October: Jury Duty! Mo's Birthday Party!

October 2nd through the 10th, I got to work at Disney, which was great. I felt like a real live contributing member of society there for a while. And then the next week I had to go to jury duty. And that is a long and painful story.

October 16th to the 18th-First of all, why on earth did I have to be there at 7:30am? Daryl had to drive me because it was an ungodly early hour of the day to be going to court. And I was late. We all sat in a large room handed in our questionnaires and watched a video about how great it is to serve on a jury and then waited for our names to be called out. Unfortunately, I got called late in the morning, just before lunchtime. Our group went up to the court and after being sworn in and some people being excused because of "hardship," I got called up to be in the jury box. I'm juror #3 and the case is about land taken by the county sanitation district through "eminent domain" for a water reclamation plant (sewage treatment plant). The land is vacant. By law, the government must pay the owners what they call a "fair market value" for the properties taken. The issue we had to decide was how much money the county sanitation district had to pay. So basically we were there to decide a PRICE, which to me sounded ridiculous. I mean, how could they have not come to a compromise on a price? According to the documents we saw, they had OVER A YEAR to settle the matter without a jury and they didn't, which just tells me that the only people making a profit here are the lawyers. Anyway, we're given two questionnaires to fill out, one for general jury selection and one regarding eminent domain. All of the questions total around 50, stupid questions. The judge called upon us to read OUT LOUD our answers to each and every question, and then, the lawyers would question us on our answers. Let me tell you that it was just as excruciatingly tedious as it sounds. I tried to speed up the process by saying, "Questions 1-5, No. Questions 6-8, No. Question 9, Yes, my cousin is a real estate agent, etc..." So now a good number of complete strangers know that I'm married and work as a film/video editor and I have no kids and have no prejudice against lawyers, real estate appraisers, and real estate agents. But I do have a little problem with eminent domain, since my favorite cooking supply store, Surfas, is currently being taken over by the city through eminent domain. Which is just terrible and makes no sense at all. And I also know quite a bit about other people and how they feel about eminent domain as well. The only entertaining moments occured when an obviously hostile potential juror would read their answers and respond with overwhelming resentment, which happened often, by the way. All of the most confrontational people were excused, some of whom I think were faking it and saying just the right thing to get them off. (And I think the majority of those people were very rich and arrogant. One of them actually said, "Do you know how much money I'm losing by being here?" Like the rest of us weren't losing money? Complete. Ass.) The judge also let people off because they had to make a movie or edit a movie and I thought that was ridiculous, since there were plenty of single mothers who had to go out of their way to get childcare for two weeks and miss out on getting paid for two weeks in the jury who weren't excused. I call that a real hardship. Pushing back your preproduction for a couple of weeks doesn't sound like much of a hardship by comparison. There was one guy who read back his questionnaire in such bad English it was funny in that it was so overdone and inconsistent. They excused him as well, but only after he went through every single question! And then another guy got excused because he fell asleep in the jury box! And then they kept a juror who was a paralegal, who's boyfriend was fired by the plaintiff's lawyer's firm! It made no sense, really. All in all I think we went through about 23 people's questionnaires. It took three days, people. THREE DAYS! And I was never excused so I was juror #3. Juror #1 was an illustrator, juror#2 was the paralegal/legal secretary, juror #4 was a web graphic designer, juror #5 was a college professor, juror #6 was a nurse, juror #7 was a housewife, juror #8 was a housewife, juror #9 was a journalist for the Korea Times (I think if they excused the Iranian man for not understanding English, they should have excused this guy because he had similiar difficulty. I think they kept him because he really didn't put up much of a fight.), juror#10 was an accountant, juror #11 worked in a church, juror #12 worked for UPS, alternate juror #1 was a DNA analyser, a la CSI, and alternate juror #2 was an architect, who just happened to be working on a civil engineering project wherein some properties were taken over through "eminent domain."

October 18th to the 20th-OK, so now we get opening statements, which is fine, but takes a day and a half because the plaintiff's (LA County Sanitation District #14) lawyer keeps getting interrupted with objections from the defendent's lawyers. Basically, most of the plots of land are in the same 2 mile area and in parcels consisting of 5 acres. (There was a small 2.5 acre parcel and a 10 acre parcel, too) All in all it was 24 separate parcels that were in question. The owners were represented by a lawyer for a land company that owned a lot of the parcels and then another lawyer who represented 8 individuals who owned parcels in the same area. The owners wanted more money thant the county sanitation district was willing to give. For example, the county sanitation district wanted to pay $26,000 for a parcel that the owner (land company) wanted $50,000 for. The individual owners and the county had an even larger difference, they wanted, say, $71,000 for a parcel of land the county was only willing to pay $26,000. I mean, really, someone is taking advantage here. We got to hear from the first witness, the civil engineer in charge of the project for the water reclamation plant. Basically, I think we didn't really need to hear from him, since the question of the government taking the land was moot. They were going to take it, we were just there to figure out the price. And it took forever for them to get to the explanation as to how that price was determined.

Just a word on life in a jury. Of course, we couldn't discuss anything about the case outside of court, nor could we discuss it between ourselves, like, say, at lunch. Our hours were, typically, 10a-12noon, then 1:30p-4:30p with a 15 minute break somewhere in the afternoon. I constantly got soy chai lattes (There was a Starbuck's right in their courtyard!) to keep awake because it was staggeringly boring. I totally sympathized with the guy that fell asleep. We were all given pens and notebooks to take notes and I took notes, just as if it were a class I had to be tested on. It kept me awake, anyway. It's kind of like being in the most boring high school class that you have to take to graduate, but you can't chew gum and you can't leave and you have to pay attention. Lunch was difficult for me and for the first week I brought my own sandwiches because it was so hard to find a place I could actually eat that was gluten-free. One of the other jurors suggested the Department of Water and Power, which had a really nice cafeteria. Luckily, they had a burrito bar so I usually got the burrito without the tortilla. The DWP actually is housed in a nice building, the John Ferraro building, which had lovely fountains and a slightly dizzying staircase. (There's also a garden out front which consisted of plants that didn't require a lot of watering. And it looked nice! All of the plants were available in local nurseries so I do wonder why people insist on getting the most water greedy plants to put on their property. You live in an area that used to be a desert! Have some respect for the resources available! Anyway, water-greedy grass has always been a pet peeve of mine. It's annoying to see people watering their lawns every day just so they can have green grass. It's obscene how fresh water is wasted around here.) Also, I didn't have a car, so I had to take public transportation every day. I left at 8:30a to get there at 9:30a and left at 4:30p to get home around 6p. The bus was pretty consistent, but it was usually hot and stuffy and crowded. I'm not sure how many people take public transportation around here, but this bus service was pretty good for me. And I only had to take the one bus, no transfers.

October 21st, Saturday-Mo's Birthday Party #1. It's not actually her birthday, that's next week, but we gathered together to eat, carve pumpkins, and play a serial killer game (I kid you not.) Mo showed off some of her new culinary skills and fed us with some of the food she created in her cooking class for appetizers. We ordered food for dinner, and while everyone else got pizza, I got Thai food. Kristin, one of Mo's fellow improv-er was there with her fellow, Scott, who I vaguely remembered back in the day when I actually took improv classes. And Kim, one of Mo's actors from her LA version of The Magnificent Ass Show was there, too. And we carved pumpkins! Daryl carved a particularly disturbing face into his pumpkin that was really creepy. I followed a template that took forever, a witch on a broomstick flying over some buildings. Kim had never carved pumpkins before and I think she liked the experience. Then, Mo gave us all a game wherein we had to figure out which serial killer was which. Daryl and I got about 4 out of 13, but Scott and Kristin got 9! It was really nice to do something fun and somewhat depressing in that I knew I'd have to go back to court on Monday. Which wasn't fun at all.

October 23rd to the 25th-Ok, back to more witnesses. We heard from the land company's appraiser, the individual owner's appraiser, and the county's appraiser, as well as the tax assessor for the area. Bascially, they all used the same methodology, take the prices for land sales in the area that most resemble the subject area around the date of sale, "comps," weight them appropriately according to how close they were to development, power, paved roads, etc. and then come up with a price. Say you have 4 comps in the area.
Comp 1 was sold for 3,500,
Comp 2 was sold for 5,000,
Comp 3 was sold for 2,500, and
Comp 4 was sold for 3,500.
If Comp 2 had access to power then you'd have to give that the least weight, same thing if the comp was too far away from the subject area, or if it was next to a paved road, or if a well drilling was included in the price, etc. So you use percentages that add up to 100% to weight the price.
Comp 1-3,500 X .30=1,050
Comp 2-5,000 X .20=1,000 (less percentage because it was close to power)
Comp 3-2,500 X .20=500 (less percentage because it had no road access)
Comp 4-3,500 X .30=1,050
Adds up to 100% =3,600
And that would be your appraisal of the price of the property.

And it's all very good, but completely boring to most of us since none of us are involved in the real estate industry, nor do we really care. The best part was when the individual owner's appraiser made a mistake in her calculations which added up to 105% instead of 100%. And she did it right in front of us using a pad of paper and markers! Let's just say we found her appraisal to be the least reliable of the three appraisers. The problem with this is that the percentages are completely arbitrary and subjective. But since none of us were experienced appraisers that methodology was really all we had to go on in our deliberations. The plaintiff also tried to make us believe that Land Company Sales were sales made to buyers who really had no idea what the land was like, so they would buy it up for more than market prices. (Which, who buys a piece of land without checking it out first? Silly people?) Only the individual owner's appraiser used Land Company Sales, so that was another strike against her, but not that bad of a strike because we kind of didn't buy that argument completely.

October 25th to the 27th-Finally! We get to deliberate! And we get to determine our working hours, which turned out to be a lot similiar to the regular hours we'd been accustomed to. We basically decide to take the best comps from all three appraisers, and using more from the appraiser we felt was most qualified and less from the less qualified appraiser. We had maps and boards and various items from the appraiser's reports. It took a while because we were still trying to figure out what comps we liked and what methodology we'd use, but once we'd figured out the system, it went swimmingly on from there. A lot of the parcels were within the same 1 mile area so once we agreed on a price for one of the parcels, we applied it to all of the similiar parcels. So there was a 10 acre parcel, a 2.5 acre parcel, various 5 acre parcels in the same area with access to power and paved roads, and various 5 acre parcels in the same area without access to power and paved roads. So using the best comps from the three appraisers, we came up with $35,000/each for the 5 acre parcels that had no access, and $40,000/each for the parcels next to power and a paved road. When we went to court with our verdict, the clerk had to read every single parcel's price out loud. Then the lawyer's wanted to poll the jury so we had to respond yes or no to whether or not we agreed on the stated price. You can imagine how tedious that got. They didn't know that we were all agreed with the prices while in the jury room. It would have saved us a lot of time if we had just said it at the beginning. All in all it took us about two days total to deliberate and we got out around lunchtime on Friday. So, I'm safe for a year. Oh, and I get $15/day for 9 days (they don't count the first day) for jury duty. I feel sorry for all of those people whose jobs weren't going to pay them for the days they missed, I mean, really, it was two weeks. For some people, that's a whole paycheck!

So that's my really boring saga of jury duty. What a huge waste of time.