. 

The fourth mouse, however, proved to have some Zen judo capability, dropping to the ground several times just as or just before the owl made a grab.  A couple of us-and remember, this party was made up of tough private industry folks, steely-eyed economic developers and public officials who made it through election campaigns-took up a chant: "Pardon the mouse! Pardon the mouse!"  Which is what happened.  The scrappy little mouse went back into the container with a promise that he would live a long, happy rodent life.

Moms and Small Business

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 56.6% of mothers with infants under a year old are working or looking for work.

So why am I sharing this with you? Because my world is about to change.  I am going to be a mom!  This, of course, changes everything!  I am preparing to take some time off of work but also to return to my wonderful position here at the North Coast SBDC.

The blog post at the link below explains that a small business with a new mom on staff should be aware of a recent shift in Internal Revenue Service policy, and it has some great links that provide information about State regulations that may be of interest to small businesses with employees returning to work after childbirth.