'CAMP' WOULD HAVE RAIDED POT GARDENS FOR FREE

Editor:

Tehama County is tops in pot plant seizures with 54,504 seized, according
to a recent Associated Press news article. This figure is substantially
different than the 89,008 plants claimed by Sheriff Parker.

Being ever curious, a few quick phone calls led to the Department of
Justice and a nice lady named Sonja, the director of Campaign Against
Marijuana Planting.

She revealed that 54,504 was the number of plants seized with CAMP
assistance and did not include the number of plants that the Sheriff's
Department may have pulled on its own. End of story?

Shockingly, a few more questions revealed that there were things much worse
going on in our county than a discrepancy in pot totals. The Q and A went
as follows.

Sonja, does the state charge the county anything to pull marijuana? No. The
CAMP program was put into place specifically because the cost of marijuana
eradication placed too large a financial burden on county law enforcement.

Did Sheriff Parker become aware of this policy too late in the season to
have CAMP pull the other 34,504 plants seized this year?

No. Tehama County has been signed up for this program for a number of
years, but they don't always call us for help. Last year they never called
us at all.

There were 42,000 plants pulled that year and CAMP was never called? That's
right.

Is it possible that CAMP was just too busy to come and help when Sheriff
Parker called?

No. If we were busy the day that he called the most he would have had to
wait would be a day or two.

Incredible. The citizens of our county have paid for the cost of
eradicating more than 76,000 plants that we could have had done for free if
Sheriff Parker had just made a phone call. He can't even use the excuse
that CAMP wasn't available that day and he had to act right away.

In September, the Daily News reported that Parker said his department knows
of at least 10 additional gardens and will continue to pursue them as time
permits. Does this sound like pulling pot was too high of a priority to
wait a day or two?

Unfortunately the county auditor's records do not segregate the funds spent
on marijuana eradication from the rest of the Sheriff Os Department
expenditures.

The auditor's records however, do show that during the fiscal year in which
the 42,000 plants were pulled without CAMP assistance, that the Sheriff's
Department paid out almost half a million dollars in overtime alone.

That, and the fact that Sheriff Parker uses the detectives, the
department's highest paid employees, for these pot forays leads one to
suspect that the tally needlessly paid by us, the taxpayers, is in the
realm of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Can anyone come up with one justifiable reason why Sheriff Parker spent our
money on something that he knew full well we could have gotten for free?

Van William Washburn

Gerber