Hill accused of threatening a nonprofit

November 4, 2016

By KAREN VELIE

For more than 10 years, a local printer produced fundraising brochures for the Food Bank Coalition of San Luis Obispo County. Then in late 2008, the owner of a printing business said she lost the contract after Supervisor Adam Hill threatened to withhold county funds from the nonprofit.

Julie Tizzano, the owner of SLOCO Data & Printing in Grover Beach, first met Hill when he joined the food bank board in 2003. While the two did not agree on how the food bank should operate, problems escalated in 2008, a year and a half after Tizzano left the food bank board.

During the 2008 campaign between then incumbent Jerry Lenthall and Hill, a campaign brochure included Tizzano disparaging Hill’s actions while on the food bank board. Shortly after Hill won the Nov. 2008 election, he allegedly approached Food Bank CEO Carl Hansen and ordered him to stop doing business with SLOCO Data & Printing or risk losing county funding, Tizzano said.

Before that, since 1996, Tizzano had produced four fundraising brochures a year for the nonprofit bringing in about $250,000 a year in donations, Tizzano said.

“After Hill was elected, I had lunch with Carl Hansen,” Tizzano said. “Adam told Carl that because I sent the mailer, he couldn’t use me anymore or the county would cut off their funding.”

Even so, Tizzano said she was not involved in the production or distribution of the flyer that irritated Hill.

In late 2009, after a more than 50 percent decline in fundraising monies, Hansen went back to using Tizzano for the food bank’s fundraising mailers until about two years ago. Tizzano said she is unsure why the food bank changed printers in 2014.

Hansen said he does not recall what occurred in 2008 other than it did not have anything to do with Hill.

During the past week,  Tizzano and former Grover Beach council member Debbie Peterson recorded robocalls that asked registered voters in District 3 not to vote for Hill because of his alleged bullying behavior.

Hill did not respond to a request for comment. However, Hill told the Tribune he thought that a conflict of interest policy adopted by the board could have been the reason it stopped working with Tizzano’s company, but not how the former board member had a conflict.