Home Care In Hanford, CA

Property owners on the north side of Hwy 198 between 11th and 12th avenues have filed an ambitious plan for a large mixed-use project just under 40 acres being processed by the City of Hanford. Named Hanford Place, consultant firm QK has submitted for a conditional use permit and mitigated negative declaration on the project. No developer or medical agent has been named.

The proposed project would include the following: a 22,525-square-foot ambulatory surgery center; a 12,445-square-foot specialty clinic; two 12,445-square-foot medical office buildings; a 12,445- square-foot psychiatric health facility; a 100,000-square-foot, a four-story 105-room hotel with a conference center and pool; a 35,000-square-foot nursing college; a 54,611-square-foot skilled nursing facility; a 34,480-square-foot memory care facility; a 34,380-square-foot assisted living facility; a three-story 90-unit multi-family apartment; 41,500 square feet of medical/commercial uses; and a five-acre bio infiltration basin.

The application says construction should begin in March of 2024.

Car sales are up

New vehicle registrations in California are predicted to approach 1.8 million units this year and increase 6.9 percent from 2022 according to the California New Car Dealers Assn.

Following three years of below average sales, pent-up demand is at elevated levels as the volume of postponed purchases continues to grow. This will be the driving force for the market for the remainder of the year, say the dealers. Weakening consumer affordability will hold back the release of pent-up demand, but improving vehicle inventories should be sufficient to push sales above current levels.

New light vehicle registrations in California increased 5.8 percent in the first quarter of this year versus the year earlier, slightly below the 8.4 percent improvement in national sales. New vehicle registrations in the state increased for the second consecutive quarter in 1Q ’23.

Prior to the fourth quarter of last year, the market declined by more than 10 percent for four consecutive quarters.

California’s new vehicle market is predicted to increase higher than last year’s results in the remaining three quarters of this year.

Among items of interest, estimated electric vehicle market share approached 20 percent in 1Q ’23; Tesla Model Y was Best-Seller in California; Best Full Size Pickup: Ford F-Series; Toyota retained the title of Top Selling Brand in California in 1Q ’23.

Wonderful plans wood/biomass yard

Wonderful Renewable Energy, LLC filed an application for a development code text change to allow for permitted uses in the Light Industrial (IL) zone district to be permitted in the Rural Commercial (CR) zone district subject to the approval of a Site Plan Review zoning permit. Wonderful wants to establish a biomass wood yard to manage wood or nut waste for biomass conversion to power generation. The Kings County Planning Commission approved the application this month.

The Wonderful Company is the world’s largest almond and pistachio grower, generating 250,000 tons of nut waste per year, made up of wood, hulls and shells). The industry is looking to turn these liabilities into carbon-negative revenue via reliable electricity and bio-char production. Besides waste nuts and shells, the company removes large numbers of trees each year including thousands of nut tree acres due the drought, anticipating a lack of water to sustain some orchards.

The Wonderful Company announced in 2019 it will use 100 percent renewable electricity across all its U.S. operations by 2025.

Cotton acreage detailed

Cotton mapping for the San Joaquin Valley by CDFA was completed the week of June 1, 2023 confirming lower planting estimates in each county.

The current total mapped acreage for the SJV is 93,229 acres (down from 125,449 acres in 2022). The breakdown of cotton acreage is 30,799 acres in Fresno County (down from 34,290 acres in 2022), 7,226 acres in Kern County (down from 9,591 acres in 2022), 34,701 acres in Kings County (down from 46,988 acres in 2022), 18,875 acres in Merced County (down from 29,113 acres in 2022), 86 acres in Madera County (down from 254 acres in 2022), and 1,542 acres in Tulare County (down from 5,213 acres in 2022)

Fresno County will see large battery storage plant

German power generation company RWE has announced that it has linked its 137MW utility-scale battery energy storage system (BESS), called Fifth Standard, to the California independent system operator.

Located in western Fresno County, the BESS project is the company’s largest facility to date in the US. The project also includes a 150MWac solar PV facility, which is expected to be completed in August 2023.

It will feature 369,334 solar photovoltaic panels covering 1,600 acres. The facility will power 26,000 homes in the region and support California’s clean energy goals as the state works toward its net-zero target of 2045.

The excess energy will not be sent to the grid, but instead will be stored in an on-site lithium-ion battery energy storage facility with up to 548 megawatt-hours of capacity. The power storage system will allow the plant to maximize its value by releasing solar energy when electric demand is highest.

RWE Clean Energy CEO Mark Noyes stated: “Projects like Fifth Standard, with its co-located battery storage system, will become increasingly important to help ensure that as renewables form a bigger part of the energy mix, the electricity produced can be used when it is needed most.

“In our case, future growth is backed by a project development pipeline comprising more than 24GW in onshore wind, solar and battery storage, one of the largest in the US.”

While large pieces of land in Kings County, including land just outside Lemoore and Corcoran, are classified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency at a high-risk for flooding, Hanford is not, according to a map released by the Kings County Office of Emergency Services.

“We don’t have any natural waterways, and we don’t expect that the snow melt will cause any significant flooding problems within the city limits,” said Community Relations Manager Brian Johnson. “As far as the runoff goes into the ditches and streams, that is something that we always keep an eye on, but we don’t have any real concerns as far as flooding.”

The map breaks down the parts of Kings County that are at a high risk of flooding by compiling the geographic areas and flood-zones that have historically had higher probabilities of flooding.

The red parts of the publicly available map are labeled as flooded area, while the dark blue parts of the map indicate land that is currently designated by FEMA as a high risk area.

Under these FEMA designations, areas that are classified as high risk have a 1 percent or greater risk of annual flooding or otherwise have temporarily increased flood risk. Areas that are considered moderate risk, colored by a lighter blue on the map, have a 0.2 percent chance of annual flooding.

Kings County has continued a state of emergency declared on March 10 prompted by a series of intense winter storms that caused flooding throughout California. The storms also deposited a "historic" snowpack in the Sierra Nevada — data from the California Nevada River Forecast Center shows that snow depth is more than 7.5 feet in some places.

The snowpack is expected to melt as warmer spring weather approaches and deposit over a million acre feet of water in the Tulare Lakebed.

Breaking down the map

The map shows that Lemoore and the Island District have many large swaths of land classified as high or moderate risk. West of Highway 41 along West Industry Avenue is one of the large swaths of high-risk land. North of town, at the intersection of Grangeville Boulevard and Highway 41 is another area classified as high risk.

North 191/2 Avenue, inside Lemoore city limits from West Bush Street to Lemoore's northern border, is classified as moderate risk.

Corcoran is surrounded by both high-risk and flooded land to the west, south and north on the map. The area inside city limits is largely not classified as high-risk, but the area just south of the city near Highway 43 is described by the map as flooded. To the west, Whitley and Orange avenues are both closed past 7th Avenue.

Just east of Remnoy, the map shows that large swaths of the city are classified as either flooded or at high risk. In this same area, Grangeville Boulevard is closed by flooding between 5th and 2nd avenues.

Hanford 'in good shape'

Hanford Vice-Mayor Mark Kairis commended Hanford city staff for continuing to keep storm drains clear and giving water the chance to move off of roadways.

“The message I want to put out to the people of Hanford is, we’re in good shape,” Kairis said. “We don’t have any major concerns of massive flooding or anything like that. There may be some lower areas in the city that do get impacted, especially if additional storms come through, but our staff at the city is doing a wonderful job."

A spokesperson for Kings County said the maps are provisional and are updated as flooding occurs, adding that the county is waiting on models from the Department of Water Resources to project the rate of snowmelt that will affect the area around the Tulare Lake basin.

The maps are publicly available, along with a list of closed roads in Kings County and emergency preparedness tips, through the Kings County Office of Emergency Services website at www.countyofkings.com/community/2023-flood.

'It's never too late to prepare'

“The best thing that we can tell the community is that it's never too late to prepare,” said Kings County Office of Emergency Services Manager Abraham Valencia. “Anybody that lives around a waterway or lives anywhere near those flood maps that we have on the county website needs to make a conscious effort to prepare.”

The spokesperson recommended that residents living in the higher risk flood areas should prepare by registering for Kings County alerts through the Office of Emergency Services website, getting sandbags at one of a number of free locations and notifying Kings County dispatch of any flooding by calling (559) 852-2720.

Strengthening partnerships

Valencia said Kings County was now focusing on strengthening its partnerships in other communities.

“They have more communities around their waterways, which is the reason they've had these situations earlier than us in Kings County,” Valencia said. “The communities that we’re concerned about are more because of the water buildup, that it's pushing up against our communities like Stratford, Corcoran. We're strengthening our partnerships with them so that they can share lessons learned.”

Hanford officials, meanwhile, say they’re ready to provide support to other nearby communities as the snowpack melts.

“We want to make sure they know it is available, and I think we’ll continue to have that supporting role as warmer temperatures and snow melts as a result,” Johnson said.

Valencia said Kings County was continuing to monitor how quickly the snowpack would melt, including hot days and cold nights, and warm rainstorms. Valencia describes the snowpack as “historic.”

“From this point that we're talking right now, the rivers have been handling that,” Valencia said. “But we do fear that if it gets too hot too fast, as far as weather, it could melt that snow and then that could create uncontrolled pressures on our waterways, and then it could flood areas in our county.”

“There’s a lot of great minds and great people working on this, but Mother Nature is Mother Nature,” Kairis said.

Faraday Future has announced the start of FF91 production in its Hanford, CA, factory in central California, which it calls “FF ieFactory California.”

Earlier this month, Faraday said that it would finally start production by the end of March, pending millions of dollars of funding coming through.

Faraday says this is the last of seven major manufacturing milestones on a long road to bring the FF91 to production, a car that was originally unveiled in 2017 with the intention of 2018 production.

The Faraday FF91 was promised 1,050 horsepower, a 130 kWh battery capable of 381 miles of range, 200 kW charging, and self-driving capability. It also promised a 0-60 time of 2.27 seconds, which was faster than “other benchmark cars” (namely, Tesla) at the time.

These specs were quite eye-watering at the time and are still very good, though the shine has been somewhat taken off of them through five years worth of delays. But to Faraday’s credit, it seems to have kept the same specs as its original announcement without watering them down in the interim.

In the meantime, Faraday Future’s founder and former CEO Jia Yueting, otherwise known as YT Jia, found himself in difficult financial issues. Jia was replaced by Carsten Breitfeld, formerly of BMW and Byton, who was later replaced by current CEO Xuefeng Chen, known as “XF.”

Both XF and YT were on site for the livestream, with the two affixing a plaque to the first chassis to roll off the production lines.

Faraday has still not specified the price of its vehicle, but during the stream, execs praised the FF91’s luxury, and founder YT Jia name-dropped both Ferrari and Maybach, setting a rather high bar in that respect. Jia also said that Faraday wants to position itself well in the “high-value user market,” another signal that prices won’t be low.

Faraday has two tiers of preorders for its vehicle: $5,000 for the “FF 91 Futurist Alliance” tier and $1,500 for the “FF 91 Futurist” tier. The $5,000 tier is currently sold out, but Faraday says that interested buyers can sign up to be on the $1,500 tier and ask to be contacted by a member of the sales team if a spot opens up.

Immediately after the original announcement, Faraday announced it had received over 64,000 reservations in 36 hours. But these were unpaid hand-raises, and on a more recent check-in, the company claimed to have 14,000 unpaid reservations and only 401 paid reservations.

Despite these modest numbers, Jia stated today that “current production capacity falls far behind market demand.”

Faraday plans to open a store in Beverly Hills later this year, with sales efforts starting in Los Angeles and San Francisco first, then New York, and in Shanghai and Beijing in China.

The start of production was accompanied by a livestream on Faraday’s social media channels, which you can view below (the actual action starts at 46:49 in the video):

Electrek’s Take

When this car was originally announced, I noted that it included “every popular concept car feature from the last several years” – and even some new ones, like facial recognition technology which would automatically set music, temperature, scent and massage features if the car detects that you’re having a bad day.

It felt like a “kitchen sink” announcement, a car that was heavy on promises but would likely lag behind those promises in reality. So the delays before production are not a big surprise. I think almost nobody expected it to actually get on the road in 2018.

Personally, though, I didn’t expect it to ever get to production at all. It seemed unrealistic to me.

So Faraday should be commended for getting to the point it has gotten to, despite it seeming quite unlikely. It has at least produced a chassis, and it has a factory and some customers waiting for said chassis, at an as-yet-unannounced price and hopefully with the rest of the car attached. Now, the next step is to actually get the car onto the road, and into customers’ hands.

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With a slew of triple-digit temperatures both behind and in front of us, perhaps the only relief we can achieve is a nice two-scoop cone of ice cream — or perhaps a Superior oversized sundae.

For the last century or so, Superior Dairy has served as an ice cream hub, bringing in visitors from all over the Valley. For the longest time, it was commonplace for families to ride into town on the Amtrak just to get some Superior ice cream. When I first started working at the Sentinel, I think the first 50 questions I was asked by people in town were some variation of “Have you been to Superior Dairy yet?”

Superior Dairy’s word-of-mouth adoration has reached national and even international levels, as I’ve met superfans of former Journey frontman Steve Perry who’ve come from as far as Texas and the Caribbean islands to get ice cream at Superior Dairy just because they know it's one of his favorite hometown spots, and they want to wager on the tiniest of chances they’ll see him there.

Superior was not just an ice cream shop, it was the ice cream shop.

But is that still the case?

According to the reviewers of Yelp, the answer is no. Java Heaven and Frosty King both rank higher for “best ice cream in Hanford.”

What could have caused this sea change?

Like virtually everything else, Superior Dairy closed its doors during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, unlike virtually everything else, it never re-opened them.

Superior Dairy was once the place where the community went to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and anything else that provided a good excuse to eat several pounds of ice cream, whipped cream, bananas and fudge. It was absolutely packed after every high school football game, after every Thursday Night Market and pretty much any time a warm breeze rolled through town.

Now it isn’t. Superior Dairy offers take out only and doesn't allow diners to sit in its iconic booths or to belly up to the bar.

I recently visited the popular Central Valley Foodies Facebook group to ask locals what they think of Superior Dairy in its current state. In just five hours on a Wednesday afternoon, I had drawn in more than 100 comments from the community, many of whom posted photos of themselves and their families from past Superior visits.

“Definitely miss the experience of dining in. We would bring family from out of town and not tell them how BIG a scoop of ice scream was. Their eyes would light up at the sight of a single scoop. I think if they opened back up they would definitely have the business,” said Megan Michelle.

“I think it is a SAD thing that the Superior Dairy experience can no longer be shared,” Tracy Jeffery Myers said. “To ‘take out’ a banana split does not offer the experience of eating in the quaint booths and watching the smiles on your children’s /grandchildren’s faces as they ‘dig in.’ It is just sad for the residents of Kings and Tulare counties.”

“I no longer go there ... was great when it was full-service dine in. Great memories with my sisters and my Grams ... That was the best part — sitting in and enjoying my convos with her,” said Abel Puga.

“I work in Fresno and I have tons of people tell me they have taken the train down specifically to eat there and they get there to be told there is no seating available. It’s summer. It’s hot. There’s no real shade across the street on the park to sit and eat. Lots of people tell me how disappointed they were,” said Jennifer Evans Vikjord.

“I definitely don’t see much foot traffic from visitors anymore and I still currently work downtown. It has so much potential to be a good local business and create extra foot traffic for other local businesses downtown. It’s a novelty experience in Hanford. It’s sad seeing it empty now when I remember how busy it used to be,” said Chandler Everill.

While the overwhelming majority of comments echoed sentiments like these, there were a couple from folks who didn’t mind the take-out only experience and expressed that they were happy to have Superior Dairy in any iteration.

A call to the ownership of Superior Dairy for comment about when and if they’d re-open for sit-down service was not returned.

But whether you’re OK with take out, getting drive through, finding somewhere to dine-in or just munching right out of the pint at home, it’s safe to say we’ll all need at least some ice cream to help us get through these dog days of summer.

Parker Bowman is the Editor/Features for the Hanford Sentinel. He can be reached at [email protected].

An afterschool Boys & Girls Club program for Hanford students in middle and high school will be coming to the City at the Coe Park building next fall.

The main focus of the program, which will be the first of its kind for Hanford, will be to encourage students to avoid using unhealthy substances, according to the City.

“The substance-use prevention material will all be evidence-based,” said Hanford Parks and Community Services Director Brad Albert. “It’s really to promote making good choices.”

A $2.45 million grant from Proposition 64, which legalized recreational use of marijuana, was awarded to Hanford by the California Board of State and Community Corrections, and will fund the program for five years. Afterward, city officials say that significant fundraising will be needed to keep the program afloat.

The City will partner with the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Sequoias to run the afterschool program.

“The board and staff at Boys & Girls Clubs of the Sequoias are honored to open a Club in Hanford,” said Boys & Girls Clubs of the Sequoias CEO Galen Quenzer. “We currently operate 15 clubs in Tulare County, and this will be the first in Kings County. We look forward to working with City leaders, local educators, and parents to design a youth development program that meets the needs of Hanford's youth.”

According to Albert, the program will incorporate STEM, or Science, Technology, Education or Math curriculum into the learning opportunities for its students.

“We’re going to give them hands-on experience using cutting-edge technology,” Albert said. “Hopefully that will translate into students pursuing STEM degrees and careers right here in the Central Valley.”

Staff from Hanford Elementary School District and Hanford Joint Union High School District identified potential candidates for the program. The City says they will work closely with the districts to bring the Boys & Girls Club to students and their families.

Those interested in supporting the Hanford Boys & Girls Club can contact Brad Albert at [email protected]