Press release from newly seated Humboldt County Supervisor Natalie Arroyo:
I am pleased
to announce my selection of Lonyx Landry for the Humboldt County
Planning Commission District 4 seat.
Lonyx brings a
fantastic skillset to the Commission, with a strong background in
education, watershed science, and community development. He is a
citizen of the Nor Rel Muk Wintu Nation, a leader within Cal Poly
Humboldt’s Indian Natural Resources, Science and Engineering
Program, and a Councilmember with the Northern California Indian
Development Council.
Lonyx has an
educational background in biology, Native American education, and
natural resources, and conducted his post-baccalaureate research in
soil science. Lonyx has a robust and diverse employment history,
having worked for multiple local Tribes and community organizations
as a teacher, a social services director, an advisor about Tribal
community needs, and a mentor to youth and adults pursuing education
and work in the sciences. Additionally, Lonyx volunteers his time to
planning the California Indian Big Time and Social Gathering and is
an active community member in and around his home of Eureka.
Lonyx shared that
he looks forward to bringing his strong grassroots values, local
knowledge, and indigenous perspective to the Planning Commission.
After careful
consideration, I asked Lonyx to serve in this capacity because of his
depth of knowledge about local issues, his ability to draw from
multiple wells of knowledge in the sciences and use an analytical
approach to issues, and his incredible warmth of spirit and strong
relationships. It’s an exciting time for Humboldt County, and I
believe Lonyx will serve the 4th District very well and
bring a fresh perspective to planning-related matters.
This appointment
will be part of the Board of Supervisors’ agenda on January 24th,
2023. I wish to sincerely thank Mike Newman, the current 4th
District Planning Commissioner, for his years of service in this
capacity.
The Humboldt Transit Authority offices in Eureka. | Photos by Ryan Burns.
A local advertising partnership called ADS in Motion last week filed a lawsuit against Humboldt Transit Authority (HTA) accusing the regional bus service provider of breach of contract and defamation, among other allegations.
The suit, filed by Arcata-based attorney Eric Kirk on behalf of Charles “Chuck” Edwards and Ted Sheets, claims that HTA “arbitrarily” canceled a multi-year contract agreement in early August, causing Edwards and Sheets’ advertising partnership, ADS in Motion, to lose $105,000, nearly eight months of ad revenue through the end of March, when the contract was set to expire.
The suit also seeks nearly $90,000 in additional losses and damages, plus $400,000 for defamation. Specifically, the suit alleges that HTA General Manager Greg Pratt and Finance Manager Katie Collender falsely accused the ad company of acting unethically and attempting to cheat HTA of money through inappropriate overcharges.
ADS in Motion is identified as “an unincorporated partnership” in the suit. The entity is affiliated with Eureka firm Advanced Display & Signs.
The lawsuit further alleges that HTA terminated the advertising contract with the intention of claiming the plaintiffs’ business interests as their own — effectively stealing away clients that Edwards and Sheets had spent years cultivating.
“I think it’s unfair,” Edwards said in a recent phone interview. “Truly, I think they’re greedy.”
HTA is a public entity operating as a joint powers authority between Humboldt County and the cities of Arcata, Eureka, Fortuna, Rio Dell and Trinidad. Nancy Diamond, HTA’s legal counsel, told the Outpost that she and the rest of the agency’s legal team were reviewing the complaint and couldn’t discuss legal strategy. However, she said, “I think HTA has always acted with enormous integrity. Otherwise I can’t respond to the allegations.”
While the lawsuit says more than once that HTA terminated the contract with ADS in Motion arbitrarily, emails obtained via a Public Records Act request show that HTA had been questioning the company’s billing practices for months.
On Jan. 31, 2022, Pratt sent Edwards an email saying, “I would like a better understanding of the income/expense listed on your monthly reports.” Over the next six months, Pratt exchanged numerous emails with Edwards and Sheets, asking them to explain and justify various charges.
Speaking with the Outpost, Edwards said ADS in Motion first won the contract to provide bus ads for HTA in 2008 and has since bid and won contract renewal every four or five years.
He acknowledged that billing mistakes had been made by a former bookkeeper, though he said that he and Sheets were transparent and proactive about trying to rectify those errors. HTA, he said, refused to abide by a dispute resolution provision in the contract, which calls for “good faith negotiation” and, if that fails, third-party mediation prior to either side initiating legal action.
In Edwards’ telling, the bookkeeper (whom he did not identify) worked both for ADS in Motion and for a separate business operated by Sheets. Last January, Sheets discovered that this bookkeeper had made an error related to his own business, so he terminated her. She kept working for ADS in Motion, however, even though Sheets found out that during the pandemic she’d moved out of town without telling anyone.
“In our partnership I never handled the books; I always did sales or customer service,” Edwards said. “So I was insulated from the the financial aspect, and I was fine with that.”
He recalls receiving the January email from Pratt, in which the GM asked for an explanation for certain charges.
“And so we inquired and found out that [the former bookkeeper] was actually confusing certain expenses with other counties that we do bus advertising for, and frankly she should not have taken those,” Edwards said. In other words, the bookkeeper had been passing expenses along to HTA that should not have been HTA’s responsibility.
“So, again, being totally transparent, I told Greg — I called him up, emailed him and said, ‘Hey, I just did an audit. Here it is. It looks like we owe you about $5,200, almost $5,300. And here’s a check.’ Well, that just seemed to whet his appetite to look deeper, which is fine. He started asking for more clarification.”
These requests for clarity appear in the emails obtained by the Outpost. The check that ADS in Motion cut to HTA was actually for $5,959.15, and in a February email to Pratt, Edwards said he and Sheets “are looking to continue on well into the future without any further hiccups. Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention so I could make it right.”
A couple weeks later, Pratt responded with a list of follow-up questions. The back-and-forth communication continued, and in April Pratt directly challenged some expenses and requested financial records dating back to 2018.
“I know that the Quickbooks report is a push of a button so I would like that now … ,” Pratt wrote in an April 14 email.
A few days later, Sheets responded to Pratt, explaining the reason for a delay in turning over the financial records: “When Covid started, my previous bookkeeper went to work from home and took our files with her. I could not access them for the last two years,” he wrote.
Before signing off he added, “Lets [sic] keep the line of communication open, I have nothing to hide here. I don’t like funny business and would not do that as a rule.”
The email exchange continued through early June. Edwards said he and Sheets hired local accountant Richard Hutchison to go over their company’s finances “with a fine-tooth comb,” and sometime in June or July Sheets and Hutchison had an in-person meeting with Pratt and Collender of HTA.
Edwards said the meeting was contentious, and it ended with Pratt and Collender abruptly standing up and leaving.
“Richard looked at Ted [and] said, ‘What just happened?’ We don’t know,” Edwards said. “And then it was just a few weeks later, we get a letter of termination from Nancy Diamond.”
The letter said the account was being terminated for breach of contract. “And so that was when we retained counsel,” Edwards said.
To him it feels like HTA simply decided to take over the business he’d built up over a period of years. Before ADS in Motion took over the advertising on local buses the ads “looked like crap,” he said. “They were all on metal trays that were attached … . And so we came in and removed all that and then started a whole different kind of approach to bus advertising.” They adopted sleek adhesive ads with material from 3M. Some of the ads wrapped entire buses.
“And we built it up all these years on our own sweat and brow and efforts. And it has not been without expenses because we guaranteed the signs for up to seven years.”
He and Sheets had plans to further improve the business, Edwards said. They were planning to install video screens inside the buses for digital advertising, opening up a whole new stream of revenue.
“It’s pretty devastating to lose a business that you worked so hard to build since 2008 — to have someone just come and go, ‘Mine!’” Edwards said. “It’s, personally, it’s — it’s very sad. I’m really sad.”
When Diamond was asked why HTA canceled the contract with ADS in Motion she replied, “It was an ongoing situation and I think, given that the lawsuit has been filed, I’m going to say we just can’t comment on that right now. But it was after a lot of internal investigation as well as back and forth with ADS in Motion.”
Asked why HTA didn’t enter into third-party mediation, as required in the contract, she said, “The mediation request was brought forward without [ADS in Motion] identifying exactly what was going to be mediated, and I never got a good response to that [question] from their counsel. So the board [of directors] was not able to respond in a direct way, so because of that they just declined the request.”
A case management conference has been scheduled for April.
… aaand another one. Early this morning, Humboldt experienced its latest medium-sized earthquake, oh boy. Did you feel it? Did you enjoy it? Love Humboldt, as they say.
With all the recent rumbling in mind, we thought y’all might want to keep better score of our planet’s local movements at home, so we cooked up this handy dandy LoCO Quake Bot page showing the sizes and locations of the last 50 notable earthquakes to disturb our peace. The list and map will update whenever the ground trembles with a force greater than 1.5M. You can find this tool by pulling down the News Gizmos tab on our homepage.
With the help of our trusty robot friends, we will survive.
Illustration by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters; iStock
Tax season approaches: Cue dread, confusion, and mentally preparing to part with a chunk of your money.
At least, that’s how many people think of taxes.
But in recent years, especially after payments related to the pandemic and rising gas prices in California, submitting a tax return has also become key to receiving money.
Adam Kuhn learned this the hard way. His wife, who is a contractor, lost all of her work early in the pandemic. She received some unemployment benefits, but even with Adam’s work as a software trainer, the couple’s earnings in 2020 were low enough that they didn’t owe taxes. “So why would we bother?” Kuhn, a Sacramento resident, said. They didn’t bother.
Then, in 2021, California started sending out its own pandemic stimulus payments, which reached up to $1,200. To get the payments, you had to have filed a 2020 tax return. The state did a second round of payments in late 2021, also predicated on having filed a 2020 return.
In 2022, with gas prices soaring and a massive budget surplus on their hands, state lawmakers decided to send out another round of payments to help with the rising cost of living — again tied to 2020 tax returns.
“I wish I had filed taxes especially because, you know, it’s not that much trouble to file taxes, and especially when you don’t owe anything,” said Kuhn. “We do okay for two people with no kids, but we certainly don’t make a ton of money,” they said. They were late on their rent several times in 2020, but luckily their landlord was “gracious” about it, Kuhn said. If they had received some of those payments, they said, the couple probably would have spent the money on food.
It’s a recurring problem. One of the main ways California helps people financially — and redistributes wealth — is by passing money through the tax system. It’s not just one-time pandemic payments; there are also yearly payments, called refundable tax credits, that provide thousands of dollars to lower-income people through the tax system.
But some of the people eligible for those programs earn little enough that they don’t owe any taxes. So, many don’t file a tax return. And if they don’t file, they can’t collect what is essentially free money on the table.
“Your best bet is to file your taxes, because there may be things like stimulus payments or the [gas payments] that we can’t anticipate,” said Anna Hasselblad, director of public policy at United Ways of California, a network for dozens of organizations across the state which, among other things, provide free tax prep.
That’s especially true for any Californian earning less than $30,000, Hasselblad said, because they are likely eligible for cash back, in the form of a tax credit.
The official line, from the state’s Franchise Tax Board, is essentially the same: Filing your taxes, even if you don’t owe any, can be beneficial, because it allows you to potentially get tax refunds, payments via taxcredits if you qualify, and potential future one-time payments like the pandemic stimulus packages. You can file a state tax return even if you have no income from work — this includes seniors living off of Social Security — wrote tax board spokesperson Andrew LePage in an email.
One caveat: High fees charged by paid tax preparers might make the trade-off of filing taxes if you don’t owe any not worth it. But many people qualify for free, individualized tax prep through an IRS program — more on that later.
Kim Kaufman, a retiree in Los Angeles, hasn’t paid California taxes for several years; she paid off her house a handful of years ago, she said, and the state doesn’t tax the Social Security checks she receives.
When she heard about the gas payments and learned they were based on 2020 tax returns, “I thought ‘Well, shit. I could’ve used that money,’” Kaufman said. It would have chipped away at her property tax and home insurance bills.
She plans to file a return this year, “in case something like this comes up again,” she said.
“I’ll do it early. I’m not gonna wait until, you know, April.”
More and more aid programs are being delivered as tax-based benefits, said Elizabeth Linos, a public policy professor at Harvard who has studied how people interact with the tax system. “What we’re seeing is that people will be missing out on benefits if they’re not filing their taxes.”
“It’s your money, go get it”
California’s biggest cash back credit for low-wage people is CalEITC, or the state’s earned income tax credit. That credit alone can give tax filers as much as $3,417 cash back, and combined with the federal credit, the sum can grow larger. There’s also federal cash-back credit for people with kids under 17, and another California credit for families with kids under 6.
So, for example, if you’re a single parent in California making $25,000 with two kids under 6, you could receive $9,990 when you file your taxes in 2023, according to figures provided by the California Budget and Policy Center.
“We like to say, ‘It’s your money, go get it,’” said Hasselblad, with United Ways of California. “And going and getting it means also: Ask for help if you need it.”
Despite all the money on the table, lots of people don’t file their taxes and miss out. It’s difficult to know exactly how many people are in this group. Nationally, about one fifth of the people who are eligible for the federal earned income tax credit don’t receive it, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. When researchers looked at California households who receive food assistance and are eligible for CalEITC, they found that about 400,000 households that qualified for credit didn’t receive it, largely due to low-income families not filing taxes.
It’s hard to convince people they should file a tax return even if they know they could get cash back. In 2020, Berkeley researchers partnered with California state agencies to research whether small “nudges” — including sending text messages and letters with information about the tax credits to 1 million people — aimed at people who were probably eligible, but who might not claim the benefit, would increase filing. The nudges had no effect.
Another approach was slightly more successful. Researchers reached out to households with emails and voice messages explaining they could receive stimulus payments and directing them to a simplified filing tool designed by Code for America, but the largest boost was only from 0.43% to 2.4%.
California saw an uptick in low-income tax returns in 2020, which the state’s Franchise Tax Board attributed to pandemic-related factors. In 2021 the number of tax returns from people or households making less than $30,000 went down again.
Trying to make it easy to file
This summer the state Franchise Tax Board plans to send letters to two groups of Californians.
For people who filed a timely 2022 return and appear to qualify for CalEITC but didn’t claim the credit, the tax board will make them aware of the credit and allow them to fill out just one form to receive it. For people who worked and have filed taxes recently but missed 2021, they will potentially receive a letter explaining how much money they might qualify for, as well as how to receive free help filing a return.
Illinois has run a promising pilot with another approach: Sending people forms that are already filled out. The state sent tens of thousands of letters to people who had filed a federal tax return and claimed the federal earned income tax credit, but who hadn’t filed an Illinois state tax return. Those people received letters explaining that they might be eligible for an Illinois tax credit, as well as a form with their tax information already filled out, which they could review for accuracy. Recipients could simply sign the letter and mail it back, or take a photo of their signed letter and email it to the Illinois Department of Revenue. Almost half responded and got refunds in the first year of the pilot.
“I don’t understand why — if the IRS and the California tax board, kind of broadly knows how much I owe in the first place, or if I owe anything at all — why they don’t just send me a letter?” Kuhn, the Sacramento resident said. “Why have to go through Intuit, or, you know, Turbo Tax or whatever?”
Getting free tax help
One big reason people don’t file tax returns is that taxes are hard.
“It’s entirely too complicated, it’s entirely too difficult, and there’s a lot of fear around, you know, getting it wrong,” said Teri Olle, California campaign director for Economic Security Project Action, an advocacy organization. “We, as a country and as a state, do not make it automatic in the way that a lot of other countries do,” she said.
But there is a network of over 100 sites across California that offer free tax prep. The help is provided by trained volunteers and the program is funded in part by the IRS. It’s generally for people making $60,000 or less, people with limited English, and folks with disabilities; California has a lookup tool for finding a site near you, and many sites offer multiple languages.
Anna Perez manages United Way of Kern County’s free tax prep program, which typically operates at 10 sites across the county during tax season. People who visit a site, Perez says, will generally get checked in, chat with a volunteer who will ask them questions about their situation and collect their paperwork, and then that information will get passed on to another volunteer who is certified to prepare their tax return. Then the return will get double-checked by yet another volunteer, reviewed by the client who came in, and then a return will get filed — all for free. The whole process typically takes 45 minutes to an hour, Perez says.
There are also locations that provide free tax help specifically for people over 60. And if you want to file yourself, the Franchise Tax Board recommends some free online tools.
“The bottom line is, a lot of Californians qualify for tax credits,” said Hasselblad, “and none of them should have to pay a tax preparer to get those credits.”
###
CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
Jean Davlin was born November 26, 1942 and
passed away with her family by her side the evening of January 6,
2023.
Jean was born in San Diego, California to
Kenneth and Helen McGregor. Her father’s construction career let
her grow up all over the state, including Fort Bragg, Merced and
Napa. Her best friends were many including her older sisters, Donna
Wise and Virginia Salley, cousins Louise and Paul and others. After
graduating from Napa High School and Pasadena College, she began
working as an assistant in several engineering firms. It was there
she met the love of her life, Ken Davlin. Ken swept her off her feet
and brought her home to Eureka when they were married in 1976. Within
a few years, they had two daughters, Jennifer (Eric) Frahm and
Christina Davlin.
Throughout her life, Jean’s energy was always
directed first toward her friends and family. Her passion was
children – first “her girls;” soon joined by their friends;
then through her service within the Eureka Public School system; and
ultimately for her grandchildren, Nicole and Nathan Frahm.
Jean worked as a staff member at Winship Middle
School for many years. There, she could always be relied upon to have
lunch money for the forgetful and less fortunate. She also helped
begin a backpack donation program before they became common.
Jean worked hard to create a kind, loving home
for all who entered and prided herself in supporting her husband as
he created a burgeoning civil engineering business. Her table often
became a mini–United Nations here in Humboldt County, hosting
visiting dignitaries from Mongolia, Russia, Japan, Samoa, England and
elsewhere. She was comfortable with the international flavor of
guests because of her trips with Louise to Europe and having taken
the Orient Express to Turkey to visit her sister Donna. And
typically, she’d happily host a bevy of neighborhood children who
were as cherished as her own. She enjoyed her trips to Hawaii, the
Bahamas and the trips to see family and grandchildren in various
locations in the US.
Creatively, Jean was a talented seamstress and
an avid reader. Many in the neighborhood still recall fond memories
of their kids wearing matching outfits crafted by her. Along with her
friend Bonnie Julien and assisted by Yvonne Cooney, she for a time
created and sold her own line of dolls and doll clothes, selling them
throughout the area. As children grew and began having children of
their own, she would create beautiful baby quilts cherished by many
as family heirlooms. Likewise, she made large quilts for co-workers
to honor their retirements.
Her love of friends, grandchildren and her
daughters brought joy to her soul throughout her life. Even when
illness robbed her of nearly all else, she would still somehow find a
way to show you she cared and was delighted to be with you.
Thank you to Dr. DeMay of UCSF and the Hospice
personnel along with Antionette Skiles who provided guidance and
comfort during her last months.
She was preceded by her father Ken McGregor,
her mother Helen McGregor, her sister Donna and her husband John
Wise.
She is survived by husband Kenneth Davlin,
daughters Christina Davlin and Jennifer (Eric) Frahm, sister Virginia
(Robert) Salley, numerous nieces and nephews, numerous cousins and
her numerous friends.
Please
join Jean’s family on Saturday, January 14 at Old Growth Cellars (Eureka) from 1 to 3 p.m. to share a glass of wine and your favorite memory of Jean. A
celebration of life will be held in the spring of 2023 in the
Sacramento area. Memorial contributions may be made to Hospice of
Humboldt (www.hospiceofhumboldt.org)
or the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (www.makeagift.ucsf.edu).
###
The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Jean Davlin’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.
Photo by Lynn Friedman. | Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
As the FBI office in Fortuna investigates an alleged embezzlement scheme in which 47-year-old bookkeeper Nina Tafarella is suspected of stealing from a local dance studio, Humboldt County Fair Association General Manager Rich Silacci says Tafarella also appears to have embezzled several hundred thousand dollars from the fair association, where she was employed until her arrest in November.
Tafarella | Booking photo
Silacci is hesitant to speculate about how much Tafarella may have embezzled until a Fortuna accounting firm completes a forensic audit of the nonprofit fair association’s books, but after looking through the available financial documents himself he believes the figure could be between $300,000 and $400,000.
“It looks that way,” Silacci said in a recent phone interview, “but I want a professional to say, ‘This is what it is.’”
As first reported by the North Coast Journal, Tafarella was arrested on Nov. 15 at the Bear River Casino and booked on suspicion of embezzling from a nonprofit Eureka dance studio, where she worked as a bookkeeper. Silacci said he reached out to law enforcement after learning that a felony warrant had been issued for Tafarella because she had also been handling the fair’s finances for nearly two years.
Asked whether anyone besides Tafarella was regularly examining the organization’s bank statements and payroll reconciliation reports, Silacci said, “She [Tafarella] would have been the only one. … I was relying on the reports I was receiving,” he continued, “and no one else in the office was reconciling accounts.”
The fair association’s board of directors was also relying on the accuracy of information provided by Tafarella, according to Board President Andy Titus.
“From what I gather, none of the information that goes to the board would have allowed the board to pick up on what was going on,” he said in a phone interview. “The information we see in our board packets would have never — we would have never caught it.”
Financial documents obtained through a Public Records Act request filed by former Ferndale Enterprise owner and publisher Caroline Titus (a distant relation through marriage to Andy) and later provided to the Outpost suggest that the embezzlement was achieved primarily, if not exclusively, via payments to a fake employee.
Payroll reconciliation reports from the Humboldt County Fair Association show that in August of 2021 Tafarella began issuing direct deposits in the name of Bryce J. Bill.
There is no Bryce J. Bill employed by the fair association. The fair association’s board of directors confirmed as much to Caroline Titus during its December meeting, as documented in an audio recording, and Silacci later confirmed it to the Outpost, saying it appears to be a fake employee invented by Tafarella.
If so, she chose a name that closely resembles that of an actual fair employee, a maintenance worker named Bryce T. Bell, who received his own, presumably legitimate payments from the fair association during Tafarella’s tenure.
However, Bryce J. Bill got paid a lot more.
The first direct deposit to “Bill,” debited from the fair’s payroll account on Aug. 9, 2021, was for $426.41. The next, in the amount of $1,098, was issued that same day. The 2021 Humboldt County Fair was held in late August, and in the account ledger payments to Bill are mixed in among hundreds of others, a reflection of how the fair association staffs up during fair time.
But according to the payroll reconciliation reports, the payments to Bryce J. Bill didn’t stop after the fair was over. For a while, Bill received payments every other week, including another double payment on Aug. 24. The amounts ranged from a little over $700 to more than $2,300. In September the frequency of payments to Bill began to increase, and by late October he was getting paid every few days — $2,111.77 on the 21st, $1,425.04 four days later, $2,464.15 three days after that, and so on.
Between Aug. 9 and Nov. 29 of 2021, the Humboldt County Fair Association paid the fictitious Bryce J. Bill more than $51,000, according to the official reports. After that there’s a gap in the records, with no payroll expenses reported (save a $367.20 payment to the IRS in January) until March of 2022. Four more payments were issued to Bill in the first 10 days of March, totalling more than $7,000, though the records say those payments were later “deleted.”
After March, the fair association’s payroll reconciliation reports disappeared. Or perhaps they were never completed.
“The fact is, from our office, we don’t have them,” Silacci told to the Outpost. “It just simply wasn’t done, I think, by our bookkeeper.”
But another set of records — statements from the fair association’s payroll account at U.S. Bank, also obtained via Public Records Act request — suggest that the embezzlement continued well into 2022. Silacci said the fair association maintains very limited staff when it’s not in the midst of running the annual county fair. A typical off-season monthly payroll would be “around the $20,000 range,” he said. Bank statements covering the first 10 months of 2022 show that withdrawals far exceeded that level, averaging close to $60,000 in the off season and much more than that in July, August and September.
All told, in the first 10 months of 2022 there was almost $400,000 in withdrawals above and beyond what Silacci said is typical, which is why he suspects Tafarella could have embezzled that much.
“When you look at the [payments to the] fake employee, you can get to a couple of those numbers in a hurry,” he told the Outpost.
Over the past year and change, the fair association was in an uncommonly ripe position, financially, for anyone looking to fleece the organization. After finishing 2019 in the red, the association turned a corner in 2020 despite canceling the Humboldt County Fair due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 and 2021 the organization received almost $200,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds plus $316,640 in state subsidies, according to the Ferndale Enterprise. In June of 2021 the Board of Supervisors approved a $200,000 budget allocation to help finance the county fair.
With the worst of the pandemic over, the Humboldt County Fair was a financial success in 2021 and an even bigger success last year. Despite the suspected embezzlement, the fair association ended the year with more than a million dollars in the bank.
“Financially the fair’s in as good of shape as it’s ever been,” Silacci said.
He won’t be with the fair association much longer. On Dec. 5, about two and a half weeks after Tafarella’s arrest, he submitted his resignation to the Board of Directors, saying he’d work through the end of January. He said he’d made his decision to leave prior to the discovery of anomalies in the association’s books. Three members of the Board of Directors have also resigned since late last year.
The fair association’s financial records have now been turned over to Fortuna accounting firm Anderson, Lucas, Somerville & Borges, LLP, for a full audit. Looking back, Silacci said the fair association was clearly not keeping close enough tabs on its finances. The California Department of Food and Agriculture requires fair associations to undergo a financial review annually and a comprehensive audit every three years, but the Humboldt County Fair Association doesn’t appear to have been fully audited since 2012.
“I was told by previous management that that had been done at some point, but Caroline [Titus] and I, the last one we found was from 2012. Now that all needs to be caught up.”
For his own part, Silacci said he simply didn’t look closely enough.
“I was reliant on the reports and information I received from the bookkeeper’s office,” he said.
As for the bank statements and payroll reconciliation reports? “I didn’t bother to go looking for those,” Silacci replied. “I assumed the job was being done until this all came out.”
Tafarella was first hired by Katherine Ziemer, executive director of the Humboldt County Farm Bureau, which contracted with the fair association for her services from Nov. 1, 2020, through Oct. 31, 2021. Reached by phone, Ziemer said she hired Tafarella because she had skills on QuickBooks, the accounting software used by the fair association.
“She had three other jobs that she was doing work with,” Ziemer said, adding, “I’ve been asked not to say too much because there’s an ongoing investigation.”
Messages left for agents at the Fortuna office of the FBI were not returned. A voicemail left at a number listed in Tafarella’s name was also not returned. Her case remains under review and she has yet to be charged with any crimes stemming from her arrest, according to the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office.
Andy Titus said he is committed to tightening controls.
“I can tell you what’s going to change,” he said. “We will have a third party we pay to audit [the financial reporting] on a monthly basis. That has been decided by the board. We will find somebody to audit and reconcile on a monthly basis, and then a yearly audit to make sure the risk of this happening again is minimized.”
The fair association has had a challenging time finding a new bookkeeper, but Titus said the board will keep looking because someone honest and competent is what’s needed.
“All I can say is that [the embezzlement] was not a one-time thing,” he said. “It was [happening] over the course of her whole time working there, looks like, and we [on the board] are going to do everything in our power to minimize those opportunities happening in the future.”
He said the board has been criticized in the past for being too hands-on, for interfering with the work of employees rather than allowing them to do their job.
“But then you step back and it’s, ‘Well, how can you let this happen?’ You can’t have it both ways, people,” he said. “But I can guarantee you there will be a lot more eyes looking at this stuff for a long time after this scenario.”
###
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post listed an incorrect figure for state subsidies received by the Humboldt County Fair Association. The Outpost regrets the error.
Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:
On January 12, 2023, at about 6:15 a.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies on patrol in the Kneeland area observed a reported stolen vehicle traveling on Greenwood Heights Drive. The driver of the vehicle was identified by deputies as 23-year-old Tyler Tommy Lemmons, who is wanted on multiple outstanding felony warrants.
Deputies attempted a traffic stop on the vehicle, however, the vehicle failed to yield. While attempting to flee deputies, Lemmons lost control of the vehicle and collided with a tree. Lemmons then fled from the vehicle into the nearby woods. A passenger of the vehicle was detained without further incident while deputies completed their investigation.
No one was injured as a result of this incident. Lemmons remains outstanding at this time. He is described as a white male, approximately 5 feet tall, 140 pounds, with blonde hair and blue eyes. There is no perceived elevated threat to the Greenwood Heights community, however, residents who see Lemmons should not approach him, but call law enforcement right away.
Anyone with information about this case or Lemmons’ whereabouts is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.
