Kern County’s 2020 free speech violations trigger new safeguards. Will they work?

Three years ago, a string of Facebook posts spelled doom for a Kern County plan to curb COVID-19’s path through vulnerable communities.

The virus had already wreaked havoc in the conservative, agricultural county by October 2020, when the Kern County Public Health Department struck what would be a nearly $1.5 million deal with local organizations and an associated small business to get crucial information about COVID-19 to hard-hit ZIP codes and vulnerable groups.

The coalition, organized through Building Healthy Communities Kern, would preemptively begin hiring canvassers and creating campaigns targeted to reach those they served, especially immigrant, non-English speaking and farmworker communities the county couldn’t effectively reach alone. Getting the contracts approved by the Kern County Board of Supervisors was expected to come later — starting the urgent, life-saving work as quickly as possible was paramount. 

But the county supervisors torpedoed that plan. At their Oct. 20, 2020 meeting, four of the five supervisors said the political activity of Building Healthy Communities Kern and Adelante Strategies disqualified them from receiving a county contract — citing social media posts coalition members made amid international protests over the murder of George Floyd.

One Building Healthy Communities’ post on June 26 read “Defund police in schools! Money for resources, nurses and counselors!” Another post on June 11 read: “The Bakersfield City’s budget should reflect the communities values. This means to #defundthepolice by cutting the police departments (budget).”

Supervisor Jack Scrivner, representing the county’s southeastern smattering of high desert communities and mountain towns, said the posts represented a “radical political agenda.”.

“This is Kern County,” Scrivner said. “It’s not Seattle. This is where we support law enforcement.”

The move caught the attention of the state Justice Department, which opened an investigation into whether the county had violated the coalition’s free speech rights. This month, state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that the department and the county had reached an agreement, pending a court sign-off, that would not fine Kern County but would require it to change some of its practices. A Kern County Superior Court judge has since signed off on the judgment.

The county has agreed to:

• develop and distribute a free speech policy
• designate a coordinator who will specifically take complaints about violations of the free speech policy
• develop training for all county officials and staff about free speech rights.

Although the coalition of organizations – which includes Lideres Campesinas, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, All of Us or None, Jakara Movement and Centro de Unidad Popular Benito Juarez – held a triumphant press conference Dec. 5 to praise the agreement, they claimed the county’s 2020 choices left county residents vulnerable. 

“We hope with this judgment that things will change from Kern County,” said Dolores Huerta, a  United Farm Workers co-founder who also founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield with her daughter, Camila Chavez. “We know that with the denial we had a big setback. We could have saved lives.”

‘Personal opinion’ or public health

The county supervisors did approve one contract with the Latino Advisory task force led by the Kern Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Then-board chair Leticia Perez – also the only woman and person of color on the board – was the only supervisor in favor of continuing with the other partnerships.

“There are very few entities in the state of California or this country who can effectively communicate with a group of people picking your food and getting it in the stream of Kern County’s economic well-being,” said Perez. “It is just so astonishing to me that we’re still having this debate.”

She also implied the other supervisors were engaging in politically fueled retribution, demanding supervisors come up with a rubric by which to judge the political activities of all future contracting groups if they chose not to fill the contracts.

“I think it would be fair to understand which friends are getting money and which enemies are not,” Perez said. 

The judgment comes at a time when local government agencies are increasingly accused of politicizing public policy decisions involving everything from public health to education.

In California, where both Gov. Gavin Newsom and elected Attorney General Bonta are Democrats, the governor’s office and the Justice Department are increasingly intervening – or at least weighing in – with their own opinions of how local school boards and government agencies handle these issues.

“As Attorney General, I am committed to enforcing Californians’ rights to free speech,” said Bonta said in a December press release about the case. “The California Constitution guarantees the right of every person to have the liberty to speak, the ability to assemble freely, and the right to petition government.”

Kern County spokesperson Ally Soper said the county would not be commenting beyond the press release issued Dec. 5, the same day as the attorney general’s announcement.

The release emphasized that the county wasn’t agreeing to any fines, and that the Justice Department also didn’t find a “pattern or practice of free-speech rights violations” beyond the two contracts that prompted the complaint. The county said it turned over 12 million pages of documents to state investigators during the investigation.

“Upon further review by the Board of Supervisors, it was identified that this work could be effectively performed internally by County staff without engaging outside contractors,” the release said. “Kern County is proud of its service to residents throughout the Covid-19 pandemic…”

Dealing with the consequences – and planning for a new future

The next few months after that 2020 meeting, COVID-19 positivity rates in Kern County rose again. Deaths followed.

At least 2,667 people died from COVID-19 in Kern County, and Olaguez and Chavez said many came from the communities they served. Kern eventually became one of the counties hardest-hit by the pandemic, prompting Gov. Newsom to increase planned vaccine allocations to many Valley communities in February 2021. Even so, coalition leaders compared the success of their vaccine clinics – after they received alternative funding – to the county’s other vaccination clinics and outreach choices. The county’s vaccine clinic at Cal State, Bakersfield, for example, was so infamously empty that young people still on the Los Angeles County waiting lists made the long drive over the mountains to snag shots in droves.

A Bakersfield Californian analysis found that the smaller, rural communities around Bakersfield were particularly ravaged by the virus in 2020. The impoverished, majority-Latino towns and areas of the county appeared to suffer the most, with high case numbers and high-profile outbreaks in the farmworker towns of Arvin and Wasco.

‘I wonder how many lives could have been saved if the county had not acted based on personal opinion.” said Nataly Santamaria who worked with another coalition organization Vision y Compromiso.

Gladys Flores from Centro de Unidad Popular Benito Juarez in Bakersfield held back tears when she spoke during the coalition’s press conference about the judgment. Her group works with indigenous farmworkers who primarily speak dialects of Mixteco, Zapotec and Triqui – and often don’t speak or speak English. She doubted the county’s ability to adequately reach these groups. 

Despite the lingering anger and betrayal still evident when Kern County nonprofit leaders discuss the events of October 2020, the same coalition had successfully partnered with county officials for outreach around the 2020 Census and other efforts.

“Our goal is to advance health and racial equity for everyone that lives in Kern County,” said Reyna Olaguez, now the executive director of Building Healthy Communities Kern. “I believe that’s the same goal the county has, so I hope to work with them to implement some great programs together.”