Chris Smith: Need a job? Now's a good time to be looking

HELP WANTED: I'm trying to remember when, if ever, I've walked into or past more businesses that have signs up pleading for employees.

It's not just me. Kelly Hartman of Nelson Staffing has worked in job recruitment 26 years and says, “I have never seen it the way it is right now.”

She said Sonoma County retail, hospitality and manufacturing businesses all are competing for people who'll work for about $10 to $13 an hour.

As a result, Hartman said, “It's all about the employee right now.” Employers are getting creative with ways to retain existing workers, and some are boosting pay to attract new ones.

If only there were also apartments and other rentals with “VACANCY” signs out front.

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Our housing crisis gets pretty real, and pretty human, when you sit outside a Starbucks with Autumn and her two children.

Having driven giant trucks in the Army until an injury ended her career, Autumn collects nearly $4,000 a month in benefits for the physical and emotional disabilities that prevent her from working. So she's not broke.

But she and her 16-year-old son and her daughter, who's 9, live in a tent in an encampment near the Russian River.

“We're in our sixth month of being homeless,” Autumn said. She and the kids lost their last place, she explained, to a rent hike she just couldn't afford.

The approach of winter has her scared. The cold and rain are bad enough, but she's also troubled by the prospect of sheriff's deputies moving in to roust those people who don't relocate from the woods to the winter shelters.

Her family can't go into a shelter, she said, because animals aren't allowed and she can't leave behind the two cats and 18-year-old dog she relies on as emotional support animals.

Autumn is not her real name. She said she has to protect her identity because there's someone who mustn't know where she and her children are.

She figures she could afford a two-bedroom house with monthly rent of as much as about $1,700 - if she could just find one.

The place has to be approved by HUD so she can use her voucher, her animals would have to be allowed and the location has to be in the Guerneville, Forestville, Sebastopol area.

“We have lots of barriers,” Autumn acknowledges. “I never thought I'd be in this situation.”

She's hoping she'll find a decent home “before the police raids and before the cold.”

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THERE'S A COW named Betsy in second-grade teacher Chris Wilson's classroom at Taylor Mountain School just south of Santa Rosa.

A real cow? Yes. But not a live one.

Peter Leveque, the tireless hiker and naturalist and retired SRJC biology teacher, found the skeleton off to the side of a trail.

Leveque volunteers regularly with Chris Wilson's students. He asked the teacher if he'd like to have the skeleton to help introduce the 7-year-olds to the life cycle and the difference between vertebrates and invertebrates.

“Why not?” Mr Wilson replied. Leveque cleaned up the bones. With his and the teacher's help, the students enthusiastically reassembled and then covered them with a skin of burlap.

Not too many second-graders know how a cow is put together.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.