The County Deserves to Be Sued and Booed

by Andy Caldwell

Damage from the 2018 Montecito Mudslide. Source AP / Marcio Jose Sanchez 

During every County Board of Supervisors meeting, you would be aghast at how much money is being spent on a combination of the county’s own mistakes and the wokeness of the supervisors. For instance, every week, the board must review lawsuits it is involved in, but it does this behind closed doors, which, unfortunately, is permitted by state law. The current list includes the suit filed by American Medical Response (AMR) claiming the county defrauded AMR from a bid it won that would have renewed the contract it has held for ambulance services for decades.

Two other court cases are very interesting. The County District Attorney is suing the county supervisors for failing to maintain the equipment that was needed to capture the flow of oil from a natural seep in Toro Canyon which resulted in damage to a creek and the critters in the vicinity of the creek.  Herein the county, which has a notorious record of being harsh on oil company “mistakes and misfortune”, is finding out that turn-about is fair play.  

The second case has the county defending itself against the largest lawsuit ever filed against them by Southern California Edison for the damages done by the Thomas fire and the subsequent debris flow that killed 23 Montecito residents and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to homes and infrastructure. The county is fixing to pay outside attorneys upwards of $8 million to represent it in pending litigation which it characterizes as “an attempt by Southern California Edison to shift more than a billion dollars of Edison’s liability to the County, the District, and other public entities”. The way SCE sees it, the county failed to build enough debris basins to prevent the loss of life and infrastructure in areas that have been subject to devastating floods going back 100 years.  Moreover, the county was fixing to remove two debris basins out of concern for fish! SCE noted that the same fire and subsequent storms caused little to no damage in Ventura County because their flood control district was prepared for the inevitable. 

The woke supervisors, unanimously, I might add, are also on course to spend upwards of $1 million dollars to affect the culture, policy, and systems change necessary to advance racial equity and justice, and reverse “the legacy of slavery” and effects of racism in Santa Barbara County. This expenditure is a ridiculous waste of money because California was admitted into the Union in 1850 as a free state.    

Speaking of our justice system, during the George Floyd/BLM controversy, our supervisors joined with many other jurisdictions declaring that our justice system was a product of racial bias. That resulted in law enforcement being second-guessed, demonized, and, in some cases, prosecuted, for simply doing their jobs here and elsewhere. Altogether, this took a huge toll on recruitment efforts, and it also spurred early retirements. County supervisors are now having to offer upwards of $30,000 per recruit as an incentive for new hires in the sheriff’s custody division (jail services).

Finally, there is a classic true story (look it up on the web) about how Congressman Davy Crockett determined it was not right for the government to give away tax dollars for the purpose of “charity”. Obviously, that lesson was lost a long time ago in this era of pork-barrel spending in Washington, D.C. However, now our county supervisors are creating their own version of pork as each of the five supervisors are gleefully receiving $100,000 per year in “discretionary” spending to meet “the social needs” of their district. This is nothing less than a proverbial slush fund.