Government employees and elected officials are public servants entrusted with authority that can directly affect people's lives, property, businesses, permits, licenses, and livelihoods.

That authority must come with accountability.

I am calling on the Lake County Board of Supervisors to adopt a Government Accountability Policy establishing clear standards for how County employees, departments, and elected officials exercise their authority and interact with the public.

My own experience showed me why this is necessary.

Through a public-records request, I obtained internal government communications concerning actions involving my business. Those records allowed me to see government discussions and interactions that I otherwise may never have known occurred.

I have also dealt with a process where the Sheriff's Office can determine that someone has a criminal-background “disqualifying factor” affecting their participation in a regulated industry, while refusing to identify that specific factor to the person in writing.

This petition is asking Lake County to create accountability for its own government.

When County authority is exercised against a member of the public, there should be a clear record of what government did, who made or authorized the decision, what authority supported it, and what process exists to question, review, or correct that action.

When a County employee or department makes a mistake, the correction should not end with an apology. There should be a process for documenting significant errors, determining how they occurred, correcting their consequences when possible, and preventing the same government failure from happening to someone else.

When members of the public raise legitimate complaints about government conduct, those complaints should not simply disappear back into the same department being questioned. There should be a meaningful and traceable accountability process.

And when elected officials oversee County departments, oversight should mean more than responding after something has already gone wrong. They should have enough information to identify repeated problems, questionable practices, procedural failures, and patterns in how the public is being treated.

What the Accountability Policy should require

The policy should establish standards requiring significant government actions and interactions to be documented, explainable, reviewable, and accountable. It should create procedures for reviewing complaints about official conduct, documenting significant government errors and corrective actions, identifying who has decision-making authority, providing written reasons for consequential government decisions, and regularly reporting patterns to the Board of Supervisors and the public while protecting information that is legally confidential.

The purpose is not to prevent government employees from doing their jobs. It is to make sure government is accountable for how those jobs are performed.

The public should not have to file public-records requests, search through internal emails, repeatedly appear before elected officials, or spend months trying to reconstruct what their government did and why.

Transparency lets us see government.

Accountability requires government to answer for what it does.

That is the change this petition is asking Lake County to make.

Sign this petition if you believe every person who interacts with Lake County government deserves a government that documents its actions, explains its decisions, corrects its mistakes, and holds its employees, departments, and elected officials accountable for the public authority entrusted to them.