Excerpt from "VALLEY PEOPLE"

Our Frivolous Supervisors

by Bruce Anderson

AT THE RISK of being even more boring than usual, and there's no bigger bore than A Man With A Law Suit unless it's A Man With A Medical Problem, but your tax dollars, thousands and thousands of them, are being spent to pursue me in the state appellate courts. I'll spare you the re-hash of my case, which a jury took 45 minutes recently to decide unanimously in my favor.

LAST FRIDAY, Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Leonard LaCasse awarded me costs, meaning that the judge agreed that the supervisors had deliberately run up my legal bills. The judge ruled that the County of Mendocino now owed me about $32,000. I had to borrow most of that amount off credit cards at usurious rates of interest. A private citizen, obviously, is at a huge disadvantage in legal fights with public entities.

BUT EVEN BEFORE Judge La Casse heard my request to get my legal bills reimbursed, the supervisors, meeting in closed session, came to a "consensus decision" to appeal my case, meaning us taxpayers will fund County Counsel Frank Zotter to draft another cockamamie brief on behalf of a board of supervisors too cowardly and chintzy to fight their own personal battles with their own money. (All the decisions by the supervisors in my case have been made in closed session, and none of the five has had the basic integrity to put their names on the vote.) County Counsel Peter Klein, another malignantly anonymous player in this pathetic saga, has urged the supervisors to bankrupt me. I've been in hassles with some low down punks in my time, but these sissies take the grand prize. Anyway, short of personal satisfaction with any or all of the above named wuss-wimps, I'll have to borrow more money to fund a response to whatever delaying nonsense Zotter now devises on the public's dime.

IT TOOK ME a year and a half to even get my case in front of a jury because the ineffable Zotter, lashed on by the supervisors, Klein and the cretins in the County's so-called Risk Management Office, filed four frivolous appeals with the state courts, each of which was summarily tossed straight back into his uncomprehending puss without so much as a sentence in reply. But each phony appeal ate up time and money, which has been the County Counsel's and the supervisor's strategy from the beginning when this thing could have been settled for $200. The cost of all this to County taxpayers will easily zoom past $100,000 by the time the state courts again find in my favor.

SUPERVISORS COLFAX AND SHOEMAKER are wringing their moist, pink, grasping little hands about looming County budget shortfalls. The state is mostly responsible, certainly, but this board of supervisors spends public money just as frivolously as the big spenders at the state and federal levels of government do, and it's Colfax, Shoemaker, Delbar, and Campbell who've helped bankrupt Mendocino County.

THE LEAST RESPONSIBLE move by this crew of supervisors has been to add some 600 new County employees to the County payroll, many of them in their 40's and 50's, thereby endangering the County employee pension fund because more older workers will be drawing benefits than there are younger workers contributing to the system, especially after the upcoming layoffs. Couple the employee imbalance to diminished returns on County investments, some of them with dubious outfits, and we'll soon see more grans and gramps spending their golden years laboring beneath the golden arches.