Off Beat: Tax bill swept away by Team Sutter

Oh, Team Sutter, you've strayed again.

Once again, the public's right to know is secondary to your own need for secrecy. Luckily for the good people of Sutter County, they have someone on their side — the defender of the Brown Act — Assessor Mike Strong.

Team Sutter, it appears, wanted a property tax claim from Fremont-Rideout Health Group to go away very quietly, so the Board of Supervisors back in May authorized repayment of $588,024 of the $885,024 the hospital group said it had wrongly been taxed from 2006 to 2008.

This all occurred in closed session during the board's May 19 meeting. And then the board announced, according to the minutes of that meeting, that no action was taken in closed session.

Yes, agreeing to repay somebody nearly $600,000 is not an action. As far as the public is concerned, it didn't happen, no matter what the Brown Act says or implies or intimates or hints at.

It's Team Sutter. They do things differently. There was no press release in the weeks after the May 19 "action" as the Brown Act would define it. No acknowledgment that anything had happened. Nothing.

Utterly shameful.

So how does the public know what Team Sutter has done? Well, Strong announced it himself because he was, apparently, kind of ticked off at the board for not backing him in this otherwise arcane tax dispute.

When you're an elected official, you can give other elected officials what-for. Stuff happens that way in politics, even around here.

Team Sutter didn't offer much of an explanation for why this closed-session action went unreported. It was left to the assessor — an unhappy guy — to report it himself.

The agreement between the county and FRHG was signed June 30, as this paper reported. Again, nobody said anything.

Maybe they were waiting for something else to happen. Maybe the moon turning blue. Or whales flying in from the Pacific. Or aliens landing on the Sutter Buttes.

It's just one of those mysterious things about the Brown Act. It gets violated all the time in California with a wink and a nod. The public's right to know gets trumped by the elected's need for secrecy.

By the numbers

If you're wondering how bad the real estate crash has been in Yuba County, just ask Assessor Dave Brown. He's got all the sad numbers.

In 2007-08, the total taxable value of Yuba County's local roll (not including the utility roll) was $5.36 billion, up nearly 12 percent from the previous year, the fourth consecutive year of double-digit percentage increases.

And then the bottom fell out, according to Brown's recent report to the Board of Supervisors.

In 2008-09, the roll fell 4.3 percent to $5.1 billion. This fiscal year, it plunged 7.5 percent to $4.74 billion.

To keep it in perspective, from 1979-80 through 2007-08, the roll increased in value every year.