To: Majority Members of the Board of Supervisors: From: Lang Dayton, MD. FCCP
I am a retired physician who has practiced Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in Redding for 36 years. I loved my job and found Shasta County a wonderful place to live, work, play, and raise a family. I never regretted my decision to settle here, but now I consider leaving here.
I would not have considered settling here if I were 35 years old today and seeking the same position I was offered in 1977.
Not when your strongest supporters project this image of Shasta County to the world:
This photo suggests that angry armed men with guns, looking for a fight, are a significant force in a county ruled by intimidating power rather than constitutional civil rights and rules of law. When guns kill more young children in America than anything else, and tots with guns kill more Americans than terrorists do, how many families would choose to relocate to a place like this, a place that celebrates the raw power of aggressive men brandishing weapons designed to kill people? And now you have just given people the right to bring loaded guns into Board of Supervisors meetings.
Not when your dysfunction, chaos, decision-making, and political turmoil have become state, national, and international news. Friends from around the country and overseas have asked me if this news is accurate, and I say, with regret, that it is. How many people who plan to relocate would cross Shasta County off their visit list? I would have.
Not when your hiring and firing practices place political loyalty and blind obedience over competence and accomplishment. You have repeatedly favored less qualified candidates over more knowledgeable and capable ones. You have extorted Shasta County’s citizens by giving people you should never have hired a million dollars of golden parachutes, leaving future board members two terrible choices if these new hires do not work out.
Not when you embrace conspiracy theories as a reason to ditch the county’s dependable Dominion voting system. There is zero evidence that electoral fraud had altered the outcome of any 2020 American election. Donald Trump lost sixty+ voter fraud lawsuits against Dominion due to a total lack of evidence. Dominion was awarded $787 million from Fox News because its newscasters spread what they knew were lies. Several experts, including Cathy Darling Allen, the highly respected Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters since 2004, warned you of these facts. You ignored their advice by breaking your contract with Dominion and chose to replace it with an obsolete manual vote-counting system. Luckily for Shasta County’s budget and citizens, the state legislature partially nullified your terrible decisions, by allowing hand counts only in small voting districts. Thus, the California legislature will save Shasta County millions of dollars in future elections had hand counts been adopted. Even so, you wasted a tremendous amount of time and money that could have been better utilized on any of the county’s pressing issues, e.g., the jail, homelessness, county payroll, etc.
These pernicious changes in county governance will spill into other areas of the local economy. Talented people can choose where they live. Your governance and hiring practices will ensure fewer people with marketable skills will want to relocate here, and more Shasta County residents will move elsewhere. It is already happening as described in the November/December 2023 issue of the JPR Jefferson Journal.
Your unresearched and unwise termination of development fees will have a terrible impact on government services and neighborhood viability. Supervisor Jones’s refusal to recuse himself when he voted on this matter was a selfish $20,000 moral and economic conflict of interest. In summary, you have created this financial equation:
WASTEFUL SPENDING – LOST TAX REVENUE = REDUCED GOVERNMENTAL SERVICES
If you continue this cockamamie, wasteful, and destructive path, you are serving Reverge Anselmo well in his quest for revenge against Shasta County by wrecking its budget and crippling government services. Without being reversed, your actions to date will effectively diminish Shasta County as a desirable place to visit or live.
A successful grassroots recall of Kevin Crye and election loss for Pat Jones in the upcoming election will help end the rot of this governmental race to the bottom and restore civility and a competent government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Lang Dayton, MD, FCCP
Redding, Calif.
