In what universe is it OK for high-ranking supervisors to harass, discriminate and retaliate against an employee?

The government universe, apparently. More specifically, the city Fire Department.

A jury found the city at fault on all 13 questions of how the department handled the long melodrama of firefighter Robby Pratt’s firing.

Jurors said “yes” to these key questions:

“Did the City of Bakersfield or their supervisors or agents know or should have known of harassing conduct?

“Did The City of Bakersfield or its agents fail to take immediate and appropriate corrective action?”

And most damning:

“Did the City of Bakersfield undertake an adverse employment action against Plaintiff without cause?”

Yes, jurors said.

This means the city, via its agents,  Fire Chief Ron Fraze and Deputy Chief Gary Hutton, knew Pratt was being harassed by a co-worker, did nothing to stop it and, in fact, retaliated against Pratt when he took the issue to the city’s human resources department as he had every right to do.

That verdict came down back in March. There’s never been even a murmur since then of any management changes in the department. Not even the suggestion that perhaps some managers might need a skosh more training on these issues.

Indeed, most people at the city I spoke with felt Pratt’s stunningly low judgment of $98,000 and no order that he be given his job back indicated a win for the city.

“We as a management team made no mistakes,” Fraze told me.

He blamed any poor handling of the Pratt case on then Human Resources Director Carroll Hayden and the harassing co-worker, former Battalion Chief John Weber. Both have since left the city.

The only mistake Fraze felt he made was not making sure Hayden was doing her job properly.

“This verdict was not about HR,” Pratt’s attorney, Mark Quigley, told me. “This was about the actions of Fraze, Hutton and Weber.”

HR, he said, was guilty of bumbling around and doing nothing, evident on an epic scale from depositions of Hayden and one of her HR supervisors, Anthony Gonzales.

Despite Fraze’s protestations, there’s clearly something amiss in the upper reaches of the Fire Department.

It cost taxpayers at least $1 million this time, including Pratt’s judgment, his attorney’s fees and what taxpayers shelled out for the city’s attorneys. 

And this isn’t the department’s first time at the rodeo.

In 2006, the city was forced to restore Capt. Greg Moore’s rank, his back pay and pay some of his attorney’s fees after he was inappropriately demoted for an unproven charge of sexual harassment.

The city had lost at the trial court level, appealed and lost again. The court called the city’s actions against Moore “arbitrary and capricious,” two words that do not coincide with “good management.”

If problems in the Fire Department aren’t addressed, taxpayers can be sure we will continue paying out on court judgments into the future.

I’m not defending Pratt (or Moore) as a sterling employee. I don’t know whether he was the spit-and-polish firefighter some say he was, or the whining manipulator that others paint him.

But I know how someone should be disciplined or fired. As a manager, I’ve had that unfortunate experience too often.

You outline policies clearly and you stick to them consistently with every employee, over every issue, every single time.

The city has a clear policy against harassment that was apparently ignored in the Pratt case.

Unaddressed rumors

In early 2003, Pratt went to Hutton complaining that Weber, then a captain, was spreading rumors about him being gay. Pratt says Hutton told him to “stop hanging around queers” and he’d be fine. Nothing was done, the rumors continued and by April,

Pratt took his complaint to Fraze who, he says, gave the same advice.

In the Fraze meeting, Pratt also brought up problems regarding Capt. Bryan Perry allegedly going “Code 2” to situations that required a faster “Code 3” response, a thread that runs throughout this story and continues within the Fire Department to this day.

All this is confirmed in depositions or through my own interviews with a host of Fire Department employees including retired Capt. Gary Bergman, Capt. Pat Ponec, Capt. Tim Lynch, Battalion Chief Matt Moore and firefighter Nick Catelan, now deceased.

Every one of them recalled hearing the same thing from Pratt about his meetings with Hutton and Fraze at the time it happened.

After his meeting with Fraze, Pratt felt he was going to get no action, so he went to HR’s Hayden.

Though Hayden didn’t follow up on his complaints then, that appears to be the pivotal moment Pratt became Public Enemy No. 1.

His downward spiral continued through the years with Pratt filing several lawsuits alleging harassment in 2004 and concluding with Pratt’s firing in February 2007, following a highly publicized and wacky civil service commission hearing in which Stuart Gentry, one of the commissioners, was found to have been calling Pratt during the hearing.

Different interpretations

Though everyone in the city would like to close the book on this, the verdict shouldn’t be the final shoe on this twisted tale.

I called City Manager Alan Tandy to ask him, among other things, if the city was going to investigate Fire Department management based on the jury’s findings and possibly make some changes.

Tandy must have been really busy. He never called me back.

But I got a sense of the city’s thinking through Chief Fraze.

Despite the jury’s verdict, Fraze insists he and his management team were vindicated.

“Every discipline we had, and this went on for six years, was upheld at every level from the city manager and civil service to an administrative law judge,” he said. “Not once did anyone come back and say we messed up. The city manager has no ties to me. It’s not like we’re the best of friends; if he didn’t think I was doing my job right, he would definitely let me know that.”

No doubt he’s right about Tandy.

But I would point out that all  those levels where Pratt’s disciplines and firing were upheld were done so by city commissions, city employees or a city-hired admin law judge. Not exactly a level playing field.

Once this case got to the open air of a courtroom, it was seen very differently by average citizens.

What next?

Pratt has decided not to appeal and has given up hope that he might get his old job back.

He had offered to give back half his settlement for a second chance. “Absolutely not,” was City Attorney Ginny Gennaro’s response. “This was a legitimate termination.”

The issue of wrongful termination wasn’t allowed in by the court, which said it had already been decided in a different venue — the wacky civil service commission I mentioned earlier.

The “Code 2” allegations against Perry still swirl around the department, which has never investigated him, I’m told.

The policy on Code 2 and 3 responses was recently reworked, but Fraze said it was a part of a larger policy overhaul. “This was not whatsoever tied to one person’s actions,” he said.

Pratt is now working to start his own company and focusing on the future.

Fraze, too, told me it was time to move on.

Yeah, sure, let’s move on. But not before taxpayers can be assured this won’t happen again.

The Pratt verdict is a stain on the department that will not be removed without a thorough airing.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

THE PRATT FILE
The importance of the Robby Pratt case goes beyond the issue of  whether he was a good or bad employee. It shows how far outside the bounds of acceptable management fire department and city officials were willing to go.

What is the city going to do about it? Business as usual? Or will they try to prevent it from happening again?

Taxpayers deserve an answer.

Here’s a collection of behind-the-scenes documentation of how this case this case unfolded over six years.
— Lois Henry

Gay rumors
Despite the fact that the city’s harassment code specifically says you can’t hassle people who are gay, or even perceived to be gay, depositions of Pratt’s friends show city attorneys tried to explore Pratt’s sexual preference.

Yes, taxpayer dollars were used so the city’s attorneys could ask questions like “Have you never engaged in any homosexual acts with him?” of Pratt’s friend Raul Cepeda.

And “Have you ever called him “Queen?” or “Have you ever called him “Bitch?” of Carlos Garcia, another friend of Pratt’s.

Tale of a sex act
In May 2003, Perry told another fire official he’d seen Pratt receiving oral sex in Station 1.
Management immediately opened a massive investigation.

Both Pratt and Perry were on duty at Station 1 when Pratt’s fiance, Shelly Scudder came to talk with Pratt. The two went into the dorm and at one point, Perry walked in and saw them for a few seconds.

In his first interview, Perry says he didn’t see who Pratt was standing with. He did not see a sex act, nor any “straightening” motions as if a sex act had just been interrupted.

“I saw nothing that was actual sexual,” Perry says.

Then, “It’s regrettable and maybe some assumptions were made...”

At the start of his second interview he’s told by Human Resources Supervisor Anthony Gonzales that a “formal complaint” had been filed by Scudder and his name, Perry’s, was mentioned. (There never was a complaint.)

After that, Perry says he did know the woman with Pratt that day as Scudder because he recognized her voice. In this version she was sitting on a dorm bed with Pratt in front of her. After he walked in, he says, Pratt pushed her over so she was lying on her side. He also said Pratt appeared to be fastening his pants.

By his third interview, Perry said he saw Scudder sitting on the edge of the bed, Pratt standing in front of her with her legs straddling his. When Perry walked in, Pratt then tossed her back onto the bed so she had to fling out her arms to catch herself. Not only did he say Pratt was fastening his pants, but he said Pratt’s fly was open, his belt unbuckled and his shirt untucked.

In a deposition, Engineer Roger Tilford said Perry told him at the time of the investigation that he didn’t see anything between Pratt and Scudder and only said he did after he felt threatened when HR brought up the phony complaint.

Retired Engineer Bruce Haas confirmed that, telling me that Perry flat out told him he saw nothing.

“I was at Station 13 when Perry walked in and the place went dead silent,” Haas said. “He said, ‘I saw what I saw.’ I went outside to work on the rig and he came out and said he actually didn’t see anything.”

Pratt was ultimately disciplined for the “appearance of sexual impropriety.”

Changing evaluations
Retired Captain Doug Webb said he’d never seen anything like it.

His first evaluation of Pratt was good, with a notation of “excellent” in regard to medical aid calls.

It was kicked back from management, which wanted it downgraded, including removing an award. They also wanted Webb to include information about Pratt’s previous DUI. Webb refused.

“This back-and-forth went on for three months and finally I told ’em I’d filled it out to the best of my knowledge and I’m not changing it; if you have something you want to add, type it in yourself.”

The next year, again Webb wrote a good evaluation on Pratt which was again kicked back. This time, Webb noticed one of his scores had been changed without his involvement.

“That was just unbelievable to me,” Webb said. Both he and Pratt refused to sign the evaluation.

All along, Webb said, he had command staff send instructions for the evaluations to his email, which he saved and gave to Pratt’s attorneys.

“They weren’t very smart about it.”

The city needs a conviction
In trying to assess all the costs associated with the Pratt case, I tried to find out about the hours spent by City Attorney Andrew Wang in Pratt’s second DUI in 2004.

City Attorney Ginny Gennaro told me she had no idea if Wang sat through that case. He was not assigned to do so and if he did, it was his prerogative and on his time.

I tried to find Wang, who has since left the city, but couldn’t locate him

Pratt’s attorney Richard Middlebrook remembered Wang at every court proceeding.

“I was probably 20 to 30 hours total,” Middlebrook said. “At one point, he was speaking with (Chris) Nelson (the prosecuting attorney) and told him in open court that the city needed this conviction in order to get rid of Pratt. He was very open and honest about it.”

Pratt’s blood alcohol level was below the legal limit so a DUI conviction was looking shaky. Since he was on probation for a previous wet/reckless conviction, however, he wasn’t supposed to consume any alcohol at all and he’d run over some shrubbery and left the scene (that’s the hit and run).

Judge Michael Bush saw there wasn’t much of a case for the people and asked Nelson, then Deputy District Attorney John Brownlee and Middlebrook to hammer out a compromise in chambers.

As they walked back, Middlebrook recalled, Wang followed.

“Bush asked, ‘Who are you?’ and he said, ‘I’m with the city and we have an interest in this case.’ And Bush tells him, ‘No, it doesn’t, and you’re not welcome into chambers.’”

“Code 2” allegations
One of the most galling aspects of the Pratt case to many firefighters I spoke with was the refusal of management to investigate serious allegations that Capt. Bryan Perry responded to Code 3 emergencies (lights, sirens, run the red lights) at a Code 2 speed (no lights, sirens, engine moves with traffic).

In an email, Perry said he had no comment and didn’t wish to be contacted about the Pratt case again.

Back in 2006, he told The Californian the allegations weren’t true and that he’d never been questioned about it.

Numerous firefighters gave depositions and testimony in the Pratt case about the Code 2 issues.

Battalion Chief Matt Moore, who was Perry’s supervisor, said he had discussed the issue with Perry and brought it to his supervisors’ attention, but was told not to investigate.

In a 2005 email to Deputy Chief Dean Clason, Moore made another request to investigate, saying “a vast majority of the department is fully aware of this practice and I’m constantly questioned as to what actions the department has taken to correct the problem.”

The allegations are frightening.

“Perry was working OT with me and wanted us to drive Code 2 to a medical aid call. Just because he’s a captain, it’s not right to make stupid decisions. We shined him on and went Code 3 anyway.” 
— Retired Engineer John Leon.

“I was driving one time and didn’t hear the call. Perry tells me it’s a Code 2, I ask, ‘What’s it for?’ He says, ‘I don’t know.’ The ambulance passed us getting there.”
— Engineer Garrett Pacheco

“One of the first incidents I remember Perry telling us to go Code 2 on was a full arrest back in February 2003 over on Lockfern. In the trial, the city’s attorney asked me ‘Well, how do you know the guy’s not dead already?’ Now how stupid is that? ‘That’s why we go Code 3,’ I said.”
— Firefighter Dennis Roe.
(The victim  was in full cardiac arrest when fire crews arrived. He later died.)

Most firefighters I talked to believe management wouldn’t touch Perry because he was the department’s main witness against Pratt in the alleged sex act incident.

Discipline merry-go-round
Pratt was disciplined in September 2005 for, again, reporting issues he’d heard about regarding Capt. Perry. He was accused of dishonesty and criticizing a superior officer.

He tried to appeal to City Manager Alan Tandy, which is allowed under the Bakersfield Municipal Code, but was told by Tandy in a memo that “There is really no procedure for such an appeal of a written reprimand.”

So he tried to grieve it, as allowed when no appeals process exists. He was then told by Gennaro there actually was an appeal process but he’d missed the time window.

TIMELINE

1992 - Pratt is hired by Bakersfield Fire Department as reserve firefighter
1999 - Hired full time at BFD
January 2003 - Hears that Capt. John Weber is telling people he’s gay. Capt. Gary Bergman advises he report it to Deputy Chief Gary Hutton. Hutton tells him to “stop hanging out with queers.”
April 2003 - Reports his concerns about continued gay rumors to Chief Ron Fraze. Also reports that he’s heard Capt. Bryan Perry is going Code 2 to Code 3 emergencies. Fraze repeats Hutton’s advice. Pratt takes concerns to then Human Resources Director Carroll Hayden.

May 2003 - Pratt accused of engaging in sex act in Station 1.

June 2003 - Pratt receives termination notice and fights it.

Sept. 2003 - Pratt is disciplined for the appearance of sexual impropriety and allowed back to work. His pay is cut 5 percent and he’s not allowed any overtime for a year.

Late Sept. 2003 - Pratt is accused of flipping off a captain. Discipline process is started but the gesture cannot be substantiated.

November 2003 - Pratt again complains to Hayden about the continued gay rumors.

November 2003 - Pratt arrested for DUI, pleads down to a “wet reckless” in May 2004.

December 2003/January 2004 - Hayden conducts one interview with Hutton and concludes her investigation. Pratt hires an attorney and sues for harassment and discrimination.

September 2004 - Pratt gets a good evaluation from Capt. Doug Webb, who is then pressured by management to downgrade it.

August 2005 - Pratt written up for again reporting allegations about Perry.

September 2005 - Another good evaluation by Webb is downgraded by management. Webb and Pratt refuse to sign it.

August 2006 - Pratt arrested for DUI and hit-and-run. The DUI is dismissed.

February 2007 - Pratt is fired.

March 2009 - Jury reaches verdict in Pratt’s case: The city loses on all questions of harassment, discrimination and retaliation. Pratt wins $98,000 plus attorney’s fees.

DOCUMENT LINKS

Interviews from the 2003 “sex act” incident
• 1st interview with Capt. Bryan Perry by internal affairs

• 2nd  interview with Capt. Bryan Perry by internal affairs

• 3rd  interview with Capt. Bryan Perry by internal affairs

Code 2 concerns
• Memo from Hall Ambulance and email from Matt Moore

2005 discipline
• Memos between Pratt, Fire and city management

Depositions from the Pratt trial
• Raul Cepeda, friend of Pratt

• Carlos Garcia, friend of Pratt

• Former Bakersfield HR Director Carroll Hayden

• Human Resources Supervisor Anthony Gonzales

• Battalion Chief Matt Moore

• Engineer Roger Tilford

• Captain Tim Lynch deposition

• Firefighter Nicolas Cattelan

• Deputy Chief Gary Hutton

• Jury’s verdict handed down in March
 

Today is Women’s Equality Day.

Yay.

Here’s what women should do to celebrate the 89th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment giving us the right to vote —  GET OUT!

After looking over the stats, I’ve concluded Kern County so undervalues its “better half” we’d be better off packing up and heading for greener pastures.

OK, I’m kidding, sort of.

Women shouldn’t have to wander off in search of equality and opportunity. We should create it right here.

And we can, but first, here’s a glimpse of where we live today.

I was prepared to see Kern women’s incomes lower here and there, particularly in certain industries where we haven’t made as many inroads as say, education and health care.

But holy moly, this is bad.

In the job category “health diagnosing and treating practitioners and other technical occupations,” per the U.S. Census, women outnumber men by 60.4 percent to 39.6 percent.

In median annual dollars, however, men earn $100,000+ while women only earn $61,903.

We aren’t talking about file clerks compared to surgeons here. This is apples to apples.
In “educational services,” a so-called “pink ghetto” where women tend to gravitate — 74.6 percent to 25.4 percent — men still out-earn us $43,849 to $29,956.

The list goes on: “professional, scientific and technical services,” $52,894 men, $31,250 women; “architecture and engineering,” $73,534 men, $58,538 women; “legal occupations,” $73,764 men, $69,355 women.

GRRRRR!!!!!!!

To be fair (though why I should be, when our absurdly chauvinist society certainly isn’t?), it’s the same all over.

The wage gap is alive and well throughout California, though it’s more pronounced here with women earning .60 cents to every $1 earned by men (compared to .78 cents to every $1 earned by men nationally), according to the California Employment Development Department.

Some other Kern numbers to chew on:

More women live below the poverty line than men, 18.6 percent to 15 percent.

Fewer women have private health insurance, 44 percent to 55 percent, according to the 2007 California Health Interview Survey.

In 2007, 70 percent of all single-parent families were headed by women and those families accounted for more than 35 percent of all families in poverty, according to census numbers.

Oh, and women here suffer more domestic violence, 49.9 incidents per 10,000 people in 2008 compared to about 45 incidents per 10,000 people statewide, according to RAND California.

Lovely.

OK, so we have our work cut out for us. Which is why we need many more competent, tough, savvy women in political office.

I ranted about this very topic two years ago and things haven’t changed much.

County Board of Supervisors: 5 men, 0 women.

City Council: 3 women, 5 men.

City boards and commissions: Nine women in about 55 positions. Notably, there are zero women on the high-profile, high-powered Planning Commission and three civil service commissions.

County boards and commissions: 115 women in about 412 positions.

Kern High School District Trustees: 5 men, 0 women.

Judges: 34 judgeships, 4 women, that’s up by one from 2007. There are seven court commissioners/referees including one woman, no change from 2007.

In the last general election in Nov. 2008 there were about 144 seats from school boards to special districts up for grabs. There were 75 women candidates and 37 either gained or retained office. That doesn’t count female incumbents who weren’t up for election.

Still, it’s not enough.

We’re gaining parity faster in the Kern County jail than in politics. Female arrests shot up 18 percent between 2003 and 2007, according to the state Department of Justice. Ugh!

Time, money and lack of familiarity are the three biggest barriers I hear about from women. But there are ways around them.

Yes, juggling family and politics is tricky, said former Kern County Supervisor Barbara

Patrick who had one daughter in junior high and the other in high school when she decided to run for office.

“On the other hand, women are very good at multitasking,” she said.

Money? No worries!

In her first campaign, Patrick ran against veteran City Council woman Conni Brunni, a client of political puppet master Mark Abernathy.

“I was significantly outspent,” Patrick recalled. “But we ran a people-to-people campaign, very grass-roots and very successful.”

The other thing Patrick had was a few years on the Planning Commission. “That gave me the courage to move on to elected office,” she said.

Those boards and commissions are key to springboarding into higher office.

Patrick and other members of the California Women Lead Kern County chapter are holding a workshop to teach local women what commission seats are available, what the jobs entail and how to get them.

Mark your calendars for Wednesday Sept. 2 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in Bakersfield City Hall South, 1501 Truxtun Ave.

You need to RSVP by Monday, which you can do at http://www.cawomenlead.org/... Or call Kay Pitts at 665-5506 for more info.
Getting on a public board levels the playing field, Patrick said.

“You get a very up-close look at how government works, you learn a lot, you watch elected officials closely and often realize you can do a better job.”

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

Thanks to Skip Slayton, you can still afford a burger or slab of steak grilled to perfection at the mom and pop restaurant down the street. For now, at least.

Slayton, owner of Jake’s Tex Mex, almost single-handedly (my words, NOT his) backed the San Joaquin Valley Air District down from a new requirement that would have forced any restaurant grilling 800 pounds of meat a week to spend potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and install new exhaust systems.

How’d he do it? By getting people involved, researching the issues and collecting actual facts, something the air district did not do on a rather shocking scale.

He said district staffers kept saying they had empirical data to back up their stance, but it never materialized. Someone failed at their job, he noted, and if there’d been no opposition, that proposed rule would be the law of the land.

“We sit in the logic world,” he told me. “They’re in a whole other world.”

The issue first came to the board in with a wholehearted staff recommendation to pass the new rule back in June.

But Slayton rallied the troops, including makers of the exhaust systems being discussed, and showed the board that not only was the staff report way off on estimated costs, but the recommended system simply would not work.

At Thursday’s board meeting Seyed Sadredin, executive director of the air district, recommended the board put the rule on the back burner (so to speak), study the situation over the next year, hopefully find a restaurant willing to test out one of the systems and revisit the issue in 2011.

“Ultimately,” Sadredin told me, “the system worked.”

In his view, it was a close call, but the district opted not to ram the rule down anyone’s throat and, instead, do the leg work.

I reminded him that this proposed rule had been in the works for the better part of a year and the staff report, which I read, made no mention of questions or uncertainties.

Indeed, it listed what I assumed were actual, known costs to install and operate one of these filtration systems — no more than $37,000 to $100,000, depending on the size of the restaurant.

The report also said the only thing a restaurant would need was a HEPA filter, which clears out anything down to six microns.

And, staff said, such systems are already in operation in some restaurants in Bakersfield.

Zip. Zip. Zip! All neatly packaged.

Except all three assertions are flat wrong.

Slayton, and other restaurant owners explained to district staff that the systems often have to be customized to individual restaurants, upping the cost. And maintaining them can cost $26,000 a year or more, again depending on size.

And you can’t just use a HEPA filter without a two-filter system on the front end to remove grease, otherwise it clogs almost immediately.

Oh, and no restaurants in Bakersfield using under-fire charbroilers have these systems.

A couple of newer restaurants were supposed to install them per their use permits, but they never did. That’s something air district staff might have known had they picked up a telephone and called one of the establishments.

Sadredin acknowledged there were shortcomings in the staff report, most notably relying on costs outlined in a similar report by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which approved the charbroiler rule in 2007 to be effective in 2013.

“That was our big mistake,” he said.

But, Sadredin laid some of the blame for the bad info on an initial lack of participation by restaurant owners. Air district staffers aren’t experts in how different businesses operate, he said. They need people in the know to come forward.

That brings up a side rant, which I’ll get to in a sec.

I have to disagree with Sadredin here, though I’ve found him to be one of the most receptive and fair-minded regulators I’ve encountered in the air pollution biz.
If you’re about to cost an entire industry multiple thousands of dollars and you’ve spent months compiling a report, you ought to be pretty darn sure of your facts.

That staffers relied on numbers out of another air district’s report is alarmingly similar to how the California Air Resources Board complied the report used as the basis for the draconian diesel rules, which could cripple California’s trucking and heavy equipment industries for what I believe is questionable good (yet another side rant I won’t go into right now).

Sadredin stood by the district’s overall track record, noting that over the past 15 years more than 500 rules have been enacted under intense scrutiny from multiple sides.

“It’s not like no one’s been watching the district,” he said good-naturedly. “And we did the right thing here, we didn’t push this through.”

OK, extremely grudging kudos.

Now for my side rant:

People who stand on the sidelines and holler about “the government” as if it were some alien, brain-sucking zombie need to stop the noise and get involved the way Slayton did.

I’ll agree that some government agencies are a more than a bit zombie-esque, but the fact is, government IS us unless we abdicate our power by not participating.

These days it’s easier than ever. You can watch City Council meetings at home on KGOV.

You can watch Board of Supervisors’ meetings online in real time, or check them out later.

You can download documents on just about any topic from just about every agency. You can find the name, address, phone number and email of any agency locally on up to the federal level online. And, best of all, you can e-mail your representatives about anything big or small.

As for the “you can’t fight City Hall” nay-sayers out there: Tell it to Skip Slayton.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

Col. Thomas Baker was many things — founder of Bakersfield, highly-regarded lawyer,  generous soul to travelers and neighbors alike, a surveyor, and, oh yes, a civil engineer.

As such, he liked a good road system. In fact, he was a stickler for it. As the original planner of Bakersfield’s roads system, he designated streets here would be 82 feet wide rather than the standard 66 feet of the day.

He wanted people to be able to get around.

What would he think of Bakersfield’s now snarled system of bottlenecked thoroughfares, hodge podge developments connected by single-lane farm roads and, of course, our intermittent freeways?

Who cares?! The man’s been dead since 1872. Let him rest, for Pete’s sake. The real question is what are we going to do about it?

Here’s an idea:  Those who put an extra burden on the system by building housing subdivisions should help ease that burden by paying a fee toward traffic improvements from the profits they’ll reap from that very subdivision.

That’s fair and appropriate. The only issue after that is how much.

In Bakersfield, as numerous people have said since the traffic fee was instituted in 1992, ours has been way too low for far too long largely because of political pressure from developers.

That — and politicians’ undying inability to say no, or even not yet, to any development that comes down the pike — has led to our current infrastructure mess, in which we are $3 billion behind, by some estimates.

I was thinking of doing a column examining what Bakersfield would be like without any government regulation (some say interference) at all. What if housing were totally “market driven” and developers completely unfettered?

Ha! Look around. That’s exactly where we are — a sprawling mess.

In the last general plan update, city planners had hoped to make sense of the ever outward spiraling building boom by creating “city hubs,” areas of commercial, light industrial, retail, etc., so there might be some reasonable flow to traffic. Even allow for (gasp) public transit.

Developers blew past that so fast it wasn’t even a blur in their rear-view mirrors.

A friend recently told me Oildale now seems quaint to her in comparision with what’s happened to the Rosedale “community.”  Not much community among the unending housing subdivisions slashed here and there by clogged arterials where motorists jerk along as people scoot in and out of strip malls that spring up haphazardly along the way.

And truth be told, if we were still in boom times, I doubt developers would have sued the city and county over bumping the traffic impact fee from about $6,000 per single family home to over $12,800.

By the by, even with the traffic impact fee increase, Bakersfield’s overall fees ($25,000 for everything including sewer connection, parks, habitat conservation and schools, which is determined by the state, not the city) are about middle of the road compared to other cities.

The boom went bust, however, and now developers are pulling out all the stops, from suing to suggesting a builder “bailout” by having the city drop its fees.

Other cities have done so in an effort to stimulate the construction industry, which is flat out foolish.

It leaves those cities wide open to California Environmental Quality Act-based lawsuits.

The fees are supposed to help lessen impacts from development. Dropping them doesn’t negate the impacts, so approving the developments would immediately put the city at odds with CEQA.

“It’s just silly to subsidize developers,” agreed Gordon Nipp, who represents the local Kern-Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club. “It’s the same sort of boosterism that led us to sprawl to the horizon and caused the traffic problems we have now.”

If government wants to subsidize jobs, he suggested just do it directly and pay for those who’ve been laid off to get education and retraining.

Besides, developers can’t get anyone to buy the half-finished subdivisions already collecting dust all around town. Taxpayers certainly don’t need to help fund more such ruins.

As Col. Baker understood, city representatives have an obligation to provide a safe, well-run environment for all their citizens, not just the ones who fill their campaign coffers.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

It’s nice to see developers and the county creating housing plans that go beyond the mono-zoned, cookie-cutter, “un-smart” growth style that has been so highly prized here in B-town for so very long.

Nice, but in the case of the proposed Neighborhood Development in western Rosedale, no cigar.

I put this in the same category as other recently approved developments in far-flung Rosedale (along Nord Road north and south of Rosedale Highway) by Bakersfield Land Investment and Northwest Communities.

This latest development frog leapt before Supervisors last Tuesday when they tied 2-2 on requested zoning changes with Supervisor Jon McQuiston absent.

That should have killed the item, but supervisors inexplicably decided to bring it back next Tuesday when McQuiston will return.

Ah, yes, the oft-used “try, try again,” approach that’s led to success for so many developments. Wonder why that never seems to work for the regular schmoes opposed to these projects?

Anyhoo, on all of these latest western Rosedale developments, planners have required far more than they ever did before in terms of higher densities, buffers for surrounding neighborhoods (which are mostly a mix of ag land and 1/2 acre- to acre-sized ranchettes), landscaping, walkability, public transit access, higher fees and so on.

OK, that’s good.

And growth is headed that way, no doubt, so planners and politicians can’t continue to ignore problems inherent in the rural/urban face-off.

But I still maintain, as Supervisors Mike Maggard and Don Maben did with their “no” votes last Tuesday, that it’s too much, too soon.

There still are large swaths of land not only empty but there are half-done, defunct housing developments between the edge of the city and this development.

It doesn’t matter that Neighborhood Development would have housing and commercial mixed with trails, open space and more. It’s still sticking 203 units, which equals hundreds more cars trips on Rosedale Highway, in the middle of what is mostly “country” with half-paved roads and septic instead of sewer.

Bakersfield Land Investment will bring 1,100 more houses, by the by, and Northwest Communities more than 800.

The Neighborhood Development project is a little different from the others in that the land is already zoned for 1/4-acre lots so owners have the right to develop and this proposed zone change holds them to much higher standards.

But it would still mean plopping a mini-city in the middle of the boonies.

During last Tuesday’s meeting, Supervisor Ray Watson told angry neighbors this isn’t leap-frog development because the leap frogging happened long ago. His take was this will bring far more money in development fees so they can build the infrastructure to handle the increased population.

Hogwash.

If you don’t build the houses, you don’t need the infrastructure.

Two other points:

Why not wait for the general plan update before rushing to approve this and other subdivisions in that area, which isn’t slated for buildout until 2035 according to preliminary general plan maps?

Second, planners said in Tuesday’s meeting that in order to approve the requested zone changes, supervisors would have to find the development was so desperately needed it outweighed concerns about air quality, traffic and other impacts.

Huh? We desperately need another housing development? Unless Watson is holding a gaggle of home buyers captive in his garage, I don’t think so.

One neighbor I talked to said he’s not opposed to development. They all know it’s coming. He’s not even opposed to the condos being proposed as long as they’re not right on top of his property.

“But do it right,” Ed Tucker said.

And at the right time.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

The deaths of Annette Sowders and her mother show at least two substantial cracks in Kern County’s domestic violence protection system that need fixing — pronto.

This isn’t a drawn-out, new-law kind of fix. It’s up to us to handle.

Sowders and her mother, Sharon Cannon, were gunned down in their home at 2:30 a.m. last Saturday by someone wielding a 12-gauge shotgun. Robert Fuller, Sowders’ estranged husband, was arrested a short time later, a 12-gauge shotgun with him in his truck.

Guns

Sowders had a restraining order against Fuller that mandated he either turn all his guns over to the Sheriff’s department or sell them to a licensed gun dealer. In fact, he was twice ordered to dump the guns and provide a receipt showing he had done so.

Though he said in court documents that he’d rid himself of the weapons, he didn’t provide documentation — and apparently no one ever made a fuss over it.

That was the first crack, which then gets wider when you understand there’s no way for anyone, including law enforcment to check on the guns. Officers can’t go storming into people’s houses without probable cause.

In Fuller’s case, Sheriff’s deputies did seize two handguns after he shot himself in the chin with a .44 magnum in April, giving them enough cause to get a search warrant. But they didn’t find any other firearms in his trailer and no criminal charges were filed against him.

According to documents buried in one of his several divorces, Fuller had more than a dozen rifles, handguns and shotguns.

There must be a way to shoe up the firearm loose end. Perhaps the court could mandate guns go only to the Sheriff’s department and require the documentation come directly to court from the department, which would eliminate the “good faith” receipt loophole.

That won’t keep someone from lying about having guns in the first place, or illegally getting more guns. But ordering a potentially violent person to get rid of guns without any kind of accountability is pointless.

Bail

Fuller was arrested twice for violating the restraining order (at least five other violations reported).

He bailed out the very same day of both arrests.

That’s because both arrests were subject to a “bail schedule” which put bail at a set amount — $5,000. Fuller never had to go before a judge who could have reviewed the full case and seen an escalating pattern of harassment and possibly kept him in jail. And that’s the second big crack in the system.

“Both of those are the very things the Domestic Violence Advisory Council was working on,” Nada York, past president of the council told me.

She said the council is resurrecting its criminal justice committee, which includes members of law enforcement, victims’ advocates and court officers, and looked at similar issues several years ago.

There are a couple of ways to fix the bail issue right off the bat. First, bail is too low, she said. And there’s a little-known code section officers can use to ask judges for higher bail based on exactly the kind of escalating circumstances seen in the Sowders case.

“We know officers get frustrated because the perpetrator keeps bailing out and they’re just not aware that that tool is available to them,” she said.

The committee would also address the firearm issue.

“It’s a maze that officers and courts have to navigate and we have to find a way for them to get through that maze so the right person gets the right information and those guns get confiscated.”

Ultimately, what’s needed is a domestic violence court to better track these cases, which studies have shown get continued two and three times more often than other cases.

The cost of creating a new court, she said, would be offset by reducing continuances and repeat visits by law enforcement. Not to mention the cost in lives.

Michael Runner, director of legal programs in the San Francisco office of the Family Violence Prevention Fund also wondered if law enforcement and the District Attorney’s office could improve communication and urgency in these kinds of cases.

“For all those violations he (Fuller) had, I don’t understand why charges weren’t filed,”

Runner said. He mentioned a report several years ago by the Attorney General’s office that documented a severe lack of enforcement on the prosecution side.

I tried to check Kern’s prosecution rate on restraining order violations (Bakersfield Police makes about 250 such arrests a year and the Sheriff’s department responds to about 463 reports of violations a year).

But the cases are prosecuted in a myriad of ways, such as being sent back to civil court if that’s where the restraining order originated, or hooking the perp up on a probation violation instead of opening a new case, so they’re nearly impossible to track.

In Sowders’ case, the arrests and the many reports she made of Fuller violating the restraining order weren’t sent immediately to the DA for charges.

Senior Deputy Michael Whorf told me there’s a time delay getting the paperwork downtown that varies depending on a lot of outside factors, but he was sure the DA had most, if not all, of the reports on Fuller’s violations by now.

That’s cold comfort to Sowders’ cousin, Jeanne Dillman, who last spoke to Sowders and Cannon the Friday before they were killed.

Sowders had been making the rounds between court, the DA’s office and the Sheriff’s department trying to make sure Fuller was prosecuted.

Finally, Dillman said, Sowders was told by the DA’s office they didn’t have the Sheriff’s reports. She went back to the Sheriff’s department, which gave her a handful of request forms to get the reports to take to the DA herself.

“That’s what they were doing Friday night,” Dillman told me. “When I last talked to them, she and Sharon were at the dining room table filling out those request forms.”

She never spoke to them again.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

It’s hard to look at the smiling picture of Annette Sowders and not feel that she was horribly and irrevocably let down by a system that should have protected her.

She and her mother were shot to death Saturday, deputies say, by Sowders’ estranged husband, Robert Fuller, after he bailed out of jail for violating his restraining order eight times in 11 days.

The restraining order was officially logged into the system July 21 and Sheriff’s deputies began getting reports from Sowders July 25 that he was slashing her tires and the kiddie pool.

They couldn’t find him the first couple of times, but by July 28, after another set of reports, they caught him and stuck him in jail. He bailed out and went right back to harassing Sowders.

They caught him again and sent him back to jail Aug. 4.

Again, he bailed out.

Sowders and her mother, Sharon Cannon,  were shot four days later by someone using a 12-gauge shotgun.

Fuller was arrested a short time later in his truck with a gun.

Here are just some of the questions that need sorting out in the aftermath of this tragedy:

Because of the restraining order, could deputies have searched Fuller’s home and seized all his weapons after his first arrest on July 28? If so, why didn’t they?

We know he either owned, or had access to, at least one gun after he shot himself in the head in April during a weird incident at his trailer park that the Sheriff’s department was called out on.

Did the judge on Aug. 4 have the opportunity to review the full history of this case or was bail automatic? If it was automatic, should it be in cases of domestic violence?

Maybe nothing could have been done to prevent these deaths.

If Fuller indeed shot Sowders and her mother, it was his decision alone and in reading through the remnants of his history, he may have been following a path he chose long ago.

In fact, in one crushing irony of this story, Sowders herself may have been an unwitting accomplice in her own death.

Fuller was married once before in 1995.

Things went bad quickly and he filed for divorce in 1997. After a few reconciliation attempts the marriage was definitely over by 2000.

His wife at the time sought, and was granted, a restraining order against Fuller in June 2000, saying he had hit her and during one drunken rage had waved a 10 mm handgun at her.

In the marriage dissolution order listing who would got what (including the horse that ultimately introduced him to Sowders through her stables), the judge mandated that Fuller couldn’t have his guns for one year. He had to give them all — and he had an arsenal — up to the Sheriff’s department.

That’s where they stayed until he filed the paperwork to retrieve them in early 2001.

That paperwork was filled out for him by Annette Sowders, according to her signature.

On March 5, 2001, Fuller was allowed to collect all of his dozen or so rifles, shotguns and handguns, including his Remington 870 Wingmaster, a 12-gauge shotgun.

Like I said, who knows what, if anything, could have altered this sad course.

But it sure seems like there were a lot of warning signs along the way.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

My, my, my what sharp teeth developers have for the hand that has fed them for so long.

I’m talking about the lawsuit filed by the Home Builders Association of Kern County over the city and county increasing traffic impact fees from $7,343 to $12,870 per single family home outside of the city’s core.

Builders have had it so good around here for so long  — absurdly low development fees, few mitigation requirements and a steroidal laissez–faire attitude toward sprawl — they’ve forgotten the dog is actually supposed to wag the tail, not the other way around.

Meaning government (on behalf of the taxpayers) should call the shots on development with regard to where, when and how much it should pay.

Because the tail has been doing most of the wagging in Kern County, our roads can’t handle the traffic they have now.

More development without enough money to keep up roads only compounds the problem.

Unfortunately this we-all-saw-it-coming-but-no-one-did-anything-to-s top-it kind of problem is  coming to a head at a terrible economic time.

That is too bad. But the now oft-repeated cry from development standard bearer Roger McIntosh that builders shouldn’t be punished for sins of the past when city and county leaders didn’t have the political huevos to set the fees high enough is patently ridiculous.

It was developers themselves, many the same ones being “punished” today, who fought tooth and nail against fee increases in the past that led to where we are today.

It’s hard to know which party deserves more derision in this little melodrama.

City and county leaders have clearly not done their job over the last 17 years by making sure the traffic impact fee was at the right level for needed road improvements.

I covered the Council when the first fee was introduced in 1992 and well remember the debate. Planners calculated they would need a fee of $6,000 per single family home to keep roads up to snuff while developers pressured council members to get the fee squashed down to $1,179 per home.

Everyone at the time agreed it wouldn’t do the job. But developers were happy, so council members were happy.

The fee got bumped here and there (most notably and after a major fight in 2003, but only up to $6,000 — where it should have been 10 years prior) but it stayed fairly low.
Meanwhile, between 1994 and 2007, builders paved over more than 27 square miles and paid only $130 million in traffic impact fees and built $6 million worth of road projects, according to a Californian analysis done in 2007.

At the time, it was estimated $2 billion was needed to build or improve roads.

That measly $136 million in developer contributions represented only 6.8 percent of the solution when development had clearly created the majority of the need.

It’s no wonder Kern voters spit back the one-half cent transportation sales tax proposal for the third time in 2006. (It certainly didn’t help that developers were some of the most avid promoters of that measure, contributing most of the $767,000 used in that campaign.)

So, no, developers haven’t made the case that they’re being overburdened by local government.

But local government has some ’splaining to do as well.

In particular, the city needs to clean up its act in accounting for how it’s spent traffic impact fees thus far. A handful of loose papers instead of itemized yearly reports is pure hogwash.

And the city’s methodology for calculating the fee seems haphazard as well, going from actual current costs for road widenings, signals, etc. to an average over the last five years.

Neither side is looking very clean on this.

Instead of buckling down and hammering out differences to fix problems, though, we’ve gotta get all lawyered up and start looking for a tree, so to speak.

I’ve said it before and it continues to be true: Development by lawsuit is the Kern County way.

I wonder if everyone is as torn as I am when I see people on the side of the road holding cardboard signs begging for help.

I’m not heartless (not totally anyway). I want to help.

But then, I can’t help thinking: What happened to all the “Homeless veteran, please help!” people who seem to have been replaced by “Foreclosed family, please help!” people?

Did the “homeless vets” all find homes? Did the “foreclosed families” muscle them out in a turf battle? 

Or have savvy panhandlers simply switched marketing tactics to prey on our sympathies and, lets face it, our fear that we’ll be making our own cardboard signs soon in this never ending dump of an economy?

The cynic in me suspects the latter which, in turn, causes my sputtering social conscience to look for solutions.

The thing is, foreclosed families are a very real and frightening phenomenon whose numbers are increasing at crisis rates. Though most aren’t begging for change on the side of the road, they are in dire need.

“Families are one the fastest growing segments of the homeless population,” Louis Gill, executive director of the Bakersfield Homeless Center told me when I called asking about how to handle these “foreclosed family” panhandlers. “People would be shocked to know how many families are living in vehicles in this town.”

If Dorothea Lange were alive today, he said, and knew where to look, she could make photos strikingly similar to her haunting images of Kern County during the Great Depression.

To get a sense of how quickly things have gone from bad to worse, he said he homeless shelter gave needy families $8,425 to assist with utilities and $29,331 to assist with rent and mortgage payments between February and June this year.

Then in a six-week period between June and July, it gave out $5,422 in utility assistance and $27,242 in rent/mortgage assistance. Yowser!

“The need is accelerating,” he said.

I asked Gill what he thinks of the panhandlers. His advice was to approach everyone in need with kindness and respect, but to consider giving information rather than cash and to support helping agencies, such as his, or perhaps your church or business has a charitable arm that could help.

“People can print out little cards with phone numbers and addresses and give those out instead of cash,” he suggested.

Everyone I talked with in the social services realm noted those same factors:  needs are

increasing exponentially; and the community can do far more by banding together rather dropping a couple bucks on random panhandlers.

There are 240,000 Kern County citizens on some form of assistance right now, Human Services Director Pat Cheadle told me. That’s a third of our population.

“This is a whole new population coming to us,” she said. These are people who until recently had never been out of work, always paid their bills and never needed help.

In just one month, she said, 4,000 people who never applied for any kind of services before walked through her doors.

“We all know someone, a relative or friend, who’s been touched by this economy,” she said.

Because of the unprecedented need, Cheadle is considering new resources, possibly even forming a partnership with faith-based groups such as Kern Leadership Alliance.

I know everyone might not like a religious organization mixing with taxpayer money, but I think this could be a fantastic private-public partnership.

The Alliance was formed late last year and includes a couple dozen churches of all denominations that marshall their forces to provide whatever is needed.

“Our dream is that we can have the Department of Human Services, or anyone, come and explain what their needs are and then we coordinate among our churches and move forward to meet those needs,” said Shannon Grove, who serves on the Board of Directors for the Alliance.

Churches in the group recently responded to a call for service in Oildale by collaborating to provide everything from tutoring to financial help for families in danger of losing their homes.

“The people who need help now, they’re you and me,” Grove said. “They are the people who used to provide help to the people on the street.”

It’s serious and it’s getting worse for far too many families.

Which makes me wish the professional panhandlers would stop using their misery to make a buck and just be honest as was one man whose recently spied sign read: “Why lie? I need a beer.”

Don’t we all.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

Panhandler advice
Instead of giving cash to roadside panhandlers, give them resources. If your church, service organization of business has a charitable arm, give them that information. Or point them to these agencies:

Bakersfield Homeless Center
1600 E Truxtun Ave
Bakersfield, CA 93305-5432
(661) 322-9199

Bakersfield Rescue Mission
724 E. 21st Street
Bakersfield, CA 93305-5241
(661) 325-0863

Or tell them to call 211, which is an information clearing house in Kern County where they can get connected to all kinds of agencies and services.