What I have written about this, as I went.

OTHER BLDGS. ON LOT: 3

Somebody at the Nevada County building department wrote that on a permit for the main house on my family’s land in November 1962, the same year the county first had a building department to write it in. Three other buildings. Already standing. Counted, in the county’s own hand. A year before that, the assessor had walked the same parcel and written down what stood on it.

The county knew what was here. It wrote it down.

And the case against me proceeds as if none of that exists.

The case is CC25-0261. The parcel is APN 036-190-010. Someone filed a complaint, the county opened a file, and the burden of proving those buildings legal, decades after they went up, landed on me. Not on the department whose own records counted them. Not on the complainant, who paid nothing, risked nothing, and may never be named. On me. Which is a hell of a deal if you can get it.

None of this is really about my parcel.

I did not hire a land use attorney. Not because I weighed it and chose the scrappy road. Because there was no money. None for the lawyer, none for the drawings and permits the county wants, none for the fight.

People assume there is always a version where you write a check to somebody with a Sacramento office and it ends quietly, the file stamped closed and you a little poorer. That road is real. It just has a price at the gate, and I could not pay to stand on it. What was left was the letter, and no money to answer it.

Code enforcement doesn’t have to be right. It has to be more patient than your money lasts.

I have been broke and up against a government before. In 2006 I went to federal prison for refusing to give a grand jury my video footage. I stayed 226 days, longer than any journalist in this country had been jailed for protecting material. I know what that arithmetic feels like from the inside. Nobody has to beat you. They only have to outlast you, and they are built to.

When you cannot buy a defense, one thing is still free: the California Public Records Act. It does not ask what is in your checking account. So I filed, and filed, and read what came back.

The 1961 record of what was already on this land. That 1962 permit. A 1994 permit. A 1995 planning staff report. And more than twenty times, in writing, the answer that the record I asked for does not exist. The county’s account of what it can no longer produce is its own kind of document.

None of this is clever lawyering. It is what any competent defense does: gather the record, set the government’s own words side by side, and let the contradiction sit there. The only unusual part is that I did it myself, because the alternative was folding.

Then I published, which turned me from a case number into an adversary in front of the same people who decide the case. I did it anyway. Going public is the only pressure I can afford. My file will resolve however it resolves.

Here is what actually decides these cases, and it is in no code book. Every complaint the county opens is a test of whether an owner can absorb an unbudgeted legal bill on somebody else’s schedule. That is a wealth test. No one in the building department would ever call it that, but it outweighs everything in the code.

I have read the county’s files on other parcels. Some owners got a year, even three, to sort things out. Other complaints closed as unfounded in a matter of days.

I did not pass that test. I could not pay the toll. The only reason there is a column here instead of one more quiet surrender is that I refused to stop filing. Take away the records act or the stubbornness and I am the silence too.

And most people are, not just the broke ones. Plenty of people who could put up a fight don’t, because the fight is the expensive part. It eats your evenings, your weekends, your attention, for months, against an office that does this full time and is in no hurry. So they pay to make it go away. They pull the permit, tear it out, write the check, or sell and go somewhere with cheaper problems.

Being right was on the table. It just cost more than they could spare.

Their silence gets read back later as proof the county was right all along. That is not a record of compliance. It is a record of who could afford to argue.

So here is what I am asking, and none of it costs a dime.

If your family owns property in this county, file one public records request about it now, before any letter arrives. Ask what the department has on file about your buildings, and from what year. Do it while it is cheap and calm instead of expensive and urgent.

If a letter has already come, or one came to someone you know, tell me. One parcel is an anecdote. Fifty is a pattern. A pattern is what a newspaper can investigate and a Board of Supervisors has to answer for. Comparing notes is the one thing this process is built to keep us from doing.

The fix is not complicated. Before this county opens a file and orders an owner to prove a building legal, it should have to search its own records and disclose what it already knows about that land. It counted the buildings once.

They wrote it down. Make them read it back.

In the fall of 2025, a young prosecutor in the Nevada County District Attorney’s office filed a brief with citations that were not there.

They looked real. They had the shape of law, the case names, the confident parentheticals. But the quotations appeared in no opinion, one ruling was attributed to a court that never issued it, and a passage of the state constitution had been read to say something it does not say. Over roughly two months, filings in four separate felony cases carried the same kind of invented authority. The prosecutor was barely a year out of law school; it was her first job. She had used a generative AI tool to help write and check the work, and by her own later sworn account she did not know such tools can fabricate citations out of nothing. She said she was pushed to use AI with no policy and no training, and that when she tried to report and apologize for the errors, she was told not to.

The defense caught what the office had not. The county public defender, working with attorneys from a nonprofit civil-rights group, found the fabrications and asked the courts to do something about them. The matter climbed. The California Supreme Court stepped in at the start of 2026, and this August a state appeals court appointed a judge to investigate what happened and whether the District Attorney should be sanctioned, according to CalMatters and the American Bar Association Journal. More than twenty law and technology scholars filed a brief warning that this kind of error can put innocent people in prison. Nothing has been finalized; the investigation is ongoing. What is already settled is the rarity. Plenty of lawyers have been caught filing AI inventions. A prosecutor’s office doing it, in cases about people’s freedom, is among the only known instances in the country.

It was not a freak week in one small county. A public database maintained by a legal researcher now counts more than sixteen hundred cases worldwide in which someone filed AI-generated falsehoods in court, well over a hundred of them in California. Last September a California appeals court issued the state’s first published opinion on the problem and fined a lawyer ten thousand dollars after finding that twenty-one of the twenty-three quotations in his brief were fabricated. The California State Bar had already warned, back in 2023, that a lawyer’s duties of competence and candor apply to AI like anything else. The tool writes fluently and with total confidence whether or not it is telling the truth, and busy people, trusting the fluency, sign their names beneath it.

Around the same time all of this was surfacing, the same county opened a case against a man who also could not afford a lawyer.

The parcel sits on eleven acres outside Nevada City. In November 2025 the county opened case CC25-0261 after a complaint, sent an officer to walk the property, and put three old farm buildings on notice as unpermitted structures. The citation that eventually followed carried a $390 fine and a demand to permit or demolish. Josh Wolf, who holds the master lease on the property, had no money for a land-use attorney, no money for the drawings and permits the county wanted, no money for the fight. What he had was the same thing the prosecutor’s office had reached for. He reached for it too.

He read what it wrote.

That is the whole of the difference, and it is not small. Wolf used artificial intelligence the way the office was supposed to and did not: as an instrument held under discipline, its every output checked against a real record before it went anywhere. He used it to file public-records requests, round after round, and to lay the county’s own answers side by side. More than twenty times, in writing, the county told him the record he asked for did not exist. There was no written policy for deciding whether a building predates the permit requirement. There were no grandfathering provisions on file. There was no certificate of occupancy for any structure on the property, including the main house nobody questions. The photographs the case was built on had, by the county’s own admission, been lost, with no backup and no preservation hold.

Wolf knows the arithmetic of being outlasted. In 2006 he spent 226 days in federal prison for refusing to hand a grand jury his video footage, longer than any journalist in the country had been jailed for protecting material. “Nobody has to beat you,” he has written of fights like this one. “They only have to outlast you, and they are built to.” His plainest line about code enforcement is not about buildings at all. “It doesn’t have to be right,” he has said. “It has to be more patient than your money lasts.” Every complaint the county opens, in his telling, is a quiet test of whether the owner can absorb an unbudgeted legal bill on someone else’s schedule. A wealth test, he calls it, that no one in the building department would ever name but that outweighs everything in the code.

Set the two stories next to each other and the shape is hard to miss. One is a government office, with lawyers and a budget and a sworn duty of candor, that used a powerful tool carelessly and now answers to a judge. The other is a man with none of those things who used the same tool carefully, and used it to hold that office to its own record. The machine did not choose between them. It would have written just as fluently for either. The people chose, and what they chose was whether to read the thing before they trusted it.

There is a temptation to make the junior prosecutor the villain of the first story. She is not. A junior lawyer handed a confident machine and no instructions is closer to a warning than a scandal, and she is, in her way, the same figure as the homeowner: a person given a tool more powerful than the guidance that came with it. That is the part worth sitting with. The failure was not that a person used AI. It was that an institution deployed real power without the discipline to match it, and left everyone inside and outside its walls to sort out the consequences alone.

This is where the small county case opens onto a larger one. Artificial intelligence is being sold, with some justice, as the great equalizer for the millions of Americans who walk into civil court every year without a lawyer and lose at staggering rates. A tool that can explain a statute, find the right form, and draft a coherent argument in seconds is exactly what those people have never been able to buy. The scholarship is genuinely split on where it leads. The same tool that could finally close the justice gap could just as easily widen it, because the firms and agencies get the capable systems and the unrepresented get a free chatbot and a warning label.

And the capable systems are not drifting toward everyone. They are concentrating. The most powerful models, the largest computing clusters, and the researchers who build them are gathering inside a handful of private companies, and governments have begun asserting the right to decide who may use the frontier at all. The instrument that let one broke homeowner answer his county in its own words is also a thing that can be priced, throttled, and gated, by a company or a state, long before it ever reaches the next homeowner.

The prosecutors will get their hearing. The homeowner will get his. The larger case, the one about who gets to hold power to account when the tool for doing it is itself the thing being controlled, has no hearing date and no assigned judge. It will be decided the way these things usually are, in a thousand ordinary rooms, by whoever happens to be holding the machine and whether anyone thought to read what it wrote.

A note on how this was made, offered because the argument requires it: this piece was drafted by an AI assistant working from Josh Wolf’s research, records, and direction, and edited by him. In a piece about who uses this technology and how, saying so plainly is not a disclaimer. It is the point.

On November 18 of last year, a county code officer walked onto my family’s land outside Nevada City, knocked on the doors of our old farm buildings, and took photographs. I know this because I’ve read his field notes. The county’s enforcement case calls those buildings “unpermitted structures.” One permit in our parcel’s file was issued in June of 1962, the month before the county Building Department existed. You can see the problem.

I’m not writing to argue about the buildings. That dispute has a proper forum, and we’re headed there if we have to be. I’m writing about what happened when I asked the county to show me the rules.

Under the California Public Records Act, I asked five county departments for the written standards behind the case. The grandfathering provisions for older structures. The policy for deciding whether a building predates the permit requirement, which is the entire question in our case. The procedure connecting the Building Department’s records to the Assessor’s. Basic things, the paperwork any of us would assume exists before a government tells a family to tear down or re-permit its buildings.

The departments answered, and I want to be fair about this: they answered promptly, and mostly in good faith. The clerks did their jobs. But across four rounds of requests, the same written answer came back twenty-four separate times: “No records exist.”

No grandfathering provisions. No policy for the determination at the center of my family’s case. No record of how permits issued before July 1962 were ever tracked. No procedure for the county’s own departments to check each other’s files. No record authorizing anyone to walk up to those doors in November. When I asked what this enforcement effort has cost taxpayers so far, the county confirmed it doesn’t keep track of that either.

Then there are the photographs. The case opened with that November 18 inspection, and the officer’s own notes say he took photos that day. They no longer exist. In May the county told me, in writing, that no documentation existed of when, how, or by whom they were lost, and separately, that it had called the cause a corrupted storage device. So I asked for the IT records. In late June the county produced them: three help-desk tickets. They say exactly what happened. County IT reimaged the officer’s laptop in February. His county phone, the device the photos were taken on, was wiped and turned in. Nothing had been backed up to any system. And in the officer’s own words when he discovered it a month later: “all photos from 05/30/2023 through 02/09/2026 have been deleted. I need the photos for my cases.” Two and a half years of one code officer’s enforcement photographs, across every case he worked, gone.

Here’s what stays with me. Those tickets were opened and closed by late April. In May, the county answered my records request by saying no documentation of the loss existed. The documentation existed. It’s how I know all of this. I’m not accusing anyone of destroying evidence on purpose; the tickets describe routine IT work and an ordinary backup failure. But a county that wipes its own devices with no preservation hold during an active case, and then tells the property owner there’s no record of it, has a problem that no single property dispute can fix.

Every document I’ve described is posted on this site, quoted verbatim, with the county’s own reference numbers attached. Don’t take my word for any of it. Checking is the whole point.

Then ask the Board of Supervisors the question we’re asking: where are the rules? The Board should order an independent review of how this county keeps, and loses, the records it enforces with. If it can happen to our family, it can happen to anyone with a barn and a county file. Ask to see the rules. We did. Twenty-four times, they weren’t there.

Josh Wolf lives outside Nevada City.

“Never write anything down.” That’s the first rule of California politics, the one Willie Brown is supposed to have drilled into every new arrival in Sacramento.

That line came back to me this spring while I reviewed the county’s responses to the public-records requests I filed after the county opened a code-enforcement case against my family’s property outside Nevada City.

Two officers came out last November, walked the place, took photographs. A week later we got an official Warning Letter claiming six violations.

Every code-compliance case starts with a complaint. Anyone can make one. A neighbor with a grudge, a passerby with an opinion, somebody you’ve never met. The county doesn’t go looking. It waits for the phone to ring, and then it opens a case against whatever property the caller names. The property next door, which may have the same structures and the same history, doesn’t get touched.

I filed eight Public Records Act requests asking for the county’s file.

The county produced what records it had, then told me what it didn’t.

It didn’t have the photographs the officers took. The pictures that are supposed to prove the violations are gone, and the county’s account of how keeps changing — first that they were simply “no longer in our possession,” then that no record exists of when or how they went missing, and most recently that the computer holding them suffered a “corrupted storage device.” I’ve now asked for the records behind that corruption — the IT ticket, the backup log, the date the drive failed.

It didn’t have a form authorizing their disposal. The county’s own retention rules require one.

It didn’t have a preservation notice for the active case, even with three of my records requests already pending.

It didn’t have a written policy backing up the “open-case withholding” rule the county had used a month earlier to refuse me records. When I asked for that policy, the reply came back verbatim:

“No records exist. The County is unaware of such a policy.”

That is the County of Nevada, in writing, telling me that the policy it used to refuse me records does not exist.

The instinct is older than Sacramento. Records are evidence, and evidence is risk. An unrecorded deed cannot be challenged. An unwritten claim cannot be taxed.

California has spent a hundred and seventy-five years trying to legislate the habit out. In 1968 the Legislature passed the Public Records Act. In 2004, California voters wrote the same principle into the State Constitution at the ballot box, eighty-three percent in favor: “The writings of public officials and agencies shall be open to public scrutiny.”

The law tells the government what it must produce. It doesn’t tell the government what it has to write down in the first place.

Which is why the way the county keeps its records is the whole game. Everything that happens after the complaint — who got assigned, what was decided, what got preserved, what got lost — that’s the only way any of us can tell whether the system is being applied fairly. When the records aren’t there, the honest answer is we can’t tell. An answer the 1968 law and the 2004 amendment were written to make unacceptable.

The Board of Supervisors adopted Resolution 24-641, the county’s records retention schedule, in 2024. The Global Holds Rule, which suspends destruction during active matters and pending records requests, sits on every page of its Exhibit A. This isn’t state law our Board had to live with. It’s a rule our Board wrote for itself.

There’s one decision the Board can make at its next Tuesday meeting. It can direct the County Auditor-Controller, or ask the Civil Grand Jury, to audit compliance with Resolution 24-641 across all departments. Any one of the five Supervisors can put it on the agenda.

If you live in Nevada County, call your Supervisor and ask them: Would you support a compliance audit on Resolution 24-641? Whatever they say, ask them to put it on the next Board agenda.

That’s how a lost record becomes history.