Buddy buddy, part 2

The nominating party launched in the new year by contacting their good friend, inquiring about their nomination and, of course, stroking William Burg’s ego a little bit. A bit of puffery goes a long way.

Here’s where it starts getting more interesting. See how William Burg eagerly agrees to edit the nominating party’s application for them. I didn’t know this was the responsibility of SHPO staff which is suppose to vet the nominations, I do have a question out about this, we’ll see if I get an answer before the hearing:

The nominating party started sending revised information in the body of the email itself with the agreement from SHPO staff that he would incorporate these changes into the nomination itself even though it had already been submitted.

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Here’s a nice creepy bit of correspondence where the nominating party sent to a SHPO staff person a clip of Doug Biggs at a City Council meeting, the google drive link is not publicly shared, but video is here and it’s item 7A. I wonder if the nominating party excluded the part of the presentation which talked about the need of the population that the Wellness Center would serve. Probably.

Then on April 19 a flurry of emails started coming to William Burg, what the question or statement that he had written to the nominating party to set that off, we’ll never know because they decided to redact it which makes it seem more shady then if they had just left it in, because this is not suspicious at all.

At 10:31 AM:

Another one seconds later at 10:31 AM:

At 10:57 AM:

At 12:14 PM the nominating party wanted SHPO’s counsel to review the following ordinances:

At 4:58 PM perhaps William Burg was satisfied with what he had seen, the nominating party started sending off maps of the property they wanted to cover in the historic nomination.

And then later in April:

This last letter was fascinating because while I was just trying to get an electronic agenda packet after a formal request William Burg of SHPO was just sending out opposition letters to the nominating party unsolicited on his own accord. This, of course, is an answer to Good Swimmer’s statement “vUnless you have evidence of the same government officials NOT helping your friends/client/ally or NOT responding to their requests or questions then this is a non issue.” Well, here you go. I asked for an electronic packet prior to the meeting on April 29. I was told that the only packets available would be one printed copy that I could access in their office in Sacramento prior to the meet or at the meeting itself. As I was making this request and being declined access, SHPO staff was sending portions of the packet (namely opposition letters) to the nominating party unsolicited.

And that’s it of new things we haven’t seen yet. There are a few concerns from this PRA. (1) This is not a complete disclosure. There are clearly things we’re missing which is mostly email responses from staff. It does not appear that there is anything that needed to be redacted and, I thought, redactions were supposed to be as minimally made as possible. (2) Staff is WAY too involved in the nomination and application process itself. I don’t know if this is normal or an outlier but it definitely is something that jumped out in the very few staff correspondence we saw.