Editor's note: This is the first story in a Desert Sun series on “prosecution fees” in the Coachella Valley. PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR | PART FIVE



COACHELLA, Calif. – When Cesar Garcia pulled the letter out of his mailbox, he immediately recognized the name of the law firm on the envelope – Silver & Wright. Eighteen months ago, they had dragged him to court, called him a criminal, cost him thousands of dollars and made his life hell. What did they want now?

Garcia opened the letter, prepared for the worst, but was still shocked by what he found inside.

The law firm had sent him a bill for $26,000.

When he protested, the price climbed to $31,000.

“I thought it was a mistake,” Garcia said. “But then they told me no. They said I had to pay.”

Garcia, 41, a longtime desert resident, had been snared by the lowest level of the eastern Coachella Valley's criminal justice system, where homeowners who commit some of the smallest crimes can be billed for the cost of their own prosecution. Garcia got in trouble with Coachella City Hall in 2015 after a city code inspector discovered he had expanded his living room, making space to run a small day care center, without first getting building permits. Silver & Wright, a law firm contracted as Coachella's city prosecutor, took the building permit case to criminal court, filing 29 misdemeanor charges. Garcia signed a plea agreement, brought his house up to code, paid a $900 fine to the court and moved on with his life. But then, this April, Silver & Wright mailed Garcia that hefty bill for the cost of his case, saying if he didn’t pay up a lien would be put on his property and the city could potentially sell the house from under his feet.

Garcia’s case may sound strange, but in the low-income cities of the eastern Coachella Valley, it is not. Empowered by the city councils in Coachella and Indio, the law firm Silver & Wright has repeatedly filed criminal charges against residents and businesses for public nuisance crimes – like overgrown weeds, a junk-filled yard or selling popsicles without a business license – then billed them thousands of dollars to recoup expenses. Coachella leaders said this week they will reconsider the criminal prosecutions strategy, but the change only came after defense attorneys challenged the city in court, saying the privatized prosecutors are forcing exorbitant costs on unsuspecting residents.

“Fixing his house was just a side effect. Collecting this money was always their goal,” said attorney Shaun Sullivan, who represents Garcia in a lawsuit seeking to erase his $31,000 bill from Silver & Wright.

“They saw a potential payday and jumped at it," Sullivan added. "When it’s this easy, and this lucrative, they are going to look for ways and opportunities to do this as often as possible.”

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Through an extensive review of public records, The Desert Sun has identified 18 cases in which Indio and Coachella charged defendants more than $122,000 in “prosecution fees” since the cities hired Silver & Wright as prosecutors a few years ago. With the addition of code enforcement fees, administration fees, abatement fees, litigation fees and appeal fees, the total price tag rises to more than $200,000.

In most of those cases, the disparity between the crime and the cost is staggering. Defendants who faced no jail time and were fined only a few hundred dollars ended up paying five or ten times that much to prosecutors who attended a couple of court hearings.

For example, a Coachella family with a busted garage door and an overgrown yard filled with trash and junk was billed $18,500.

An Indio man who sold parking on his land without a business license was billed $3,200.

And an Indio woman who strung a Halloween decoration across the street in front of her home – then pleaded guilty to a crime no more serious than a speeding ticket at her first court appearance – was billed $2,700.

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In all of these cases, the bills got larger when the defendants dared to object. All three of the above residents appealed their bills to either Indio or Coachella City Hall, then Silver & Wright added thousands more to their debt for the cost of defending the appeal.

The family’s junky yard bill rose from $18,500 to $25,200.

The parking sales bill rose from $3,200 to $5,100.

The Halloween decoration bill rose from $2,700 to $4,200.

The last bill was eventually tossed out by an administrative hearing officer, who said neither the woman nor her landlord had to pay Silver & Wright. But public documents still show the law firm argued it was entitled to thousands of dollars for a court case where prosecutors attended a single court hearing that lasted a few minutes at most.

Mark Scott, Indio’s interim city manager, said the Halloween decoration case was an outlier for the city, which mostly prosecutes cases involving corporate properties with more serious violations. Still, Scott questioned why the resident, who ignored the city’s rules and warnings, should not be responsible for the cost of the case against her.

“I certainly don’t want to suggest that what this woman did is a $6,000 violation, because it isn’t,” Scott said. “It was the court costs that ran up the high bill. And the question is, why is there an obligation of everyone else in the city to pay these court costs when she knew from the beginning that she did the violations?”

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Of the 18 cases identified by The Desert Sun, all exist in the little known arena of nuisance property abatement, an unglamorous corner of city hall that handles violations of law that are too small or inconsequential to involve the county’s real prosecutors, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. The vast majority of these cases are resolved without a single court hearing, but if a property owner refuses to cooperate, and all other remedies fail, then the city gets to choose which kind of court case it wants – civil or criminal.

Most cities go to civil court. City attorneys file a legal petition asking a judge to order the resident or business to get in line with city code. Generally, the defendants fix the problem. If they don't, the judge can issue fines or hold them in contempt. City Hall can still recover attorneys fees in civil cases, but the amount must be approved by the judge, who can deny any bill that seems exorbitant.

Rancho Mirage City Attorney Steve Quintanilla, who worked as Coachella city attorney in the early 2000s, said he has spent years encouraging cities to take this civil route, which is quicker and cheaper for everyone involved. Often, the owners of nuisance properties are already poor, he said, so the cost of a criminal case makes the root problem worse.

“The object of every nuisance abatement case should be cleaning up the property, not punishing the property owner monetarily,” Quintanilla said. “We don’t pursue these cases in criminal court because not only does it cost more money for the city, it costs more for other taxpayers too, because in a lot of cases the property owners have to be provided with a public defender.”

According to a review of thousands of local court filings, Indio and Coachella are the only cities in the Coachella Valley that make a regular practice of taking nuisance property owners down the less-traveled route to criminal court. They are also the only desert cities who outsource their prosecutor’s duties to Silver & Wright, a firm which boasts on its website that it specializes in code enforcement and “cost recovery.”

Indio contracted Silver & Wright in 2014, then Coachella followed in 2015. Within a year of hiring the firm, both city councils created new nuisance property ordinances empowering the cities to seek prosecution fees without needing approval from a judge. Then Silver & Wright started taking east valley property owners to criminal court.

Each case is different, but they all follow the same path.

First, one of the city code enforcement officers will discover a property that is violating the municipal code in some way, often while investigating a complaint. The property owner is given at least one warning or citation, but likely more, and if the violation isn't resolved, a city prosecutor files criminal charges at the Indio courthouse. The owners then go to court – often without a lawyer because they believe the stakes are low – and plead guilty to a few misdemeanors or infractions. Generally, the judge orders the owners to pay a fine or complete a short probation term, then the criminal case ends.

A few months later, the property owner receives a bill from Silver & Wright, citing the little-known city ordinances that were created after the law firm was hired. Property owners have 15 days to appeal or 45 days to write a cashier’s check to Silver & Wright and mail it to their offices in Irvine or Ontario.

If the bill isn’t paid in full, a lien may be levied against the property.

After three years, the tax collector can sell off the property to pay off the debt.

“That’s not fair,” said Juan Alvarado, a disabled Coachella homeowner who was prosecuted for converting his garage into a studio apartment without getting a building permit, then was billed $7,800 for the total cost of the case against him.

Alvarado, who speaks limited English, pleaded guilty to seven infractions – the lowest level of criminal offense – in February, but did not realize he would later be billed by prosecutors. When the bill arrived in April, he didn’t understand it, so he left it unpaid. Last week, after a reporter explained what was at stake, Alvarado realized his home was in jeopardy and expressed interest in hiring a lawyer.

“It shouldn’t be this way,” Alvarado said, “especially for people who are in bad health.”

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Silver & Wright is a state leader in nuisance crime legal work. In 2015, when Los Angeles needed help with more than 600 vacant properties, Silver & Wright was one of two law firms the city turned to. More recently, the firm has litigated nuisance properties – although not always in criminal court – in Santa Barbara, Santa Ana, Chino, Banning, Lake Elsinore and other cities. One of their newest customers is the Orange County city of San Clemente, which contracted Silver & Wright earlier this year with the specific goal of “100% cost recovery” in all prosecutions, according to city documents.

Finally, one of the law firm partners, Matthew Silver, is a vice president of the California Association of Code Enforcement Officers, an organization that represents the front line of nuisance abatement cases.

Silver & Wright would not comment for this story. The firm's second partner, Curtis Wright, said he couldn't discuss the prosecutions in either Indio or Coachella due to “attorney-client privilege,” despite the fact that this privilege does not apply to prosecutors because they work for the general public. After a court hearing on Monday, another Silver & Wright prosecutor, James McKinnon, said “no comment” as soon as a reporter introduced himself, then briskly walked to his car in silence, ignoring all questions.

Although their prosecutors wouldn’t talk, Indio and Coachella officials generally defended the criminal prosecutions, stressing that they were filed against only the least cooperative property owners and ultimately represented just a minuscule sliver of the thousands of nuisance abatement cases.

Coachella officials, however, also admitted they would rethink their methods after being confronted with the full impact on property owners.

Luis Lopez, the city hall official who oversees Coachella’s code enforcement division, said Monday the city council told staff to be “more careful” when choosing cases to forward to Silver & Wright and to keep the council "better informed of cases before we go into the courtroom." That direction came, at least in part, because of questions posed by The Desert Sun while reporting this story.

As an example of a case that should've been handled differently, Lopez cited the Coachella home owner with the junk-filled yard who had been billed $25,200. In hindsight, the property was “not a great candidate for prosecution” because its violations “did not represent an imminent threat to the public health and safety," Lopez said.

Coachella Mayor Steve Hernandez said the city council was now “wary” of prosecuting nuisance properties in criminal court, but insisted that irresponsible homeowners would still need to be held responsible – legally and financially – at some point.

“While the tactics may change, and we have to find out if there is a better way, the endgame we still want is a clean community,” Hernandez said. “Frankly, we wouldn’t be in this situation if these property owners actually abated their properties and cleaned them.”

Indio City Hall presented a firmer defense of criminal prosecutions, insisting they were more effective and no more expensive than tackling nuisance property cases in civil court.

Scott, the interim city manager, who has run cities for nearly three decades, said that when a city is dealing with an uncooperative property owner, the route through criminal court can be faster and cheaper – the opposite of what The Desert Sun was told by four attorneys while researching this story.

“With all due respect, that sounds like an argument from a defense attorney – not reality,” Scott said. “The civil process is not always faster, and the criminal way is not a heavy handed process or unusual.”

Scott also dismissed criticism that prosecution fees were disproportionate to the crimes that were being prosecuted, insisting that proportion was never the point. In each case, Silver & Lake was intending to recover the public’s cost, which has far more to do with the length of the court case than the seriousness of the underlying crime, Scott said.

In the past, Indio taxpayers have had to swallow this expense, said Lupe Ramos, a city councilwoman who said the criminal prosecutions strategy is working but could be “fine tuned.” Before hiring the law firm, Ramos said, Indio struggled to resolve stubborn cases and the city was rarely repaid for whatever money it had spent in the process.

“For the first 85 years of our history, we were doing it on our own, but we found people weren’t taking the fines seriously,” Ramos said. “We weren’t getting anywhere, so we decided to take a more aggressive approach.”

Indio has also applied that aggressive approach with businesses. Unlike Coachella, who filed all of its criminal prosecutions against residential homeowners, more than half of the cases filed by Indio were against corporate land owners or businesses.

For example, last April Indio prosecuted Fiesta Latina, a family-owned furniture store in the city’s struggling downtown district, because it didn’t have a permit for a sign on the roof. Then the store was billed $3,327 by Silver & Wright.

A year before that, Indio filed criminal charges against SHJR, a company that owns the Shadow Hills Plaza along Avenue 42, because the shopping center had overgrown weeds, unsecured dumpsters, two broken windows and a “sun-damaged address number.” The company pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors, then was billed for $18,600. When they appealed, the bill rose to $25,000.

SHJR Owner Joseph Ramani, who bought the shopping center three years ago, said the entire case was the result of a city inspector who was nitpicking to make a prosecution out of nearly nothing.

The grass was overgrown just by two inches, Ramani said. The trash was the result of trespassers who were dumping illegally at the plaza, Ramani said. The broken windows were being replaced with special-ordered tempered glass. Ramani tried to explain to the code enforcement officer, he said, but she didn't want to listen.

“She was picking on me left and right, right and left, for unbelievable issues,” he said. “The whole thing was a game.”

In the resulting case, SHJR was defended by Leonard Cravens, an Indio attorney who originally represented Cesar Garcia, the Coachella resident from the beginning of this story who was prosecuted for not getting building permits. Cravens said neither of his clients knew they would be charged prosecution fees when they took a plea deal. Their bills from Silver & Wright weren’t sent until more than six months later, after the window to withdraw the pleas had ended.

In both cases, Silver & Wright billed the defendants more than six times what they were charged by Cravens, their actual lawyer.

“It’s absolutely a scam – you can quote me on that,” Cravens said. “They pick the most expensive way to get the job done, in criminal court, because it’s all about the money.”

In September, Cravens signed a sworn statement in county court, calling the prosecution fees charged by city prosecutors “unreasonable,” “unconscionable” and intended “only to enrich their own pockets.”

The statement is one of the foundational documents in the lawsuit filed by Garcia, which had a brief court hearing on Monday but is not expected to see any arguments until next year. Garcia’s new lawyer, Sullivan, said the suit is predicated on the belief that, if Coachella prosecutors had asked for $31,000 in attorneys fees during Garcia's original case, any judge would have "laughed them out of court."

But Sullivan admits the lawsuit is a gamble. If it fails, Silver & Wright will most likely send Garcia yet another bill.

“We could have just quit,” Sullivan said. “What if we go to court and ask a judge to stop this, but they just keep running the meter? Now we’ve dug ourselves a deeper hole.”

“That is still a concern, but we’ve decided to go with our gut and fight this thing.”

Investigative reporter Brett Kelman can be reached at 760 778 4642 or by email at brett.kelman@desertsun.com. You can follow him on Twitter @tdsBrettKelman.