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Mendocino County Today: March 28, 2012

COUNTY GARBAGE CZAR MIKE SWEENEY, at their Tuesday meeting, will present the County Board of Supervisors with a Draft Environmental Impact Report in support of an ordinance banning “single use carryout” bags, i.e. plastic bags, which foul the roadsides and line every creek and river in the County.

THE BROOKTRAILS SCAM is also on the Supes agenda this week. McCowen raised the issue last year by pulling from the consent calendar the County's routine authorization to sell tax defaulted properties at auction. Most of these properties were unbuildable vacant lots sold repeatedly over the years to mostly unsuspecting buyers. If a property owner fails to pay the property taxes for five consecutive years, the County can sell the property at auction to recover the back taxes, fees and penalties. And another sucker is stuck with an unbuildable Brooktrails lot. McCowen objected that buyers of the postage stamp sized Brooktrails lots were not being told that most of the lots were effectively unbuildable because of steep terrain and a lack of sewer and water hookups. McCowen's colleagues apparently don't share his concern that the County is complicit in an on-going scam; the vote was 4-1 in favor of continuing Brooktrails business as usual.

HERE'S HOW IT WORKS: The tax defaulted lots are bought for a song by speculators, some of them local, who market them in San Francisco or Los Angeles or on the internet. It seldom occurs to the urban purchasers, often immigrants and mostly first time property buyers, to ask if basic services like sewer and water are available. The speculators have paid $5,000 or less for the lots and resell them at up to a 1,000% mark up, collecting the down payment and monthly payments until buyers either belatedly visit their vertical country estates or otherwise realize they have been had and stop making payments. And of course they stop paying the property taxes as well. Which is where the County again becomes the owner of the lots and again sells them to unscrupulous real estate salesmen who again sell them on the internet. The speculators are spared foreclosure costs. They simply wait to pick up the property cheap at the inevitable County tax sale and the scam starts all over again.

BUT THE REAL ESTATE market being what it presently is, even the vampires aren't buying — forty of the Brooktrails lots failed to sell at last year's auction. And the scam, as comprehensively reported by Linda Williams in the Willits News, is far worse than McCowen seems to have suspected. The County, as part of the "Teeter Plan," pays 100% of the taxes and assessments on the lots up front and then waits for reimbursements that never arrive. Properly managed, the County profits from the Teeter Plan because a 10% penalty charge is added to each tax delinquent property, plus 18% annual interest on the total unpaid balance. Most owners eventually get caught up and if not, their property is sold at auction by the County which owns them after they default. But now that the lots aren't selling, the County's Teeter is tottering.

MOST OF THE PROPERTY TAX is owed to the County, but each vacant lot is assessed $120 every year by the Brooktrails Community Services District to pay for water and sewer services that will never be delivered to most of these lots. To reduce fire danger, Brooktrails requires owners of the vacant lots to keep the brush and weeds cut back. If they don't, Brooktrails does the work and adds that to the tax bill, adding up to a $1,000 or more to the cost the County has to pay up front. And Brooktrails wants to raise the fire assessment another $60 a year, bringing the total assessments for sewer, water and fire to $180 per vacant lot. Do the lot owners get to vote on this tax increase? No, only the residents of Brooktrails get to vote. The absentee lot owners (including the County of Mendocino) have paid out millions of dollars for services they will never enjoy and you can bet the homeowners who are benefiting will have no problem voting to make the absentee lot owners pay 50% more than they do now. But in an increasing number of cases, it is the County that will be paying the bill.

THE SAME PEOPLE who said nothing about the mismanaged Teeter Plan and the "excess earnings" scam — the County Treasurer, the Auditor Controller, the Assessor and the CEO — also kept quiet about the Brooktrails scam as it began to unravel. Twelve tax defaulted Brooktrails lots failed to sell at auction in 2008; 33 failed to sell in 2010; 41 failed to sell in 2011 and 74 are up for sale this year. For reasons that are not yet explained, there was no tax auction in 2009, but the steady increase in lots that were not selling should have alerted our highly paid County officials who are supposed to be guarding heCounty's financial well being. If McCowen, reinforced by Ms. Williams excellent reporting in the Willits News, had not raised the issue and demanded an explanation, the problem would have continued to be swept under the rug.

THE BROOKTRAILS SCAM BEGAN AROUND 1962 and continues to this day. The original developers, including former County Supervisor John Mayfield, Jr., took advantage of a short lived loophole in State law that allowed developers of rural subdivisions to sell four times as many lots as they had water for. The "Brooktrails Vacation Village" was never supposed to have more than 25% of its homeowners present at any one time. The State closed the loophole, but too late to stop Brooktrails and Shelter Cove, another sprawling rural subdivision on the Northcoast with mostly unbuildable lots.

BROOKTRAILS WAS UNDER A WATER MORATORIUM for several years, but a couple of years ago the State said they would allow 24 additional water connections. The Brooktrails Board of Directors quickly jacked the connection fee to nearly $24,000 each (!), thereby making it more expensive to build a new home than to buy one of the numerous existing homes perennially for sale in Brooktrails. But with only 24 water connections and more than 4,000 vacant lots, it isn't hard to see that nearly all of the lot owners, and the County, will be left holding the bag.

THE REAL DANGER FOR THE COUNTY will kick in when the owners of the 4,000 plus vacant lots realize that only the first 24 willing to pay the exorbitant connection fees will ever be able to build on their lots. This week's agenda item will give the Supes the chance to order staff to schedule a public hearing to discontinue the application of the Teeter Plan to Brooktrails. The lots will still represent an on-going scam of near criminal proportions, but at least the County will no longer be subsidizing Brooktrails by paying the water, sewer and fire assessments out of the County's general fund with little or no hope of getting the money back through tax-default auctions.

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MANY SONOMA COUNTY residents in northwestern Sonoma County are calling for the removal of what they believe is an illegal industrial printing operation in the wooded, rolling hills west of Cazadero. Once the subject of idyllic Ansel Adams photographs, these coastal hills, zoned in the Sonoma County General Plan as a Resource and Rural Development Zone, are now hosting the printing operations of Dharma Publishing, formerly located (for 30 years) in an industrial neighborhood of Berkeley. Sonoma County Planning officials originally allowed a variance for a small printing operation in 2004 — not to exceed 18,750 square feet of space and 27 workers, running one press, producing 100,000 books a year. The printing operation was approved as an “ancillary,” or secondary, function of the Ratna Ling Retreat Center in 2004. Since then, Dharma Publishing has completely relocated its entire industrial book manufacturing, storage and distribution operation to Cazadero, and is requesting that the county approve a total of 60,500 square feet of book printing and storage buildings, 94 workers in the press building, six printing presses running six days a week, no limit on the number of books that can be produced in a year and storage for hundreds of thousand of books. At a hearing of the Sonoma County Board of Zoning Adjustments on April 5, 2012 at 1pm, coastal hills residents will be asking Sonoma County officials to recognize the inappropriateness of this industrial, large-scale printing operation in an area zoned for the production, processing and protection of local resources and land based uses such as timber production, ranching, agriculture, recreation and related enterprises. Dharma Publishing must truck in all raw materials and truck out all finished products. Residents are calling out use permit and zoning violations perpetrated at the site over the last seven years, and are citing serious environmental concerns including fire safety, water scarcity, runoff to local streams, impacts on endangered species and the affects of heavy trucks on narrow, rural roadways. (Carolyne Singer, Coastal Hills Rural Preservation)

WHEN THE SUPES dig into the entrails

Of the unsellable lots in Brooktrails

They’ll find some old scams

which have cost lots of clams

that can’t be recovered by more auction sales.

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