on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Fear in the Hills

When code enforcement goes a-roaming, with guns and backup, what’s it really after?

(April 24, 2008) “There’s more people that are not in this room, who are out in the hall and spilled out into the street — I’m not saying they’ve got pitchforks, but there’s people out there who are really, really concerned about this and they’re not going to go away. …

This code enforcement program is completely out of control.”

GALLERY >

— Paul Bassis, at a meeting in Garberville organized by the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project

Elk Ridge is that long dividebetween the Mattole and the South Fork of the Eel. To get onto its network of private dirt roads, which are run by road associations to which neighbors pay annual fees for upkeep, you can take the Briceland Road out of Redway. First you travel through groves of giant redwoods, pocked with darkness, until gradually the road rises into tan oak, fir and assorted oaks. Eventually, depending on the road you take, you might top out into a green meadow with giant live oaks, floods of sunshine and sweeping vistas of ocean and more ridges, some snow-capped.

It was along this road in February that residents say a convoy of Sheriff’s deputies and a county code enforcement officer wandered up and down the private roads and into yards, surprising the rural residents of homesteads scattered among the trees. Their visit came just days after code enforcement inspections in the nearby Woods Ranch Road area, initiated after a complaint of a diesel spill, had led to two marijuana busts. According to court records of inspection warrants granted and served, the unit had inspection warrants for the properties it had investigated on Woods Ranch Road, but it did not have any for the properties of residents who said they were bothered on Elk Ridge.

Randy and Sarah Foster live on Elk Ridge. Their place, though high up, isn’t on one of those bald hilltops; it’s nestled more in the trees, with a languid pond they dug some time way back. Randy bought the 40 acres for a song, $50,000, back in 1974 — nobody wanted to live there then, he said, because the place had been stripped bare by logging. The trees have come back nicely.

Last Thursday in the early evening, the Fosters stood outside their home and talked about that day in February when code enforcement came for a visit. Sarah said she wasn’t home that day, but Randy told her about it later. He was just getting ready to go on his daily run, when about five four-wheel-drive vehicles, two of them unmarked and the rest with Sheriff decals, came up their driveway, and several cops got out. They wore flak jackets, he said, and had their weapons out. Randy said one of them came up to him and gave him his card: code enforcement officer John Desadier. He asked Randy for directions to Young Jacobsen’s place. It was a couple miles away — Randy gave him detailed directions.

It was all very polite, Randy said. But he was rattled. Still, once they drove off he went for his run. When he got back, he said, their dog Dojo was barking like crazy. He looked down his driveway, which makes a big loop through the woods, and saw that Desadier and his team had returned and were now walking through a second house on Randy’s property — it was his brother’s old place, which his son had recently been fixing up to live in.

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