All references below can be best explained by a view of the "Not the FRCCSD Website" which can most easily be reached by going to www.canyongraphics.net.
OK, I've decided. If someone wants to go through that warning, fine with me. I don't really believe in the notion of dirty words. Many perfectly good Anglo Saxon words of bodily function became unseemly and a "swear" word only after the Norman conquest, while the avoidance of words of a sexual nature are the sick notion that the world is burdened with by the obsessions of the three monotheistic religions. The hangups with display of the human body which Jews passed on to both Christians and Muslims, who arguably made it worse, is one of the big three's worst legacies.
By ten minutes after six, I'd guess the Viper had turned to her folder of my emails where she had yellow markered those words she could use as fodder against me. She started with the last few paragraphs of my famous "non negotiable and irrevocable letter of resignation, which I had emailed her some two weeks earlier.
(At my earliest opportunity I will archive the all the relevant email traffic but the resignation letter is found bellow.)
What led up to that was that on the previous Wednesday and Thursday, both beautiful, gorgeous afternoons, I was stuck inside doing work for Plumas County Community Development. I was as disgruntled as a kid stuck in summer school while others are out swimming and fishing. Then I get this sanctimonious and supercilious email from Rocki, who had just arrived on the board, about how we are (this is paraphrase) how we are all public servants and must not act like children. Believing I was out of any allies and feeling totally blocked in pulling this organization against great resistance into the 21st century, I did resign in a snit. I did shut down the <frccsd@hughes.net> email address (which was on my dime) and the www.frccsd.org website (which was completely on my numerous dimes). I deleted all the water related numbers on my speed dial. I wonder if going through a divorce these days is like this times ten. In other words, I was pissed off on Thursday afternoon and it took Laine driving down to meet me at the PO on Monday morning at the post office to change my mind.
When Rocki read my email beginning with "...so much for approbation." she made sure not to read any of it that might actually reflect positively on me. Therefore, with the beauty that this is my forum, here's the entire post and I'll admit upon reflection it sounds a bit self-pitying and is for sure the hissy fit of a stereotype of a single, old foggy, curmudgeon.
Here it is in full:
It may have gone over your head but during the May meeting I absorbed continuous sarcastic, hostile and insulting remarks from Laine Lehman while we were on the record. I realized he was defending, at some level, his friend Joni's honor for the embarrassment and distress my remarks apparently caused her at the June 12th Caribou meeting. I decided that that would be the one and only time I would accept such attacks on my character. Life is too short and who needs it?
When you first joined the board, I had some hopes that I'd have an ally in bringing us into a high tech and green response to our otherwise almost hopeless situation, with declining revenues and increasing expenses. Now that I see that you are yet another who sees fit to attack me personally, the final straw has been reached.
I hereby resign from the board of the Feather River Canyon CSD effective immediately. This resignation is non negotiable and irrevocable.
I have already pulled down the FRCCSD website and it will never be seen again.
I will have everything boxed up and ready to go by 11:00 AM, Friday, August 27th. The paperwork will be in much better order than when I received it but still needs a lot of work and there is a financial report you better deal with before the end of September or you will face another $1,000 fine. I suggest you have Joni come by tomorrow to pick this stuff up as it should not be in the home of a non-member. It will be up to you to take my name off the check signing card, to change the board mailing address back to Twain and to find a sucker dumb enough to accept the extremely time consuming job as treasurer.
I will not be accepting any water related phone calls as I've now put the whole sorry episode behind me. At least I got a well out of the deal though I have serious doubts about this organization keeping it functioning.
Now that you have succeeded in getting rid of me, you might want to look at the harsh and insulting tone you frequently have taken with Joni. If you drive her away too, there will be no one who has any idea what to do at a technical level.
John Keith
PS: This is my last board related communication. I am also pulling down the <frccsd@hughes.net> mail address and hence forth I will be turning to other interests.
When she read this she made her first motion to to accept my resignation. Liane wanted to know who she was to make that call as she was not REALLY chair; that she had not been actually be a board member yet, not having taken the oath of office when she had (illegitimately) been elevated as Chair. Then the whole conversation spun into a totally off point death spiral until in crashed without a second and Rocki making a snippy point where Laine and John always hang together (in spite of the first paragraph of the resignation letter describing how Laine had given my a ration of shit at the previous meeting.)
The point that she had ignored our published agenda in contravention of the Brown Act in order to take me down first was missed by all. I hope with a bit of research to show that in he very first action that she broke the law. I'll be sure to pass on my research so watch this blog.
My worse, in my view is that her assault to humiliate me (and Laine as well, which I didn't remember in the fog of war until he reminded me how Rocki called him"a bully") in public and further, to imply malfeasance as treasurer, she demonstrated, as did Ken George, that both lack honor.
(I thought of Michelle Backman, wackjob congresswoman from Minnesota, who accused Nancy Pelosi of spending 500 K of the tax payers money for her flights home to San Francisco. Facts be damned. Fox'll push it in spite of the fact that 1.) Pelosi does not drink and 2.) no alcohol is served on air force flights.)
(The above picture was taken many months earlier at a Paxton Lodge meeting, not at the one being discussed here, the character assassination meeting.)
So as first as Ken George began to I thought maybe he would have some sort of pep talk so he was several sentences into his talk when I realized he had been listing how I had be a detriment to District, how I had been "horrible" in my treatment of Joni, our treatment operator, perhaps even exposing the board to criminal liability !?! He was resurrecting charges he made against me that I had "yelled" at Joni, our operator, and that I should berate no one like that, much less an employee. I insisted, against Laine's numerous requests that I attend, so that Joni could talk without intimidation IN CLOSED SESSION. I said before the meeting that should she allege that I was in any way improper or mean or anything else reflecting poorly on the board that I would tender my immediate resignation. Rocki to use this against me at the last meeting when she exclaimed with a sneer that I had already quit three times.
What a sucker punch!! How cool in a hyper real event like this one must be to function properly. I did not. I was poleaxed. Oh the things I should have said after having stood up, taken the floor and looking right at his pinche pendejo face. I did not, but rather sat there with what I'd guess was my bemused and frozen face.
Like an annoying horse fly the guy sitting next to me, who I later learned was John Galehouse of Old Mill, began an intense inquisition as to WHO did I think that YOU are to TAKE down the BOARD's website? Who was I indeed! Only the creator, publisher, editor, webmaster, content provider and the sole contributor to its cost to exist. I grabbed on to this thread, perhaps because a bit of solid ground remained there. I could be amused (or I hoped appear to be) asking this guy where he thought the website existed (me thinking on my bloody server, mate) and him responding that it's on the Internet.
To make it completely surreal, as I slowly looked around the crowded room, I fancied everyone was glaring at me with sadistic smiles seeing the apostate driven from the group. By then some had left the room. The guys from Dickens Drilling, whom I consider close to being friends, and who were there to discuss the huge leaks at Old Mill went to stand outside during my stoning.
Going into this meeting I thought there might be a culture war, the gated home owner association middle class snob contingent against my bunch, the rough, ragged poor or of modest means hippies. Before the meeting I had stopped at Laine's house and, oh it looks so naive now, but we discussed how Rocki would be a good and different opinion for the group. We foolishly thought that if my resignation letter came up, that either the board would vote to not accept it or, otherwise, re-elect me back onto the board if absolutely necessary. I still thought, which shows what a shallow thinker I can be, that with me presenting my charts of water waste running our power bills to stratospheric levels
I thought I entered this fray with allies. John Toboni on my right flank, Laine Lehman on my left and Mike Mondot covering my six. What I expected was that one or more of them would jump to his feet exclaiming that all these charges had been covered eighteen months before in closed session and that not only had I been completely exonerated but the yelling incident had been explained. I know now this is not the true explanation. My belief and explanation is that Ms. Joan Chandler is a pathological liar and outrageous sycophant who says whatever she thinks whoever she's with wants to hear. I believe she gave Ken George every reason to believe I had been mean to her. Indeed, not only did I not hold his protection of her against him, I appreciated the effort even though I was made uncomfortable by vague and baseless charges. Nonetheless, I did not hear any of my fellow board members defend me, saying that they had attended the meeting wherein I was exonerated. Laine, in a latter conversation, says he did address Ken but was to say I had indeed been completely cleared but he was either unheard or ignored. Nonetheless, I reflected ruefully as I drove home, still in shock, how perhaps having an alliance with a buncha guys, myself included and all of who had California Prop 215 certificates and used them.
( This is Joan Chandler, the FRCCSD's sole employee, a water treatment operator with a T-1 certificate and who is, as I believe and I intend to prove in exquisite detail is a practiced and pathological liar.)
What was the "mean" thing I kept bugging her and making her cry about? That I wanted her to document properly her work, to keep a bound, hand written journal and to let me scan it at least once a month. All board members have a fiduciary responsibility to oversee the work of its one employee but the treasurer most of all. Every check written by the board must have two signatures, one the treasurer' s and attached to the invoice for the check there is a cover page which is actually an affidavit, the first paragraph of which states "under penalty of perjury.. and the second which states that I know and can testify that the goods or services being paid for for with this check were actually provided. For power, lab tests, and fees I had an invoice but what Joni was doing, for her $2,000 per month and for which we asked her to put in sixteen hours per week or ($2,000/64 = $31.25 per hour, which is pretty good, no very good wages for a part time job in Plumas County and particularly in the Feather River Canyon. I learned decades ago when I first arrived, the Canyon is often called, perhaps correctly, the Appalachia of northern California. Fortunately for us, the Canyon lacks the coal or even cost effective gold to rip it apart as they've done back east.............
Every two months I wrote a check to Bequette & Kimmel to cover Joni's wages and social security plus other checks to cover such items as worker's comp. I realized that I had written more than 10 K in checks without vetting them, in spite of my attempts to do so. When this came to one on what would be four or five heads in the summer of 2009 I'm told she cried for three days because I had said, not for the first time, that she did not have it. One truly amazing story was how her journal, covering the past six months work had been "stolen" from the cab of her truck and was irretrievably lost. It does not matter what I thought then as, while still hoping to come up with a procedure that would work and simultaneously cover her ass, mine and the rest of the boards, she and Laine sat down in the office of the post office after it closed and had a big meeting, a fresh start and she and Laine both took notes. They both agreed that my request, no by now my adamant demands that I see documentation of her work before I cut her a pay check could not be construed as unreasonable. She, for the umpteenth time looked me in the eye, promised to deliver and then did not do a damn thing. At the famous June 13 Caribou meeting I had tried and tried and begged and threatened and had gotten nothing for my troubles except a real concern, which I still wonder about, if I was indeed guilty of misappropriation of funds, district funds saying I knew what services she was providing when I did not. I'm not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV but back to that "Under penalty of perjury" affidavit which I signed with every pay check. The county also made the point to see that each board member raised a right hand and swore or affirmed the same or very similar to the oath the president of the United States takes including the paragraph covering preserve and defend the constitution of the United States. That got my attention also and, however unfashionable in this cynical world, I took my obligation seriously. Thus, I was in a continuous dysfunctional relationship with our operator. An intractable part of the problem is that we are so so small with only around fifty water connections (@ $586.00 per year per connection) that we (I mean the District, not me - I'm outa there) cannot afford an office manager thus out treatment does not have a true boss and she's become adept at playing off one board member, none of whom are supposed to have day to day oversight, against another while lying to all of them. Without authority she over her she has exploited her niche, and took until August 2010 to finally provide me with her revised, sanitized and easily seen as bogus work journal wherein she claims the work she's done for the FRCCSD.
(Here is Joan Chandler at my place a few days before she betrayed me with her outright treachery, through a lie of omission, as she sat in the meeting, head down as Ken George libeled me in her name. She said she wanted to start fresh and with hope springs eternal, I again believed her. Is it over the top for me to wonder if she was wearing a wire, that is a miniature tape recorder in the hopes to catching me saying something that could be used against me. Perhaps too strategic for Joni but I wouldn't put it past the viper.)
ASIDE: Should any possibly concerned party now entertain a notion to break into my cabin to steal my computer's HD, let me assure you that all the documents I need reside in the cloud and under 128 bit encryption. END ASIDE
There's more, concerning how I reached the last straw when Mike Mondot, completely oblivious to the seriousness of what had just gone down, began some blather taking me to the woodshed suggesting that by my tone, I was harrassing the customers (remember this is before I was able to give a treasurer's report) and I realized that Rocki semi-accusing me of misappropriation of funds for the $80 purchase of the Mac version of Quicken Essentials. Other than save me a lot of time (of no concern to the Viper) and to improve my accuracy, it served no legitimate purpose as so was suspect. The other expenditure was for securing the domain name for two years of the URL www.frccsd.org. Rocki apparantly believes that this somehow benefits me personally.
The most amusing criticism came just before I stood up, my entire speech being "Goodbye!" and her snapping "Be sure to leave the treasurer's report..", which I did though I knew it would be incomprehensible. Her most amazing criticism was that to her notion that the board meetings beheld in different venues, from Hot Springs to Tobin. Such a plan would be great for me with a walk to Tobin Resort and a challenging but doable 10.5 mile hike to Caribou but my view was that the location should be where it would be the most convenient for the most people, thus well uphill and at least 25 miles from me for a meeting. Somehow my concern for the greatest good over my own self interest had, in her mind devoted to twisting my every word and action against me, into a complaint.
#end
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