LoCO SAYS: Please Tell County Government to Stop Giving Your Tax Dollars to Our Lawyer | Lost Coast Outpost
The other day Sheriff Billy Honsal stood up right before the Board of Supervisors and gave board associates one thing of a scolding.
The subject was an impending budget shortfall. His department stood at risk. There experienced been some chat in the air of allocating some resort tax dollars to the arts and to neighborhood theater, as the county experienced hinted it would do in its ballot evaluate last summertime, and irrespective of whether or not that was what induced him Honsal wished to toss some ice drinking water on the proceedings.
“I don’t truly feel the desperation that you all should really be exhibiting in this article,” he told board users.
Now, the price range shortfall is without a doubt going to lead to some agony in county governing administration. That is legitimate. But when I read the sheriff converse about “desperation,” I considered: Desperation? My dude, didn’t your office just hand above $4,562.50 of the finances to our lawyer for no explanation?
I checked. It had.
Here’s the story, which you need to know since it involved your dollars and it claims some thing about how your federal government is effective. Or how it can get the job done, at moments.
Again in December 2021, the county Business office of Emergency Solutions announced that it experienced partnered with a personal company termed Zonehaven. Doing work with the business, the Workplace of Unexpected emergency Solutions divided the county up into 300 or so “zones” for crisis services uses. In the party of fireplace or flood or tsunami, citizens could go to the Zonehaven map and obtain out their reside evacuation standing, or they could get text concept alerts tied to their particular zone. Quite cool!
Due to the fact I obtain geographic information that may be beneficial to our reporting, I wrote the Sheriff’s Office, which operates the Business of Crisis Providers, to say: Hey, could you deliver me a copy of that map data?
And I was kind of shocked at the solution, which was: No, we will not send you that info. It was astonishing because geographic info preserved by the government is, fairly unambiguously, a public history. It belongs to the general public. The county itself maintains a internet site wherever you can obtain all types of this form of details every time you like.
I filed a formal request underneath the California Community Documents Act. About a thirty day period and a 50 percent later on, the county eventually responded. All over again I was denied. I was explained to that giving the Outpost the knowledge could place the community at serious danger — could, in reality, “result in normally preventable harm, loss of daily life, and/or hurt to property and/or natural environment.” The panic, apparently, was that the Outpost would just take the map we had requested and use it to make our own variation of Zonehaven to contend with the Office of Crisis Expert services — and that our have, hypothetical competing variation of Zonehaven wouldn’t be as up-to-date as the true Zonehaven in the event of an crisis, and as a result individuals would die.


This was ridiculous for a couple of reasons. One particular: We had no intention of making our have Zonehaven-killer, and the knowledge we were requesting would not have allowed us to if we did. We only needed to know how the zones ended up divvied up on the map, which we could use — just as an illustration — to figure out about how many folks would be evacuated, in the occasion that a zone have been evacuated. We did not talk to for real-time information and facts about which zones were less than evacuation orders or not, and we didn’t want that information and facts. The Sheriff’s Office was appropriate: The genuine Zonehaven functions fantastic for that goal, and if we want men and women to have the most up-to-day facts, which we do, that is the place we will level men and women.
The next purpose it was ridiculous, as the Office of Emergency Providers would reveal a couple months later, is that it didn’t seriously care about obtaining out-of-day details out there in circulation. All through the Willow Creek fires previous summer it slapped Zonehaven screenshots all in excess of social media, in which a user might stumble in excess of them days or months immediately after the actuality. They’re nevertheless there. (See below, in this article, etc.)
Just after the county turned me down with this justification, I asked for the similar map data from 6 other California counties who experienced contracted with Zonehaven. One misunderstood the request and despatched a PDF in its place, one in no way wrote again, but the other 4 despatched it straight over with no fuss at all. That was plenty of.
So which is when I obtained my attorney involved, which meant that the county experienced to get its legal professionals included, which meant that the Board of Supervisors experienced to examine the concern in shut session, which meant god understands how substantially personnel time expended on the difficulty.
At last, at some level in the chain — I do not know in which — some cooler head prevailed and persuaded all people that the regulation was what it was, and they’d do ideal to lower their losses before going to trial. Fourteen months following we initially asked for the facts the county gave use all the things we’d asked for, without restriction, and it wrote our law firm a examine for $4,562.50 to pay out for his time and expenditures.
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How substantially is $4,500? If you appear at it a person way — the way county governing administration appears to be like at it — it is just about absolutely nothing at all. It would not do anything at all to close the budget gap that Honsal was conversing about. It is about .02 p.c of the Sheriff’s Office’s yearly funds, or about .002 p.c of the county’s annual basic fund revenues. You would not assume twice about throwing away .02 per cent of your once-a-year revenue on a whim. Probably, if you’re like some folks, you’d consider even fewer of it if the funds you were being throwing absent did not belong to you in the initial put. If you have been just the custodian of that funds.
Glance at it the other way, though — the way we citizens glance at it — and $4,500 is a decent chunk of alter. It’s about a month’s value of wages for a commencing correctional officer in the county jail, or about two months of an in-dwelling support services employee for the county’s disabled. A local community theater corporation could do a great deal with $4,500.
Perhaps extra to the issue: $4,500 is about 50 % once again as considerably as my household pays in assets tax in a year. Possibly your family members pays someplace in the vicinity of the same. County federal government only will get a tiny proportion of our property tax. So assume of that: County government took the home taxes it received from four or 5 of us this 12 months, and it pissed it absent on just this one particular petty and imperious and, eventually, incorrect work to withhold public information. And you never would have known about it ended up I not writing this now.
There’s a third way to glimpse at it, and that is from the perspective of the excellent Paul Nicholas Boylan, our bulldog-like attorney, who was just honored with a effectively-deserved life time accomplishment award from the Northern California Chapter of the Culture of Qualified Journalists. For Boylan, $4,500, minus charges, equals not these kinds of a terrible bit of do the job. He’s carried out it up and down the condition for 30 many years, such as numerous situations in Humboldt County, and he’s heading to preserve performing it for the reason that it’s a fuel. “It’s pleasurable when they underestimate you,” Boylan tells the SPJ. “It’s exciting producing mindset changes.”
And thank god he retains at it, mainly because there is from time to time a inclination for some individuals in govt service to forget which way this is all intended to get the job done. You get in there, you make a job, you climb the ladder, you make your have minor fiefdom … immediately after a whilst, you do not provide. You rule. This is the mind-set that the Boylans of the entire world occur alongside and regulate. We will need a hundred a lot more of him.
Do you think the county acquired anything from this episode? I hope it did. Most likely it didn’t. But now you know, at the very least, and maybe when you next chat to your agent on the Board of Supervisors — or the metropolis council, or the college board, or etcetera. — you could put in a word. You could say: I know it is not a good deal for you, especially due to the fact its not yours, but could you you should place aside your satisfaction, abide by the regulation, recall who you work for … and stop blowing our tax dollars on LoCO’s law firm?
