EDITORIAL - There are always two sides to every story. This past Friday afternoon my phone was blowing up because apparently, Madera County Supervisor Tom Wheeler (78) stepped in another big patty of cow dung. This time with a female reporter from the Fresno Bee seeking what she believes to be “public records”. Did Mr. Wheeler respond to a request for public records with an insult towards the reporter? Yes, he did. Did Mr. Wheeler intend for his opinion of the reporter to make it back to her and be public? I do not think so. I think it was just Tom being Tom.

For the last month, Fresno Bee reporter Yesenia Amaro has been seeking information about the July 2020 murder of Calley Jean Garay (32) at the hands of her husband, and a lawsuit filed by the victim’s family against the county. According to Wheeler, this Fresno Bee reporter kept pushing the supervisor for information about what the Madera County Supervisors had talked about in the closed session portions of their meetings.

Well, this experienced reporter should have known that Wheeler was precluded by law from revealing discussions made in closed session. Had he disclosed anything that happened within a closed session meeting he might be charged with a misdemeanor and face up to one year in jail and a thousand dollar fine. She should have known that the California Open Meeting Law also known as the Ralph M Brown Act allows for some of the county’s business to be conducted in closed session and this includes personnel evaluations or labor negotiations, pending litigation, and real estate negotiations

So Thursday, when this reporter requested public records from the county, Supervisor Wheeler expressed his opinion of Amaro being a “piss-poor reporter” based on his experience with her pushing for closed session disclosures that he was forbidden to share by law. He thought that opinion had only been included in a reply to an email with the county’s CAO, Jay Varney. However, the email was originally directed to a group of recipients who also received Mr. Wheeler’s response. When he found out that his opinion had been made public and was shared with the reporter, he apologized for the insult.

If I were Ms. Amaro’s employers at the Fresno Bee, I would have more issues with her original request for these records and if she knows what is a public record and what is not. She was requesting a package of documents shared with the board from the Madera County Victim Services program manager Tina Rodriguez in the January 19th BOS Meeting.

She did not indicate the subject of those records, so I guess she thought the county would just assume they knew what she was requesting? Then she requested that the Fresno Bee not be charged for the copy fees for those records like everyone else would have to pay. Do you know how many “pay-walls” I ran into on the Fresno Bee’s website this weekend researching this story? If the Fresno Bee is going to charge people $2.00 for access to this story, the Fresno Bee can pay the 50 cents a copy fee for the file they requested. They may be a bankrupt company but they are not a non-profit company.

And then the words she used in requesting these records, “pursuant to my rights as a journalist”. She has no more rights as a journalist to public records than any other person. In my twenty-four years of being a journalist, I have only run across one law that gives journalists any extra abilities and that would be crossing an emergency line while working to gather news. I can walk into a burning building and take a picture, and the California Penal Code allows for this. My wife and kids have sworn me to never invoke this right and I agree. I am sure there are others but that is the only one I am aware of being on the books.

Had she wanted to avoid paying any “copy” fees, she should not have requested copies of files but “inspection access” to the files. This way you not only avoid the ten-day wait time but you also avoid unnecessary copies fees if those are not the documents you were seeking. I learned this in my first year on the job at Big Valley News / Madera Online.

The other verbiage she used in the request was in the “public interest” to release the files so the public has a better understanding of the government agency’s operation. At this point, we do not even know if the records she seeks are public. These files are related to on-going litigation making them exempt from disclosure.

Over the last quarter of a century, I have been the biggest pain in the backside to the County of Madera. I have exposed corruption in the Madera County District Attorney’s office (twice), broke the news of a drunk driving sheriff (twice), exposed a former CAO of sexual misconduct twice (two different CAO’s too), exposed lies and fraud in the auditors' office, caught supervisors on the take. In all that time I have issued the county hundreds of California Public Records Act requests and every time but one, I got what I sought. The one time a county council attorney tried to keep the records from me, he was replaced a couple of months later.

I am not going to say that Madera County is transparent, but they are not as bad as they once were. The one thing that would help Madera County be more open would be the termination of the contract with the Lozano Smith law firm or just the removal of current county council Regina Garza. We need in-house attorneys at the government center and not a Fresno law firm led in Madera by a bubblegum chewing cheerleader. Of the last ten stories I have written about Madera County, the majority of them have been caused in a number of ways by the incompetency of Garza or shortcuts she has tried to make. I often wonder what the real reason former county CAO Eric Fleming had for picking this particular attorney out of the vast pool of available attorneys from Lozano Smith (no I don't).

As for Supervisor Tom Wheeler, cue the theme song from ‘Dukes of Hazard’ - ‘Just a good old boy, never meaning no harm. Someday the mountain might get him’ but the media never will.' He is the only elected official to ever take a swing at me. He’s called me a "jerk" and an "a**hole" from his seat on the board (never a piss-poor reporter though). That is just Tom. He has no filter and does not understand the phrase “politically correct”. Yes, he called Amaro a “piss-poor reporter”. Even so, my advice to Ms. Amaro is ‘grow a backbone, lady’. Politics is a blood sport. If you are going to report about valley politics, get a thicker skin and a better understanding of public records requests.

**Neither Fresno Bee Reporter Yesenia Amaro nor Madera County CAO Jay Varney returned our phone calls to participate in this story