This is the first of three stories about the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election in Shasta county, a region of 180,000 people in northern California that has emerged as a center of the election-denial movement and a hotbed for far-right politics.

When Shasta county had to search for a new official to oversee its elections earlier this year, there was an obvious candidate.

Her name was Joanna Francescut, and she had been the assistant elections clerk and registrar of voters in this remote region in California’s far north. Francescut had worked in elections for more than 16 years, oversaw the office of the county clerk and registrar of voters for months after her boss went on leave, and was endorsed by elections officials and prominent area Republicans alike.

Instead, the ultra-conservative majority on Shasta county’s board of supervisors in June selected Tom Toller, a former prosecutor who had never worked in elections and vowed to change the office culture, improve public confidence, and “clean up” voter rolls.

Were it any other California county, the decision would have been shocking. But Shasta county in recent years has made a name for itself as a center for far-right politics and the election-denial movement, which maintains that Donald Trump, and not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. In the past year, the majority on the board of supervisors, the county’s governing body, has cast doubt on the integrity of the local elections office and sought to rid the county of voting machines.

The move fueled anxiety among some of the county’s residents. Before one of the most turbulent and consequential races in recent history, Toller will be in charge of administering the election to 114,000 voters with just a few months’ experience under his belt.

Already, challenges have been thrown his way. In September, a county advisory board, which makes recommendations to Shasta’s governing body, proposed limiting absentee ballots and returning to one-day voting. Toller rejected the proposal, pointing out the plan would violate state law.

“People are worried about it,” said Robert Sid, a Shasta county conservative who supported Francescut and has been frustrated by conspiracy theories about the elections office. “If there was any hint of scandal [at the office], I’d be the first one down there. But there’s never been anything.”

Toller declined the Guardian’s request for an interview, citing his office’s focus on preparations for early voting.

The controversy in Shasta over the elections office is a more extreme version of an issue that experts have been sounding the alarm about for years. US elections officials are leaving at increasingly high rates after facing intense harassment and threats in the aftermath of the 2020 election and are being replaced by administrators with less experience and institutional knowledge.

For 20 years, Shasta’s elections had been managed by Cathy Darling Allen, one of the only Democrats elected to office in this region where Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one.

Allen’s job, a non-partisan administrative role, radically changed after the 2020 election, when Trump refused to acknowledge his defeat. As an election-denial movement flourished locally and the county’s governing body veered radically to the right, her office came under growing scrutiny and dealt with harassment and bullying. The evening of a local election in June 2022, someone placed a camera outside her office.

Allen was re-elected with almost 70% of the vote that year. But she was frequently villainized by the far-right majority on the board of supervisors, which had set out to dramatically change how elections are conducted in Shasta county.

In early 2023, the county board of supervisors cancelled its contract with Dominion Voting Systems, the company maligned by Trump and his supporters, without a replacement, and attempted to implement a costly and error-prone hand-counting method. Soon after, the state thwarted those efforts with the passage of a bill preventing counties from using manual tallies in most elections.

Far-right county officials insisted they would use their hand-counting method in November 2023 regardless, and falsely claimed elections were being manipulated; Allen made clear she would follow state law, and the election ultimately unfolded without issue.

Many voters heralded Allen’s commitment to upholding election law in the face of unprecedented attacks. People routinely stopped her in public to express their appreciation, she previously told the Guardian, and often sent cards and notes of gratitude. But Allen’s position also made her the No 1 enemy of Shasta county’s far right, one local journalist wrote.

In February, Allen shocked the county when she announced plans to retire with two years left in her term. She had been diagnosed with heart failure, she said. “An essential part of recovering from this diagnosis is stress reduction. As many election officials could probably tell you right now, that’s a tough ask to balance with election administration in the current environment,” she wrote in a letter to the community.

Francescut, Allen’s deputy, seemed an obvious choice for her replacement, given her more than 16 years’ experience assisting with more than 30 elections in the county. She had been training for the role for years and took on Allen’s job – in addition to her own – and oversaw the March election.

She had the support of her ex-boss, elections clerks in two other counties, as well as a conservative former county supervisor.

The board of supervisors held public interviews with eight candidates, including Francescut, Toller, and Clint Curtis, an attorney and former congressional candidate who has long claimed he was once hired by a lawmaker to create a software that could rig elections.

During public comment after the first day of interviews, an air of cynicism hung over the room. Several speakers urged the board to hire Francescut while acknowledging the supervisors had likely already made their decision. “The fix is in,” one woman shouted from the audience.

Board members took a combative approach with Francescut. One supervisor, Kevin Crye, attempted to coax her into criticizing her former boss, while another, Patrick Jones, accused her of “mal-conduct”. Their tone was hostile, said Sid, who characterized the public interviews as a “dog and pony show”.

Francescut, who described the process as “humbling”, tried to focus on her values as a leader and on her work ethic, she said in an interview with the Guardian in June. “I prepared myself the best I could to get the job I’ve been striving to get for the last 16 years. Even if right now isn’t the right time. I have community support behind me.”

In his interview with the panel, Toller said he would bring what he described as necessary change to the elections office, and suggested he would not mind pushing back against state law.

“I’m a firm believer that just because the secretary of state of California tells us a statute or regulation must be interpreted in a certain way, that’s not the end of the story,” he said.

And then there was Curtis, who has advocated hand-counting and noted in his application he was a speaker at election events hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who has spent millions of dollars promoting lies about elections in the US.

During the public hearing in June, a group of residents who have frequently spoken publicly on their concerns about vote tampering and their beliefs that elections are being rigged expressed their support for Curtis. None of the speakers who offered public comment spoke in favor of Toller.

Still, Toller’s appointment was a win for critics of the elections office in a year with relatively few victories for them. Patrick Jones, the official who has most aggressively condemned voting machines and spread misinformation, in March lost his bid for re-election by a landslide. In June, a county judge dismissed a lawsuit from a failed supervisor candidate who sued the elections office, claiming that an error in the placement of her name on the ballot cost her the election. She had sought to change the outcome of the election.

“The lack of evidence was profound,” the judge said of the case. A state court denied her attempt to appeal the ruling.

Those who buy into conspiracy theories about voter fraud and stolen elections are not giving up on their efforts to remake the voting process in the region. The local elections commission recently recommended the county limit absentee ballots and return to one-day voting. Toller, in a move that may have surprised some of his supporters, rejected that idea and said doing so would not comply with state law. Those items will come before the board of supervisors for consideration.

With a new elections official, a deeply divided county and an intense presidential contest, the office faces busy and daunting months ahead.

Between November 2023 and June more than a third of the elections office’s 21 staffers left. But Francescut has said that she plans to stay put – at least through November – to help maintain stability in the office and support Toller as he learns the ropes.

“In the long run, ensuring that the November election is where it needs to be and the voters are able to vote, that’s the biggest priority right now in my mind,” she said. “It’s way more important than me as an individual.”

RENO, Nev. (KOLO) -A suspect in a double homicide early Friday in Redding, Calif., was arrested Sunday afternoon in northeast Reno, the Regional Crime Suppression Unit reported.

Trevon Gage Evanoff, 18, is an accessory to the shooting of five people in Redding, two of whom died, the Redding Police Department said.

Two others were treated and released and a woman was in the hospitalized, Redding police said.

The RCSU found Evanoff was on East Ninth Street near Sage Street and the special weapons and tactics team made the arrest without incident on Sunday about 1:04 p.m.

Andrew Greer-Herrera, 19, of Lookout, Calif., was the primary suspect in the shooting and he remains at large, Redding police said. The RCSU said he is not believed to be in the Reno area.

Copyright 2024 KOLO. All rights reserved.

Californians are sidestepping the state’s acute housing shortage and soaring property prices by building cute cottages in their backyards – but not everyone is happy about this new development. 

Advocates say in-law suites or accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are the quickest and easiest way to get people into livable homes. 

But some experts are warning that ADUs can drive down the price of single-family homes in neighborhoods because potential buyers may not want to live near the tenant of the backyard unit. 

Others complain that these tiny homes are not a comparable substitute for building more traditional homes to combat housing shortages. 

Despite this, many people are continuing to build ADUs – often to house elderly relatives who need assistance and have no use for a big home anymore. 

After Teddy Gray King’s mother passed away in 2021, she decided to move her 88-year-old father into a prefabricated house on her property in Piedmont, a small Bay Area town just outside Oakland.

He had been living in a 3,000-square-foot home in Millbrae, which King said he was able to sell so it could be freed up for another family.

King said she bought the prefab house from an Oakland-based company for $268,000 and had it airlifted to her backyard in 2022.

‘In a place like Piedmont where…many houses have a big backyard, it’s kind of a perfect way for infill development (and) it’s pretty low impact from the visual perspective,’ she told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Wealthy communities like Piedmont – where the median household income is more than $250,000 – are the predominant areas where these backyard cottages get built, according to government data that tracks what type of housing is being constructed across the state.

After all, King paid nearly $270,000 for the one-bedroom home her father now lives in, which is higher than the median sale price for an entire house in Cleveland, Ohio, or Buffalo, New York.

King still made off with a discount though, since there isn’t a single one-bedroom home in Piedmont on the market for less than $389,000.

Pictured: A 650-square-foot backyard cottage in Oakland, California

Pictured: The exterior of the cottage, complete with a living area and a kitchen

However, if the goal with ADUs is to house more people who are being squeezed by rising rent in California, it’s unlikely to succeed.

A brief from the Virginia Housing Commission found that a significant percentage of ADUs don’t rent for below-market rates.

Scott Wild, the senior vice president of real estate-focused firm John Burns Research & Consulting, recently authored a report that agreed with this assessment.

‘If rented out, ADUs usually garner decent premiums over nearby multifamily rentals, positioning them at the high end of the comparable rental spectrum,’ Wild claimed. 

A 2021 bill from the New York assembly tried to address this issue by creating an ADU financing program for homeowners who wanted to build one on their property. 

But if they took a loan from the program, they’d have to rent the unit at a below-market rate in their area.

This proposal never made it out of committee.

Pictured: A 499-square foot ADU in Los Angeles. Putting a ‘1/2’ on the address number is a common practice for properties like this

Prefabricated accessory dwelling units are often small enough to be delivered by truck, pictured, or even be airlifted straight onto the property

Meanwhile, California is steaming ahead, leading the nation in the number of ADUs built. 

Piedmont Mayor Jennifer Cavenaugh said the city doesn’t have many unused lots available for housing, which could be why no new living space has been built in Piedmont except for ADUs over the last three years.

ADUs were the only new housing built in two other Bay Area cities in 2022 and 2023: Los Altos and Hillsborough. 

Matt Lewis, a spokesperson for California YIMBY (which stands for Yes in My Back Yard), supports Piedmont loosening restrictions on ADUs but said cities should also be repurposing existing buildings to house more people.

‘Every city has the ability to increase the number of homes within its borders,’ Lewis told the Chronicle. ‘We have some of the lowest density cities around and it’s because of the constraints cities have put not just on building but how many homes you can put in a building.’

The backyard cottage craze has come as a result of California passing legislation in 2016 that required cities to approve ADUs if they met parking and size requirements.

Over 31,000 homeowners applied for ADU permits in 2023, up from 7,000 in 2018, state data show.

Rohin Dhar, a San Francisco real estate agent, is skeptical about ADUs and fears they may lead to more complications for people trying to sell their homes

The momentum may only get stronger thanks to two new bills signed by Governor Gavin Newsom last year that allow property owners to sell ADUs separately from their primary home and ban local governments from forcing owners to live in their backyard cottages. 

Even though it’s become all the rage, a San Francisco real estate agent raised serious concerns about ADUs and their potential impact on the housing market.

Rohin Dhar said he sees plenty of single family home owners who build ADUs to rent it out for some extra income. 

The problem comes, he says, when they list their home, especially if there’s a tenant in the additional unit.

‘But when they go to sell the home, it sells for *way less* than if they had never built the ADU,’ he wrote in a post on X. ‘You’re basically selling a single family home with someone living in the in-law unit. That’s a hard sell!’

Another San Francisco real estate agent, Naomi Lempert Lopez, told DailyMail.com that the buyers she interacts with generally react favorably when shown properties with ADUs

Lopez recommends her clients sell their ADU-equipped home when there’s no tenant occupying the additional space to cut down on complications

Another San Francisco real estate agent told DailyMail.com that the buyers she interacts with generally react favorably when shown properties with ADUs.

‘For buyers, they open up possibilities with properties vis-à-vis extended guests or additional income,’ Naomi Lempert Lopez said. ‘There’s so much that you could do with an ADU and they add flexibility.’

She also said homes with ADUs sell for more than homes without them, though its important to note that an additional unit adds square footage, which almost by definition would increase the price of a property.

However, Lopez recommends her clients sell their ADU-equipped home when there is no tenant occupying the additional space to cut down on complications. 

‘San Francisco is a city with extremely strong tenant protections, and so anything that is tenant occupied, be it the home, be it the ADU, be it a multi family, that is going to definitely give buyers pause,’ she said.

‘I would definitely say that selling vacant is a much bigger value add.’