With little apparent evidence, DA investigators question petition process Meanwhile, Pacioni’s backers overlap with rent control opponents.

OPINION |

By Royal Calkins

The East Salinas woman was mopping her apartment floor when she heard a knock on the door.

“He said he was from the DA’s office,” she said, “I thought he was selling something but he asked if I was so and so and I told him yes. I was nervous. He said I had signed a petition about renters’ rights and wanted to know when and where I had signed it.

“I said I didn’t think that was his business and he said ‘OK, but I need to know whether you were offered anything in order to sign the petition.’”

“‘Like what?’” she asked.

“‘Like anything,’” he said.

 “I didn’t know what he was talking about,” she continued. “Then I stopped talking ‘cuz I didn’t understand. I got what he was saying, but not what he meant.”

“‘Like food,’ he explained.

She told him she had signed the petition in favor of rent stabilization outside Food4Less last summer but didn’t want to get into details. She worried that she might be in some sort of trouble just for being one of the 10,000-plus people who had signed the petition.

“He said it was no big deal, but that he just wanted to know if there was any food involved. That’s when I decided that this was crazy.” She asked not to be identified “because of how things are.” She said the woman who asked her to sign the petition offered her nothing except the use of a pen. 

“Why wouldn’t I sign it?” she said. “Everyone I know signed it.”

To her and others, it remains a mystery why the District Attorney’s Office would think bribes would be needed to gather public support for rent control, also known as rent stabilization, in an increasingly expensive, Latino-majority city where most residents rent, where homelessness is on full display, where big ag and the landlord class have dominated public life for decades, where civil rights organizations are proliferating and where, like everywhere else, the cruelest federal government in U.S. history is prying food and health insurance away from its most vulnerable citizens.

But there they were in recent weeks, DA investigators knocking on doors of those wanting to maintain rent control provisions that had been put on a chopping block by a City Council majority — installed by the city’s ruling class at least partly to do just that. During the petition drive sponsored by a citizens’ group called Protect Salinas Renters, there were some fund-raising events that included food, but the organizers say there was no tit-for-tatting, no freebies.

“The California coast from Oregon to San Diego is like a gated community,” said Margaret Bruner, cantor of Temple Beth El, who signed the petition. She says she couldn’t afford to live in Salinas except that her landlord “is a weirdo” who charges way less than market rate. She and enough others signed the petition to put rent control to a public vote. She called the DA’s inquiry “Burritogate.”

Rent stabilization laws were approved just a few months before a new,  ag-backed coalition led by former mayor and mayor-again Dennis Donohue took control of the City Council last year with heavy support from agribusiness, developers and landlords. Because of the successful petition drive, the issue likely will go to a full citywide vote a year from now. But there seems to be some disagreement over exactly what happens next.

In support of the drive, 136 contributors put up about $41,000. Organizers say the signatures were gathered by nearly 2,000 volunteers, though seven of the neediest participants were paid a total of $3,410. Among the keys to the successful effort was its penetration in the city’s health care community, led by retired physician John Silva and Dr. Jaime Gonzales, according to one of the organizers, affordable housing consultant Matt Huerta.

Overlapping backers

Many of the contributors who bankrolled Donohue’s council slate a year ago had also contributed to the 2022 re-election campaign of Monterey County District Attorney Jeanine Pacioni, a Republican who proclaims that she is tough on crime though there is little evidence that she is tough on political malfeasance, public corruption or campaign shenanigans.

In fairly recent times, her office did prosecute a gaggle of King City Police Officers for stealing cars and a Monterey County sheriff’s sergeant for payroll padding. But that was more than a decade ago, before Pacioni became the first woman DA in left-leaning Monterey County in 2019.

More recently, the DA’s Office investigated a reigning sheriff, Republican Steve Bernal, for misusing tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to pay for a private sheriff’s convention. Pacioni concluded that he clearly had broken the law — but shouldn’t be prosecuted because he was just doing what other sheriffs had done elsewhere. Months later, the Board of Supervisors censured Bernal, but only after Voices of Monterey Bay wrote about the matter. 

Under Pacioni, the District Attorney’s Office also successfully prosecuted an Assembly candidate, Republican Neil Kitchens, in 2020 for lying about where he lived. But that was only when the California Secretary of State’s Office began a formal investigation after Pacioni’s office turned down repeated entreaties from the opposing camp. 

Residency issues similar to the Kitchens matter have been among several complaints apparently not taken up by Pacioni’s office, as well as some involving public meeting requirements, campaign contribution irregularities, police misconduct and other topics outside its focus on street crime and drugs. Even search warrants clearly falsified by a sheriff’s detective prompted no apparent investigation.

Former political consultant Christian Schneider has clashed with Pacioni’s staff in connection with his longstanding dispute with Monterey County over its handling of slanderous accusations aimed at him during Bernal’s sheriff’s campaign of 2018. He has alleged that Monterey County officials broke the law, helping to crush his business by paying the legal bills for sheriff’s commanders who falsely accused him of criminality during the campaign.

Pacioni’s office “won’t investigate the gifting of over $150K of public funds regarding an election but will investigate whether or not someone got a free potato,” Schneider said last week. “They cherry-pick the laws they feel like enforcing and the people they feel like targeting.”

As has been her practice, Pacioni didn’t respond to calls from Voices of Monterey Bay, nor did her chief assistant, Berkley Brannon, who is assigned to handle election-related  matters. Brannon is designated as the county’s chief enforcer of election law, though his office habitually refers such matters to the state Fair Political Practices Commission or the Secretary of State’s Office. Unfortunately for those with complaints, both those state entities are overburdened and difficult to engage. To help clear a giant backlog of cases, the FPPC’s policy in recent years has been to prosecute only the most egregious cases and to simply send warning letters to violators of election law. 

The investigation into rumors of food for signatures apparently began with letters to the FPPC from two people, identified as Luci Rodriguez and Jamie Estrada. But the state agency decided there was not enough evidence to warrant an inquiry. Voices and the Monterey County Weekly have been unable to find the complainants.

The letters said Rodriguez and Estrada had attended a fundraising event for the rent control group’s sponsor, Protect Salinas Renters, in late June at an Alisal Street furniture store. They said they were offered free food by Huerta, one of the organizers. He denies that anyone was offered food in exchange for a signature.

A longstanding county ordinance designates the DA’s Office as the chief enforcer of election laws. A few years back, that apparently came as a surprise to Pacioni’s office. In an email to Schneider, the political consultant, Brannon wrote, “We do not have documentation on procedures for handling election complaints.”

Brannon wrote that an investigator in his office recalled telling Schneider to contact the Fair Political Practices Commission about the Kitchens residency matter. The investigator “spoke to an attorney in this office who told him such matters should be referred to the FPPC,” Brannon wrote. “When you asked him whether the DA would not accept an elections complaint, he responded yes. This miscommunication did not involve me.”

Brannon went on. “We do not investigate matters unless we have substantial evidence of a crime.” He did not explain how his office might come upon substantial evidence without investigation.

Before becoming district attorney in Monterey County, Pacioni worked in the office of Kern County DA Ed Jagels, who was one of the state’s most conservative and controversial prosecutors. She was then hired as a staff prosecutor by longtime Monterey County DA Dean Flippo, a Republican in a largely Democratic county, who functioned behind the scenes as a GOP kingmaker. At a time when the Republican Party was intent on getting party members elected to mayorships and other offices, Flippo’s blessing was considered a must. Even after his retirement, he maintained that role, sometimes in tandem with former county Supervisor John Phillips.

After he left office, Flippo’s blessing of Pacioni’s campaign meant enough that she was elected to replace him without opposition in 2018. She was re-elected four years later with only token opposition. The list of contributors to her 2022 campaign comes off like a condensed version of the donation reports for the Salinas political players who contributed to the council majority that tried to wipe out rent controls. Her biggest funder was Monterey Peninsula restaurateur Chris Shake, $4,900, but her second largest was Taylor Farms, which gave $2,500. Taylor Farms contributed $50,000 to the Donohue-led council slate.

Others on Pacioni’s list of contributors include familiar Salinas Valley political players such as the commercial real estate firm CH Business Properties, Gary Cursio, banker Richard Aiello, the Alvarez Brothers trucking and cannabis operation, labor contractor and cannabis operator Ricky Cabrera, Joe Cardinale, Henry Franscioni, Gold Star Motors, former Greenfield police chief Joe Grebmeier, accountant Harry Wardwell, Salinas Valley Ford and King City rancher David Gill, one of the biggest ag players in the region.

Her list of contributors also includes a couple of entities whose existence is difficult to verify, Sentec Underground Utilities and the “Monterey Corporation at Monterey Bay.”

Pacioni also reported accepting a $20,000 loan from Brannon, who has been partially repaid through donations to her campaign treasury.

The council vote to wipe out rent control was 5-2, with Tony Barrera and Andrew Sandoval dissenting. Sandoval was unpopular with his council colleagues before then and their opinion of him has declined since. Two council members, Aurelio Salazar and Margaret D’Arrigo, have called for the council to censure him primarily because he filed FPPC complaints against several of them and routinely filed Public Records Act requests relating to their actions. He has waved off their criticism as petty politics and says he has no plan to back off. 

Sandoval told Voices over the weekend that he fears the use of armed investigators to question residents about legitimate petition signing would create a “chilling effect on civic participation.” 

Others have alleged that the DA’s investigation is meant to intimidate.

During the past campaign, “the mayor and four councilmembers never told the public where they stood on rent stabilization, and most people never knew about the thousands of dollars in contributions from property managers and landlords,” Sandoval said.

During that last council campaign, Young Voices reporter Isaac Gonzalez asked all the candidates whether they would vote to roll back renter protections if elected. None of the challengers now sitting in office responded. 

“Now the choice belongs to the voters,” Sandoval went on. “The false claims used to justify the repeal have been exposed and I’m confident our community will once again stand up for fairness, stability and transparency.”

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