Some Mark Villasenor Archeology

Well, there's not much to say about Casey right now, except that once again the house is up for auction and there doesn't seem to be much that his mortgage eliminating scams can do about it. We'll have more about that after the auction that is scheduled tomorrow. Our friend James Marks has commented about it on his blog and we have little more to say.

But there's been some discussion of long-departed Mark Villasenor, aka LossMitPro, on the Campidiot Thread, and we thought we'd toss some extra information out there about his vexatious litigating ways.

As discussed in the thread, Mark at one point actually sued a nonprofit volunteer organization for violating his civil rights. It seems that the Stanislaus Wilderness Volunteers was incorporated as a nonprofit organization to coordinate the activities of volunteers working with the Forest Service in the Stanislaus National Forest. Mark was a member.

We've read through this and managed, through Mark's poor use of the legal language, to figure out what seems to have irked him. It appears that Villasenor didn't like the fact that the Forest Service was telling the SWV folks how they had to conduct themselves if they wanted to continue working with them. He determined that this was an inappropriate involvement in a private organization's affairs and thus, somehow, was a violation of his civil rights. So he sued the organization for essentially giving in to the Forest Service's demands.

We should mention that we're not unfamiliar with the FS people, or the sometimes unreasonable demands that they make of associated volunteer organizations. But for better or worse, there's no law requiring the FS or any other government agency to take volunteers at all, let alone to allow them to run things as they see fit. It seems that the FS took the position that "you can do things our way, or you can do things on your own without FS volunteer uniforms or any other trappings of officialdom."

Here in SoCal, one of our little Casey-hatin' band is in fact a volunteer with two such organizations, one of which is focused on Search and Rescue and the other of which helps rebuild and maintain trails. He's avoided joining any of the "official" Forest Service volunteer groups precisely because he doesn't want to be subject to as many of their rules. Of course, he also gives up the opportunity to participate in certain types of activities that are reserved for more "official" types and does so with the knowledge that the FS could at any time and for any reason decide that the volunteer efforts are no longer desired.

Mark seems particularly pissed off about the fact that one of his buddies was removed from the board of the SWV after repeatedly pissing off the local FS people and -- it seems -- insisting on a mode of operation that was contrary not only to the FS rules, but also to the rules established by the organization. He seems to have been the sort of guy we have encountered through participation on CERT activities in southern California: the kind of guy who wants everybody to be in uniform, who will have set up his own entire command structure outside that of the sponsoring agency, and who will make unreasonable demands not only on the other volunteers but on the sponsoring agency itself. You see these guys at quarterly LAFD drills. They're the ones with their own radios, helmets, rescue gear, etc. In fact, some of them show up with more thousands of dollars of their own gear, often more than the firefighter/trainers have! And they always want to jump in and tell everybody else how things need to be done.

The guy who sponsored our own CERT class was like that. He and his HAM radio club sponsored the class. He wanted to force all the participants into some additional training focused on use of radios in an emergency. He wanted to set up a local SAR team for callup during an emergency. For months after the class he pestered everybody who had attended (including those from outside his immediate area) about joining his private little group. He tried to set up an emergency chain of command that bypassed all local authorities. He declared himself the "commissioner" of the group and gave himself a "commissioner" email. (OK, it was a gmail account, but still...) He was quite clearly uninterested in participation by women or by those who saw their role in an emergency as being neighborhood points of contact and information rather than as active SAR types. Eventually he pissed off the LAFD folks to the point where he was "disinvited" from sponsoring any further CERT activities. Sounds like the same thing happened to Mark's buddy. Mark didn't like it.

Also, it seems that the SWV, in coordination with the FS, instituted a set of rules about use of dogs during volunteer activities that irked Mark. Again, he attributed this to FS meddling and his own organizations' unwillingness to be more independent.

How all this translates into a violation of Mark's civil rights is somewhat unclear to us.

It seems to us that this is essentially the problem with Mark, both during the Casey saga and apparently elsewhere in his life. Like many Americans (in fact, very much like Casey) he's decided that he deserves to have things both ways: he wants to be an official Forest Service volunteer, but somehow also wants to have the right to volunteer on his own terms and to be able to reject Forest Service rules when they don't suit him.

Back in the IAFF days he wanted to be a very public participant in what was a very public saga, yet felt that he was entitled to privacy in all matters other than those that he personally chose to discuss. He went so far as saying that his name could not be used because he hadn't actually provided it himself (rather, he provided "clues" that allowed anybody with Google and a brain to deduce his name in about 30 seconds). Some in the Caseysphere chose to accede to his demands either out of courtesy for a fellow Hater or out of fear of a BS lawsuit. We're sufficiently versed in law that we choose not to do so. His activities and history are not only relevant to the story, but they actually became a matter of public record, once he filed a lawsuit against Casey.

We could go on and on. But we got the documents and they are linked here, so feel free to read them for yourselves if you care to:

Mark Villasenor's complaint

Stanislaus Wilderness Volunteers' response to Mark Villasenor's complaint

In any event, it seems that Mark decided to move on, and in fact started his own nonprofit volunteer organization focused on the use of dogs to help the disabled enjoy the wilderness. Good for him.

Hope this helps those of you who are still trying to get a full picture of the individuals Casey has associated with over the years.

And that's the view from FalseCasey HQ, where it's cold and foggy.