Hard Truths: NEW RELEASE: Perjury, Election Fraud, and Campaign Finance Crimes (the Oxnard Special)

Hard Truths is a newsletter about national, state, and local issues, with (sometimes sassy, other times serious) personal updates from the author – Heather Schmidt. Heather is the owner of Heather Schmidt Consulting Services, Executive Director of VC Voter Edge, and a busy Mom to three.

This isn’t one of our normal newsletters, rather a special release that my team and I have been working on for months (nine, to be exact). Like a labor of love, this new Policy Brief turned out to be something so daunting and unexpected… well, none of us were prepared. What set out to answer some simple questions revealed to us so many credible concerns within our case study – which I took the liberty of choosing, as many who worked with me on this project also reside in Ventura County…

That case study? …on my current home town of Oxnard, California.

For those of you that are not familiar with Oxnard, in 2010 the FBI and Ventura County District Attorney engaged in a joint raid of City Hall over numerous allegations of corruption. The raids resulted in over 100,000 documents taken as evidence, but poor record keeping rendered the case un-prosecutable.

At the beginning of this year, we decided to work on a project on the issue of political corruption, to find simple steps that could potentially create big movements towards less corrupt local governments. Oxnard seemed like the perfect example to investigate as a case study: has Oxnard made those types of meaningful changes since 2010?

The City has certainly come a long way since those dark days, but a new darkness remains, or rather has formed, above City Hall. In truth, it threatens the entire organization, and many questions must urgently be answered by public officials before public trust is lost again. While evaluating the City’s changes and public corruption perceptions, we were simply blown away by some of the problems that persist, and it helped to articulate how some simple changes or proactive measures would have gone (or can still go!) a long way to prevent political corruption.

You may read our paper in full below.

Or, please join me over Zoom or YouTube LIVE at 6:30 PM (PST) on Wednesday, October 15th, where our findings while creating this Policy Brief will be discussed along with a historical look at the politics and problems in the region.

Thanks for reading!