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Corkey Caves, Chair Crye Rolls Long and Plummer: Shasta County Board of Supervisors Charts Rocky Road

From left, District 4 Supervisor Matt Plummer, District 3 Supervisor Corkey Harmon, District 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye, District 5 Supervisor Chris Kelstrom, and District 2 Supervisor Allen Long. Photo by R.V. Scheide for A News Cafe.

People put too much stock in the “cowboy way.” People like me, for example. When I hear the phrase, as I did when Corkey Harmon was running for the Shasta County District 3 Supervisor seat last year, I imagined John Wayne in “The Cowboys” — a weathered father-like figure who teaches his young cowhands how to herd cattle.

So, I had high hopes going into Tuesday’s meeting of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors; the first of the year. Three newcomers, District 3 Supervisor Harmon, District 1 Supervisor Allen Long and District 4 Supervisor Matt Plummer promised to change both the tenor and the direction of a board that’s been mired in MAGA mendacity for three years.

For me, Harmon was the wildcard of the three nubes. Both Long and Plummer proved themselves familiar with the machinations of local government on the campaign trail, but Harmon kept his cards close to his vest while wearing Christ on his sleeve, professing his piety, his business acumen and his ability to think from the heart. The cowboy way, in other words.

Harmon would be put to the test right off the bat with R1, “Elect a Chair and Vice-Chair for 2025.”

According to the current board rotation, it’s District 5 Supervisor Kelstrom’s turn to be chair. Yet despite his towering height, it turns out Kelstrom’s a bit of a softy when it comes to taking up the reins of power.

In a move that would make former District 5 Supervisors Les Baugh and Trish Clarke vote Democrat, Kelstrom turned down the chair position and made a motion to stay with the status quo, like the election never happened, with District 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye as chair and Kelstrom as vice chair.

As public speaker David Hallagan pointed out earlier in the meeting, the board hasn’t broken the rotation-format since 1958.

Shasta County District 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye.

That’s OK, because breaking things is Crye’s forte! He’s done a bang-up job culling county staff the past two years, sparking numerous outside investigations into his alleged harassment of employees, resulting in sustained claims of sexual harassment, as A News Café recently reported.

County Counsel Joe Larmour and County CEO David Rickert are well aware of these allegations, because they signed off on the outside investigations that have been conducted.

Lacking any positive accomplishments to boast of, Crye moaned that he should get a second chance because former supervisors Mary Rickert and Tim Garman were mean to him in closed session meetings, a tired tactic borrowed from former Supervisor Patrick Jones. He also claims he got shorted three months on his first term as chair because he spent three months fighting, and barely winning a recall election.

What? Crye baby can’t chew gum and allegedly harass county staff at the same time?

To any objective observer, Crye hasn’t earned a second bite at the apple. He’s not John Wayne in “The Cowboys,” he’s the psychopathic rustler played by Bruce Dern. Harmon’s John Wayne in this western, and I won’t spoil the ending by telling you what Dern does to The Duke in “The Cowboys.”

Anyway, are there any objective observers on the new board?

Shasta County District 4 Supervisor Matt Plummer

Supervisor Plummer appears to be one. After citing precedence for the existing board rotation, he politely noted that Crye has been at the center of the storm since joining the board in January 2023.

“In terms of the chaos that has happened in this room, I don’t attribute that all to you, but I do think that bringing a new leadership both on the board as three new members, but also as the board chair, will help signal to the public that we’re turning a page on the last chapter, and we’re moving into a new zone,” Plummer said.

Plummer fired back with a substitute motion: Long as chair and Harmon as vice chair. Long seconded the motion, and Plummer’s view that Crye has become too controversial to remain as chair.

“My opinion is that we have gone through unprecedented instability and a lack of a functioning government for some time,” Long said. “And I ran on this platform, that we need to restore stability, we need to restore respect, we need to restore access for everyone to our government.”

“I think that’s important to get a new face to the board, and I think right now at this critical junction in our community, we have the ability and the opportunity to reset the entire board and our working relationships with each other.”

Count Long in the objective camp.

Shasta County District 2 Supervisor Allen Long.

Both Long and Plummer reminded Harmon that he’d also run on restoring stability and civility to the board. A somewhat overwhelmed Harmon agreed.

“I deliberately sat here and listened,” Harmon said. “What I wanna tell you is, I was not convinced what my decision was gonna be. I actually somewhat slightly resent the fact that I’m considered a swing vote. I don’t like being in that position.”

“I’m not opposed to Kevin Crye being the next chairman,” Harmon continued. “I’m not opposed to Kelstrom being the next chairman. I wanted to hear what everybody had to say. It’s really difficult with the Brown Act for us not to be able to sit in a room and discuss this ahead of time before it turns into a little bit of a shelling.”

Welcome to the shitnado, Mr. Harmon.

Harmon made a plucky substitute motion of his own, the third so far during the R1 deliberations: Kelstrom as chair and Crye as vice chair. Plummer followed that up with a fourth substitute motion: Long as chair and Crye as vice chair.

County Counsel Joe Larmour.

Finally County Counsel Larmour broke up the shenanigans, explaining that three motions at the same time is the recommended number of balls to juggle, and four balls were now in the air.

In fact, five balls were in the air: Kelstrom’s original motion to keep Crye as chair and himself as vice chair, Plummer’s substitute motion to select Long as chair and Harmon as vice chair, Crye’s substitute motion to select himself as chair and Long has vice chair, Harmon’s substitute motion to select Kelstrom as chair and Crye as vice chair and Plummer’s substitute motion to select Long as chair and Crye as vice chair.

Count ‘em. That’s five motions in total. I tried to keep track of them as Larmour and Chief Deputy Clerk of the Board Stephanie Blankenship worked backwards from five to one through each motion. They didn’t drop a ball until the second motion, Plummer’s first substitute motion to select Long and Harmon.

Long had seconded the motion after Plummer proposed it, which means the board should have voted on it as they worked their way backwards through the motions.

Instead, the board skipped right over Plummer’s substitute motion to Kelstrom’s original status quo motion, Crye as chair and Kelstrom as vice chair. Yet Larmour had previously said Kelstrom’s motion failed due to the lack of a second. Nevertheless the board rushed to vote on Kelstrom’s motion, with Crye, Kelstrom and Harmon voting for it and Plummer and Long voting against it.

Just as the vote was completed the lovely Dawn Ashmun twirled up to the dais, told Crye “I want you to stop this!” and sat down on the floor in protest, striking a meditative pose as she faced the audience.

Dawn Ashmun meditates as Supervisors Corkey Harmon, Kevin Cyre and Chris Kelstrom look on.

“It was clearly a done deal,” Ashmun told me later when I asked why she was protesting. “I just wanted to put a face on who they were not listening to.”

Apparently, realizing that manhandling female protestors and journalists is bad for publicity, Ashmun was allowed to remain seated. Somehow her presence was soothing, even though Shasta County once again got rolled by Crye, who will remain chair for the coming year barring some unforeseen occurrence, such as me being proved correct that Plummer’s motion was skipped. Stay tuned.

Shasta County CEO David Rickert.

R3: A Lesson in Servility

What do you do if Kevin Crye helped engineer you a big fat pay raise right before Christmas? If you’re CEO David Rickert, who’s now making almost $300,000 per year after getting 7.6 percent raise in December, you gaslight the public with hagiography thanking Crye for his service as chair of the board of supervisors in 2024 and praising him for his conviction, enthusiasm, passion for public service and focus on enhancing transparency.

That’s how Rickert led off his CEO’s report, and it was cringe inducing to say the least. As mentioned, Rickert is well aware that Crye is a problem child. Transparency? Crye, Kelstrom and Jones voted to settle retired Sheriff’s Capt. Patrick Kropholler for $2.6 million late last year in closed session and they still haven’t reported it out.

Rickert apparently expected us to believe this hogwash after Plummer, Long and a host of public speakers had spent the past hour illuminating the elephant in the room, Crye and his abysmal treatment of staff and colleagues. If Rickert, who serves at Chair Cyre’s pleasure, wanted to convince us it’s all about the money, he succeeded.

One last thing: Supervisor Long, the 25-year RPD veteran, pulled item C21 on the consent agenda, which would have shifted $2.6 million to risk management to account for the Kropholler settlement. C4, C5, C10 and C11 were also pulled.

Meet your Shasta County IT Employee of the Year for 2024, Tim Lewis and family.

Some Good Things Happened, Too

In a heartwarming employee recognition ceremony, IT Application Support Analyst I Tim Lewis was named Shasta County’s Information Technology Department’s Employee of the Year. Lewis was joined by his wife, their kids and his parents, reminding us all that with the right people supporting us, Shasta County can be a great place to live.

Also, the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office K-9 Team showed up to commend Deputy K-9 Ace, and honor his discharge from service. Unfortunately Ace didn’t show, but you can watch a video about his career on Friends of Shasta County K9 Facebook page.

Finally, you might not expect anything good to come out of something ominously named “Coroner and Medicolegal Death Investigator Week” but Tuesday we got to meet public health officials who work largely out of the limelight, the men and women of the Shasta County Coroner’s Office. Wonder if they’re watching “Dexter: Original Sin”?

Come Fly With Chris?

Supervisor Kelstrom’s proposal to give $100,000 to United Airlines passed 5-0.

Perhaps Supervisor Kelstrom isn’t keen on serving as board chair because he’s having too much fun stalking passengers at the airport. He’s been conducting research on the revenue-guarantee program Redding, which operates the Redding Regional Airport, is working out with United Airlines, which wants to establish a Redding to Denver route.

That was the subject of R10. The details, at least as presented at the meeting, were squirrelly. Apparently, Shasta County is going to pony up $100,000, or maybe $200,000, to put into Redding’s revenue guaranteeing pot, which includes a $100,000 donation from Bethel Church and $50,000 from Sierra Pacific. If United makes enough profit on the route, maybe the city and the county gets the money back. Maybe not.

This was the second meeting in a row Kelstrom has talked about encountering strangers on airplanes, and he appears to have developed a mercenary attitude toward tourists, whom he sizes up like a hunter stalking trophy elk. Tourist dollars are the ultimate currency, according to Kelstrom, because tourists rarely call the police, they don’t drive heavy trucks on our roads and they don’t send their kids to our schools.

You know, like his constituents.

The general consensus was the Redding to Denver route will be more successful than the ill-fated “experimental flights” of the past. Despite some grumblings that the donation amounted to corporate welfare, R10 passed unanimously. It was a sweet win for Kelstrom, who got torpedoed by his buddy Jones at the last meeting on the same issue.

Now maybe the 6’9” supervisor will quit stalking visitors to our fair county.

Work Getting Done: No Parking Dept.

Shasta County Supervising Engineer John Heath.

I hear a lot of people talking about moving away from Shasta County because of all the trouble we’ve seen, but I’m not one of them. Not yet, anyway. One of the things I truly love about living here is our wonderful winding roads, which I experience frequently by taking the long way into town from my lair in eastern Shasta County.

That’s how I recognized the stretches of Old Forty Four Drive and Old Oregon Trail mentioned in R11 and R12: I drive those roads all the time. I thought the cars gathered around a certain house on Old Forty Four were there for an indoor grow. Turns out, it’s a group home, according to John Heath, a supervising engineer with the Department of Public Works.

Despite efforts to get the group home employees to park in designated areas, they continue to park on the side of the road, creating a traffic hazard and damaging the roadway. So Heath is implementing a new no-parking zone in an effort to get the employees to comply. R11 passed unanimously.

R12 proved to be a bit more tricky. The parking issue on Old Oregon Trail is near the Redding Sports Park, formerly known as Big League Dreams. For years, sports enthusiasts have parked on either side of the unnamed entrance road leading from Old Oregon Trail into the sports park, causing serious congestion.

Confusion about the exact location of the proposed no parking zone brought Columbia School Superintendent Clay Ross to the board, worried that the sports enthusiasts would wind up parking in front of his nearby school.

“I just want to express my concern,” Ross said. “I don’t want people parking in front of my school.”

“Our intention is to not have people parking in front of the school,” said Heath, who’s going to rewrite R12 to make the location of the no parking zone clearer.

And that’s how the sausage was made at the first Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting of the year. Both Supervisors Long and Plummer were elected in March and obviously spent the past nine months preparing for the board. They’re going to be formidable.

Supervisor Harmon asked that no one hate him for making one bad decision, and boy, did he make a doozy. But hey, he’s new and can be forgiven. Once.

It’s the cowboy way.

If you appreciate career journalist R.V. Scheide’s investigative reporting, please consider supporting A News Cafe with a subscription or one-time donation. Thank you!

R.V. Scheide

R.V. Scheide is an award winning journalist who has worked in Northern California for more than 30 years. Beginning as an intern at the Tenderloin Times in San Francisco in the late 1980s, R.V. served as a writer and an editor at the Sacramento News & Review, the Reno News & Review and the North Bay Bohemian. R.V. has written for A News Cafe for 10 years. His most recent awards include best columnist and best feature writer in the California Newspaper Publishers Association Better Newspaper Contest. R.V. welcomes your comments and story tips. Contact him at RVScheide@anewscafe.com

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