Edrington at Tuesday’s rally for Auditor-Controller Karen Paz Dominguez on the courthouse steps.



PREVIOUSLY:

###

Local sometime political activist Thomas Edrington — a strong supporter of Auditor-Controller Karen Paz Dominguez — took to his Facebook page yesterday to explain his role in Tuesday’s release of documents that he requested from the Auditor-Controller’s office, and which comprise the “documentation” of alleged financial malfeasance that Paz Dominguez has promised to present to the Board of Supervisors.

That presentation has been delayed and delayed again — see links above — but Paz Dominguez’s campaign apparently worked with Edrington to release the decontextualized documents directly to the public. (Find them at this link.) During her reelection campaign on the courthouse steps Tuesday, Paz Dominguez sent reporters and supporters to Edrington’s request in the county’s “NextRequest” public records platform. (Later, Edrington put them in the Google Drive linked above and sent them out by email.)

In his post yesterday, Edrington talks about all of this and tells how experience in the local cannabis industry made him a Paz Dominguez supporter.

Through incompetence and malfeasance the County has done irreparable damage to our cannabis farmers. They failed to honor their promises to me, to you, and to our neighbors. In doing so, they made all the work I had done a lie. They had made a liar out of me.

I take that pretty goddamn personally. Since then I’ve been watching. Mapping social networks. Monitoring anomalous datapoints in County finance and policy. Last year I began an onslought of public records requests, and had to pull teeth from the CAO’s office to get them to even begin to process them. They knew what I was fishing for.

I wasn’t the only one fishing. While I was just casting lines from the shore I spotted a lady in the middle of the water, who knew where all the fish were. When Karen Paz Dominguez used her 3 minutes of public time on her lunch break as a county staffer to raise a red flag from the Auditor Controller’s office, and then had the audacity to run to fix it, I knew there was going to be a much better way to catch fish. All I had to do was watch her, and they’d all come to bite. Why waste worms?

Shockingly, she was elected. An honest politician won the race. I love it when I’m wrong. But I also loved that it if I was going to be fishing for corruption, she would be both bait and sonar as AC. I never had to approach her, and if I had it’d have spooked the fish. But every shot she’s taken from every lazy, corrupt, or incompetent county department has been a data point. I spent years watching her in the water, keeping my shadow on land, and crafting myself a great big fucking net.

As the excerpt above will attest, Edrington’s full post is well worth a read. The first part of it is embedded below; click “see more” to access the entire thing.

See more.