There are a number of County-inflicted financial annoyances the local Community Services District suffers every year. The County goes out of its way to charge “special districts” for lots of relatively small things, but over which the districts have no control. This despite the County’s frequent pronouncements and studies showing how important the County’s fire and emergency services are and how underfunded they are.
Yet every time the CSD turns around, there’s the County hitting the districts up for another fee or fee increase, or refusing to offer any subsidies or financial support.
It’s not like the County is broke — they recently voted unanimously to pay a Sonoma County consultant well over $75,000 to help them prepare a strategic plan. Nobody wondered where that money would come from. They also magically came up with an as yet unspecified big pile of cash to subsidize water deliveries for the drought-stricken Mendo Coast. (Not that we’re complaining, but nobody has asked where that money’s coming from either.) And don’t forget the overgenerous pay and benefits for the Board and CEO who alone (excluding staff) amount to about $1 million per year just for those six people.
What are those fees and increases?
The County charges the districts whatever they spend to conduct elections whenever more than the number of candidates exceeds vacancies. Last November the CSD was hit for around $5k because a Boonville man with no chance of winning threw his hat in. The Local Agency Formation Commission also charges special districts a “LAFCO” fee for no tangible service other than an infrequent “service review” which is mostly done by the District itself. This year the Anderson Valley LAFCO fee has jumped way up to over $2500 for no apparent reason. Other districts have experienced comparable jumps.
The County also charges the District thousands of dollars for property tax administration, an automated County process that shouldn’t cost the District anything. This year the County advised the AV District that their property tax administration fee would jump up from an already high $4k to almost $6k because the County got a new property tax computer system. Nobody asked the Districts for their opinion on this. Although the County’s property tax system upgrade was overdue, a percentage of the cost was passed along to the small districts without a moment’s thought or consideration. The County did that all on their own.
On top of that the District has to now pay over $60k per year for insurance, over $21k of which is workers comp for the volunteers. Of course, that one is not imposed by the County. But the County has never even considered lobbying the state to get them to exempt volunteers from this cost or to cover this ever increasing cost out of state funds since you’d think that the state’s essential rural volunteer fire departments should not have to pay workers comp for their volunteers; it discourages recruitment. The County could also offer to subsidize those insurance or workers comp costs.
On the plus side, sort of, the County finally grudgingly agreed to give fire departments their long-overdue small percentage of the Prop 172 sales tax revenues a few years ago after years of being the only county in the state to not do that. This was after years of pointing out the obvious problem, and years of resistance from the County. The County also recently put on the ballot (which the voters easily approved) a measure to give fire departments the new revenues from the bed tax on campgrounds. But together the new Prop 172 money and the campground bed tax increment don’t even cover the local District’s insurance bill.
Special districts don’t get any of the County’s millions of non-campground bed tax revenues either, even though tourists account for a large percentage of the emergency calls. Instead the County either keeps the bed tax money for itself, or doles it out to the tourism industry itself where it’s wasted on demonstrably ineffectual marketing exercises.
Then you have the patchwork of small County ambulance operations which range from private businesses like Ukiah Valley’s Medstar, to hospitals, to clinics, to fire departments. The funding for these disparate essential services is marginal at best, mostly from limited (pennies on the dollar from Medi-Cal and Medic-Aid) and grotesquely overcomplicated insurance billing and the occasional private donation. The County provides no subsidies to rural ambulances, again while praising them for their mostly volunteer services, especially during emergencies and public health disasters. But the County pays hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a Sonoma County emergency services administrative agency which charges whatever they want, year after year.
The Anderson Valley Ambulance benefits from a popular local membership program that was in place prior to the ambulance being merged with the fire department, otherwise the insurance billing wouldn’t come close to covering its modest costs. Laytonville operates another small but essential ambulance service as part of their fire department, but they don’t have a membership program and are losing money every month, money that has to be made up by donations and their already cash-starved fire department.
The Fifth District has a supervisor who until being elected to his $84k plus benefits Supervisors job in 2018, was the Fire Chief for the Albion-Little River volunteer fire department and who is quite aware of these lop-sided fiscal arrangements. But so far that Supervisor hasn’t done much at the County level to address them or correct them.
Why do essential volunteer fire departments and emergency services have to pay for all these extraneous and ever-increasing non-operational costs when the County could easily afford to cover them or waive them?
What do you want to bet that the consultant’s $75k-plus “strategic plan” won’t even mention funding for ambulance services?
The Wine Mob’s Lake-Draining ‘Protocols’
Not surprisingly former Supervisor John McCowen wrote a response to our claim that his observations were contradictory:
McCowen: “You wrote: ‘If, as McCowen claims, “frost protection plans that protected fish were successfully implemented prior to the hearing,” why did the Mendo wine contingent drive to Sacramento to screech at the State Water Board? And why did the Wine Whine Mop later sue to put a stop to it? Then McCowen adds that “the dispute had more to do with the Water Board targeting frost water.” Which is what McCowen said was already in place. Get yer contradictions straight, McCowen.” Where is the contradiction? The much maligned grape and wine industry did not protest or sue to prevent protections for fish from taking effect. They had already voluntarily implemented protocols that prevented rapid flow reduction for frost protection which had resulted in stranding. The objection was to the State Water Board using a problem that had already been solved as an opportunity to target the use of frost water regardless of whether it came from the river or any other source.”
* * *
AH YES, the wine people were so concerned about the fish that they had “already implemented protocols that prevented rapid flow reduction for frost protection.” And what were those “protocols”? They built a bunch of ponds for themselves and their vine irrigation and promised to use the ponds instead of pumping directly from the creek for frost protection. Like everybody else (except McCowen, of course), the Water Board didn’t trust the wine people and their protocols, especially when their oxymoronically described “self-regulation” and “protocols” didn’t involve any formal arrangements, no pipe size limits, pump size restrictions, no meters, no seasonal restrictions, etc. Later, when their local court victory was overturned on appeal, they simply promised to implement versions of those protocols anyway. And the whole thing went away, proving that they only objected to being required to document their “protocols” for fear that real regulation might be considered, despite the aversion of public officials to impose real regulation much less enforcement on the grape people. (Just the opposite of what they’re imposing on the poor pot people trying to get legal.)
WHICH BRINGS US to yesterday’s bad news for McCowen (and the rest of us). The wine friendly Press Democrat reported yesterday of “inadequate compliance among more than 1,500 water rights holders in the upper [Russian] river who fell under a wider curtailment last week. Supplies released from Lake Mendocino continue to all but vanish from segments of the river downstream, according to stream gauge data and observations from regulators. Dam managers outside of Ukiah have had to maintain higher reservoir releases over the past two weeks than at any other time this summer to ensure a minimum flow in the river at Healdsburg, even though diverters have been under orders since Aug. 3 to take only enough for basic human health and safety needs.”
LET’S MAKE SURE we understand that: the PD says that dam managers have had to “maintain higher reservoir releases” to ensure minimum flows at Healdsburg. That means that the wine mob is effectively pumping water directly out of the already extremely low Lake Mendocino because every drop they pump is replaced by the “dam managers” to maintain flows downstream.
OF COURSE the PD uses the words “water rights holders” and “diverters” when they mostly mean grape growers who, as Supervisor Glenn McGrape himself admits “[wine] people don’t necessarily go along with regulation” when it comes to their precious wine grapes.
TROUBLE IS, McCowen had argued earlier that the tens of millions of gallons being taken from the Russian included the various Sonoma County municipal water districts. But the PD points out that no, most of it is being greedily sucked up by the wine people before it even gets to Healdsburg.
McCOWEN will probably still want the last word on the subject of the inland wine/whine mob and their outright theft of Russian River water, but he’s running out of defenses for their self-alleged public spiritedness.
PS. THE PD also reported that the water board is sending out water patrols on the Russian River and has set up a tip line for violations of their restrictions on the Russian. We will just have to wait and see what comes of that. (We’re not expecting much: Wine people don’t rat on other wine people, generally, even when the downstream wine people are shorted by the upstream wine people. If the Water Board was serious, they’d offer rewards for tips; then the Mexicans who do the wine people’s actual work might be tempted to send in a cellphone pic or video or two.)
PPS. Lake Mendocino is now at its lowest point in recent history, an unprecedented development, thanks in large part to the wine mob’s refusal to cut back their pumping. In the past we had heard that the problem with dredging the Lake bed to produce a little more capacity was ill-advised because of reports of toxic substances that might be dug up or stirred up. As the Lake level drops there’s an increasing risk that the remaining water will be poor quality and/or silty requiring increased treatment. And if they detect any significant levels of bad minerals, or toxic substances, it could be even worse.
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