HomeMy WebLinkAbout5.31.22 Board Correspondence - FW_ No, Judge Trotter and Administrator Cathy Yanni are NOT arrogant and out of touch, YOU ARE. (2)
From:Paulsen, Shaina
To:BOS
Subject:Board Correspondence - FW: No, Judge Trotter and Administrator Cathy Yanni are NOT arrogant and out of
touch, YOU ARE.
Date:Tuesday, May 31, 2022 8:46:56 AM
Please see Board Correspondence below.
Shaina Paulsen
Associate Clerk of The Board
Butte County Administration
25 County Center Drive, Suite 200, Oroville, CA 95965
T: 530.552.3304 | F: 530.538.7120
From: Ring, Brian <bring@buttecounty.net>
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2022 8:43 AM
To: Paulsen, Shaina <SPaulsen@buttecounty.net>; Reaster, Kayla <kreaster@buttecounty.net>
Subject: FW: No, Judge Trotter and Administrator Cathy Yanni are NOT arrogant and out of touch,
YOU ARE.
Good morning – Can you pass this along to the Board as Board correspondence? Thank you!
Brian Ring
Assistant Chief Administrative Officer
Administration
25 County Center Drive, Oroville, CA 95965
T: 530.552.3311 | M: 530.570.7688 | F: 530.538.7120
From: Alex C <alexanderchen530@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2022 6:53 PM
To: Ring, Brian <bring@buttecounty.net>; Connelly, Bill <BConnelly@buttecounty.net>;
mwolcott@chicoer.com
Cc: Fire Victim Trust Info <info@firevictimtrust.com>; melanie.woodrow@abc.com
Subject: No, Judge Trotter and Administrator Cathy Yanni are NOT arrogant and out of touch, YOU
ARE.
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Hello to all the parties involved,
I'm writing to you guys because I read this article (https://www.chicoer.com/2022/05/28/a-
horrific-miss-by-trust-funds-trustee-hits-and-misses/) this morning and I got pissed by how
you guys have painted the Trust in the past couple of years, and who knows whether you are
inadvertently or deliberately choosing to ignore some of the facts and info about the whole
claim process as well as what the Trust and Judge Trotter have clearly explained several times
in the past.
First of all, my name is Alex, I'm one of the victims of Camp Fire and one of the claimants
that's waiting on the settlement money. And most importantly for you to note, I did my entire
claim process "pro se" without any help from legal firms or from anyone else and was
awarded with a satisfactory amount in my determination notice that meets my estimates and
expectation. I say this here so you know that I am not someone who is uninformed and
unskilled but yet opinionated and driven by your "activist" mindset. And not sure if it's worth
noting, a couple of you guys have met or heard about me before when I worked for the
County, I'm an immigrant and English is my second language and I don't even have you guys'
fancy yet useless American liberal degrees that shine on your resume but have taught you
nothing about simple fact checking and research and proper inquiry techniques.
While I don't claim that I'm a legal expert and I am certainly not an expert in claim processing,
but judging from what I've learned, read, research and seen from what you have reported, I
feel obligated to educate you on some of the simple facts that you guys just refuse to educate
yourselves on. Let's start by me answering some of the questions and claims in the letter from
the supervisors.
1. "....Currently the Fire Victim Trust has not evaluated all the claims, has only paid out a
small percentage of funds, and has amassed over $93 million in administrative costs......"
I don't know how you guys interpret the "evaluation" process, or have done any due diligence
by just reading the documents, alerts, and notices that the Trust has published (and most
importantly, UNDERSTAND them), but as the Claims Questionnaires (CQs) and their
instructions clearly instructed: the Trust can only give final Determination Notices on
COMPLETED claim questionnaires. CQs that are incomplete with required documents and
are pending additional information cannot get fully evaluated with a final amount/value.
Urging the Trust to "finish" the evaluation on incomplete CQs is like urging a court to decide
on a case that's incomplete with documents filing and not fully substantiated. I don't know
what you would expect out of that. If I were the administrator, I'd ask why it has been more
than a year past the DEADLINE and there are still CQs that are incomplete and pending
additionalinformation. Are the victims themselves and their lawyers doing their due
diligence?
And as Judge Trotter has explained before, the Trust is set up in a way that's "parallel" to the
court system to resolve the sheer amount of fire claims (that are essentially legal cases), to
speed up the claim evaluation process without each victim and their claims having to wait in
line for the MUCH SLOWER court system to determine on each case. And compared to the
complexity of a full-fledged case in a court proceeding, the CQs are designed to be VERY
EASY to fill out and are written in layman's terms for the victims to provide their information.
I'd say, the difficulty level of this CQ is easier than a small claim court case. I hereby use my
own CQ as an example: I completed and sent my revised/additional documents that support
my CQ BEFORE the deadline (2/26/2021), the Trust has begun evaluating my CQ even
before my final revision and informed me to just upload additional documents stating where
needs to be updated, and the Trust evaluated and issued my Determination Notice on
04/10/2021, was that slow? And have you been following the Trust's website about how many
CQs that have been fully determined each month? (And to the Trust, you can probably make it
clearer by adding a graph about the number of CQs determined each month, by a finer
category of some sort.)
As for the cost and Judge Trotter's $1,500/hr rate, I don't know what your understanding of
"fair pay" is, but judging by Cathy Yanni and Judge Trotter's extensive background, this
amount is not "scary" given the size, scale, and complexity of the matter that they are dealing
with and the cost involved in the legal field. The Trust's 93 millions in expenses involving
legal, technical and financial matters at this scale is a lot, but not unreasonable, and certainly
not "making themselves rich by profiting off the victims" (Come on, an attorney representing
a fire victim takes 1/3 of their total compensation as their contingency fees, why don't you
jump on that). As Judge Trotter and Cathy Yanni said, their goal is to keep the administrative
costs around 1% which is 13.5 Billion x 0.01 = 135 Million, the 93 million is well under that
number and given the speed of the CQ processing progress I assume they may meet that goal
eventually or get very close to that percentage. 1% of administrative costs for claims at this
scale is really not that much, have any of you researched on how much a typical legal
case/class action case like this would cost and how much you'd be paying to the attorneys and
law firms and consultants? And I also wanna just ask - what amount do you expect people to
get paid and what types of people do you expect the Trust to hire for the skills and knowledge
needed to process these cases which involve quite some interdisciplinary knowledge to get the
CQs determined correctly? A bunch of Library Assistants that get paid 13 dollars an hour and
calculate numbers on a paper and then type the numbers into Excel and claim that they know
how to use Excel proficiently (this is real at the library, by the way)? Your Library
department's annual budget is well over 3 million, FFS.
2. ".... How many claims have been filed by fire? .... What is the total monthly expense to
administer the trust, inclusive of all staff? .... How much have all of the attorneys received as
of now? .... Why has only $3.4 billion been distributed out of $13.5 billion? ..... How long
before the trust distributes all funds?....."
Well I can't answer all of these questions but some of them, and some of the questions are very
simple to answer and have been answered and explained before.
The Trust is not sitting on $13.5 billion CASH that's ready to spend at will. If that were the
case, things would be much simpler. The deal, brokered by your beloved liberal Governor
Gavin Newsom, consists of 50% of cash and 50% of PG&E stock that total the $13.5 billion
(6.75 billion each, in case math is difficult for any of you). The Trust has received the 6.75
billion cash portion (in installments over a period of time), but the other 6.75 billion PG&E
stock shares are not yet fully monetized due to low stock prices (thanks to Bidenflation and the
economy going downhill). The Trust has monetized millions of shares to boost the payments
from 30% - 45% earlier this year, despite the lower than expected stock price. IF, the Trust
monetizes ALL of the stock shares NOW (they had a total number of 477 million shares of
PG&E stock, but they now have less of that number due to previous sales), it will roughly
make up 477 million x $12.35 (PG&E stock price today on 05/28/2022) = 5.89 billion
dollars. In order for the Trust to realize the full amount of 6.75 billion dollars by selling the
PG&E stock shares, the PG&E stock price has to be around (essentially above) $14 (math:
6.75 billion / 477 million = 14.15). And since they have less than 477 million shares now, plus
the various costs coming out of the funds, I would expect that in order to have enough money
to fully pay to the victims, the PG&E stock price probably has to be above $15 to be safe.
That said, that's why the Trust has not fully monetized the stock shares and has not fully
dispensed the payments. Judge Trotter has clearly said previously that the Trust is roughly 2.5
billion dollars short given the low stock prices over the past couple of years, and has asked the
State for a loan of that amount to boost payments to victims. Also, due to the current claim
processing progress, there are other factors involved, here are some additional explanation for
you for a better understanding of the whole context:
- Because not all the CQs have been evaluated with a final award amount/value, the Trust does
not know for sure how much the TOTAL amount of money is needed for ALL the CQs. The
current amount awarded in the finalized Determination Notices is roughly 9 billion, which
consists of 64% of the total number of fully determined CQs, if the rest of the 17%
undetermined and 19% incomplete CQs mount more than 4.5 billion, then the 13.5 billion
dollars will not be enough. Conversely, if the remaining 17% undetermined and 19%
incomplete CQs total less than 4.5 billion (hypothetically say, 2 billions), then the Trust will
have enough money to pay to everyone (hypothetical math: 9 billion + 2 billion = 11 billion
needed for all the CQs and claimants, and 6.75 billion + 5.89 billion = 12.64 billion is what
the Trust will roughly have after monetizing the PG&E shares at its current price). Hope the
maths make sense to you all? And the Trust please correct me if I were wrong in any of these.
- These two articles will add other contexts:
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/california/newsom-refuses-comment-after-judge-
says-law-left-out-pge-fire-victims/103-426007f6-5c82-4217-b83d-43f8526bb136
https://abc7news.com/pg-e-fire-victims-victim-trust-fund-ca-wildfire-not-paid-
taxpayer/11593929/
- There has been little to no update on whether the State will fund a loan to the Trust to help
advance the payments to the victims. In case some of you don't understand how this works: the
State, which has 22 billion dollars in reserve and $97.5 billion budget surplus (which Gavin
Newsom says the surplus is available to spend for any purpose), can lend the Trust some
money to pay to the victims while the Trust hold on to the PG&E shares to wait for it to raise
in value and then sell them to pay the State back, because the State is able to wait for another
few years for the stock price to fully increase to $15+, but if the fire victims have to wait for
the uncertain stock price to reach its target value, it could be another few years without being
fully paid. So how about you activist journalists get these facts and information together and
urge all these parties to actually reach a proposal/decision on the path going forward, instead
of blaming the Trust for everything?
3. ".... It’s enough to make you wonder if the judge forgot who the real victims are here. ...."
No, Judge Trotter didn't forget who the real victims are here. I trust Judge Trotter way more
than you guys, and if you have truly done your due diligence on understanding the whole
thing, you'd know that there are a hundred other ways that people can profit off a case this
large if it's litigated in a traditional form in the court system. You guys, the uninformed or ill-
informed supervisors, the activist journalists who are eager to jump into conclusions and find
someone to blame without enough research and proper inquiry and have forgotten how to do
journalism, are the ones to blame. What you guys are doing here - reporting pieces of
information that lack explanation, consistent context and research in their entirety - is
complicating the process and wasting the Trust's time in dealing with you guys and the public
relation mess you created rather than actually focusing on processing our claims and getting us
paid.
Do I think the Trust is perfect? No. The Trust can do much better by illustrating the stats and
reports better in layman's terms, and have some dedicated public relation person who is good
at bridging the gaps between a bunch of legal professionals and the general public as if you're
explaining rocket science to kids whose average reading levels are lower than high school (I
didn't say this. When I was working for the County, we were once trained on how to put out
press releases and the then County PIO explained during the training that we shouldn't
overestimate the readers' reading level to be above middle school/high school and shouldn't
use words that are "difficult" such as "operationalize" when writing a simple press release. I
forgot which reading level they referred to but you get what I mean). And the Trust can
certainly do better in gathering all the relevant news and info and post an easy to understand
FAQ or periodic updates to better present the progress and hurdles that the Trust is facing, to
the claimants and the public. But honestly, I don't know how much difference that will
actually make if someone just extracts partial information out of the whole picture or takes
things out of its full context to make an eye-catching subject for a news article.
--
Thank you,
Alex Chen