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John Van Doorn has announced he is running for San Diego County Supervisor in 2010. We believe he deserves strong consideration for your vote in the June 2010 primaries.

The corruption and abuse within the County of San Diego government threatens the well-being of the citizens and particularly children and parents of the county. Bill Horn, the incumbent candidate, has participated in hiding and continuing these abuses. Despite two decades of San Diego Grand Jury reports detailing how San Diego CPS has wrongly removed children from families, fabricated evidence, perjured, and acted in a malicious fashion against many parents and children, Bill Horn has not lifted a finger to correct these problems despite being a member of the County Board of Supervisors during this long era of egregious CPS misconduct.

ELECT JOHN VAN DOORN TO THE COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS IN 2010 – DISTRICT 5

I’m running again in 2010 as I continue to feel passionately about the issues I raised in 2008. Thanks to the people of District 3 for their vote of confidence in that message.

I knew that as a newcomer to the political scene, in running against a very well liked incumbent, I was likely to face resounding defeat. However, in receiving 30% of the vote in the June primary, this was to me, an affirmation that the message and issues I put forward in the campaign were very much on the hearts and minds of San Diegans.

That said, in the past year, I’ve heard from many of you about the concerns felt by many of the residents of District 5, that being, our vulnerability to wildfire, our ever dwindling supply of water, and our current supervisor’s questionable relationships with developers.

It’s time to bring an outsider into this office, one that does not have ties to big business or special interests, one who wants to make himself available to you and your concerns. As such, I am running for the office of County Supervisor of San Diego County, District 5, and I hope we have the chance to meet in the months ahead, discuss some of your concerns about where this county is headed and come June and possibly November, see to it that we the voters bring about for ourselves the leadership we deserve and can trust!

My 2010 website will be up and running before the end of February. Until then, you can click here to view my 2008 website as it looked back at the election in 2008, nothing has changed since then (other than our address and FPPC number). If you would like to contact me, you can e-mail me at [email protected].

Again, I look forward to the privilege of being considered as your next County Supervisor!

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2008 Campaign

In 2008, John Van Doorn ran for the County Board of Supervisors as a virtually unknown candidate against four-term supervisor Pam Slater-Price. Despite his newcomer status, he attained 30% of the vote.

I believe his strong showing in part came from sharing his views about how the County of San Diego is harming children and families and how he wants to stop this destruction. His personal experience with the corrupt and broken San Diego government and courts has educated him in the way the county hurts children and parents for a profit. He has seen in person the abusive conduct of County of San Diego Child Welfare Services (commonly referred to as San Diego CPS). He has been subjected to harm against his family by the broken San Diego County Superior Courts that fail to understand that children need both parents. It’s evident to him that the County of San Diego government has decided that declaring fit parents as child abusers or “bad parents” and tossing their children into foster care or sole custody are viewed as money-making opportunities. The county gets Federal Title IV payments for each child it takes from a family, each parent it labels as an abuser, and each child support case it opens up.

You and your children are but dollar signs to the County of San Diego. They care about their budget and jobs, not about your family. John Van Doorn says that he knows this well and wants to put an end to it.

Using Children To Pump Up Revenues

The County of San Diego has financial motivation to label you as a child abuser or a bad parent. That you have not abused or neglected your children or that you may have made a mistake that has CPS upset at you but did not seriously endanger any children doesn’t matter to them. The shocking truth is that San Diego CPS management predetermines the outcome of some “risk evaluations” to meet their financial goals. You can be declared a child abuser to have your children taken from you and put into foster care so that the County of San Diego can get paid by the federal government for doing it. They are likely to fight to keep your kids in foster care, even if there is no reasonable justification, as they “earn” federal Title IV-D revenues for each child in foster care.

John Van Doorn related in a conversation in January 2010 that this disgusting practice of predetermined risk evaluations was revealed to him by a CPS case worker as an explanation for why he couldn’t change a CPS report with false information and conclusions. He said his supervisor told him what the outcome would be before he even did the interviews. He explained that he could not change his report even though he knew the bruise on the child involved was from slipping in a bathtub and hitting the tub spout and that this has been verified by the interviews.

Van Doorn was alarmed and brought attention to this problem in a public meeting of the County Board of Supervisors. He explained how these practices hurt innocent parents and children who are in no danger. Instead of moving to correct the problem by ensuring CPS management stops this abusive profiteering, the CPS case worker who disclosed the abusive practices of CPS management was promptly fired.

Hiding Title IV Funding Dependencies Upon Abusing Families

CPS and the County of San Diego Board of Supervisors want to hide their very dirty secret that a large part of funding for county operations comes from abusing children and parents to get payments from the federal government. It doesn’t just involve foster care and child support, it even involves adoptions. For many years, by delaying or blocking adoptions, the county maintained its revenue stream for each child living under its “protection” in foster care. That foster care is statistically more dangerous than leaving children with their biological parents is well known but commonly ignored because putting children in foster care is more profitable and helps keep county social worker jobs secure.

When this problem became apparent to some in the federal government, rather than cracking down on the CPS family abusers, they passed a law allowing payments to county governments for each child they adopted out to make up for the revenue loss. Now adoptions are more often supported by San Diego County. It’s not because they realized that adoptions are generally better than leaving children in foster care until age 18 and then kicking them out on the streets. They are now more supportive because adoptions have become yet another revenue center for the county. Maximizing revenue involves declaring parents child abusers, taking their kids and putting them into foster care, and then moving to terminate parental rights and adopt out the children. This is the way County of San Diego Child Welfare Services (CPS) helps funds its own operations and that of other county agencies.

John Van Doorn wants to end this practice by substantial cuts in funding and employee count for the family-abusers in county government. Children who are in danger should still get help to ensure their safety, but children who are merely poor or needy or whose families are going through temporary difficulties shouldn’t be removed from their homes simply because the government can make a profit on them.

Broken Family Law and Juvenile Law Courts

This corruption spreads into the San Diego family law and juvenile courts. The judges know that they are expected to help fund county and court operations. They can do it by issuing unfair and punitive child custody and child support orders as part of the Title IV federal funding paid to the County of San Diego is for collecting and enforce child support. Taking away children, dragging out trials for years, and abusing families are tactics they can use to help do their part to fund county operations.

Encouraging the use of psychological evaluators in cases in which they are not needed is another tactic that the local courts use to pass along dollars to their friends. Van Doorn has experience with this abuse, too. Despite a fair and impartial psychological evaluation by one psychologist that pointed out the good points and flaws in both parents, the courts allowed Van Doorn’s ex-wife to force a second psychological evaluation conducted by ill-reputed Dr. Stephen Doyne. Doyne was allegedly upset at Van Doorn for not being able to pay him because his assets were frozen by the court due to the divorce. Van Doorn pointed out that his ex-wife could pay, so it appears her payments got her the evaluation she wanted. The San Diego Superior Court rubber-stamped this corruption and the county benefits from it doing so as the county is paid by the federal government to place children primarily or solely with one parent to force the other parent to pay child support.

(from Custody Evaluator’s Credentials Questioned In Lawsuit)

John Van Doorn, a Doyne client, said “You have a certain expectation that the courts have vetted out the person they are appointing.”

San Diego family law courts have allowed Stephen Doyne to act as a court-appointed psychological evaluator even though he appears to have published questionable and allegedly fraudulent credentials and failed to file state-mandated disclosure and reporting forms required of all psychological evaluators. Doyne has earned the ire of many San Diego parents for allegedly biased evaluations and unethical business practices. Some of the other section 730 psychological evaluators in the county have been critical of Doyne, expressing the opinion that Doyne is making a bad name for all psychologists involved in resolving child custody and divorce disputes in the county.

Too often the result of this type of corruption is that children are prevented from spending more or less equal time with each of their parents. The abuse of using a divorce or child custody case as a means to impede or terminate parent/child relationships is traditionally committed against fathers. But it sometimes happens to mothers, too. Whichever parent is the target, the children will suffer harm in virtually every case. Even when good evaluators spell out workable plans to keep both parents involved in the lives of their children, San Diego courts may misuse such evaluations in “winner takes all” decisions that ultimately harm the children and are extremely unfair to one of the parents.

Children need both parents. The government should get its fingers out of perverting children’s lives for its own financial gain. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with children who have adequate food, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care (which is the case with the vast majority of children) from spending equal time in each parent’s home and seeing that their parents have made different choices and have different lifestyles as a result. This would be far more beneficial to the children than yanking them away from one parent, damaging or destroying that child-parent relationship, and doing so to maximize the amount of child support to be paid and thereby maximizing the amount of Title IV funding that the County of San Diego will be paid to enforce these abuses.

New County Board of Supervisors Members Needed

The wrongs heaped upon San Diego children and parents will never stop with the current board members in place. As one of our authors wrote last year:

(from San Diego County Grand Jury Cites Further CPS Misconduct)

The failures and shortcomings in the CPS agency in the county have been brought to the attention of the Board of Supervisors repeatedly. Yet they do nothing effective to fix the problems, leaving CPS and its abusive staff free to continue to abuse the county’s children and parents.

There is no realistic doubt that the current San Diego County Board of Supervisors is substantially at fault for the abuses in the current system. Grand Jury reports have exposed the problems to them over and over again with substantial evidence of the misconduct of CPS and its sister child-abusing agencies. But little to no action is taken to correct the serious deficiencies.

The current Board of Supervisors consists of Greg Cox, Dianne Jacob, Pam Slater-Price, Ron Roberts, and Bill Horn. All five of the supervisors have been in office since 1995 or earlier, a period of time during which Grand Jury investigations have consistently shown that serious problems exist with CPS and that the agency blows off the recommendations to fix them on a routine basis.

The county supervisors have no incentive to clean up problems in the system because to do so, those problems must be discussed further. This is political risk-taking intolerable to them. They know they were in charge during this whole period of time and should have done something about the problems. Doing it now is effectively an admission that they were negligent in the past. Instead, they do all they can to bury these problems behind the scenes so that they are not politically damaged by their harmful and negligent conduct.

The county badly need new leadership to put an end to these problems and clean up the abuses and corruption.

John Van Doorn is a candidate who has stated that he intends to do exactly that. While he alone may not be enough to clean up the county, there’s no doubt in my mind that the alternative of re-electing Bill Horn will certainly lead to four more years of the same bad government.

Further Reading

San Diego County Board of Supervisors Candidate Questionnaire Responses in 2008

Men’s Legal Center Endorsement for John Van Doorn in 2008

John Van Doorn Contact Information

John Van Doorn 2008 Campaign Site

San Diego DA Bonnie Dumanis Attempts to Pervert Justice

Eileen Lasher on San Diego CPS/Family Law Court Misconduct

Stephen Doyne and San Diego Family Law Courts Under Fire

San Diego County Grand Jury Cites Further CPS Misconduct

Torture of the Wade Family by San Diego CPS

Conservatives Organize Rare Push Against Incumbent Judges

Child Welfare Urged To Tell Parents Why Kids Taken

No Term Limits for San Diego County Supervisors

Imposing Term Limits on County Supervisors

Enter the daughter: Bill Horn scrambles to explain his relationship with his chief of staff

San Diego News – More on Horn/Wonsley financial irregularities story…

Lifting the Veil: A Critical Look at the Foster Care System

Nationwide Blueprint for Title IV Reform

TITLE IV—GRANTS TO STATES FOR AID AND SERVICES TO NEEDY FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN AND FOR CHILD–WELFARE SERVICES