PREVIOUSLY

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Hank:

Your recent headline derogatorily refers to me a “Railroad Buff.” At the turn of the century I served a three-year term as a Director of the North Coast Railroad, and have long since recognized our area’s need for improved transportation. That having been said, I have never advocated for (or against) an east west railroad. Richard Marks, President of the of the Harbor District, also serves as a Director of the North Coast Railroad Authority and has spoken of the need for improved transportation. I have never thought of Richard as a “Railroad Buff”, and doubt that Richard is a member or advocate of the east west group.

Over the past 20 years I have attended numerous monthly Citizens for Port Development luncheons at the Samoa Cook House, as have many Harbor Commissioners. I never felt doing so necessary made me or them members of the Citizens for Port Development. I am not a member of the Citizens for Port Development, and was unequivocal when asked at the press conference. You have simply taken a whole cloth claim by the Commissioners, and ignored asking me for confirmation.

The accusation that the timing the suit is simply to affect the election is a wholly biased and unfounded accusation. Any blame for the timing of the suit fall directly on the shoulders of the Harbor District. It is in reaction to actions they took in September, and I could not have acted any sooner.

I totally reject the bias you’ve used to paint me with false colors.

To be perfectly clear, I answer to no one other than myself. Over recent years I absented myself from community involvement to care for the declining health of my wife. But I believe my track record to be one of pursuing Economic Growth and Stability. That is what I’m trying to do now. Nothing more, nothing less.

– Leo Sears

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Leo:

As always, it was nice seeing you yesterday, and Bill Bertain too. I very much enjoyed the jocular banter between Team Sears and Greg Dale, the target of your lawsuit – the little word bombs tossed from trench to trench, across the invisible barbed wire between you. It was conducted with smiles and laughs all around. Somehow that symbolized the best of Humboldt County politics, or maybe just the best we can hope for.

I would never doubt that you believe you are doing the right and proper thing, according to your own lights. I think you and Bertain are going to have a tough time winning this suit, for the reasons I stated yesterday, but I realize that it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility. If you end up strengthening good government laws, then good on you.

But I do not believe you so ignorant, so lacking in self-awareness, that you would fail to recognize the political element to your lawsuit – the degree to which your team wins, or makes the effort to win, regardless of whether or not the suit has legal merit.

Bertain acknowledged yesterday that both the district attorney and the Fair Political Practices Commission have the statutory ability to fully investigate and prosecute the claims you have made. Yet he acknowledged, also, that neither of you had informed either of those offices. Instead, you held a press conference on the courthouse steps, just as absentee ballots are being mailed out, to announce a lawsuit that hinges completely on the darkest possible interpretation of offhand comments made at a Fortuna Chamber of Commerce meeting. 

It’s also strange to see you protest that the timing of your lawsuit was dependent only on the district’s actions in September. Indeed, your own lawsuit lists a series of contracts signed between the district and Coast Seafoods dating back to April 2014. If you believe that Dale is an “officer” or a “director” of Coast Seafoods, as your lawsuit claims you do, then none of the Section 1090 “remote interest” exceptions would apply to any of those contracts, either. Why didn’t you file your suit last year?

If you said, yesterday, that you were not a member of Citizens for Port Development, then my phone recorder failed to pick it up. (Perhaps Bill was talking over you.) So if you are not, I apologize. Is this one of those arrangements like back-in-the-day Earth First!, though? In the late ’80s-early ’90s, when you asked a forest activist if he was a member of Earth First!, he’d look back blankly and say – correctly, actually – that Earth First! has no members. Perhaps I should just say, to be completely precise, that I have never not seen you at a luncheon of the Citizens for Port Development, or at a luncheon of its successor agency, the Humboldt Bay Harbor Working Group, and at the most recent of these you were acting in some sort of semi-official capacity, passing around the tip jar for the Samoa Cookhouse wait staff.

Finally, Leo, I must say that you stretch the boundaries of credibility when you so fervently reject the “train buff” label. Sure: You didn’t dress up in striped caps and suspenders, as so many of your colleagues did a decade ago, back when they believed that the North Coast Railroad Authority was only weeks away from restoring service. You don’t, so far as I know, play with electric trains. I’ll allow that.

But in your 15-odd-year tenure as one of Humboldt County’s biggest buffs and boosters of a state-run money sink of a railroad line – dating back even to the Ruth Rockefeller days, if I’m not mistaken – you have long given fellow followers of Howard Jarvis occasion to scratch their heads in puzzlement.

Did you not write, in endorsing candidates who supported the idea that we should spend vast sums of public money to build a container shipping port and public railroad so that we might step up and roll the dice on the dubious notion that transnational capital might take note of us – the same idea that Nick Angeloff, the political challenger of the person you’re suing, hopes to bring back, coincidentally I am sure – that:

“Rail service is indispensable if our port is to reach anywhere near its potential in international trade. It underlies the district’s strong support of the North Coast Railroad Authority in its efforts to restore the vital rail link to the outside world.”

Did you not say this, in an NCRA press release:

“My belief in the importance of the railroad to the future prosperity of this area has brought me to the point where I eat, sleep and breath [sic] its return.”

C’mon, Leo. 

– Hank Sims