George Rebane
Word from the litigation front is that former Nevada County software provider AtPac is filing for summary judgment in its intellectual property suit that names the county, Clerk-Recorder Greg Diaz, and Aptitude Solutions, the county’s new software provider, as defendants. (Ref Case 2:10-cv-00294-WBS -JFM Document 172 Filed 06/01/11)
Filing for summary judgment is an extremely expensive and aggressive step in such lawsuits, and entails risk if the plaintiff is not absolutely sure about the strength of the evidence and its case against the defendants. Such an action essentially says to the court, ‘The evidence is overwhelming, our claims are on solid ground, let’s cut to the chase and get this thing over with.’
Readers not familiar with what is turning out to be a landmark fiscal and political event for Nevada County can quickly get up to speed by reading ‘Rood Center Bumblings’ or searching RR (left column) or The Union with ‘AtPac’. (A related story about Aptitude Solutions and its owner LPS is found here.)
It will cost the county an additional arm and leg in legal fees just to respond to a summary judgment filing. And you can bet the costs will go up even more if AtPac’s strategy is correct.
I believe that the county will now get off its high horse and scramble to mediate so as to head off the summary judgment at the pass. This will still add costs way beyond the $1.2 million approved so far by the Board of Supervisors. But it will serve what seems to have become the overarching objective at the Rood Center – the cover-up of errors, omissions, and just plain incompetence.
There are no legal strictures in place that prevent the county from telling taxpayers what is going on with AtPac and Aptitude, they all know. And there is nothing that says the county ‘must’ keep a tight lid on developments in this case, only that it ‘may’. In my opinion, the only conceivable reason that the county is keeping things hush-hush is to keep the taxpayers and voters in the dark on the details of what now appear as gross errors in oversight, management, communications, operations, strategy, and cost controls.
However, this sound of silence from the Rood Center will not come free. In its mediated settlement the county will demand that AtPac not divulge the contents of the evidentiary packages that have been exchanged according to the applicable rules governing federal court proceedings. Such revelations would put a laser pointer on individuals, from the electeds through management to the worker bees who screwed up. And in addition to covering its legal costs, AtPac will be due its pound of flesh for such an agreement, mitigated only by its hope that it may again in the future become the county’s records and processing software provider. I will not be surprised if we taxpayers will be out of over $2,000,000 when the dust settles on this.
In response, the local know-nothing echo chamber will parrot that such agreements of confidentiality in perpetuum are the norm, but that is both wrong and irrelevant. Between private parties, who have no higher authority to which they must answer, such agreed-upon silences are indeed the norm. But even between corporations, the managements handling a lawsuit must divulge the settlement details to their boards which hire and fire them.
But in such cases as the AtPac suit, it is the imperial state that looks down upon its citizens, who fund it and hire/fire its leaders, and then deems what they should know and not know. This is an ancient maneuver of self-preservation über alles, and we are witnessing it right here in Nevada County.
rebanesruminations.com 
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