Russ Steele
The Nevada County Tea Party Patriots have taken an interest in activities at the Rood Center. Here is the latest e-mail action alert:
Our Board of Supervisors Needs to Hear from You Concerning the Impact of the AtPac Lawsuit
It appears that there is a lot going on in our Nevada County government that is not transparent. I'm talking about the lawsuit between Nevada County and AtPac, the former supplier of software to our County Clerk/Recorder's office.
Depositions recently made public show that the Clerk/Recorder's office shared AtPac's confidential software codes with their new software supplier, Aptitude Solutions, in violation of federal law. That's why this case is in the federal courts. To date, this lawsuit has cost you and me over $350,000 in legal fees, and the cost increases every week. Documents show that the county could have avoided this problem before the lawsuit was filed.
Other depositions, taken under oath, have shown that documents were intentionally given to Aptitude Solutions under the direction of
the County Clerk/Recorders office. These documents also show that management ordered documents to be destroyed so that they would not be available for the courts to view in this lawsuit. The county has already been fined $20,000 of our money for not providing some documents as ordered by the court.
The Board of Supervisors were warned in advance at a public meeting that this was going to happen and chose to ignore the pending problem. Why? I have no idea. I spoke to one of the Board of Supervisors early on and was told that this was a nuisance lawsuit and would just go away. Well, it hasn't! Now the costs are skyrocketing and you and I will have to pay the bill. How high will it go? Nobody can answer that. If the county loses this lawsuit, it is my understanding that we will also have to pay the attorney's fees for AtPac.
The costs to us, the taxpayers, could be more than one million dollars or more.
I appeared before the Board of Supervisors to express the NCTPP's concern over the costs involved in this lawsuit. They said they couldn't answer any questions because all their discussions were held in a closed session. That means that their discussions are secret as provided by law. How's that for transparency?
This is a perfect issue for the Tea Party Patriots. We expect fiscal responsibility from our elected officials. We expect transparency from our elected officials. How many other lawsuits are going on that we don't know about? What other monies are they wasting? At a time when county employees are being laid off and services being cut, how much of that would have been saved had this lawsuit been avoided? Why are these discussions held behind closed doors? What are the Supervisors hiding and why?
You can read the rest of the e-mail here. It concludes:
We need to write to each member of the Board of Supervisors and to The Union's "letters to the editor" and demand to know what is going on. Let's all get involved in finding out the truth.
Stan Meckler, President
