Monterey got about 80 public records requests in the last six months with no unified theme among them.
As expected, there are a fair amount of requests from journalists and attorneys.
Gordon Smith of Veterans Wild Fort Ord and environmental attorney Zan Henson had one of the more interesting threads of requests. They both were asking for a lot of information on La Sala's Bi-Rite Market on Casa Verde Way.
"I represented a neighbor who lived down the street who was concerned that they were expanding their operations and it turned out they were," Henson said today. "So, they cut back some of their outdoor operations."
The Presidio of Monterey continues to be cagey about an incident that caused the evacuation of the base back in mid-August.
After months of silence, The Herald was able to determine hundreds of students, faculty members and military personnel fled because officials believed an instructor intended to blow himself up.
This newspaper was only able to figure that out using a California Public Records Act request for all communication from law enforcement to dispatch at the Monterey County Emergency Communications center in Salinas. All the Army said was that a "real world incident" took place, a suspect was in custody and there was no danger to the public.
A Freedom of Information Act request for the Presidio, made at the same time as the state request, came back empty.
The Herald asked for: "All emails, reports and correspondence concerning the
Aug. 8, 2014, incident at the Presidio of Monterey that required an emergency
drill to be halted."
What we received was three press releases without an explanation of why nothing else was included. This would mean: 1) No one sent any emails, made any reports or sent any letters on a major military instillation, and home to the Defense Language Institute, about a basewide evacuation or 2) It ignored the law in its response.
FOIA law says government agencies must give "the reasons therefor" not granting a request. The Presidio's response just says "please find enclosed partial response." The fine print of the act is on the Department of Justice's website.
I was at Del Monte Beach around 6 p.m. Sunday when one of my friends noticed something in the sky.
It was red and orange and seemed to be moving much slower than a plane, helicopter or drone. I am at least 90 percent sure it was one of those flying Chinese lanterns.
My three friends there were pretty excited about whatever it was so I sent the video to Monterey Regional Airport.
"Our Operations Officer had seen a drone recently but the only other explanation is Santa?" said spokeswoman Jennifer Hickerson.
Unlike the Monterey Bay sea creature that turned out to be a whale carcass, this mystery (probably a Chinese lantern) continues.
Nader Agha stands outside the Holman Building in Pacific Grove in 2005. (David Royal, Monterey Herald)
Another day, another million.
The online auction for the historic Holman Building continued Tuesday with a bid of $5.5 million. The auction ends Wednesday.
On Monday, a bid of $4.5 million was registered on Auction.com. Mike Bitar of Executive Commercial, which is running the auction, said he is prevented from disclosing names of bidders.
The property and 5-story building is valued at $6.5 million, according to the Monterey County Assessor's Office. Owner Nader Agha put the building for sale in 2008 for $17.5 million.
Bitar said most bids come on the last day. He said he is getting several calls a day about the property.
The 120,000-square-foot property was home to the former Holman's department store. It was featured in John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" with the story of a man roller skating above the store as a promotion.
Agha has “sole and absolute discretion” to accept the winning bidder’s offer, say legal documents posted on Auction.com.
A federally recognized Native American tribe based in Shasta County has come out against a bill co-authored by Asm. Luis Alejo (D-Salinas) that is opposed by several Monterey County unrecognized tribes.
The Pit River Tribe, recognized by the federal government since 1976, has called AB 52 a "thinly veiled attempt" to cut Native Americans out of the development process in a letter to the main author, Mike Gatto (D-Los Angeles).
"Marginalization and cultural extermination of California's surviving Indians seem to have replaced genocide of past centuries," wrote Dolores Raglin, tribal chairwoman for Pit River.
At issue for unrecognized tribes is the bill's Section 1 (b) which says it will "Establish a consultation process for federally recognized Native American tribes in California in the California Environmental Quality Act."
Unrecognized tribes, such as Monterey County's Ohlone/Coastanoan-Esselen Nation, interpret the bill to mean they will no longer be consulted on projects they consider part of their ancestral land, such as the Fort Ord veterans cemetery.
California currently does not distinguish between unrecognized and recognized tribes, according to an analysis by the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality.
Alejo said last week the tribes have misinterpreted his bill and it would not affect their ability to work with developers. However, Gatto told The Herald the legislation would likely not pass if the state's 78 tribal communities petitioning for recognition were added to the mix.
"We have to bite off what we can chew," he said. ". . . Politics is the art of the possible."
In Raglin's letter, she wrote the tribe was concerned a change to the definition of what a Native American tribe is would further past grievances.
"Given the shameful, historical treatment of California's Native Americans at the hands of the U.S. and State Governments," she wrote, "AB 52's proposed removal of many Indian peoples from the CEQA process puts the State of California in the role of continuing that dark legacy."
Gatto said he actually came up with the bill because of a desire to preserve California's history. AB 52 would elevate federally recognized tribes to the same status as other government entities. Instead of just being focused on finding archaeological artifacts, it would force every project under CEQA to be reviewed by the Native American Heritage Commission.
Raglin also opposes the work required of recognized tribes if the bill passes as "an undue burden and unfunded mandate."
The Pit River Tribe plans to attend the Senate Appropriations Committee in Sacramento on Aug. 4 when it is read again, according to Morning Star Gali, the tribe's historic preservation officer.
There are three local unrecognized tribes. The Esselen territory is mostly limited to Monterey County; the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band is spread across San Benito, Santa Cruz and northern and eastern Monterey counties; the Salinan Tribe is in Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties.
At the height of the Monterey County sheriff's primary, I made a California Public Records Act request for documents related to a claim that eventually came out in a last minute attack -- That Sheriff Scott Miller had several official complaints against him.
According to my recently-received response, the Sheriff's Office had 11 complaints with the county Equal Opportunity Office. Of these, seven cases were based on race, national origin and/or gender and four cases complained of discrimination based upon disability and age.
The only thing it proves is the office had complaints, not Miller. Also, there is no way of telling what they were about exactly.
The Californians for Law and Order group, run by a former GOP Central Coast leader, claimed in advertisements Miller has had "13 charges filed for sexual harassment and discrimination" against him.
No evidence has ever been produced to validate that claim.
Here is what Miller wrote about complaints against him at the time:
"None have been shown to have any factual merit," he wrote, "Most of them have been abandoned or lie dormant. The majority of the claims were filed by disgruntled former employees."
I figured this was worth a blog post because 1) It likely will come up again in the campaign and 2) for how long it took my request (attached below) to be filed.
I made the request to the County Counsel's office May 14. I did not get a response until last week.
No explanation was given as to why it took 44 business days to get a response, but I did get an apology. I've never had an issue with County Counsel Charles McKee or his staff; They are usually fast and helpful with requests.
Under California law, public entities have a maximum of 24 days to release records, give a date for their release or explain what exemption allows it to not release it.
I made another request for something else related to the campaign on April 24 and have not received the information I asked for. McKee said they are working on it.
Last week, Miller's challenger in the November election, Steve Bernal, received the endorsement of the Deputy Sheriffs Association. Although it is unclear how much that means to voters, Bernal was very pleased and said it would give his campaign momentum.
There is no public meeting planned to discuss the recently-released Fort Ord veterans cemetery plans, according to the California Department of Veterans Affairs.
The state is not required to hold the meeting, but its absence has increased fear among the Keep Fort Ord Wild, or KFOW, group that the project will get "rubber stamp" approval.
If the state would have done a much longer environmental impact report, instead of an environmental assessment, it would have needed to have a public meeting, according to the California Environmental Quality Act.
KFOW, which plans to ask the state for a full environmental impact report, found about the lack of a meeting through a public records request.
The group gave the response to its CPRA request to The Herald. A few things of note:
The two agencies who will ultimately approve the environmental assessment are the state Department of Veterans Affairs and the federal Department of Veterans Affairs.
The representatives for the agencies are David Gerard, CalVet assistant deputy secretary, and George Eisenbach, director of the VA's cemetery grant services program.
The state plans to respond to public comments received during the public comment period (accepted until July 18).
The public will be able to get updates on the Central Coast Veterans Cemetery in two weeks. The Fort Ord Veterans Issues Advisory Committee meets July 24 at 920 2nd Ave. in Marina. It typically meets at 3 p.m., although an agenda has yet to be posted.
At the meetings there is always an update on the cemetery and representatives from the state VA, state Sen. Bill Monning's office, Rep. Sam Farr's Office and the Presidio of Monterey attend.
The 629-page draft environmental assessment for the cemetery is available online or at the Seaside Library at 550 Harcourt Ave. or Marina Library at 190 Seaside Circle.
After more than 20 years of work, cemetery organizers hope they can meet federal deadlines to begin the project in late fall. Besides KFOW, the only other public opposition to the project has come from the Oholone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation which contends the cemetery land is on its indigenous homeland.
"Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation objects to all excavation in known cultural lands, even when they are described as previously disturbed and of no significant archaeological value," wrote Esselen chairwoman Louise Miranda Ramirez to the state.
Ramirez said Monday afternoon by phone it sends a similar letter to all Fort Ord projects because it considers the former base part of its land. Its effort to build an 80-room hotel, wellness center and cultural center has stalled out of concerns a casino could be built -- Despite the tribe voting not to build a casino and saying they are willing to sign an agreement with the county it would not build a casino.
The effort to find the company who will build the Central Coast Veterans Cemetery has begun.
In Monday's edition of The Herald, the state Department of Veterans Affairs advertised for bids for the cemetery, which it estimates will cost $6.3 million and take 525 work days to complete.
Prospective bidders must attend the mandatory pre-bid meeting and site inspection tour July 9 at the Fort Ord Reuse Authority office in Marina.
The advertisement said the work involves labor, demolition, excavation, earthwork, storm water pollution prevention planning, monitoring for unexploded munitions, building fences, concrete, asphalt paving, electrical wiring and transformers, interior and exterior lighting, landscaping, installation of PG&E infrastructure and AT&T substructure, improvements to Parker Flats Road and more.
The bid opening will take place July 30 in Sacramento.
Organizers are on a tight Aug. 24 deadline for a $6.7 million grant to be approved, which has been complicated by some environmentalists protesting the environmental review process through comments to the state Department of General Services.
They said the state should complete a much longer environmental impact report, or EIR, as opposed to the environmental assessment the state produced. Although, they have stopped short of saying they will pursue legal action.
Those interested in the state Department of Veterans Affairs' environmental assessment for the Fort Ord veterans cemetery will now have six more days to comment.
The last day to comment on the Central Coast Veterans Cemetery assessment is now July 18.
The change was the result of the assessment accidentally being shipped to the San Francisco City and County Clerk instead of the Monterey County Clerk-Recorder, according to State Sen. Bill Monning's office.
I read the whole 629 pages because I am insane. Trust me on this one: You are probably better served reading a copy at the Seaside Library at 550 Harcourt Ave. or the Marina library at 190 Seaside Circle.
Reading it on an iPad isn't bad, but I found printing it out (I only did that for about 100 pages) was the best.
Some environmentalists plan to ask the state to complete a much-longer environmental impact report. More on that story as it develops.
Valerie Namba, Senior environmental planner Californian Department of General Services RESD-Environmental Services P.O. Box 989052 (MS 502) West Sacramento, CA 95798-9052
Monterey County Sheriff Scott Miller, who is seeking re-election in the June 3 primary, had at least five signs vandalized or destroyed in the past few days.
Not surprisingly, no one has come forward to claim responsibility. At the time of this blog posting it was unclear if there was any investigation.
One of the most contentious endorsements of the Monterey County sheriff's race was made by five people.
The 5-person board of the Monterey County Probation Association, which represents 198 Monterey County Probation Department employees, voted to endorse sheriff candidate Fred Garcia in January, according to past president Dawn Allen.
Garcia was the only candidate to speak to the board. Allen said it is not that Garcia was the only candidate allowed to speak, it was that he was the only one to reach out to the association.
The endorsement became an issue last week when Garcia was forced to issue a correction press release after he mistakenly told 12,000 voters in a flier he was endorsed by the county Probation Department, which would have been illegal for the department.
After comments by Miller about the matter in The Herald, Garcia fired back with a press release accusing the sheriff of "dirty politics" and implied the probation department's chief Manuel Real was playing politics.
"Is Mr. Real using his position at the county to campaign for Scott Miller on the public dime?" Garcia wrote.
Allen distanced herself from the comments Monday morning while speaking to The Herald.
"While our Probation Association, not the Probation Department, has endorsed Fred Garcia for sheriff," she said in a prepared statement, "we do not endorse any negative commentary by any candidate about each other, the Probation Department and, especially, our chief."
Allen said the association is considering changing its bylaws to allow all members - not just the board - to vote on endorsements, similar to the Monterey County Deputy Sheriff's Association.
In that association's vote in March, no candidates received its approval because a majority is needed for the endorsement. Miller got the most votes with 49 out of 135 votes cast, or 36 percent of members. Garcia got 21 percent, Bernal got 16 percent and Richards received 9 percent.
All four candidates are expected to address members of the legal community Monday at 3 p.m. at the law offices of Miguel Hernandez at 40 Central Ave. in Salinas. It is open to the public.
As a follow up, I did a public records request to see all the websites the Army was "filtering" on its bases.
I got the request back, which showed the Army had only blocked one website all year - a link to a 2010 diplomatic cable from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on The Guardian's website.
This is weird because:
The diplomatic cable had been on the website for three years.
The Army told me in June it had restricted access to The Guardian because of the National Security Agency leaks.
The same cable is on the New York Times website and not blocked there.
To get to the bottom of this I contacted the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, because it had answered my questions for the story in June.
This time, the agency's spokesman Gordan Van Vleet said I needed to contact U.S. Army Cyber Command (NETCOM is a subordinate to Army Cyber Command). So, I made some calls and was told to contact Jennifer Downing, a spokeswoman for the command.
On Nov.22, I emailed Downing (at the time I couldn't find a phone number) about some questions about my public records request. She emailed back on Nov.25 that "OSD Cyber PAO will be replying to your questions below. I am passing your information to him."
She did not bother to tell me who it was or what "OSD" meant but - after two emails - she coughed up a name and phone number. The man who would answer my questions was Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickard.
I called Pickard on Tuesday and got him on the phone right away. I was feeling good about it because Pickard said that he had been consulted about my Freedom of Information Act request earlier in the summer.
Unfortunately, he had to get going to a previous engagement and would call back in an hour and a half. I normally just start asking questions but, for some reason, I just let him go.
He never called.
So I called later that day, again on Wednesday and now Monday. Nothing.
I am not giving up. I still have plenty of folks to keep bothering and I've only become more determined. Yet I thought it was worth noting on my blog that there seems to be a coordinated effort not to talk about this.
The Army blocking an individual website on its bases made international news, I think with good reason. The Army did admit it and explained why (classified information on those websites, etc.) but just what the heck is so bad about this public records request that no one wants to give any answers?
I'm happy to report the New Jersey public records enforcement arm, the Government Records Council, agreed with me, somewhat, in a complaint I had made against Warren County Community College.
A little more than a year ago, I was a scrappy Express-Times reporter covering northwest New Jersey. I mostly reported on county government but I was lucky enough to get our local community college as part of my beat. To say the least, I got some great stories out that place.
For reasons I will not discuss here out of libel concerns, there was a ton of suspicion behind the scenes -- in the newsroom and in the community -- about a building the school bought for a satellite campus in Phillipsburg.
After the sale was complete I made a public records request for closed-session meeting minutes of the school's board. Unfortunately, whenever the 445 Marshall Street building came up the rest of the sentence was blacked out. The college claimed it was "attorney-client privilage" that kept me from seeing what was written.
So, I filed a complaint.
I contended that the sale had already taken place so the college had no reason to block out discussions it had about its purchase. To bolster my point, I also threw in a bunch of complaints about how the college had clearly avoided protocol when it handled my request.
The GRC decided this summer the college's response to my request was "legally insufficient" because the college's custodian, Dennis Florentine, failed to respond in writing to all the items in my request. Also, it said the college had limited my access to information by demanding I fill out its official request form.
When the council reviewed the unredacted records I asked for, they found it was not direct communication between a lawyer and a client. But, it did contain a "summary" of advice from a lawyer so they were still allowed to redact it because it still fell under the privilege clause.
The council said Florentine did not have a "positive element of conscious wrongdoing or was intentional and deliberate." Translation: His response violated the law a little bit but he didn't mean to do it.
You can read the council's entire report below.
That's it for now. I promise to get back to local stuff later in the week, including a request I got back from the city of Monterey (Hint: It has to do with taxes).
As you may remember me lamenting last month, we were never able to find a photo of 2nd Lt. Valorie Pollard.
Pollard was a pilot in the Army Air Force in World War II and he remained missing until the Defense Department finally identified his remains this year.
I wrote about it on this blog after my request for records on him failed because the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis lost them in a horrific fire in 1973.
Good news though! I was just talking to his daughter, Sandra Pollard, on the phone and she sent this image along. Sure, it is not the best, but it is still pretty cool.
In early June, I was doing a lot of stories that included a discussion of gambling on the county's former Army base and one question kept bothering me.
Officials at the Fort Ord Reuse Authority told me a horse race track would be OK with its current anti-gambling policy because it was considered "a sport."
I began to wonder: "Are they just saying that? Or is there some basis for it?"
So I made a California Public Records Act request for, basically, any time FORA discussed gambling in its history. I got so many documents back I needed to split this one up into several posts.
Included here are my response letter, documents related to a 1995 to 1996 saga between Monterey and the authority over gambling and a letter from then-Mayor Dan Albert about the whole ordeal.
In the second document make sure to check out pages 14 to 15 which describes the laws (at that time) on horse racing. It actually explains how a local district could stop a horse track (which I would think something Measure M folks have probably already explored).
I know there is a lot of interest in this subject, so I hope someone finds use of this material. More coming next week ...
Today, we will continue our search for answers in the Fort Ord Reuse Authority gambling saga.
As described in my previous post, I have too many documents on this one for a single post.
First, I start with a brief letter from the Fort Ord Reuse Authority to the Monterey city manager in 1996. It is just to let him know FORA's board voted to not have casinos or card rooms.
The next two deal with the fear the local Native American tribe would build a casino on the former Army base. I did an update on this one in May which, hopefully, set the record straight on the Esselen Nation.
The deal is it would be basically impossible for the Esselens to get the land, get tribal status to do what they want on whatever land they may get and, most importantly, the tribe itself said it does not want a casino.
Sometimes the best stories can be the hardest to do.
In early August, I became obsessed with the found remains of 2nd Lt. Valorie Pollard. It turned out the Defense Department's Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office had finally identified this man after he went missing in World War II nearly 70 years ago.
Pollard was a complete mystery and it just made me work that much harder. I called every Pollard in Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties, searched tons of online military databases, read the obituaries of everyone with his last name in our paper archive and called just about every government agency I could think of.
In my desperation, I filed a request with the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.
In the meantime, I tracked down Pollard's daughter and a neighbor. The result was one of the top 20 stories I've ever done. Here's the link.
A few weeks later I got my request back from the center in St. Louis. It turned out Pollard's file was burned in the now-infamous fire that torched 16 to 18 million records in 1973.
I do not plan to put many rejections for information on this blog, but I thought this one was worth a post because it is so heartbreaking. This man gave his life for the United States and when we finally find his remains, it is a lost cause because he did not have much family left.
For Pete's sake, we could never even find a photo of the guy!
Still, I think there is some good news here. 1) At least we found his daughter and were able to put together an article that can be a reference for future generations and 2) It sounds like the center has really turned things around.
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