Supes Prefer Being In The Dark
From the superlatives the Supervisors laid on outgoing CEO Carmel Angelo at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting one would never know the reality of a badly (or un-)managed county.
Supervisor Ted Williams: “I thank CEO Carmel Angelo for her dedicated service and the honesty and integrity she brought to her work for the county.”
Supervisor Dan Gjerde said he remembered when, according to previous supervisors (Gjerde wasn’t a Supervisor at the time) the CEO made “tough decisions” that the prior CEO (Tom Mitchell) “was unwilling to make.” I.e., she cut hours and fired people. Gjerde added that CEO Angelo “righted the financial ship of the County” and “built reserves that didn't exist when the 2008 recession hit.”
Supervisor Maureen Mulheren thanked the CEO for being CEO. “It's been challenging with a lot of public rhetoric that she has faced as a female and as a leader,” said Mulheren. “I can't apologize on behalf of those people, but I can recognize the work that she has done for this community and this county." (We’re not aware of any “rhetoric” CEO Angelo faced “as a female.” A so-called “leader,” yes. But as a female. No. Ms. Mulheren chose not to identify “the work” that the CEO should be recognized for.)
Supervisor Glenn McGourty also thanked the lavishly compensated CEO for being the CEO, adding that she has been “a dedicated staff resource to us.” McGourty said he always got information from her when needed. “There's a lot of criticism and noise in the community,” grumbled McGourty, “and all I can say is consider the source.” McGourty said that he’d spoken to “all the Supervisors she's worked with and I've never heard anyone bring anything forth against her saying that she was doing something illegal or unethical. She executed her job and direction from the Board and I wish her well.” (Names, McGourty, names!)
Williams, plunging all the way through the looking glass, added, “It’s a fiction that the CEO is calling the shots. ... She has a good read on the Supervisors. She pushes ideas that are in line with our thinking and it can give the impression that the CEO is setting the direction. That’s not what I've seen from my seat. She respects ideas from Supervisors and tries to find common threads between us.”
Supervisor John Haschak said CEO Angelo had been “a tireless advocate for Mendocino County and an effective administrator. She has not gone against Board policy. She has done her best to see that Board policy is carried out and doing what an effective administrator does. The County will miss her energy, connections and expertise.”
All the Supervisors expressed their confidence in the appointment of Assistant CEO Darcie Antle as Interim CEO for up to twelve months.
As usual, the praise for the outgoing CEO was fact free, not one specific accomplishment was mentioned besides the firings and cutbacks in 2009.
Do they not know of her failure to produce simple monthly budget reports, telling us that she could but if she did it would only cause people to ask questions. (Huh? That’s the point, isn’t it?)
Do they not know that she picked a pointless and costly fight with the Sheriff after the Sheriff complained that she hadn’t been truthful with him?
Do they not know that the CEO controls their agenda, deciding what goes on, how it’s worded, what’s on consent and what’s for discussion, and when it appears? Often retroactive items appear on the consent calendar despite prior boards directing that they be on the regular calendar.
Do they not know how many of their own directives have been ignored? (Answer: Dozens and dozens.)
Do they not know how many seemingly competent people she’s shown the door or who have quit rather than work with her? Some of whom have cost the County hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside legal costs.
This is just a short list. We could go on, but the point is pretty obvious, by their own standards alone. The five auto-yes votes approve whatever Angelo puts in front of their smug, delusional, marginally competent if competent at all, pusses. Supervisor Mulheren even goes so far as to regularly post the entire Board agenda on her website with nothing but the word “approved” after each item, calling it an “update.”
On Tuesday, the Board also decided to not change from the so-called “CEO model” because to do otherwise would be just too much work for the Supervisors who — according to them — are so busy setting policy and handling constituents that they don’t have time to hire and manage the County’s many departments and department heads. Much easier to have a CEO do it.
This attitude is yet more evidence that the Supervisors don’t want anything to do with the actual operations of the County. They don’t get any regular reports from the departments listing staffing issues, current projects, budgets, problems that need attention… And they have never requested them. As long as the CEO returns their calls (always with her version of events), doesn’t overrun her generous budget (by keeping staffing low and vacancy rates high) and doesn’t do anything illegal, everything else, done or not done, is fine with the Supervisors. As long as they don’t know about it there’s no problem.
$20 Million Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF Or Puff)
On Tuesday, the Supervisors threw up their hands and approved the startlingly overpriced $20 million Psychiatric Health Facility to be located on Whitmore Lane in South Ukiah recommended by the wildly overpriced Sacramento consultant Nacht & Lewis. N&L’s Eric Fadness told the Board that the best option was to tear down the existing structure, once a nursing home, and build a new one on the site.
The site was purchased in 2020 for about $2.3 million using state covid money to house a few quarantined patients for a few months, but the more the County looked at it, the more they saw how run-down the building was and how hard it would be to remodel all or parts of it for a PHF.
More than four years of inaction have gone by since the Measure B half-cent sales tax was passed with very little to show for it. The grossly overpriced “Crisis Residential Treatment” CRT on Orchard Street (Mendo paid about $5 million for a house they could have bought for $1 million) only happened in a relatively timely manner because the California Public Health Department issued an ultimatum that if Mendo didn’t get it built by November 2021 Mendo would lose about a half-mil in state money. (It’s still not open due to contractor licensing questions…) A Redwood Valley training facility structure was purchased and remodeled for maybe half a mil, but it’s use so far has been limited and has no direct correlation to mental patients Measure B was supposed to help.
It was obvious that Whitmore Lane nursing home rebuild was the only viable option presented to the Board and, after more than four years of delay, the supervisors clearly decided that they didn’t want to wait anymore no matter what the cost.
Highlights of the N&L Proposal
N&L and the County’s Bay Area mental health service contractor estimated 40 people will be necessary to staff the 16 bed facility over three shifts, seven days a week. (Interestingly, a couple of years ago Consultant Lee Kemper recommended 17 people for a 24/7 facility based on what Kemper said were “current California regulations.”) We have not seen any attempt to reconcile these two distinctly different operations estimates.
Although N&L thought the kitchen and office areas could be salvaged, that’s going to be demolished as well.
N&L thought that any other PHF site would cost more money for land acquisition and might meet neighbor resistance.
N&L estimated that the demolition/rebuild option would take about three years, part of which would allow demolition and design planning to occur in parallel.
To arrive at their nearly $20 million cost, N&L estimated:
$7.2 million for demolition and construciton. $1 million for “site work” (apparently for utilities). They then added about $6 million for design, insurance, permits, project oversight, etc. Bringing the cost to about $14 million. Then they added a cost escalator (for inflation) to 2024 at 13.5%, bringing the cost up to $16 million.
And last, N&L added $3.5 million in “soft costs,” including “design/support fees ($1.8 million), construction management at a whopping $1.5 million. and a series of relatively minor bureaucratic requirements adding up to $3.6 million in soft costs.
That added up to the $19.5 million estimate that the Board approved.
The Bay Area mental health services outfit Telecare Corp. told N&L that 39.5 people would be required to staff the facility round the clock. The Board wasn’t provided with anything showing why that number of personnel would be required. In addition, there’s no estimate of the cost for that staffing in the materials provided by N&L. We guess the cost could be in the rough area of $100k per person which would mean around $4 million a year plus more millions for other operations costs.
Mental Health Director Dr. Jenine Miller told the Board that she thought that if the PHF were a “super-PHF” (which can accept Medicare as well as basic Medi-Cal patients and a few private insurance clients) that the insurance for the inmates, er, patients would cover much of the operational cost. Measure B includes a 1/8th cent continuing sales tax increment which is supposed go to PHF operations, but nobody has worked out the operations financing so far.
Suffice it to say that the facility will be costly to staff and operate so that insured patients — including patients from outside Mendocino County — will get priority. Insured patients are the ones who are declared “severely mentally ill” by Camille Schraeder’s mental health staffers so if they play their cards right (and include as many out-of-county insured patients as they can hold) they might make operational costs pencil out.
But if you think that any of this will help Mendo's ever larger population of walking wounded that Measure B was sold to help, you’d be very, very wrong.
Mendo’s First Pot Crop Report!
A short, mostly graphic presentation attached to next Tuesday’s Conventional 2020 Crop Report presentation to the Board of Supervisors says that Mendo generated about $131 million worth of wholesale marijuana for calendar year 2020.
The report, based on the Department of Food and Agriculture’s CalCannabis licensing information, also says that Mendo growers hold 1310 licenses (“provisional and approved” — the majority provisional) for 11.2 million square feet of cannabis (just over 250 acres). (By comparison Mendo has about 16,500 acres of [legal] grapes.) The report adds that there are about 290 “cultivation licensed acres.” Most of the reported acreage is “small mixed light,” followed by nursery acreage and small outdoor acreage. Amazingly, this relatively small number of legal cannabis acres produced over $131 million in “combined production value.” By far, the largest production value is in “Flower (Outdoor/Mixed Light)” at almost $106 million.
The only downside to the precedent setting report is that it’s now so dated as to be nearly meaningless. The bottom has fallen out of the pot market.
In 2020 over 111,000 pounds of legal outdoor mixed light Mendo mellow was going for an average of $950 a pound. Indoor flower was selling for around $1500 a pound. Etc. It’s common knowledge that those prices, on hindsight, were the tail end of Mendo’s formerly high-value pot history. 2021 saw significantly lower quantities and prices per pound. Although there was still a lot of production in 2021, much of that year’s crop has not been trimmed or sold. Nobody has quantified that year’s legal off-market.
2022 is shaping up as even worse. Anecdotal reports have entire greenhouses full of mature marijuana plants being abandoned in large quantities (growers don’t want to pay to have it trimmed without a confirmed customer and price), and what little can be sold is going for no more than $400 — if a grower can find a customer. (Rumor has it that since Oklahoma legalized “medical” pot in 2018 that state has been growing industrial outdoor cannabis in bulk and taking much of Mendo’s east coast black market away.)
By a strange quirk of timing, Mendo’s highly anticipated first official pot report looks like it has nowhere to go but down.
Combined with the not quite as bad decline in the grape market, the overall decline of Mendo’s primary ag revenue will not only hurt the growers, but Mendo’s coffers via lower economic stimulus, taxes and property values which will all take a significant hit.
As we asked last month after the release of the conventional 2020 crop report, does Official Mendo care? As the cannabis market falls, Mendo’s pot bureaucracy has expanded with a large infusion of state “equity” money. But so far, not a peep about the implications of these dismal ag numbers from Mendo’s well paid Supervisors.
Pot Bureaucracy Explodes As Pot Production Plummets…
(From Tuesday Supervisors Board Meeting Agenda Package)
Mendocino Cannabis Program (MCP) Staffing Update
(Feb 1. 2022)
The Mendocino Cannabis program has interviewed for planner I, planner II, chief planner, admin assistant, staff assistant, department analyst, office services supervisor, and program administrator, During the first round of interviews the program hired 1 – planner I, 1 – staff assistant, and 1 – program administrator all of whom on boarded with the program in November and December 2021. The program opened a second recruitment period for planner techs, planner I, planner II, senior planner, chief planner, staff assistant, admin assistant, department analyst, office services supervisor, and program manager.
The program currently has 6 – planner tech, planner I/II positions, 1 – planner cartographer, 1 – staff assistant, 1 – admin assistant, 1 – department analyst, 1 – office services supervisor, 1 - senior planner, 1 – chief planner, and 1 – program manager position available that we are currently interviewing for. Additionally, the MCP is working to complete a Request for Proposal (RFQ) seeking qualified contract planners to temporarily assist with the review and processing of applications and appendix g CEQA checklists.
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Cannabis Permit Portal Update
The MCP has completed the review of all 990 portal application submissions and is working with County Counsel and outside counsel to determine next steps for those with incomplete submissions. Once staff has completed this process with counsel we will provide an update to the public, agents, and applicants. The MCP intends to provide a minimum of 30-day notice to those who are eligible to correct deficiencies via the 30- day corrections portal.
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