Two Years and $22,000 Later

by Bruce Anderson

Mendocino County lost a jury trial last Tuesday in forty-five minutes. I won the same one in forty-five minutes.

The jury went out at a quarter to twelve and was back half way into the lunch hour with a unanimous verdict for the Anderson Valley Advertiser and, by proxy, the Mendocino County Observer.

Two years ago this January, the Mendocino County Department of Social Services began running this display ad in all the county's newspapers except the Boonville and Laytonville papers. An audio version of the ad was played on local radio stations.

State and local taxpayers paid $50,000 over 12 months for this thing. No foster homes were produced, no record of responses to the ad was kept by the Mendocino County Department of Social Services.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat received $17,000 of the $50,000; the Ukiah Daily Journal about $8,000. The Gualala paper, the interchangeable Mendocino Beacon and Fort Bragg Advocate, got a few bucks out of it, as did the Willits News. Since most of these papers are owned by people living far, far away, the $50,000 in California tax money flew east over the Sierras to Colorado and then on to New York.

There was no benefit whatsoever to Mendocino County where there is a perennially desperate shortage of foster homes.

For less than $2,000 every household in Mendocino County could have been reached by mail with a simple message: "Do you want to be a foster parent? Here's the deal. We'll pay you to take the kid..."

The ad began appearing in January of 2002. I called the number on the ad. A nice lady by the name of Swain answered my call. I said, "This foster home ad is appearing in all the newspapers in Mendocino County except mine and my friend Jim Shields'. You can't place a publicly-funded ad in some papers but not others. Mr. Shields and I are the only two critics of your department in Mendocino County. We suspect that we didn't get the ad because you people resent our criticism."

Ms. Swain said she would bring my "issue" to the attention of her supervisor, a fellow named Mockel. "I'll get back to you," she said.

Maybe I misunderstood her. Maybe she said, "I'll get back at you," because that's what happened.

Hearing nothing from Ms. Swain, I wrote to Alison Glassey, the long-time boss at Social Services. I repeated my complaint, this time in prose. The ad continued to appear in all the county newspapers except mine and Shields'.

Alison Glassey sent my letter of complaint to the County Counsel's office where it is said to have inspired much anticipatory mirth. "Ha! Ha. Look who's appealing to us for justice."

Officially, however, the county ignored my complaint. But Ms. Swain, her boss Mr. Mockel, Mrs. Glassey, County Counsel Peter Klein, Deputy County Counsel Frank Zotter, and the Board of Supervisors were aware that two newspapers had been left off the Mendocino County Department of Social Services media list.

Jim Shields and I are the only critics of county government who also own newspapers. I am a harsher critic of county government than Shields is, but it is fair to say we are both contemptuous of much of it, familiarity with its chief practitioners having left us no other emotional option.

The ad was only a month old. It was still only February, but all these people were now aware that Shields and I had been left out and the decision had been made to continue to leave us out. After all, what could we do about it? Complain to our supervisors? Appeal for fair play to County Counsel? Write to our Congressman?

The County would later argue that the absence of the AVA and the Mendocino County Observer from Social Services' media list was an "oversight." Then they argued it was both an oversight and an absence of an ad contract between us and Social Services. Then they said they'd only had two weeks to spend the $50,000 which accounted for the oversight and the contract snafu. They said it was all of the above plus Ms. Swain being new to the job and the computer on her desk at her new job.

Which were all whoppers because the "oversight" could have been re-focused into legibility back in February for $99 to me and $99 to Jim Shields.

But rather than correct the oversight when it cost $99, the county decided to continue its willful myopia until it cost them thousands of tax dollars in county time and cost me $22,000 to correct.

None of the money comes out of the pockets of the persons responsible.

The county stonewalled me because they don't like me, then compelled three Social Services people to lie about the stonewall that wasn't their idea to erect in the first place.

I surmise the following from what has since happened: The County Counsel, a lazy, unsupervised man named Peter Klein who often makes county policy by himself because his putative supervisors defer to him, informed the Supervisors that I'd filed a complaint. The Supervisors then consisted of five otherwise unemployable persons consisting of a marijuana planter who wrote a book about how his 25 goats sent his three kids to Harvard; A Ukiah liberal who hits his wife; a Fort Bragg woman who left her husband for another man while her husband was dying of cancer; a Willits mortician who ran for supervisor to maintain his sweetheart county contract for all the corpses from Sea Biscuit to Spy Rock; and the Farm Bureau's rep from Potter Valley featured in "Memo of the Week" on page four of the paper you are presently reading.

What these people have against me is an absolute mystery.

So, when Mrs. Glassey sent my qué pasa letter over to County Counsel and the Supervisors, they were unanimously pleased for a shot at pay-back.

"Oh goodie. Look who's saying we owe him $90. Bleep him. We'll paper the bastard to death if he sues us. We'll keep him in court until he's so broke he'll be standing in front of the Boonville Post Office in a borrowed jock strap selling pencils. We can cost him a lot of time and money, but it won't cost us anything except Zotter's time, which the saps, er, the taxpayers pay for anyway."

Which is what happened.

Ms. Swain, one of three hapless dupes caught up in animosities she was unaware of, would variously testify that she didn't know there was a newspaper in Boonville, that she'd never heard of me, that she hadn't known there was a newspaper in Laytonville, that she'd never heard of Jim Shields.

I think she was telling the truth. Why should she know there's a newspaper in Boonville, and why should she, a Nice Person, know a person like me, Not A Nice Person.

Ms. Swain also testified that although she had vivid memories of my call to her, and our exchange was amicable on both ends, she couldn't recall what her boss, Mr. Mockel, told her to do about it. I don't think that it's likely that she could remember my call but not its disposition, but the capacities of county administrators do tend to range from sentient to sentient.

Poor Ms. Swain. It was like having Grandma Smuckers on the stand, and when Mrs. Glassey testified, it was like Gran Smuckers and her twin sister. What kind of monster would dare suggest the Smuckers girls would short their jam on strawberries?

Ms. Swain explained she was new to her tasks — the agency seems to have a constant turnover at all levels but Ms. Glassey's top spot — that she had only two weeks to spend "this $50,000 grant"; that her computer was unfamiliar to her; that she'd only just arrived in the county, and really Mr. Lawyer Man how the heck could I possibly know where Boonville or Laytonville was if I'd only been here for a month? Unfortunately for her, Ms. Swain testified that not only did she have to dump the 50 thou pronto, but neither the Laytonville nor the Boonville paper had pre-existing "contracts" with Social Services, thus rendering them outta consideration anyway.

But County Counsel Zotter, the county's harried but eager point man for the county's obvious wielding of public money to get back at Boonville and Laytonville for their steady drum beat of criticism of various county bureaucracies, had failed to coordinate Ms. Swain's statements in her deposition with her later statements on the stand. And her statements throughout were as contradictory as Mockel's and Glassey's. The Department of Social Services had this $50,000 from the state it had to spend real fast if they expected to get more money to throw away the next fiscal year.

How to get real live Mendocino County people to be foster parents was never the priority consideration here. Or a consideration at all, given Social Services' failure to record responses from their $50,000 ad and given the sorry fact that not a single foster home was obtained therefrom. There was $50,000 to spend and it had to be spent in two weeks. But the person whose job it was to spend it, the fraught Ms. Swain, was new and beset besides, and could only turn to the Yellow Pages to try to find Mendocino County's print media.

She still managed to miss the AVA, the first publication listed alphabetically under newspapers. She also missed the Mendocino County Observer half-way down the alphabetical list of 7 (count 'em) Mendocino County publications.

But it was Mrs. Glassey who gave the game away when her testimony revealed that she'd simply passed my qué pasa letter about the ad on to County Counsel.

She knew Shields and I had been left off the list a month after the ad began appearing, and since she passed my letter on to the county's hard hitting admin team rather than take a big leap and act on it all by herself, they all knew by February of 2002 that Shields and I had been "overlooked." But the county's story would continue to be that Social Services was unaware that two newspapers — the only two regularly critical of county functioning — had been left off their "media list."

Aware from the get-go that the County would spare no expense hassling me because hassling me was free to them and, better yet, they could do it more or less anonymously which is the Supervisor's and Klein's preferred M.O., I then filed a small claims action against Glassey and Social Services in the Boonville Justice Court, the Honorable Eric Labowitz presiding.

It was the Thursday of Memorial Day Weekend before a Mendocino County representative could appear in Boonville's court — six months of oversight having elapsed — and the rep who did appear wasn't what anybody might call diplomatic. This person, a Ms. Clouser, identified as the county's "Risk Analyst," strode into the room like a gun fighter, glared hard at the plaintiff and, with an indignant snort, plopped herself down in the defendant's chair.

"Yer honor," I said, "I sued Ms. Glassey but they sent a water buffalo. What's going on here?"

Buff replied that the Justice Court didn't have jurisdiction, that I had to file a claim against the County; Ms. Glassey wouldn't be appearing because I couldn't sue her because she was a county boss.

The previous year I'd sued Mike Sweeney, the unindicted car bomber who also functions as one of two county recycling bosses, and Sweeney himself showed up to dispute an identical beef about ad placement. Sweeney had placed his publicly-funded recycling ads in all the county's newspapers except mine. So I sued him in small claims court. Sweeney, after a very careful perimeter check, arrived for court right on time. The judge explained that he had to fairly distribute ads among all the county's publications; he couldn't pick and choose. Sweeney was so unhappy he began to silently hyper-ventilate, lunging forward across the defendant's table to repeatedly demand of the judge, "Show me the statute!," pronouncing 'statute' as 'stat-yooooooot!' Fortunately, I'd prepared for the explosive recycler's Boonville appearance by bringing along a small mirror attached to a 7-foot pole that I slid beneath the under-carriage of my vehicle to check it for suspicious bulges.

Glassey, however, didn't have to show in small claims court when I sued her. Why? Because the County Counsel's office makes up the rules as it goes along. Some county people can be sued, others can't be sued.

But His Honor finding for me on the facts that Social Services indeed had deliberately left the Laytonville and Boonville newspapers off their media list for less than noble reasons, nevertheless took the Risk Analyst's word for jurisdiction, deciding that I had to file a claim against the county, not the department head directly responsible for the tortellini.

So I filed a claim against the county. Which the county slam dunked via a form letter rejection.

So I hired a lawyer, Tom Brigham, and sued the county.

For almost two years now the county, in the person of the egregious Mr. Zotter, has filed all kinds of frivolous appeals and demurs and requests to dismiss, each requiring a response from us, each being summarily tossed when each reached a judge. But it's cost me a lot of money that I've had to borrow at usurious rates of interest. Mr. Z. and Mr. Klein, and their co-conspirators among the Supervisors, successfully ran my costs up to the max and, as they went, endangered my life: my wife calls me DMW or "Dead Man Walking," the implication being that if I lost the case and was unable to recover my expenses I would die in my sleep.

At the mandated pair of settlement conferences before proceeding on to trial Zotter, with a straight face, offered "to put the AVA on the Social Services' media list."

That was it, the county's idea of a reasonable settlement offer, nevermind that the AVA and the Observer are, and have been, on every other county bureaucracy's media list.

A citizen, especially a citizen of ordinary means, shouldn't have to sue the government to get the government to do the right thing, especially when it's this clear that the government, i.e., Social Services, County Counsel and the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, has done the wrong thing — using tax money to get back at their critics. Swords, fists or pistols would be fine with me.

Last Monday, my case finally got into court before Judge Leonard La Casse who, I must say, runs a no nonsense, get-to-the-point courtroom, not the happening we get everywhere else in the County Courthouse.

It didn't take long to pick a jury. We bounced a couple of unhappy divorced babes of the end-of-the-bar at three in the afternoon type who were honest enough to say they couldn't possibly be fair to me because I was either directly responsible for their misery or approved of it. We also bounced two persons associated with local government. Zotter bounced two people I would have selected for the jury — a Hopland guy and a Willits truck driver. Zotter didn't bounce a smart, lively woman who said she read the AVA every week and liked it very much. My lawyer and I were astounded she made it onto our jury, but not surprised that the AVA reader then became jury foreman! If I'd managed to get my own mother on my jury Mom, who tends to be unpredictable where her son's newspaper is concerned, could not have been better than the lady who'd said up front she was an AVA fan.

Could it be that Zotter was on my side?

I liked the looks of the jury from the start. They were my kind of people, regular folks, working people, the kind of people likely to be appalled that $50,000 public dollars could be spent so frivolously, so mindlessly; that the government, such as it is in Mendocino County, could spend even more government money going after its two isolated, cordoned-off critics.

Still, one never knows. Juries have been known to ignore the evidence. I worried that the provocations culled from years of my newspapers and read aloud to the jury would persuade them that the plaintiff was, as Zotter declared him, "a scurrilous person."

Judge La Casse kept things moving right along, County Counsel Zotter clearly hadn't reminded his witnesses to read their depositions before they appeared on the stand, although he'd obviously spent time prepping them with brand new stories even less plausible than those they ran out in their first under oath statements on their recollections of the "oversight." Mr. Brigham undid them. It was like watching a playground supervisor cross-examine two five-year-olds.

The jury was selected by lunch time Monday. The case was submitted fifteen minutes before lunch time Tuesday. "It's almost noon," Judge La Casse told the jury, "you might want to break for lunch then begin your deliberations."

Nope. The jury went right to work and, 45 minutes later, came back with a unanimous verdict for the AVA, the Mendocino County Observer, and the First Amendment.