Community organizations in the Californian Central Valley have managed to set a precedent in terms of freedom of expression, after a demand in which the California Department of Justice (DOJ) ruled that Kern County violated their free speech rights by denying them contracts for expressing their opinions.
And on December 7, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the DOJ resolution, which states that after a two-year investigation, Kern County violated the free speech rights of a coalition of community organizations and a small business by refusing to enter into and sign contracts with them for engaging in free speech activities, specifically, for showing support for defunding certain police agencies in the context of the Black Lives Matters movement.
Reyna Olaguez, executive director of South Kern Sol, an organization in the Central Valley, recalled during an interview with Manuel Ortiz during the Peninsula 360 Radio program, in collaboration with Marcos Gutierrez of “Hecho en California,” that while the DOJ resolution is good, those who were really harmed by the lack of these contracts were the residents of Kern County themselves, especially the most vulnerable, among whom are farm and construction workers who do not speak English.
Olaguez, who is also a political scientist, said that in October 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the world, organizations, including the one she represents, agreed that, since there are several communities in Kern County that neither speak English nor Spanish, it was very important to present the local public health director with a proposal for support, in which they could bring accurate information about the SARS-CoV-2 virus to those who needed it in a language they could understand.
“We proposed to the Kern County public health director that we could help provide information to the community about what was happening with the pandemic, because it was very new and this happened in October 2020,” he said.
The proposal was very well received and they were even asked to start immediately, for which it was necessary to generate a contract between the parties.
“They told us: 'Yes, please start the work. This came as a godsend because I didn't know I could count on you to help me do this important work. The Department of Public Health couldn't do it alone.' They were super grateful that we proposed this to them. The contract was going to be for a million dollars and we were going to hire six organizations to do the work,” she said.
Olaguez pointed out that the organizations were different, as some reached out to the Afro-descendant community, another to indigenous communities, and one to people from India.
Although the whole atmosphere between the organizations was very good and they were making progress on how to cover the information and everything related, the contract still needed to be signed.
“The collaboration with all the organizations was very nice, but the contract still needed to be signed by the Kern County supervisors, and the policy here is very conservative, the supervisors sometimes don't look favorably on the organizations that try to help the community that needs it the most,” she said.
The time came for the Board of Supervisors to vote in favor of the proposal, and that's when everything fell apart.
“One of the supervisors said that he had a problem with that contract because some of the organizations had shared messages during the time of the Black Lives Matter Movement, that the police did not need so much money, so that is why they took away the contract from us, and this caught the attention of the Attorney General of the State of California and the Department of Justice, and they launched an investigation that lasted two years,” he added.
“Just last Thursday they announced that Kern County did discriminate against our constitutional rights because we do have the right to share what we feel with our voice, but they punished us because we shared something that we felt and they took away our contract that was super important,” she added.
Reyna Olaguez highlighted that, by denying the contracts, “they also denied the most vulnerable community from receiving critical education about COVID at a very critical time regarding the pandemic. It was also when everything was just happening, everything was new for everyone and the community was not receiving the necessary information about the pandemic.”
It is worth noting that Kern County has cities like Bakersfield and Taft, where many indigenous people live who do not speak English.
The Durango, Mexico native also said that, although a contract had not been signed, the organizations were asked to begin work as soon as possible, so they began training 40 people who would act as promoters who would disseminate the information.
“We started working, but after 20 days they told us that they had cancelled the contract, that we should stop all work, that we were not going to continue with the contract.”
However, he pointed out that the work was carried out months later thanks to foundations that heard what happened and decided to help them, not with the million dollars, but with 50 thousand dollars for each organization in order to achieve the objective within six months.
Following the investigation and resolution, an agreement was reached with Kern County, which will not give money to the organizations, but will have to work with them so that situations like this do not happen again.
According to the resolution issued by DOJ, the parties worked together to negotiate and agree on a comprehensive plan; judgment The stipulation provides that the county will take corrective action over the course of a minimum three-year monitoring period, which will be overseen by the Department of Justice and an outside free speech expert jointly selected by the parties.
Under the stipulated judgment, Kern County will be required, among other things, to adopt and disseminate a countywide Free Speech Policy, designate a Grievance Coordinator, develop and provide annual training to members of the Board of Supervisors and other county staff on the Free Speech Policy.
Olaguez clarified that the organizations will request the creation of an equity fund for Kern County, so that organizations can apply when it is necessary to do community outreach in different languages.
Reyna was clear: “Of the residents who died from COVID in Kern County, there were 2,267, and I believe that if we had started this campaign earlier, perhaps we would have saved some of these lives, because of all of them, 1,370 were Latino, 151 were African-American, and 1,596 were men, and that's the thing, more men died than women. I think we could have saved some lives and that's why we're happy with the results of the investigation.”
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