Why no stories critical of county government?

I received the following comment from an anonymous commenter andwanted to deal with it in depth.

Does TSN have a problem with city government? This is mostly all we read about on this site. What about... [SPECIFIC ALLEGATION REMOVED]? I drove by their office several times and their garage door was open and there was [SPECIFIC ALLIGATION REMOVED]. I asked one of the employees why there was... [SPECIFIC ALLEGATION AND NAMED POSITION OF PERSON ACCUSED REMOVED] ...for personal use? Lets face it, whether we are employed in the public or private sector we all... [SPECIFIC ALLAGATION REMOVED] ...some point in time.
Anonymous

MY ANSWER:

Does TSN have a problem with city government?
Every time I write something critical of the Sac City government it is based on information I have witnessed first hand, or that has been reported to me by people that I trust enough to take a contempt charge to protect. Secondarily, it might be that someone I don't personally trust has presented hard evidence (or in the case of your comment,) given me enough specific information so that I can follow up.

Keep that in mind as we deal with your question about the county and its employees. Are there people within that entity acting as badly as people within the Sac City Government? Probably. There's way more money and far less oversight at that level of government than at the city level. But here's the deal. The people of Sac City enthusiastically watch out for examples of abuse by the government and REPORT IT TO ME so that I can publish it. Thus the seeming disparity in city government coverage.

With the exception of your anonymous comment, the very last complaint I received about county government was regarding the starting pay of a new employee. I found that the initial allegations were true, but not an example of governmental abuse. The complainant agreed with my findings, (even though they probably weren’t very happy about it,) and it was not a story.

Before THAT, the last allegation of wrongdoing by a member of the county government was via anonymous phone call by someone that didn't trust me enough to give me the name of the person they were accusing of misbehaving. Lacking evidence or even a place to start, it was a non-story. Before THAT I don't remember the exact date, but it was in 2008 and it was a similar experience where the person realized that what they were saying might really get someone in trouble and got cold feet before I could get enough information to follow up on. That's it, with the exception of my highly critical pieces regarding the way that the Vet's Memorial is being incompetently mishandled, I've just covered the full volume of TSN's complaint file regarding Sac County.

So you wonder about the volume of stories busting on city government compared to the county? It's because your comment is literally the fifth specific incident that has ever been turned into TSN about the county government in over three years and the fact that my complaint file regarding the Sac City government gets a new addition about every two weeks.

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