Elizabeth Wilson–Record-Bee staff
CLEARLAKE OAKS — The Clearlake Oaks Community Recovery Task Force has a new supervisor to lead the task force. Sgt. Chris Chwialkowski was selected by Lake County Sheriff Rodney Mitchell for the full-time position in November. According to Mitchell, the primary objective of the Community Recovery Task Force is to connect county agencies to help “resolve problems that plague a community.”
The task force was implemented in January 2004 because county agencies found that the addresses of certain individuals causing criminal problems would match the addresses of those in violation of county building and safety codes as well as animal control violations, Mitchell said. “Sometimes we found that these same locations would match with locations wherein people on probation also resided. Rather than work as independent agencies simply forwarding copies of cases to each agency, we felt that it would work better if we took a multi-disciplinary team approach to assess what kind of problems exist and make a decision about the collective action needed to correct a problem. It has worked well for us,” Mitchell said.
For a period of 10 months beginning December 2007, the Sheriff”s Department withdrew a sergeant and deputy from the task force due to severe staffing shortages, Mitchell said. The Lake County Community Development Code Enforcement Division stepped in to manage during that time, under the leadership of Voris Brumfield, former task force coordinator.
“In general, there would be two to three joint actions per month where all the agencies would deal with a case that had multiple violations,” Brumfield said. She said during her time as task force coordinator, it was operated Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to noon.
After the Development Code Enforcement took over, Brumfield found office space at the Clearlake Oaks Fire Station. Now the office is back at its original location on the second floor of the Lucerne Visitor”s Center, Mitchell said.
“We are exploring other possibilities for the task force operation that may include space in the building that was recently acquired for our use as a north-shore division office,” Mitchell said.
Contact Elizabeth Wilson at ewilson@record-bee.com
