Shasta County Supervisors Patrick Jones, Kevin Crye and Chris Kelstrom.
Shasta County Supervisors Kevin Crye, Patrick Jones and Chris Kelstrom allege that in 2023 Elections Office administrators and County Counsel went behind the board’s back when they negotiated a $1.5 million grant with the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
“The board voted for an action and staff usurped our authority and did what they wanted,” Crye said at the Nov. 7 board of supervisors meeting. The board voted 3-2 to bring the matter back the following week to waive attorney client privilege on a trove of emails that purportedly prove this allegation.
Unfortunately for Chair Crye & Co., the emails prove quite the opposite.
In fact, Elections Office administrators and County Counsel worked diligently to incorporate the changes in the contract requested by Crye and Jones at the Feb. 28, 2023, board meeting, as the trove of emails released by the board at the Nov. 14 board meeting last week demonstrates.
The 154 emails between Elections officials, County Counsel and CTCL were released by CEO David Rickert in a 216-page document billed as an “Analysis of Correspondence Regarding the Center for Tech and Civic Life.”
(The document was made available to the public at the Nov. 14 meeting before the board waived attorney client privilege, which may be illegal and/or a Brown Act violation.)
Shasta County CEO David Rickert.
CEO Rickert’s analysis focuses on 18 emails and flatly concludes that, “County Counsel is readily available to the Board of Supervisors, Department Heads and Elected Officials in order to make informed decisions regarding legal consequences.”
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
“Considering the aforementioned information,” Rickert’s analysis continues, referring to the email evidence, “it is imperative to acknowledge that the determination of whether California’s laws pertaining to public malfeasance in office have been violated presents a significant legal challenge.”
Translation: Crye, Jones and Kelstrom don’t have a case.
Apparently, that fact hasn’t dawned on the trio sometimes affectionally referred to here on A News Cafe as Los Tres Pendejos.
“What bothers me the most is this body, this five-member body, made a motion to go forward,” Crye said at the Nov. 14 meeting, addressing District 3 Supervisor Mary Rickert. “That’s what means the most to me. The original motion. And that never made it. That should bother you to the core.”
As will be shown shortly, Crye is simply wrong. Not only that, but he also ultimately reversed himself and voted against his own revision.
It is uncertain whether Crye is deliberately gaslighting the citizenry, or he just doesn’t understand how county government functions. Neither choice bodes well for Shasta County, especially for the Registrar of Voters and County Clerk offices.
Neither Crye nor Jones responded to a list of detailed questions from A News Café.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The Zuckerberg Effect
Now former Shasta County Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen first presented the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s grant offer at the Feb. 28, 2023 board meeting.
The $1.5 million grant was offered through a CTCL program called the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. Shasta County Elections was selected as one of 10 participating counties from 93 applicants nationwide, granting the department access to election services at no cost to the county.
“We are honored and humbled to report that as a result of our participation, we were also offered a $1.5 million grant,” Darling Allen explained. “The primary conditions are that the funding cannot supplant regular departmental budgeted funds, and that the funds must be used for election administration.”
“Our intention is to use the bulk of this grant as seed money to purchase a county-owned facility for the county clerk/elections department,” she continued. “Current records obtained from our own files and with the assistance of the county Auditor reveal over $3 million spent on facility rent over the past 30 years.”
Former Shasta County ROV Cathy Darling Allen.
Moving the Elections Department to a county-owned building has been a goal for 20 years. But at the Feb. 28 meeting Jones seemed far more interested in playing the alt-right’s favorite game of softcore antisemitism, “Name the Jew.”
The Jewish person in this case being Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and billionaire philanthropist. In 2020, Zuckerberg and his wife donated $400 million to several nonprofits, including CTCL, to bolster vote-by-mail election services at the county and city level across the country during the COVID pandemic.
Because some Republicans believe anything that makes it easier to vote is a leftist plot, Zuckerberg has been demonized by the right as the puppet master behind the curtain pulling all the strings, a threadbare antisemitic trope formerly reserved for George Soros.
Zuckerberg no longer donates to CTCL, but the phrase Zuck Bucks has stuck.
Darling Allen evaded Jones’ attempts to get her to name Zuckerberg; that was left up to the usual array of far-right public speakers at the meeting.
Dan Sloan, then head of the Shasta County Republican Central Committee was first to decry accepting money from “Zuck Bucks organizations.”
Domenic Santangelo, president of the Shasta County Republican Assembly, raised the specter of a “Zuckerberg Elections Building.”
“They’ll get their roots dug deep into Shasta County,” another public speaker complained.
“This is bad ugly corrupt money!” said another speaker who warned “they” were trying to “inject us with their values” and “boost leftist turnout.”
Lame duck District 4 Supervisor Patrick Jones wants to burn it all down on his way out.
“We’re not really talking about a building, that’s not what’s at stake,” Jones proclaimed. “There’s a dark shadow over our elections office, Mark Zuckerberg and all the things he is into and all of his supporters. He is highly motivated in one direction. You’d be just as upset if we got Mike Lindell to give money to our election department.”
Infamously, Crye flew to Minnesota to beg money from the MyPillow CEO just weeks after Jones’ remark. It was early 2023, shortly after Crye, Jones and Kelstrom voted to break the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems and force shorthanded elections staff to devise a hand-counting scheme for Shasta County’s elections.
Supervisor Kevin Crye chats with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
At the Feb. 28 board meeting, the board asked for two changes to the CTCL contract. Jones demanded that language indicating the $1.5 million grant could only be spent on buying or helping purchase a new elections building be inserted into Item 3 on the list of the contract’s 12 stipulations.
Meanwhile, Crye wanted the phrase “in its sole judgement” removed from Item 12 on the list, which granted CTCL the right to rescind the grant, without a hearing, if it was found the money was used in violation of the law or regulations by the grantor, Shasta County.
Both supervisors admitted they were trying to tank the grant with their revisions.
“I have no concerns if we lose it,” Crye said. “If we don’t use it for a building, I don’t want it.”
Shasta County District 2 Supervisor Tim Garman, Rickert and Crye voted 3-2 to move the grant forward, with Jones and Kelstrom dissenting.
“I think that should be up to the will of the voters of Shasta County, not some billionaire from somewhere else,” Jones said, eliciting laughter from folks in the audience familiar with Jones’ out-of-state benefactor, son-of-a-billionaire Reverge Anselmo, who purchased Jones’ District 4 supervisor seat for $110,000 in 2019.
“Mr. Anselmo does not give money to the county elections office,” Jones sneered.
No, he’s merely poured $2 million into Shasta County’s right-wing movement during the past four years. It’s steadily trying to tear the county government down—and succeeding.
Connecticut multimillionaire Reverge Anselmo.
Deep Dive into the CTCL Emails
Between receiving the grant in December 2022 and May 2023, Shasta County elections officials, working with County Counsel, revised the CTCL contract to accommodate Jones and Crye’s requests, as the 18 emails included in CEO Rickert’s analysis clearly demonstrate.
On Dec. 8, 2022, Darling Allen emailed assistant ROV Joanna Francescut, then-County Counsel Rubin Cruse, and soon-to-be County Counsel Jim Ross to inform them that her office wished to pursue a membership with the Alliance for Election Excellence and a grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
It’s important to note these are two separate contracts, one for membership in the Alliance for Election Excellence, which promotes networking between elections professionals, and one for the $1.5 million grant from CTCL, a separate nonprofit organization.
Although CTCL claims to be nonpartisan, more than 25 mostly red states have restricted private donors such as CTCL from helping fund public elections departments.
Membership in the Alliance for Election Excellence is required to receive a grant from CTCL. When assistant county counsel Jim Ross examined the contract, he noticed it required a substantial membership fee.
In an email sent the next day, Dec. 9, Ross informed Darling Allen and Francescut that according to County Policy 6-101 section 2.4.2, the Alliance contract would have to be brought before the board because of the fee.
An hour later, Darling Allen replied that the Alliance would provide a scholarship for Shasta County permitting it to join the Alliance at no cost for the duration of the $1.5 million grant, which extends through December 2025.
Two hours after that, Ross informed Darling Allen and Francescut that the Alliance contract no longer had to be brought before the board since the membership was paid for by the scholarship. He advised them to “cross out the sections where it says you are paying so that it is clear there is not payment.”
Despite Jones and Crye flapping their arms about them, there’s nothing nefarious going on in these emails. ROV Darling Allen consulted assistant county counsel Ross about the Alliance contract, Ross provided advice, the contract was sent off and the membership was approved. That’s the quotidian nature of county government.
But the above email exchange incensed Crye, who discovered it in a thick stack of emails he dropped on the dais at the April 9 board meeting earlier this year, as if its heft added to its authenticity.
District 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye.
“This is the stack of emails, it’s super disheartening that there’s conversations going on,” Crye kvetched. “This is much bigger than the CTCL thing here. Staff slow-walked stuff. Accountability has to come. This will not go unchecked. There will be massive accountability when this happens because this is wrong on a lot of levels. If you see another elected official and a county counsel say this has to go back to the board and then through email trying to figure out how to manipulate the system so it doesn’t come back to the board, it’s egregious!”
Perhaps Coffee with Kevin should switch to decaf before he blows a fuse.
We now turn to the second contract, the one for the $1.5 million CTCL grant. In the above email dated March 14, 2023, assistant county counsel Ross shares the first draft of the contract. The emails show that between mid-March and late April of 2023, Elections officials, working with County Counsel, revised the CTCL contract multiple times to accommodate Jones and Crye’s requests.
Indeed, in the email above and adjacent emails, Ross repeatedly mentions re-listening to the Feb. 28 board meeting to ensure the supervisors get the changes they requested.
The inclusion of Jones’ request for limiting the grant to the purchase of a building was straightforward if exceedingly clunky. Item 3 on the CTCL contract’s list of stipulations states:
“CTCL’s grant supports the following election infrastructure needs: 1) Key Physical
Components: Equipment and materials, facilities, and records, including voting
locations, technical facilities, storage facilities, processing facilities, administrative
facilities, and voting hardware; 2) Key Technological Components: Hardware and
software components critical to supporting the election security mission, including
computers, servers, databases, and other IT systems and assets used in election
administration activities; and 3) Key Human Components: Personnel with
specialized training, certification, knowledge, skills, authorities, or roles whose
absence could cause undesirable consequences or hamper the election security
mission, including strategic, operational, and temporary/seasonal support
positions.”
To satisfy Jones’ request, Elections staff, with direction from County Counsel, added the following rider to Item 3:
“While a Grantee may typically allocate grant funds among these public
purposes without further notice to or permission of CTCL, CTCL understands that at
its February 28, 2023 County Board of Supervisors Meeting, the Shasta County
Board authorized acceptance of CTCL grant funds for the limited purpose of
acquiring a building and/or land and constructing a building, including related
acquisition costs or construction costs to conduct the duties and perform the
operations of the Shasta County Clerk-Registrar Voters (the ‘Board-Approved Purpose’).”
Elections and County Counsel addressed Crye’s request to remove “in its sole judgement” from Item 12 by deleting the phrase entirely. In the above email, dated March 14, 2023, assistant County Counsel Ross once again reviews the Feb. 28, 2023, board meeting before making his final change. He decided that deleting the phrase “in its sole judgement” satisfied Crye’s request. Therefore, it did not need to be brought back to the board for approval.
Here’s the original version:
“12. CTCL may discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return all or part of the
grant funds if it determines, in its sole judgment, that CTCL is required to do so to
comply with applicable laws or regulations.”
Here’s the updated version with “in its sole judgment” deleted:
“12. CTCL may discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return of all or part
of the grant funds if it determines that CTCL is required to do so to comply with
applicable laws or regulations.”
These changes unfolded over a period of weeks as the Elections Office cobbled out the contract with County Counsel’s assistance. In the email above, dated April 7, 2023, Darling Allen sought clarification on revising Item 12 for the final time, telling assistant County Counsel Ross she’d delete the phrase “in its sole judgement” and send the contract to CTCL for final approval.
There was no reason to go back to the board because the contract had been revised according to the board’s wishes. As we shall see, that fact has eluded Jones and Crye’s grasp.
Soon to be ex-supervisor Patrick Jones on a good day.
A Failure to Communicate
In May 2023, despite Jones and Crye’s efforts to sabotage the deal, CTCL approved the modified contract for the $1.5 million grant. As it turns out, Shasta County administrators have sought to buy a building to house the Elections/County Clerk’s offices for the past 20 years, so the search for a new building was already on.
There was no great celebration about the grant award, as a depleted elections staff was busy dealing with removing Dominion Voting Stystems’ equipment, installing Hart InterCivic’s voting machines and designing a hand-count voting scheme for the upcoming November special election and beyond, all unnecessary conditions imposed upon it by a board majority gone mad on “election integrity.”
What happened next was inevitable, and perhaps by Jones’ unintentional design. While $1.5 million might go a long way toward purchasing the key physical, technological and human components for an elections department the CTCL grant was designed to fund, it’s not enough to fund the purchase of a building big enough to contain the Shasta County Registrar of Voters and County Clerk offices.
Thus, the CTCL grant languished, strangled in the crib by Jones, unable to be spent on anything besides Kelstrom’s imaginary glass racquetball court at 1450 Court Street.
Perhaps seeking to confirm he’d killed the grant, Jones claims he asked interim CEO Mary Williams three times if had been approved by CTCL. Jones hasn’t said exactly what Williams answered. Either she said she didn’t know, or she said no, it hadn’t been approved.
Whatever, Jones is fired up because no one personally told him the CTCL grant was approved in May, 2023. He apparently found out when Elections brought the grant back to board on April 2 this year. Assistant ROV Joanna Francescut stood stoically at the podium as Jones railed about his own lack of knowledge.
Assistant Shasta County ROV Joanna Francescut.
“As chair I asked three times if that had been accepted and I did not get an answer as chairman of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors for the entire year!” the exasperated lame duck District 4 supervisor sputtered.
“So when did you ask?” Francescut inquired.
“I asked acting CEO Mary Williams and I asked CEO Dave Rickert … well not that long ago,” Jones admitted. When Francescut informed him the contract had been approved in May 2023, Jones was indignant.
“How come we didn’t get an update on that in May?” he asked Francescut, who was fresh off conducting her first primary election in March as acting ROV due to Cathy Darling Allen’s pending retirement.
“Because during the May timeline I did not have eight hours to spend at the board and get yelled at all day long,” Francescut said wearily. “I had a really long list of projects I had to do and I chose not to bring it back to the board. That was my decision at that time because we had to get a voting system in place. We had to create a manual tally plan, we had to take our old voting system down …”
The list went on and on and included the death of a close relative on Election Day last November. As the months went by, It became clear to Francescut that the grant wasn’t go to work out due to Jones’ building restriction.
“After reviewing the buildings and looking at the buildings, we were not going to be able to hit that benchmark,” Francescut said, adding that Jones had been adamant about spending the grant on a building and nothing else. “I believe you were quite clear and that’s why we didn’t bring it back,” she told Jones. “Ultimately the grant wasn’t approved to keep it, we had to spend it by a specific time frame.”
“You could have just emailed me,” Jones said.
“I emailed counsel, and I was directed at that point not to bring it to the supervisors,” Francescut said. “So yeah, that’s what I was going to say.”
“You know, counsel did not inform me as chair in that time period that this grant was approved in this manner,” Jones complained. “Why was that withheld from the board?”
The Shasta County Elections Office at 1643 Market St.
The answer is, it wasn’t withheld from the board. Jones could have strolled into the Elections Office any time and just asked.
Among many other questions, A News Café asked both Jones and Crye if they had contacted anyone from the Elections Office about the status of the CTCL contract during the past two years. They have not replied.
As it turns out, the Center for Tech and Civil Living is an amiable organization and encouraged Shasta County Elections to revise the grant contract to help pay its expenses for key physical, technological and human resources through December 2025. Francescut was at the April 2 meeting to offer the board a choice between two separate grant contracts.
Contract No. 1 was the existing agreement with Jones and Crye’s revisions to Items 3 and 12. Because those revisions, particularly the requirement to spend the money on a building only, make this contract untenable, choosing it was a vote to abandon the grant.
That’s exactly what Jones and Crye said they’d do if the grant wasn’t spent on a building.
“I was the one who did say I don’t want this for more technology,” Crye said. “I want it for a building and a hard cost to pay down debt because that’s always been my thing.”
Contract No. 2 was the original contract presented to Shasta County by CTCL in December 2022 combined with one of four spending packages, A, B, C or D.
Supervisor Rickert made a motion to approve Contract No. 2 with spending option A; it failed on a 3-2 vote. Jones, Crye or Kelstrom could have made a motion to approve Contract No. 1. After all, it was their baby with their revisions. They’re the ones who complained about accepting Zuck Bucks. They could have killed it right then and there.
Instead, Jones made a motion to bring Contract 2 back to the next meeting to renegotiate options A,B,C and D. It passed 4-1 with Rickert dissenting.
Crye forecast that a reckoning was coming for Elections and County Counsel staff in the form of an email dump. His spiel took on a religious tinge, as it often does, an angry father disappointed with his disobedient children.
“What’s great about history and emails and timelines is the truth will set us free,” Crye said. “I’m not laughing because it’s not serious. It blows my mind. Here it is, we’re in April, an item we voted on Feb 2023 and yet we’re still talking about it. I mean this is the most inefficient process I could ever imagine.”
That’s why they call it making sausage, supervisor.
“I’m super bothered by the process of what the board’s direction was in February of last year,” Crye continued. “Here we are 13 months later discussing something and then having a decision kind of rammed through.”
It apparently hasn’t occurred to Crye that he could have stopped the decision from being rammed through by teaming up with Jones and Kelstrom and voting for Contract No. 1. That would have spelled the end of the grant, which is exactly what he said he wanted, until he said he didn’t want it.
Adios, Los Pendejos!
At the April 9 board meeting in which Crye dropped his stack of emails on the dais, Jones would not stop ranting about the CTCL contract.
“For the entire year of 2023, I asked three different times whether they accepted our counteroffer,” Jones lamented. “I was unaware that they had. But I was also unaware of what the counteroffer was presented to the company, the Center for Tech and Civic Life. It never came back and in fact we now have received emails to that effect. I’ve read at least 200 pages going back and forth from our then counsel Ross to various people including Cathy Allen and Counsel Ross keeps reaffirming that it needs to go back to the board for approval …”
To repeat, Jones could have easily learned the status of the CTCL contract by contacting the Elections Office or County Counsel, which he apparently didn’t do during this entire time frame. The MAGA board’s counteroffer to CTCL that Jones claims to be unaware of was in fact the contract with the revisions requested by himself and Crye. The emails don’t “reaffirm that the contract needs to go back to the board,” they confirm that the board’s revisions have been implemented in the contract.
Keeping tracking of all this is mind-numbing. You can’t tell if Crye, Jones and Kelstrom are devious coup plotters or just dumb as rocks. That’s why they’re called Los Tres Pendejos, and it’s a relief that this gang will be broken up soon when Jones leaves the board at the end of the year and is replaced by the far more studious Matt Plummer.
Despite his opposition to spending the grant money on actual tools for the Elections Office, at the April 9 meeting Crye joined Kelstrom and Garman in voting for Contract 2, Option A, which does exactly that.
Of course, they didn’t miss a chance to stick it to the most abused elections staff in the United States, stripping Option A of funding for voter education and staff stress resiliency training.
“Those are the things that bother me too, the vote training and the staff stress training,” Kelstrom said. “The only reason I say this is people are looking at this like Zuckerberg money. I don’t think they would want it to pay for Zuckerberg training.”
Local queen of election denial Laura Hobbs, right, with election denying colleagues Rich Gallardo and Lori Bridgeford. Photo by R.V. Scheide.
Zuckerberg was once again on the minds of our local election deniers at the Nov. 14 board meeting last week. Laura Hobbs, the local Queen of Election Denial, hit the antisemitic trifecta by falsely claiming that Zuckerberg, Soros and David Becker fund the CTCL. Hobbs was exuberant over the release of the emails.
“We need an ordinance for the immediate firing of any employee who is insubordinate, elected or not I don’t care,” Hobbs yelled from the podium. “Joanna Francescutt was guilty of insubordination when she wrote these emails and tried to subvert the will of the board. She should be fired!”
And people wonder why Darling Allen was forced to retire for health reasons, and Francescut doesn’t enjoy giving board presentations.
The meeting devolved into acrimony as copies of the emails were distributed about the room. Supervisors Garman and Rickert complained that they weren’t given enough time to review the 216-page analysis by CEO Rickert. Rickert himself noted it had only just been released. Crye bullied the two supervisors for not keeping up.
“You guys didn’t do the work,” he chided, adding disingenuously, “I’m not trying to be combative. Me, there’s not a single thing on here I’m not prepped for in every meeting.”
Crye was right where he wanted to be, at the center of attention.
“Read the emails!” Crye exclaimed. “The press and everybody else should be saying thank goodness.”
Indeed, we are.
Muchos gracious, pendejo.
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