George Rebane
My email has been running torrid over the last day or so with everyone telling me, and everyone else, about the Sac Bee article on ‘hard money’ lending shenanigans in the state, and especially in Nevada County. “NC Clerk/Recorder Diaz has company regarding questionable dealings while in office.” is a typical message line in those viral emails.
Please, dear readers, let’s not let this latest hot flash confuse or dilute our limited attention spans with what is going on in the AtPac lawsuit. The hard money lending businesses recently rife in the county, that the Sac Bee says implicates our DA Cliff Newell, is a horse of a significantly different color. One involves our highest elected officials in an arguable screw-up that brings to question their competence, the other involves alleged criminality in private business dealings that smell to high heaven of fraud (with the added allegation that certain people received “favorable treatment” from the DA’s office).
The AtPac case also has immediacy. The folks at the Rood Center, our vaunted leadership and defendants in the lawsuit, are into a period of critical strategizing and negotiations with the plaintiff that can spell loss of more good money after the bad money already committed and spent. And as we have seen from the available evidence, these guys have yet to demonstrate the sterling quality of the their decision making capability. They tacitly corroborate this assessment by having nurtured this ‘nuisance suit’ into a nightmare while trying to keep a lid on the whole thing.
Meanwhile, the NC hard money caper is still under investigation by everyone from our local constabulary through Sacramento to the feds. Sac Bee has yet to drop the other shoe in their two-part investigative reporting on the matter. I think it’s too early to get our undies in a bundle on this one, especially since they already have a couple of good twists in them over the lawsuit that promises to cost us taxpayers some serious bucks before it is settled. No one has yet provided a hint of a connection between AtPac and hard money. In my view, job one here is to first gain enough information about the AtPac suit so that we can evaluate the people we elect to govern us.
[6jun2011 update] The SacBee dropped the other shoe today as reported by Russ Steele on NCMW. In its second of two articles the newspaper spells out some of the gory details of hard money lending that have gone down in Nevada County. The attendant graphics in the article help make sense of some complicated stuff and highlight the cast of characters involved. There is no indication yet of new evidence that would incriminate our DA Cliff Newell. The Union covers this aspect here.
[14jun2011 update] The county will enter mediation on the AtPac case on 21 June 2011. Clerk-Recorder Greg Diaz gave his deposition on 27 May. In this deposition Mr Diaz gave testimony from his perspective on the events germain to this lawsuit that would presumably identify the who/when of giving Aptitude Solutions access to AtPac software, and the subsequent scrubbing of the county records server. It appears that the county does not want Mr Diaz's deposition to see the light of day.
rebanesruminations.com 
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