George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular bi-weekly KVMR-FM commentary broadcast earlier this (27may11) evening.]
Going into its second year now is a ballooning lawsuit that names Nevada County, its Clerk-Recorder Mr Greg Diaz, and Aptitude Solutions, a Florida software company as defendants. The suit is brought by AtPac, the county’s longtime records processing and storage software vendor, which was replaced by the Florida company selling similar software and services.
Things with the switchover to Aptitude started going wrong from the start as I reported to you last month, and as has been covered extensively in The Union and some local blogs, mine included. The former vendor AtPac has charged that Mr Greg Diaz and the county wrongfully gave the new vendor access to AtPac’s proprietary intellectual property. Diaz and the county apparently did this in order to facilitate the changeover of county data so that it could be handled by the Florida vendor’s software.
Both the county and Mr Diaz continue to deny doing anything improper as the case drags through its discovery phase and preparation for trial sometime later this year. The problems apparently started when the county refused to hire its old vendor to convert county data from its proprietary format into one that could be used by the new vendor. That job would have cost the county a “maximum contract amount of $15,000”.
Then, as law firms for both sides launched into their investigations of how Aptitude got hold of AtPac’s software, the county computer or server on which the data and software resided was ordered ‘scrubbed’. Scrubbing a computer involves a purposeful and thorough erasing of its memory, leaving it so that no investigative forensics are possible on the server in order to determine what files were accessed, modified, and/or transferred. And this was apparently done without first creating and saving an appropriate backup.
You have to understand that all this happened after Aptitude asked to be indemnified by the county regarding the switchover, and after AtPac requested certain contents of that server as evidence to support its case in the ongoing lawsuit. The county stonewalled the request for weeks before informing the court that it had scrubbed the server, and the evidence was no longer available. The US District Court judge in charge of the case would have none of it. He fined the country more than $20K, and will appropriately instruct the jury on the county’s wrongdoing.
But this affair would not deserve any of the publicity that it now enjoys if the matter involved only some arcane irregularities, and a few kilobucks worth of expenses and fines. Today we should all fasten our seatbelts before we swallow the hard fact that the legal bills to the county are rapidly approaching the million and a half dollar mark. This Tuesday, in closed session, the Supes upped the legal defense ante to $1.2 million. And all this for a little dust devil that could have been avoided for less than $20K.
So what in hell is going on at the Rood Center? Everyone from the Board of Supervisors through high level county staff is deflecting inquiries about everything, even publicly available information by citing a policy for pre-trial silence while denying any wrongdoing, errors, or omissions. I have twice attempted to penetrate this cone of silence that has descended over the mavens on Maidu.
Earlier this week I talked to County CEO Rick Haffey and county counsel Michael Jamison. Mr Haffey referred me to county counsel who is handling the case and acting as the unified voice of the county on the matter. Mr Jamison was no more helpful, but agreed that the county should do better in handling public information regarding the lawsuit. He said that for more information I would be called by someone from the law firm Pillsbury, Winthrop, et al of Sacramento, hired to represent the county. As of yesterday 26 May, no one has called.
So as we review the media reports and the materials available to the public on the Diaz lawsuit, we can reasonably conclude from all appearances that –
1. The county, and specifically its clerk-recorder office, grossly mismanaged the procurement of a new software vendor and the switchover to its records processing and storage software.
2. After the February 2010 lawsuit was filed, the county acted as if it were culpable, delayed providing evidence required by the court, and wound up declaring that it had irredeemably and unexplainably destroyed the evidence for which it was subsequently fined by the judge.
3. That the elected officials at Rood have either been under-informed, received bad advice, and/or have been negligently disinterested in the lawsuit and its possible outcomes.
4. That in the interval the costs to county taxpayers have gone from a trickle to a torrent, and that there is no end in sight to future payouts since this matter has yet to go to trial.
5. The county’s electeds, staff, and legal counsel have adopted a fortress mentality to the public’s need to know what is going on, as reported costs keep increasing, and questions about visible bumblings at the Rood Center go unanswered.
We are too small of a county to calmly blow a million and more up the tailpipes of a bunch of lawyers while being told not to worry our little heads about the whole thing. Our elected Board of Supervisors has clearly been circling their own wagons, raising more questions about what has already gone down and what is going on now. To date the Diaz case appears to have all the elements of a cover-up, incompetence, or even a cover-up of incompetence.
As a minimum, our Supervisors should set up a public information process on the progress of this lawsuit, one that lays out the facts so as to minimize the misinformation, rumors, and innuendo that inevitably arise from such affairs. To me this thing smells bad enough that I expect the county to go for an out-of-court settlement with AtPac with a provision that its details will remain confidential. In the end such a settlement would saddle us taxpayers with an enormous bill, and no information about the competency and/or character of the people who ran up that bill.
My name is Rebane and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, on NCTV, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears. These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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