Right here in Coos County we have an excel­lent exam­ple of how a free press and a true democ­racy are sup­posed to work. As reported in Coast Lake News and on this blog, Jes­sica LLoyd-Rogers reported on what might have become an expen­sive pol­icy blun­der in the guise of a nui­sance abate­ment ordi­nance authored by Lake­side City Coun­sel, Fred Car­leton. Car­leton, who also dou­bles as coun­sel for the City of Ban­don, drafted an ordi­nance that threat­ened to tread on the 4th Amend­ment rights of Lake­side residents.

Thanks to Coast Lake News call­ing atten­tion to the ‘defects’ in the ordi­nance, Car­leton is now backpedal­ing and rec­om­mend­ing the city coun­cil rescind the ordi­nance. This is the power of the press in action. With­out this story and the resul­tant back­lash from rightly out­raged cit­i­zens, the ordi­nance would have been enacted unchal­lenged leav­ing the city vul­ner­a­ble to civil lia­bil­ity. This is the job of the press in a demo­c­ra­tic society.

Some­body should remind The World of this fact. Two weeks after Coast Lake News broke the story, The World reports on the ordi­nance ‘defect’ and gives no attri­bu­tion the other newspaper.

Read this exchange between Clark Wal­worth, edi­tor at The World and a reader as appalled as I am.

Sub­ject Clark’s response to: The World accord­ing to Dr. Seuss
Sender Bob Fis­cher
Recip­i­ent Mary Geddry
Date Today 00:48
To pro­tect your pri­vacy, remote images are blocked in this mes­sage. Dis­play images

Oh, well now, that clears that up. …Bob

Begin for­warded message:

From: “Clark Wal­worth”
Date: July 28, 2010 5:29:41 PM PDT
To: “Bob Fis­cher“
Sub­ject: RE: For Your Infor­ma­tion: The World accord­ing to Dr. Seuss

Mr. Fis­cher,

The main dis­tinc­tion I see between the two ver­sions is that the first is an expres­sion of the writer’s view­point, while the sec­ond is a news story. Reporters for The World are not allowed to level unsup­ported accu­sa­tions based on their own inter­pre­ta­tion of events. For that rea­son, state­ments such as “vio­late res­i­dents’ Fourth Amend­ment rights” and “a pat­tern of secrecy and tar­get­ing cit­i­zens” could not appear in Ms. Musicar’s account.

Please don’t mis­un­der­stand my expla­na­tion. I don’t mean to crit­i­cize Ms. Lloyd-Rogers for engag­ing in spir­ited advo­cacy of her view­point. Such advo­cacy is her con­sti­tu­tional right, and Lake­side no doubt is enriched by her efforts. The World, how­ever, prac­tices a dif­fer­ent vari­ety of jour­nal­ism. I hope you will rec­og­nize the value of see­ing a dis­pas­sion­ate, fac­tual report in addi­tion to Ms. Lloyd-Rogers more per­sonal interpretation.

Clark Wal­worth
Pub­lisher and Edi­tor
The World

From: Bob Fis­cher
Sent: Tues­day, July 27, 2010 10:28 PM
To: Undis­closed recip­i­ents:
Sub­ject: For Your Infor­ma­tion: The World accord­ing to Dr. Seuss

I have sent this to the Ban­don City Coun­cil, the City Man­ager, and to my pro­gres­sive friends. I want you to receive a copy from me.
Bob

Recently, Carol and I bought one of our nephews some Dr. Seuss books at a Fred Mey­ers up north, and the clerk at the check­out stand said he loves Dr. Seuss because that’s how he learned to read, and espe­cially because when he was in col­lege he dropped acid, and every time he did it the world looked just like a story by Dr. Seuss. He said he fig­ures Dr. Seuss was an acid freak, and that’s why he wrote the the kinds of books he did.

There could be some­thing to that.

Here is the short ver­sion of the Lake­side City ordi­nance writ­ten by Jes­sica Lloyd-Rogers of the Coast Lake News in Lake­side. It appeared in Blue Oregon.

Lake­side, Ore­gon decides that the 4th Amend­ment doesn’t apply here
By Jes­sica Lloyd-Rogers of Lake­side, Ore­gon. Jes­sica is the edi­tor and pub­lisher of the Coast Lake News, a weekly print news­pa­per that serves Lake­side and the sur­round­ing area.

With unin­tended irony, the Lake­side City Coun­cil unan­i­mously voted in their July meet­ing to vio­late res­i­dents’ Fourth Amend­ment rights when they passed an ordi­nance which allows city offi­cials or designees to enter pri­vate prop­erty at will to search for code vio­la­tions with­out a prior complaint.

Despite pub­lic com­ments from City Attor­ney Fred­er­ick J. Car­leton that, “We are not after the money, we are after cur­ing the problem,“the new ordi­nance also more than tripled fines from $200 per day per vio­la­tion to $750 per day per violation.

To be fair, it is pos­si­ble that the Mayor Pro Tem Rod Schilling, Coun­cilors and the City Attor­ney did not intend to vio­late the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion or “go after the money”. Those por­tions of the ordi­nance might have been an over­sight that could have been dis­cov­ered and changed with input from the pub­lic. That input was pre­vented by the secre­tive actions sur­round­ing the adop­tion of the ordinance.

There was no pub­lic notice and the item was not listed on the agenda. Brought up under “Items Not on the Agenda” the Ordi­nance was referred to only by num­ber and once by title before being imme­di­ately adopted with­out discussion.

Not con­tent with vio­lat­ing the Fourth Amend­ment and Oregon’s Pub­lic Meet­ing Law, the Council’s pro­ce­dure vio­lates the City Char­ter and con­tin­ues a pat­tern of secrecy and tar­get­ing cit­i­zens. And, of course, these are the folks who all ran on a plat­form of ‘open and trans­par­ent’ gov­ern­ment.
July 22, 2010

Here is the same story the way it appeared in The World. There are no sneaky and ille­gal pro­ce­dures by the City Coun­cil. That’s all gone like a fleet­ing thought, and there is no Fourth Amend­ment vio­la­tion, noth­ing about ille­gal searches, or tres­pass, or vio­la­tions of people’s pri­vacy. Some char­ac­ters appear who don’t exist. Sud­denly, there’s a search war­rant to be obtained when none was needed before. Where did that come from? But, the only real prob­lem with the ordi­nance is it’s kind of vague, and there could be a slight defect, maybe, and per­haps it needs some tweak­ing… if it gets repealed. Oth­er­wise, it’s all good, and Lake­side will be a bet­ter place now, all cleaned up!

Woohoo! I can hear col­ors and see music! The walls are mov­ing in and out. This stuff is a trip. The World is groovy, man. Here, take one of these and keep reading.

Lake­side ques­tions nui­sance law

By Jes­sica Musicar, Staff Writer | Posted: Tues­day, July 27, 2010 11:00 am

LAKESIDE — Lakeside’s city attor­ney wants to repeal a new civil vio­la­tions and enforce­ment ordi­nance because it’s too vague and may infringe on peo­ple rights.

Although he drafted it, Fred Car­leton admits it’s not well writ­ten and could have a con­sti­tu­tional defect.

Res­i­dents like Naomi Parker agree.

‘I think the word­ing isn’t so that reg­u­lar peo­ple can even under­stand the ordi­nance,” she said.

Parker said she plans to speak at the next Lake­side City Coun­cil meet­ing — 7 p.m. on Aug. 12 — to air her con­cerns about the ordi­nance, which increases fines for nui­sance abate­ments from $200 to $750. It also would allow city offi­cials to enter prop­er­ties that have ongo­ing nui­sance issues by obtain­ing admin­is­tra­tive search war­rants from Coos County Cir­cuit Court judges.

Parker said she opposes that part of the ordinance.

She added the ordinance’s lan­guage isn’t appro­pri­ate for the city. For exam­ple, a chief of police could enforce the ordi­nance, it states, and pros­e­cu­tion shall be filed with the munic­i­pal judge of the city.

Lake­side has no such officials.

Car­leton said he wanted to give more teeth to the city’s exist­ing nui­sance abate­ment ordi­nance, which deals with issues such as tall grass — a fire haz­ard — or rat-infested prop­er­ties that are con­sid­ered a pub­lic health issue.

He said Lake­side recently has dealt with sev­eral egre­gious cases in which prop­erty own­ers didn’t com­ply with requests to clean up their property.

Under the new ordi­nance, if a prop­erty is found to be a nui­sance by the coun­cil — fol­low­ing a com­mu­nity member’s com­plaint — the owner would be noti­fied and given a num­ber of days to fix the problem.

If an owner doesn’t obey, Car­leton said he would sub­mit an affi­davit and get an admin­is­tra­tive search war­rant from a judge that would allow city offi­cials or hired con­trac­tors to do the work themselves.

For prop­erty own­ers who refuse per­mis­sion to enter or inspect the prop­erty, enforce­ment offi­cials may seek an admin­is­tra­tive inspec­tion warrant.

Those who do not abate nui­sances could pay up to a $750-per-day fine, depend­ing on a judge’s discretion.

How­ever, ‘we don’t want the fines,” he said.

‘We want them to take care of the prob­lem, but we have to have some leverage.”

The ordi­nance would take effect Aug. 8, a month after it passed.

If it is repealed, Car­leton said he’ll rework and present it at the council’s Sep­tem­ber meeting.

Since it was approved, sev­eral res­i­dents have put up ‘No Tres­pass­ing” signs out­side their homes, includ­ing Roger Rolen.

He said he didn’t entirely under­stand the ordi­nance, but city staff shouldn’t come on his prop­erty and attempt to fine him for improv­ing his property.

Reporter Jes­sica Musicar can be reached at 541–269-1222, ext. 240; or at jmusicar@theworldlink.com.

*** *** *** *** *** ***

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a crit­i­cism of Jes­sica Musicar’s writ­ing. She is a World staff writer, and she has to write what the World’s pub­lisher and edi­tor Clark Wal­worth tells her to write. But, Fred! Oh my gawd, Fred! Where is your head? Have you ever tried writ­ing children’s books?

Bob Fis­cher

Clark, I am com­pelled to chal­lenge your con­de­scend­ing ‘view­point’ of Ms Lloyd-Rogers’ report­ing. Just because your paper fails to observe and con­firm a ‘pat­tern’ doesn’t dis­prove its exis­tence or the valid­ity of another jour­nal­ist report­ing on it. Fur­ther, your com­ments are even more ironic con­sid­er­ing your paper would not have had this story at all if another jour­nal­ist at another paper hadn’t bro­ken the story two weeks ear­lier, caus­ing the city coun­sel, Fred Car­leton, to rethink the fla­grant vio­la­tion of the 4th amend­ment he crafted as a city ordi­nance. The real story is that a real jour­nal­ist did their job and helped avert a pub­lic pol­icy blun­der. Your paper didn’t even give Coast Lake News a nod.