Timestamp: 05 September 2023 @ 1250 Pacific
The latest report from the 2022-2023 Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury paints a not-so-pretty picture of the first floor of the Humboldt County Courthouse, where the Board of Supervisor, the County Administrative Office and the Office of the County Clerk Clerk of the Board — the latter two of which support the Board’s work — are quartered.
These offices are the head of the snake of county government. As the GJ notes, the Board of Supervisors is both the legislative and the executive head of the county. Supervisors not only decide how the county should spend an annual budget in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars, but also oversee the projects that they undertake with that half a billion.
So it’s not so good, in the opinion of the Grand Jury, that the firehose of information that comes into these offices isn’t adequately tagged and managed and forwarded to the appropriate inbox for action and/or information. The result, it alleges, is “poor direction, poor oversight and missed deadlines.”
One way this chaos manifests, according to the Grand Jury, is in the sometimes very slipshod and haphazard way in which various county-created advisory boards and commissions meet … or don’t. The Jury writes:
The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors is at the center of a complex “input” and “output” information flow, but there is no log or calendar of communication received or due to be received or sent systematically distinguishing information from action items. The BOS is, for example, unaware that several committees may only be meeting sporadically, may have vacancies, may lack diverse community representation, may not be submitting mandated advisory reports to the BOS, or may be inactive. The Audit Committee, Behavioral Health Board, and Disaster Council are cases in point.
What’s the problem with these cases in point? Well, for instance, the Disaster Council, which was instituted in 2015 and to which the Board of Supervisors appoints a member every year, appears not to have ever met since that date. The Audit Committee has met only three times in the last two years.
Why do we have committees and commissions and councils on the books that meet rarely or never? The GJ believes that the County has more or less forgotten that they exist, or hasn’t been able to unbury itself from the informational deluge long enough to get them going again.
“It appears the BOS has a reactive approach to County tasks instead of a proactive approach,” the GJ writes.
What’s the solution? The Grand Jury doesn’t care for the fact that the Board of Supervisors share clerks from the County Clerk’s office to help manage the info flow. Hire more clerks, the GJ says, and also assign each supervisor her or his own, dedicated clerk. Do that starting in January! Also, get those functionally inactive committees up and running again. Simple!
Keywords: Fortuna Humboldt California information technology database SQL incompetence fraud corruption
Source: https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2023/jul/11/grand-jury-dings-county-supervisors-top-administra/
Comment: It's much worse than you think - or know.
We were actually invited to apply to serve on the Humboldt County Grand Jury.
We refused because by doing so we would have exposed ourself to criminal liability for discussing Humboldt County's corruption.
Based on information, belief, and firsthand experience, we no longer trust Humboldt County or any other California Superior Court, or their personnel, to achieve an unprejudiced verdict.
We can personally attest to grotesque dysfunction in three distinctly separate realms of Humboldt County's information technology infrastructure without even trying.
First, we call your attention to the electronic court calendars that have been inoperable for the past two or three years.
Half a decade ago, Humboldt County Superior Court had an infrastructure in place whereby court calendars were printed out on a daily basis and posted in various locations throughout the courthouse, predominantly on the second floor, where hearings are held. They were posted inside glass-fronted, wall-mounted display cases, where everyone could see them and no one could touch them.
Somewhere along the line Humboldt County Superior Court got the bright idea that this burdensome and labor-intensive task of making half a dozen copies of the next day's court calendar and manually posting them - requiring perhaps fifteen minutes per day, or 1.25 hours per week - was something that should be computerized. Funding was arranged and what we estimate to be between four and six glass-fronted, wall-mounted display cases were repurposed to each contain four wall-mounted flatscreen computer displays, at a cost of what we would estimate to be between $500 and $1500 per unit.
(As we estimate it, the county spent between $8000 [16 flatscreen displays at $500 apiece] and $36000 [24 flatscreen displays at $1500 apiece], plus electricity, plus software, plus licensing, plus support contract, plus a VMware instance or other VM to serve it ... all to save themselves one hour of one employee's time, per week, valued at perhaps $25 per hour - just sayin'.)
Somewhere along the line these flatscreen things stopped working, and the court staff went back to printing out the court calendars manually and taping them up. But because the locked glass cases are now holding blank flatscreen computer displays, there is no bulletin board to attach the court calendars and so they are taped on the outside of the glass-fronted, wall-mounted display cases, where they are not protected from tampering - leaving us scratching our heads and observing that we are worse off than we were before.
It would not be so bad if the Superior Court information technology staff fixed these things so that they started working again, but as we estimate it these wall-mounted flatscreen computer displays have been offline for at least a year, maybe two, or three..
Maybe it's a software thing.
Maybe it's a licensing thing.
However, we are, ourselves, computer professionals, with nearly four decades of experience working as a systems administrator and in technical support, usually as a third-level technical analyst and troubleshooter who worked on large and visible problems that affected hundreds or thousands of employees.
And so we can say with confidence that this is bullshit - bungling and incompetence and finger-pointing instead of fixing the problem.
We think the only reason this nonsense continues is because every time the board of supervisors asks the information technology people for an explanation, the IT people blow smoke up their asses - and, because nobody wants to look stupid by asking questions ... it works.
Permit us to tell you how real information technology professionals solve this sort of problem.
When we worked at Hambrecht & Quist, LLC, a quarter of a century ago, we deployed exactly this sort of technology to solve exactly this sort of problem - Hambrecht had trading floors located in San Francisco, New York, and Boston, and each floor had a whiteboard where buys and sells were posted. Keeping these whiteboards synchronized was a challenge and so Hambrecht installed whiteboard-sized data walls which displayed the buys and sells, relayed from a central database managed in San Francisco. This is the same thing - a database ... some lines of text ... and a bunch of networked displays.
Our sense is that the Superior Court's information technology personnel are all Microsoft-trained but they don't actually know how to program computers and they don't know how to integrate dissimilar systems; all they know how to do is buy and install software, which makes them, basically, just users with the Administrator password, locked in to buying Microsoft's products because that's all they know how to use.
More recently, we have come up with another theory. We think it is possible that Humboldt County Superior Court's IT management may have been tampering with the contents of the database where the calendars were kept; corrupted the contents of a few tables; and is having trouble finding someone who is both smart enough to repair the damage, and discreet enough to remain silent about the true causes of the problem(s) they correct.
Which brings us to our second realm of grotesque dysfunction: Humboldt County's Human Resources Department.
Not too long ago - late 2022 or early 2023 - we were surprised to see Humboldt County actively recruiting for a database administrator.
The job title - it's still posted - says '*Deadline Extended* IT Applications Analyst III (County Database Administrator)'. Please note that '*Deadline Extended*' portion of the title - the county had been looking for a long time with no success and this was a position that needed to be urgently filled. It was the very first job listed.
We are a database administrator. We are also a systems administrator, and a network administrator, and a systems architect. We have done all these things, and more.
We were trained in database theory and operation by Oracle Corporation (one of the largest vendors of databases in the world), where we were employed for several years.
We were also trained in database theory and operation by Sybase, another large vendor of databases - when the Pentagon was struck by a missile on September 11th, 2001, the target was, apparently, a cluster of computers, running Sybase software and containing financial records related to Pentagon purchasing irregularities totalling billions of dollars, and one of the people killed - Ted Moy - was someone we had known, personally, while working at Sybase.
We were also trained in database theory and operation by ASK/Ingres, in Alameda, where we worked, as well, until Computer Associates bought ASK/Ingres, and laid everyone off.
We have also worked with MySQL, MariaDB, and Microsoft's SQL Server, among other database products.
You are not going to find another person like our humble self, without going south, to the San Francisco Bay Area, or north, to Portland, maybe even Seattle - but how will you convince them to move to Humboldt County?
And so when we saw that Humboldt County was looking for a database administrator, we were excited. We had been trying to find employment in Humboldt County for over a decade, while working as a contractor down in the Bay Area, raising our children in Humboldt County and engaging in a grueling 300-mile commute, each way, every weekend, to see our wife and children - for over ten years.
We spent several days polishing our resume and we even created a web page where we carefully presented all of the exhibits that we might wish to show to a prospective employer, this being the Age of COVID, where everything was being done remotely.
We spent the better part of a day updating our governmentjobs.com profile; then, we attached our resume, our letters of reference, and some supporting documents to our application, and applied for the job.
Perhaps 48 to 72 hours later, the job disappeared from the Humboldt County Human Resources website.
When one views the Human Resources website, one sees a list of jobs, with titles - database professionals call these lists, indexes - and by clicking on the job title one's web browser is redirected to another webpage, which contains the full job description and provides the viewer with clickable links, whereby one can submit one's application to the open position.
Once the job disappeared from the index, if one were to search for the job, it would not show up in the public listing of open positions.
Here, see for yourself.
Search for 'deadline': https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/humboldtcountyca?keywords=deadline
Search for 'analyst': https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/humboldtcountyca?keywords=analyst
Search for 'database': https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/humboldtcountyca?keywords=database
Now, here is the interesting part. We already had the full job description page loaded, in another web browser tab, next to the tab showing the list of Humboldt County openings, which we refer to as the 'index'.
And, even though the announcement of the job opening had been removed from the index ... the job description was still online!
We verified this by manually reloading the web page - you can do this on most web browsers by clicking on the "reload" button, and we think you can force a reload of the web browser cache by holding down the Ctrl key while pressing the reload button, so we did that, as well.
Another way to prove that the page is still online is to install another, different web browser, open it up, and cut-and-paste the URL from the old browser to the new browser, to see if the new browser can load the same content being displayed by the old browser. We did that, too.
And, of course, one can just go to another, different computer, and use it to see if the questionable web page is visible from the different computer. We also did this.
We tried all of these methods and confirmed to our satisfaction that while the job was not being advertised to the public via the index of openings maintained by Human Resources, that the job description and application web page was still up.
Contemplating this state of affairs, we observed that if one were in possession of the URL to the job description, one did not need the Human Resources index of job openings to apply for the job; but if one did not have that URL, there was no way for the public to know that the job was still open, and there was no way for members of the public to apply to the job, either.
This seemed to us a recipe for filtering out candidates that one did not wish to work with, and also a recipe for selective hiring, insofar as only those in the inner circle would know of the job's existence and be in a position to submit candidates. Everyone else, other than the insiders, would be excluded from what was supposed to be a public and transparent hiring process. And yet, because all candidates would be submitted via official channels, to anyone auditing the hiring process, later, it would seem as if everything had been done legitimately.
We do not think that openings can be concealed from the public without the assistance of the management of governmentjobs.com, who manage the contents of the database and control what their customers can do through the buttons that are provided to the customer via the administrative interface users use to post new openings in their counties and delete job descriptions after positions have been filled. This is a huge topic that implies that this county-level human resources corruption is actually statewide, perhaps nationwide. We all need to think about that.
Also, we do not think that openings can be concealed from the public without the assistance of Humboldt County's Human Resources Department.
So if there is corruption in the county's information technology department ... there is also corruption in the county's human resources department, as well.
The position is still being advertised, now, over half a year later. You can see it yourself:
We think the position is being shared and an acceptable candidate is being sought via private Facebook groups, channels and chats. We suspect this is being done to conceal the recruiting from Freedom of Information requests and future investigations.
(We personally think every single city, county, state and federal agency should leave Facebook immediately and prohibit their employees from accessing these social media services during work hours and/or from work equipment, to rebuild the barriers that used to separate business and personal computer use. We suspect that Facebook is providing the infrastructure for all these conspiracies. But this is another topic.)
When that URL - https://governmentjobs.com/careers/humboldtcountyca/jobs/3499068/deadline-extended-it-applications-analyst-iii-county-database-administrator - no longer works then we will know that the county finally read this article and deleted the evidence - but as long as it stays up, it provides independent evidence of a covert information technology recruiting mechanism that seeks to bypass county policies and preferentially hire individuals based upon private and probably criminal criteria that are not in the public's best interests.
We do not think that the county abruptly filled the position after extending the deadline, just 48 hours after we applied. And, in fact, the county, itself, eventually sent us an email informing that the position had been 'withdrawn'.
After much contemplation we have concluded that the county's IT management has some database problems (see above comments about Humboldt County Superior Court's court calendar system) that need to be fixed but they fear letting just anyone work on these database problems because the IT management are hiding something from the public who pay their salaries.
Also, we have concluded that the management of the county's IT department are technically incompetent and unable to effect any repairs of these matters themselves ... making it impossible for them to lead by example.
As a result of the 2016 and 2020 elections we think computers and networks and databases (and USB drives) are hot topics.
Recently there have been explosive stories coming out of Wisconsin, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Florida, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia about a veritable deluge of industrial-scale premeditated computer crimes on the part of those operating our electoral infrastructure.
And so the odds, as we estimate them, are good that this database corruption has something to do with candidates for elections, as well as candidates for county employment.
All of which is grotesquely criminal.
Whomever controls government employment controls elections because they control the electoral infrastructure. It's that simple.
So, yes, we think that things are much worse in Humboldt County's IT department, than anyone can possibly imagine.
But, wait! There's more - which brings us to our third realm of serious dysfunction.
In latter 2022, as the events, described above, were unfolding, the apartment complex we were living in changed hands; and the new owners began creating circumstances favorable to unlawful evictions of their tenants, pursuant to a scheme to retrofit the apartments with paint jobs and new appliances and increase the rent by nearly 50%.
We resisted the owners' repeated attempts to enter our apartment without cause. They found a lawyer in Arcata who refused to negotiate. Which was odd - we would have accepted a settlement and relocated if it had been offered, but the new owners and their lawyer seemed intent upon achieving an eviction and inflicting damage upon our reputation.
By our calculations the eviction cost the new owners two or three times what a settlement would have cost them and it took until April of 2023, when with a few kind words and some money they could have had us out by the end of September, 2022. Clearly there was some sort of agenda at work.
We are elderly, and our ability to walk is limited. Technically, the eviction was an act of elder abuse that lasted nine or so months. The court gave us - an old man, living alone - three weeks to get out of an apartment where we had lived for many years; three weeks to empty the apartment, all by ourself, climbing the stairs, one at a time, over, and over, and over, and over, and over.
The court hearing was most peculiar.
We had filed an Answer to the eviction proceedings with the assistance of the Legal Society of Northern California, and we had filed our Answer in a timely fashion. We had also filed three declarations - two of them the week before, and a third, the morning of the day of the trial.
And yet, the judge hearing the case claimed that no declarations existed - he did not see anything in the computer and, apparently, he did not see anything in the file.
We had taken the precaution of having copies of everything we had filed with the court, stamped, at the same time, to prove that we had been at the courthouse at that time, with those documents, and had filed them in a timely fashion. We said as much. We waved our copies at the judge. He said nothing. We think this is because he did not want his voice to go on the record in response to our objection.
We gave serious thought to the ways in which such a subterfuge might be accomplished, in the days after the hearing. One of the court clerks had questioned us about the contents of our filings, apparently trying to catch us not being able to explain the legal reasoning behind the papers that, we claimed, we had drafted, and thereby prove that someone had helped us. This struck us as being somewhat sympathetic to landlords. We wondered: had he pretended to file the documents but not added the declarations in the database? Such abuses would surely be noticed by other employees of the Superior Court's Office of Court Clerk. It did not seem likely.
Had the judge pretended that there was nothing in front of him or on the computer screen - confident of his control of the courtroom, encouraged by our lack of a lawyer or third parties monitoring the hearing, and totally oblivious that the respondent before him was a highly trained database and information technology professional? This would only be possible if he had not even read our Answer, as we had mentioned that we were employed, and working from home, in our filings.
Indeed, when we restated this fact, clearly, after the hearing had concluded, the judge - upon hearing that we were providing Linux consulting services to a company in Roanoke, Virginia - HyperGen - that we were moving Rhode Island University's Peoplesoft infrastructure into Oracle's cloud, and that being evicted would interfere with this work - cast a sharp glance at the opposing side's lawyer, as if to ask, "What the hell have you gotten me into?" - leading us to think that perhaps one or more of the courtroom cameras should focus upon capturing the judge's body language, during the hearing ... along with all the other cameras, pointing at everyone else in the courtroom.
Of course, if we infer that the same people who manage the other county databases, including the court calendar database, also manage the Superior Court's filings database, then it becomes much clearer what might have happened to our missing declarations ... although the 'why' has yet to be explained.
We actually paid the new owners - Nicole and Thomas Norton - more money than we owed them; but the Nortons refused to refund the difference. To add insult to injury, the Nortons - who own perhaps a dozen other properties and a drive-through coffee business - left the PG&E bill in our name while they remodeled the apartment, during April, 2023, after they evicted us - so that we had to pay for their stolen electricity, as well. We complained to the Humboldt County District Attorney via certified mail, with exhibits; but they did not reply, and it seems that our complaint about the new owners' larceny was ignored.
So, yes, Humboldt County has some serious problems. A corrupt management - the equivalent of a 'Deep State', in the form of ancient bureaucrats infesting an inflexible information technology department - but, worse, an incompetent board of supervisors who are incapable of wrestling with the problems they are facing and whose only path forward involves denying that there is a problem; and an electorate who are so stoned they couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag with the bottom cut off, armed with scissors. Good luck with that.
Other counties in California have RSS feeds - such as Placer County's Employment Opportunities feed - so that the public can hear of new job openings as soon as they are online. Not Humboldt County.
Other counties in California have geographic information systems online - such as Tehama County's MapPort software - so that researchers can see properties and boundaries layered over satellite photographs. Not Humboldt County.
Some counties have systems in place so that library users can use their card to come into the library and use the facilities when the library is officially closed. Pretty cool, huh? But not Humboldt County.
Actually, Humboldt County does have a GIS system - see Humboldt County Supervisor District Map. But it is only provided to help property owners identify which supervisor they should direct their political patronage towards. It doesn't seem a very cost-effective use of resources.
Navigating to the root URL, https://webgis.co.humboldt.ca.us/, redirects interested parties to https://humboldtgov.org/1357/Web-GIS, where a veritable smorgasbord of GIS-related services are offered. But you have to be a detective to find any of this stuff.
We spent six months using the public workstation in the Humboldt County Assessor's Office in 2022 and 2023 and in all that time not a single clerk said a syllable to us about online GIS systems.
The GIS system is not accessible from the public workstation, either.
These resources appear to be intended for the use of county employees and their utility to the citizens who pay for the services appears to be an afterthought. That seems ass-backwards to us.
We think Humboldt Country doesn't need more clerks. We think that Humboldt County needs smarter county employees who use their resources better.
A web-based issue-tracking system that every employee can use to request help with technological or other issues, a help desk that opens tickets for callers and manages work queues, and a network monitoring system, such as Nagios, that doubles as a software inventory system for most of your information technology assets, are four basic elements of every single organizational information technology infrastructure we have designed, built or worked with over the past twenty-five years, at least.
When we first arrived in Humboldt Country in 2005 one of the first things that struck us was the inability of Fortuna's school districts to coordinate their extracurricular activities and special events with one another and with other cities' school districts. What the City of Fortuna - really, the entire county - needed was a shared calendar - and employees with the imagination required to bring such a tool to fruition. It is nearly twenty years later and nothing has changed.
It is straightforward to design a database that contains calendar events and tracks the scope of the event, IE, personal (training events), group (weekly meetings), departmental (IE, luncheons), site (IE, 'open house' events, maintenance), government-wide (such as planned service outages), and public events (such as meetings of the Board of Supervisors, or street fairs) can be scheduled, selectively displayed, and conflicts identified well ahead of time, automatically. This is all ancient technology - Yahoo had calendaring back in 1999.
It is also straightforward to further extend the web-based issue-tracking system to allow citizens of the county, to, for instance, use their phones to report people needing assistance, or potholes needing repairs; even attaching GPS-tagged photographs.
These reports of problems would be turned into incidents in the issue tracking system and queued for human review. The Help Desk would review the ticket and place it in the correct queue. The county employees supporting that particular function monitor their own queue for incoming tasks and dispatch it internally.
The citizens receive assistance. The potholes get repaired. The managers get reportable lists of action items opened, and closed, per queue, per shift, to help with their project management, estimates, and budgeting. The auditors (a generous nod here to the long-suffering Karen Paz Dominguez, who was hounded out of office for trying to do her job) get data on how the county is functioning so they can measure efficiency and integrity. Everybody's happy.
This is all possible with current off-the-shelf technology. And it would save money, too, by allowing everyone to work smarter in making the county a safe place to live and raise families.
We think that our role as editor of www.friendlyfortuna.org may have had something to do with the special treatment that we received, at the hands of Humboldt County's civil government.
If so, it was a silly thing to do, because it only shows everyone how little regard for the United States Constitution, and the First Amendment, the managers of Humboldt County possess, and how unfit they are to lead.
Also: www.friendlyfortuna.org is back ... but now, we are not so amenable to persuasion as we might have been, before.
Nice shootin', Tex!
Food for thought.
If you would like to see this matter escalated, we suggest you contact your representatives:
Also:
And:
The Congressman's contact form has a pull-down menu for the list of acceptable subjects but 'Corruption' is not one of the subjects - we suggest 'Homeland Security'.
The Senator's list of acceptable subjects offers a similar option, 'Homeland Security / Disaster Response'.
A suggested subject might be "Is governmentjobs.com being used for political patronage?".
(We personally think that sending an email to Dianne Feinstein about corruption in the Democratic Party [or anything else] is pointless; not only because she is senile and has had a stroke and is now just a puppet, like Joe Biden ... but because she is one of the sources of the very corruption we are trying to eliminate.)
For the body of the message we suggest pasting the URL for this article from your browser, along with your comments.
Last but not least:
We do not actually think that either the California or the United States DOJ will do anything - both agencies seem to have undergone regulatory capture, from within - but your unanswered complaints form a large body of evidence for future trials of those whom abandoned their oaths of office. We counsel patience. This, too, shall pass.
UPDATE, 11 September: The Lost Coast Outho-, we mean, Outpost, reports the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors has discovered a new zeal for reviewing old Grand Jury reports. LCO quotes one report as stating
"We also noted, with the exception of the Juvenile Detention Center and the Sheriff’s Garberville Station, every facility had some combination of peeling paint, leaking ceilings, water stains on walls, and drafty and broken windows. At the Humboldt County Animal Shelter appalling and dangerous conditions exist for staff and the public.”
We note that if the supervisors expect any of those items to get repaired they will need to create a list of action items and, at the start of each meeting, they need to review their previous week's list of action items, request updates, drill down and drive the problem all the way to a solution, possibly replacing managers in the food chain until you have recreated a responsive and service-oriented government that does what our elected representatives tell it to do in a timely fashion.
Were the county to deploy a web-based infrastructure - as we described, above - for documenting problems and turning them into computer-tracked action items that can be audited, citizens and county employees could take photographs of each one of those incidents of "peeling paint, leaking ceilings, water stains on walls, and drafty and broken windows", so that we would know exactly how many broken windows, unpainted walls, and leaky ceilings we were talking about repairing ... could prioritize, so that the biggest or most important leaks were fixed first ... could make realistic estimates of the headcount required to get these things fixed ... and follow up, afterwards, to verify that the repairs had actually been accomplished.
Wikipedia defines supervision as "an act or instance of directing, managing, or oversight", and adds that the word is derived "from the two Latin words 'super' (above) and 'videre' (see, observe)". Please make a note of it. That is your job, dear supervisors. To make unexpected visits to remote locations; to strike terror in to the hearts of your managers, when required; and to seek the truth.