on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Codes, Damned Codes

“They’re going to start developing that property behind us here, behind the quarry and all the way to Fox Farm Road, and I think this property is in an extremely strategic location,” said Scheideler. “I think they want to build a road through here.”

“Steve thinks they don’t want to drive by a bunch of hippies,” said Garth.

(The major-development theory riled this neighborhood 10 years ago, but all that’s on the books today is an application for a four-way lot split in that area, said county planner Michael Richardson last week.)

Whatever — that still doesn’t explain the dozen deputies who showed up in July pounding on doors. Some of the residents are fixated on the notion that they must’ve been looking for dope — after all, they reason, right after “raiding” Yee Haw the code enforcement unit went out to Redwood Valley on a code inspection visit and stumbled upon a major marijuana cultivation.

Desadier didn’t show up that Friday after all. But the day before, sitting back at his desk behind the locked doors of the code enforcement office inside the Humboldt County Courthouse, he had explained what to him seems like a very simple case: Charles Garth’s property is out of compliance with county code. Period.

“Charles has a piece of property,” said Desadier. “Charles likes to have people live there. Which is all well and good. But … if you’re going to have a campground, if you’re going to have people living on your property, you have to have proper sewage disposal, you have to have proper disposal of garbage and solid waste and you have to have structures that are built within code, that we deem safe. So, that’s where we come at odds.”

Desadier is bemused by the Yee Haw residents’ suspicions that the county might be bearing down on them now for reasons other than code violations. It’s like this, he said: Last July, after more than 10 years as a Humboldt County deputy sheriff, he was transferred to code enforcement — which is also a law enforcement arm of the county. The department had been chronically understaffed for years, and Jeff Conner, staggering under a mountainous caseload, handed Desadier a bunch of cases. Garth’s was one of them: In 2000, someone complained about his place to the planning and building departments, and someone in the county wrote twice to Garth but got no response, so the case was referred to code enforcement. But it got back-burnered.

“On July 9, I was handed the followup,” said Desadier. “I went to Quarry Road on the 12th. And I went back out there on the 17th.” Both times, Garth — whom Desadier thinks is “a fine individual” — wasn’t there but some hostile strangers were.

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