Local Attorney Comes with Invoices in Defense of Karen Paz Dominguez

Local Attorney Eric V. Kirk offers his endorsement for Karen Paz Dominguez in her reelection campaign for the position of the Humboldt County Auditor-Controller in the following opinion piece:

I support Karen Paz Dominguez in her reelection campaign for Auditor-Controller because she is brilliant, talented, compassionate, and an effective leader.  She has introduced new technology to the office which has drawn undisputed praise.  She has fixed a broken payroll system.   Unlike most of the other county government departments, she was prepared for the pandemic; having secured laptops for her staff so that the office could function from homes.  She has tried, over stiff resistance from other departments, to institute policies and procedures which could free the office and the county’s fiscal programs from problems which have persisted for years prior to her involvement with the office.

Karen Paz Dominguez

I have come to know her as a very good friend, and I really hope the voters really take a close look at the candidates and the circumstances under which she operates.  I’m appalled by the personal attacks thrown at her at poorly managed Board of Supervisor meetings – at least two of which involved flagrant Brown Act violations. She was elected in 2018 on a reform platform, but she has faced intense opposition from the entrenched culture of the administration even before she was elected after having tried to bring attention to issues which have been problems for years.  I am not impressed with the report about her alleged bullying and quite frankly I’m disappointed in the Board for even letting it see light of day (I’ve already written about this).  From my personal experience, the County administration and several of its departments suffer from a cultural inertia fueled by resentment of change and I trust nothing of what they have presented.  In my opinion, there is a crisis and it is with the administration itself, and not the Auditor-Controller office.

My first hand experience came during the Measure K campaign of 2018, the same year KPD was elected.  When a group of activists pushed for a Sanctuary ordinance, the Board of Supervisors took no interest.  I was asked by the group to draft a measure for Board consideration and ultimately for a ballot initiative.  After an extensive signature-gathering campaign, the measure made it to the ballot and eventually passed by a very significant margin.  But there was intense opposition from the Board majority as well as the county administration and the several departments which have frequently positioned themselves to actively undermine the current AC office.  

I am providing the following account so that voters may understand the extent to which elements of the County Administration is willing to go to oppose change unpopular with the entrenched culture.  

After the signatures were collected and the measure presented to the Board for certification/ballot status, two of the Supervisors requested that the staff dream up cost figures for implementation of the measure should it pass.  The measure itself was two-pronged.  The first prong was the standard prohibition against county government officials or staff notifying the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency of suspected or confirmed undocumented status of individuals who came into contact with them.  At the request of the activist group, I drafted the measure without the exclusions provided by the state Sanctuary laws, such that there are no lawful contacts with ICE about individuals unless it pertains to human trafficking or other non-immigration status related crimes or civil violations which are specifically under ICE jurisdiction.  No other contact with ICE pertaining to an immigrant is allowed, rendering the measure one of the most stringent Sanctuary ordinances in the country.  

The second prong preserves parental choice as to the status of children when one or both parents have been deported.  This was in response to incidents around the country when children were scheduled to be reunified with parents in the country of origin, but social workers took it upon themselves to oppose the reunification based upon their assessment that the children are better off in the United States rather than with their parents.  Measure K protected the preferences of the parents.

The opposition to the measure was intense.  Even just the use of the term “Sanctuary” upset some (we were accused of attempting to force “San Francisco values” onto Humboldt County), and I learned that individuals within the County Counsel office were upset that I had included a severability clause – a clause that holds that if a portion of the law is struck down, the remaining portions remain in effect and force.  At the time, President Trump was taking legal action to strike down Sanctuary measures around the country as state intrusion against federal jurisdiction over immigration issues.  Trump’s legal action failed, but at the time many of his supporters held out hope that it would not.  Even had it prevailed, the second prong of our Sanctuary ordinance would have survived as it did not pertain to immigration policy and was well within state law jurisdiction.  That meant that there would remain an ordinance on the books in Humboldt County with “Sanctuary” in its name.  That just didn’t sit well with a number of people we encountered, in and out of government.

There was more theoretically substantial opposition from the Sheriff’s office which argued that the ordinance would somehow interfere with his drug investigations, though the causation has never been made clear.  The office came up with the biggest estimate of “costs” of implementation.  But several other departments also obliged the Board and the report presented to the Board estimated annual costs of $171,000 and some change to over $312,000.  The Sheriff reported that it would take a great amount of money to train deputies to catch up with ICE agents at the county border and track them.  I imagined that it would.  But Measure K didn’t require that, nor does any Sanctuary measure across the country.  The Department of Health and Human Services estimated something like $40,000 to find housing for the children left behind by their parents, but the Measure also had no such requirement.  Among the costs cited was “training.”  Seriously, how much training does it take to not make a phone call?  

One Supervisor actually said that they estimated that the costs would be on the “higher end” of the range.

The problem?  These costs were completely made up.  Pulled out of the air.  The Board of Supervisors didn’t like the measure.  The administration didn’t like it.  So they attacked the measure by lying.  Shamelessly.  And it led to headlines which might have derailed the campaign.  One liberal attorney even came up to me and said, “Maybe we can’t afford this fight Eric.  Maybe we should leave it to jurisdictions like San Francisco and Chicago – places which can absorb these costs.”  It took a massive effort from the proponents to overcome the harm the administration’s lies caused the campaign through media and grassroots communication.

When I complained about the deception to a certain Supervisor, the response was “You should have read the fine print Eric.”

I was a bit taken back and said, “I wrote the fine print!  Remember?”

The response was, “No you didn’t.  You just copied from the San Francisco Sanctuary ordinance.”

This really pissed me off.  I had borrowed language from SF.  I had borrowed from Santa Clara, at the time the only other jurisdiction with a no-exception ordinance.  I borrowed a little bit of wording from Boulder, Colorado.  But the writing was mine with the input of several others.  The second prong was entirely ours.  I knew what was in the Measure and what wasn’t.  The Measure basically costs nothing.  It is covered in fixed costs, with the biannual reports which are required by the state law anyway.  If anything, we save the price of a call to ICE.  

When I was finally able to impress upon the young Times Standard reporter that he and the rest of the local media had been had, he became angry and pressed the issue with the CAO representative who had made the presentation.  The representative finally admitted that the figures had no basis in reality, and he was subsequently fired; not for having lied, but for having admitted that he lied.  Only, he was simply delivering lies cooked up by the several departments, including the Department of Health and Human Services.

The lie was halfway across the county before we got our sneakers on, but I and others had to dedicate a lot of time across all of the local media to correct the record.  And ultimately, the Measure passed by large margin and is codified as an ordinance.

But I will never forget the gaslighting on the part of county government and their willingness to just lie as a matter of course as well as the local media’s willingness to basically take dictation to further the narrative.  So when I see the very same agencies which lied about non-existent costs perform at Board meetings where they make huge claims about their conflicts with Auditor Controller Karen Paz Dominguez, and provide dramatic accounts of the cost to the county, the vendors, and county employees, I don’t know what’s even real.  But I do know AC Karen Paz Dominguez.  I don’t always follow the arguments at the Board meetings as they pertain to events, concepts, and terms outside of my realm of experience.  But between these people and Karen, I will trust her integrity and honesty over them.  I have not always been a fan of her methods of communication, and yes some of the conversations have been pretty intense.  But we have been witnessing a slow witch-burning over the past few years simply because she demands what her predecessors didn’t – substantiation of the costs submitted.  Receipts.  Time sheets.  Vendor contracts.  

In my view, these people don’t want to change their methods for two primary reasons: It means more work, and they don’t want to be told what to do by someone like Karen.  I’m sorry, but that’s what I believe it comes down to.  They fought her even before she came to office.  They have relentlessly pressed and pressed and pressed for the Board to take some sort of action against her.  The Board refuses to get a leash on the staff, and in my opinion the censure vote during the election campaign constitutes a brazen attempt to influence the election as it did nothing to protect staff and after four years the report could have been discussed in June after the election.  The constant meetings which constitute little more than rant sessions against an elected official over whom they have limited authority make me wonder if they are loaded up with free time.  And dragging her to the meetings, sometimes hours long, only reduces the time which she can devote to the issues they’re screaming about.    

Last summer the Lost Coast Outpost posted a story containing a litany of grievances against the Auditor-Controller.  The centerpiece of the story was about half million dollars in unpaid compensation to Arcata House Partnership for their services to the County and billing through DHHS.  The AHP Board had sent a “desperate letter” to the Board of Supervisors stating that they had submitted invoices as early as six months before which weren’t being paid.  As this represented one-third of AHP operating finances, this was a serious matter as their work on behalf of the homeless was in jeopardy of being halted.  

This is where the article gets ambiguous, because when the DHHS head was contacted she said that she didn’t know where the fault lied, but made a generic reference to rejected invoices over minor differences of money or “chasing pennies over dollars” (a gross oversimplification of the issues).  It’s not explicitly stated that this was the issue for AHP, but it’s implied.  So when the reporter asked KPD about it, she checked the electronic queue on which the invoices are posted by the DHHS for the AC office to pay, and found only one invoice listed in February of that year.  It had initially been rejected because it requested compensation for overtime which must be approved by the BOS.  Once that approval was given, she paid the invoice.

She found no other invoices for the year of 2021 up to that point.  

She then contacted the Executive Director of AHP and informed her that she saw nothing on the queue.  Apparently the AHP E.D. contacted DHHS.  Then a couple of days later, on July 8, 2021, 27 invoices totaling about half a million dollars mysteriously appeared on the queue.  KPD didn’t notice it until the next morning, which would be the day on which the LoCo story was posted.  That afternoon she sent screenshots of the invoices to LoCo (available for viewing here).  She had confided the story to me, and I expected the late postings to make their way into the story, but what I didn’t know is that she had sent them to LoCo minutes after the article had been posted.  

You can view the screenshots of the invoices posted on July 8, 2021 here.

I am ashamed to say that I made some clinical remarks about the reporter on Facebook later that evening when I thought the invoices had been omitted.  When I learned that it was all bad timing, I apologized, but I had and continue to have other issues with the story.  But just as the LoCo editor was laying into me for my comments, I was asked by a supporter of KPD to stand down and not “alienate” the media at KPD’s expense and potentially the department officials KPD was trying to make peace with.  Not wanting to hurt her, I did so, although I really wish KPD and I had responded aggressively at the time as I think it allowed a number of attacks on KPD to gel in public minds.  

I had hoped that there would be a follow-up to the story, but the DHHS refused to respond to the reporter’s questions, citing some sort of “ongoing investigation” that KPD has yet to hear about to this day.   The closest thing to a follow-up was a cryptic reference at the end of a subsequent article on a different topic in which the reporter stated that LoCo was “unfamiliar with the software” and so didn’t know what the screenshots meant.  I’m not an expert on accounting or the software, but after one clarifying question to KPD I was pretty clear on what they meant.  I suggested to the reporter that they do a PSA to confirm that the screenshots were not manipulations and that the date of their posting was accurate.  I don’t know if they ever did that, and if LoCo has ever received clarification, I do not believe that they have posted anything about it.  And so nearly a year later, many in the public still mistakenly believe that the failure to pay AHP in a timely manner was the fault of the Auditor-Controller (KPD did pay them immediately upon receipt of the invoices).  Much of the public still believes that AHP almost went under because of omissions on her part, when for whatever reason the DHHS never posted them.  

“But Eric,” people tell me, “that’s just one issue.  There are so many more.”

True, but the discussion is like a conversation with a 911 truther.  You address the point that steel girders don’t actually have to melt before they are sufficiently weakened to cause a collapse and before you’re finished they’re talking about Building 7.  And you try to address that, but then you’re cut off with “But what about the lack of photographs or video of the alleged plane hitting the Pentagon?”  And the discussion goes down the rabbit hole, “but what about, but what about, but what about” until they come to an issue for which you have no answer and pounce upon that one as the cornerstone basis for believing the whole thing was an “inside job.”  The failure to pay AHP was the centerpiece of the story.  Yes, there are accounts of some miscommunication with the IRS, and plenty of other “what abouts” in the story.  I can’t address them all here.

But what I know is that the AHP’s troubles were with DHHS, and not the AC office.  And DHHS never fessed up to it.   We still have no explanation as to why those invoices weren’t posted.  Probably miscommunication within the DHHS about whose responsibility it was, but the mistake isn’t the issue.  It’s the failure to own up to it after a fellow official had been savaged for it in the story.  

I wonder how many people still believe that it was the AC office which caused the Payroll system crash last fall so that checks were handed out by hand on the following day – a Saturday morning.  A certain Supervisor implied that it was somehow her fault.  The media ran with it.  And yet, this is what happened according to KPD.

“On November 6, 2021, CAO-IT implemented a Hotfix in Finance Enterprise because they wanted to fix issues that the CAO-Purchasing division was having in Finance Enterprise. They asked me to sign off on the Hotfix but I refused because the Hotfix had not been fully tested. After they implemented it, we started noticing glitches in our accounts payable, cash receipts, and journals module so we reported the issues to IT. It wasn’t until we were processing payroll (the cycle that would pay out on 11/19/21) that we saw the effects of the Hotfix. Previous automatic results were no longer automatic and temporary pay histories were not getting deleted after we made corrections (something they did just fine before the hot fix). The payroll system failed that week because temporary pay histories had posted and would generate errors in processing that made the system come to a halt in mid-process. Days after we paid employees out of A/P, we figured out the pay history problem. IT manually deleted the temporary pay histories and we were able to run payroll again. Now we know that we have to manually delete temporary pay histories when entering corrections.  IT was able to fix our other issues with cash receipts by manually uninstalling the Hotfix from the cash receipts module.” 

There were no apologies – no clarification from officials.  And so to this day many still believe she somehow caused the crash.  

These are just a couple of examples, but I’ve selected examples where the public perception may be in contradiction to the reality.  Again, the list is long, but I encourage people to contact her campaign if you have questions about what you have read or heard.  

Has she been perfect?  I haven’t always been impressed with her diplomacy, and yes, she is an intense young woman.  But the intensity is but one negative manifestation of a deep passion and she has grown considerably in her position and has developed working relationships with other depart

ments which have not been acknowledged in the public hearings.  Because of the toxic environment generated by these meetings, she almost decided not to run again, and changed her mind late in the game.  But she is running, and voters would do well if they don’t let the gifts she offers slip away.  Based on her performance [May 9] (at the League of Women Voters forum) I don’t believe that KPD’s opponent is not even really into the campaign, and maybe doesn’t even really want the position as it will be extremely stressful should she prevail.  It’s apparent that she was drafted, at the last minute, by people who want KPD out.

The Times Standard has raised the question of whether Karen Paz Dominguez is hampered by racism and sexism.  I would add ageism to the mix of considerations.  But in even mentioning the possibility, I will be accused of “playing the race card.”  Like the Times Standard, I can’t read minds.  But implicit bias is real and it would be hard to believe that it’s not at least a partial factor.  

I only ask that voters take a close look at the situation, and if you have questions, please contact her directly.  So many of her detractors are attacking her in the LoCo comments sections under cloak of anonymity.  I wonder how many of them have actually spoken to her.  

These past couple of years have been extremely challenging.  The pandemic has wreaked havoc to businesses and governments alike across the globe and permanently altered the way we operate.  No Humboldt County Auditor-Controller has faced the challenges of this last term.  KPD has met these challenges with grace and competence despite these challenges and has introduced changes which will mitigate future crisis.   Her staff have been supportive publicly and privately.   She has the respect and support of county Auditor-Controllers across the state, as well as the next State Controller.  She has and will continue to advocate for the independence and transparency of the Auditor-Controller office.  Please vote for Karen Paz Dominguez for Auditor-Controller on or before June 7.

Eric Kirk