short stories / By Heidi Walters

Task Force

(May 29, 2008)  Armed with pie charts, statistics and a pictorial display of the sort of slovenliness the Humboldt County Code Enforcement Unit frequently deals with regularly, interim County Counsel Wendy Chaitin and Deputy County Counsel Richard Hendry began an overview of the controversial unit last Friday at the first meeting of the Code Enforcement Task Force. (For background, see “Codes, Damned Codes,” Feb. 28, and “Fear in the Hills,” April 24.)

Actually, their presentation came just after the touchy discussion about how hard it has been for members to get a copy of the code enforcement unit’s manual of policies and procedures, and how once they got it they found it difficult to navigate. It’s unnumbered, with no index. Task force member Bonnie Blackberry, of the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, said she counted 520 pages and hand-numbered them on her copy, found redundancies throughout, and felt the manual overall was “very inadequate.”

“I don’t know why it took a month to get it … and when I did, why it was such a mess,” she said.

Hendry said there’d been an electronic problem that took a while to sort out. But he agreed the manual was a little out of date.

The exchange set the tone for the rest of the meeting. A little bit adversarial, a little bit messy.

The task force was formed on April 8 by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, after it had listened to hours of testimony from outraged residents of rural Humboldt who painted a picture of the code enforcement unit as an entity that has acquired a marijuana-sniffing, gun-toting, roam-the-countryside at will countenance at odds with the purported duty of the unit to enforce building, health and safety codes. The nine-member task force has until early July to investigate the unit.

Hendry’s office is predominantly in charge of the code enforcement unit (the investigators are deputized by the District Attorney; however, D.A. Paul Gallegos temporarily suspended the gun powers of the unit after the public outcry, and the unit itself has been on partial suspension since April 8). Hendry explained the unit’s origins, how it occasionally lacked full-time attorney supervision, and how a multi-departmental oversight committee had met regularly to discuss cases.

Chaitin talked about how, back in December, D.A. Paul Gallegos had talked to her about restructuring the county counsel’s office and how the code enforcement unit is managed, and they developed recommendations. But then the code enforcement issue exploded publicly, she said, “and we never did make those recommendations.”

1 2 NEXT PAGE >SHARE