Three lawsuits, fresh allegations from residents and a $2.2 million reform pitch all arrive at the Board of Supervisors at once

A speaker at Tuesday’s Sonoma County Board of Supervisors meeting told the room about the day Esteban Diaz had a heart attack on the floor of a Sonoma County courtroom. An ambulance was called. The judge, Hon. Patrick M. Broderick, did not pause the proceedings. Instead, the speaker said, he directed Diaz — a Mexican immigrant who has owned his property since 2004 — into a back room with Deputy County Counsel Diana Gomez. There, Gomez told Diaz the county would take his house if he did not sign the stipulated judgment.

Diaz signed.

He is now the plaintiff in Diaz v. County of Sonoma, case 25CV0427, filed in Sonoma County Superior Court in 2025. The suit alleges intrinsic fraud, duress and undue influence.

The unlawful search, the speaker said, began when code enforcement officers entered Diaz’s property looking for marijuana. They found chili peppers. Rather than withdrawing, the speaker alleged, officers — including Code Enforcement Manager Tyra Harrington and Senior Code Enforcement Inspector Todd Hoffman — falsified evidence by submitting photos of marijuana not connected to the Diaz property.

Diaz was one of several Sonoma County residents named at Tuesday’s meeting. A second speaker addressed Supervisor Lynda Hopkins directly and named four more: John Beaver, 76, who has dementia and was placed in a homeless shelter the previous week after the county took his home; Paul Mendiboure, undergoing chemotherapy for throat cancer, whose house was taken in 2018; Michael Castagnola, who lost his home last year and recently had open-heart surgery; and a man identified only as Mr. Fife, who, the speaker said, died in 2018 after receiving a $400,000 bill from code enforcement traced to a 1945 siding violation by his parents. The same speaker said her files include hundreds of cases in which residents who paid for permits in good faith were systematically blocked from compliance and then sued. Hopkins’s own committee has just proposed a $2.2 million overhaul of the code-enforcement division they hold responsible.

Wine Country Daily has not independently confirmed every detail of the speaker’s account. But Harrington and Hoffman are also defendants in Schmitz v. Sonoma, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California’s drone-surveillance lawsuit filed in June 2025, which I covered for the Sonoma County Gazette last summer. The same defendants appear in Cupp v. County of Sonoma, a federal Monell case in the Northern District of California that survived a motion to dismiss in part last year on claims against Code Enforcement Supervisor Jesse Cablk, Hoffman and the county.

Three live cases. Many of the same Permit Sonoma names.

The Board took up Schmitz in closed session April 14, taking no reportable action and giving direction to staff. A week later, on April 21, Permit Sonoma Director Scott Orr brought to the Board’s budget workshop a $2.2 million request to restore 12 code-enforcement positions and fund the division from the general fund rather than from the fines and penalties it collects. February filings in the ACLU case suggest the parties may be nearing a settlement.

The reform pitch

Orr’s request would take over funding of Permit Sonoma’s code-enforcement division from the general fund. The division currently pays for itself out of the fines and penalties it collects — a model that gives it an institutional incentive to find more violations to fund its own staff.

The recommendation came from a board committee, Supervisors Lynda Hopkins and David Rabbitt, formed in January 2025 after residents raised concerns about enforcement practices. The same window in which the committee was constituted is the window in which the ACLU was preparing the Schmitz drone-surveillance suit it filed that June.

The ask lands in a tight budget year. Final budget hearings are in June.

How the department handled press questions

The most awkward documents in the ACLU’s case are not the surveillance images. They are the county’s internal emails about how to handle press inquiries — emails reproduced in the Schmitz complaint.

After a reporter contacted Permit Sonoma in 2022 to ask whether code enforcement used drones, Code Enforcement Supervisor Jesse Cablk wrote to Manager Tyra Harrington that the “sticky one is the drone question and how you would like that presented to the press.” Harrington replied: “I (was) talking with staff and County Counsel — we thought it best not to be specific about drone use.”

The complaint reports that since 2019, code-enforcement officers have flown drones more than 700 times and produced at least 5,600 images of houses, hot tubs, backyards and other private spaces. By 2024, nearly half the flights were targeting something other than cannabis. Between October 2020 and 2024, the county levied more than $3 million in drone-related fines, averaging $16,638 per case.

What hasn’t changed

The drone program has not been suspended. The 2023 policy is still in force. The board has not voted on Orr’s $2.2 million reform. Wine Country Daily has asked County Counsel and Permit Sonoma to comment on the settlement timeline, the April 14 closed-session direction, the reform vote schedule and the allegations made at Tuesday’s meeting. A response had not been received by publication time.

—

Roger Coryell is editor of Wine Country Daily. He previously covered Permit Sonoma’s code enforcement section for the Sonoma County Gazette.