No matter how you feel about marijuana grow houses, you're likely helping to finance one.
Don't think so? Take the case of Greg Willard and Gayden Rosales, busted in February for running a grow operation in the garage of a house in the 700 block of Arcata's Fickle Hill Road.
When officers pulled Pacific Gas and Electric Co. records for the property, they found that the home used 4,676 kilowatt hours of electricity in the month of December 2010 -- an amount roughly 10 times the average monthly consumption of a Humboldt County household -- running up a bill of almost $1,500. But Rosales and Willard paid only a fraction of that -- $535 -- after receiving an almost 70 percent discount through PG&E's CARE program, which offers subsidized rates to low-income households....
But, to the knowledge of Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos, no one locally has been prosecuted for such an offense.
”With law enforcement, it's a resource issue, ultimately,” Gallegos said. “Putting together a fraud case is a lot more time consuming and takes more resources than a dope case. ... It's not because people don't care or aren't outraged; it's a resource issue.”
In order to prove that someone made false statements to PG&E, Gallegos said, his office would have to reconstruct the person's finances at the time they filled out the CARE program application -- not an easy task.
”It would take a lot of investigation,” Hansen said. “We do a lot of triage from case to case to case, so we've never gone after that aspect of it. It would be very time consuming.”
No discussion about POT is complete without acknowledging Gallegos' role in making criminal activity defacto legal.
Not just grow houses and things like this, pretending to be poor to get free power, but the outright stripping of land in complete violation of any environmental laws or sensibilities - and that at the same time Gallegos and his pals claim environmental high ground.
Right now dope growers have the best of both worlds - a complicit DA ensures they are free to operate with impunity, and defeating the ballot measure to legalize the stuff keeps the prices high and keeps them rolling in the dough. Tax-free. Fee-free. Regulation-free.
They're cheating more than just their fellow PG&E customers.
They're cheating the state out of taxes owed on six-figure incomes. They're cheating counties out of business license fees and property tax assessments, they're cheating employees out of Social Security contributions. Just for starters.
#Occupythat.
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