Last Thursday, Clearlake Police Chief Allan McClain criticized the report and statements it made about his agency, some of which he called lies.
Then on Tuesday the Board of Supervisors also pointed out issues in the report that they felt misrepresented statements they made during confidential interviews with grand jurors, and raised concerns that the way the grand jury presented some of that information was causing a Brown Act violation.
In the beginning pages of the 2009-10 report, the grand jury included what appeared to be transcripts of interviews with each of the supervisors.
However, as Supervisor Denise Rushing pointed out on Tuesday, the interviews weren't presented word for word, were out of context and omitted portions of statements supervisors made to the group.
Referring to the document, Rushing said the grand jury asked her about how Lake County is using its stimulus money. She told them that the county was applying for grants and stimulus money, but the report said, “Lake County has applied for grants rather than stimulus money.”
In another portion of the report regarding the public defender contract, the grand jury recommended that phone numbers for defense attorneys and bail bondsmen be posted near telephones, which she and Supervisor Jim Comstock told them already was being done in an Aug. 25 tour of the Lake County Jail.
After reviewing the document, Supervisor Rob Brown said, “I'm wondering which interview they were at.”
He suggested he should have taken a tape recorder and done his own transcript, because he felt the grand jury was extremely selective about which statements of his were included in the report.
One of the questions for Brown was, “What is the status of the investigations into the environmental impact of power companies' drilling on Cobb Mountain? Does the drilling increase earthquake frequency?”
He said he told the grand jurors there is no evidence that the operations are causing earthquakes, and said he backed that up by saying there is an increase in earthquakes all over the state, including areas where there is no geothermal drilling.
Instead, the grand jury report read, “There is no effect.”
“They just said there is no effect and I did not say that,” Brown said.
He added that he was puzzled at how the grand jury presented the report, leaving out what he considered important information.
“It appears that it's just a colossal waste of time to go in there and answer questions if they're not going to put it in it's entire context,” he said.
Brown said it also appeared to him many of the questions were based on complaints from the grand jurors themselves, not the community.
County Administrative Officer Kelly Cox – who, along with the board, the grand jury had admonished to “avoid misleading statements that paint a rosier picture” in budget documents – asked the board if it wanted to address those concerns in its response back to the group.
He noted that Board Chair Anthony Farrington – absent from the meeting – also had a concern about the report, which he submitted to be included in the board's response to the grand jury.
“The process is bizarre,” said Rushing.
“Do you want to say that?” Cox asked.
“I don't know,” said Rushing.
Brown chimed in, “Yes, in its entire context.”
Rushing explained. “We can't act as individual board members, we act collectively as a board.”
The grand jury asked the supervisors about their individual opinions on certain matters, she said. “The process of interviewing individual board members and them publishing select comments from those interviews doesn't make sense to me.”
She said the grand jury might as well run a newspaper. Comstock added that they would get misquoted as badly as they do in the newspaper.
Brown said a grand jury member who also was on the Lake County Genetic Engineering Advisory Committee was asking him for his opinion on genetically modified crops in Lake County. The response attributed to him was “Brown is not big on the UN recommendation of cautionary steps. 'No minds can be changed, so why bother?'”
Brown said that was another example of having something taken out of context.
Rushing wanted to include in the response the concern that it's inappropriate to question individual board members about certain items and then publish them. She said the board members then see what each other has to say on issues that haven't been discussed in public, which she feared led to a potential Brown Act violation.
Brown said he had questions about the grand jury's validity.
“There are some good things that have come out of the grand jury,” he said.
However, recently he's seen outcomes that make him think people are signing up to serve on the grand jury with an agenda. He suggested that the grand jury itself needs more oversight.
Deputy Administrative Officer Matt Perry updated the board's response document, which is addressed to Lake County Superior Court Presiding Judge Richard Martin, and returned later in the afternoon with a revised version.
Besides correcting statements by individual board members to the grand jury, the board agreed to state in the opening paragraphs of its response its concerns about the interview process and potential Brown Act violations relating to items that hadn't been discussed in a regular board meeting.
“We strongly believe that (it) is inappropriate to ask individual Supervisors to take a position on a matter of public policy and disclose that position in the Grand Jury report before the matter is discussed by the Board in public session and a(n) official policy is produced through the collective debate that is the hallmark of our government,” the document stated. “We are concerned that the Grand Jury appeared to be asking Supervisors, unintentionally, to violate the Brown Act by publishing the individual responses in the Grand Jury Report.”
The board response added that it believed the interviews reflected the grand jury's efforts to get as much information as possible from various sources.
“However, since the Board of Supervisors is a collective body and, unlike other elected officials, cannot act individually, the manner in which these individual interviews were conducted and reported was inappropriate,” the response explained.
In addition to the boards' comments, the final, 14-page response from the board to the grand jury includes comments on the city of Clearlake's public access channel, county administration oversight, inmate phone service, Board of Supervisors oversight, human resources, information technology, redevelopment, the public defender, adult protective services, In-Home Supportive Services, mental health, Lampson airport, code enforcement, the adult and juvenile detention facilities, the area planning council, parks, and the Middletown Public Library and senior center project.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
