Mendo’s Slo-Mo Betrayal of Measure V
On Monday, December 16, 2019 The Board of Supervisors discussed “Possible Action Regarding Implementation of Measure V, ‘Declaring Intentionally Killed and Left Standing Trees a Public Nuisance’.”
The Item was put on the agenda by Supervisor John Haschak.
In the months leading up to the December 2019 item in his August 2019 “Supervisors Report,” Supervisor Haschak declared, “There are many twists and turns to this saga, but the bottom line is that in 2016 County Counsel approved Measure V going on the ballot, the people voted for it [by a wide margin], and it should be enforced. In the interest of my constituents and all the voters of Mendocino County, I will work with my colleagues on the Board to see that Measure V is fully implemented.”
Right after Measure V passed, Mendocino Redwood Company took the position that they were exempt from nuisance laws — including Measure V — based on California’s “Right to Farm” (trees) Ordinance.
MRC’s dubious claim was soon submitted to the Attorney General’s office for an opinion. Months went by. More months went by. More complaints were presented to the Supervisors demanding that some kind of action be taken. The Supervisors effectively avoided those complaints again and again by simply saying that they were waiting for the Attorney General’s opinion before they took any action. Finally, two years later, the Attorney General boldly declared that his office had some kind of unspecified “conflict” which prevented them from issuing any opinion on the subject of Measure V.
The Board then asked County Counsel Christian Curtis to weigh in, given the absence of an Attorney General opinion.
On November 18 of 2019, a month before Supervisor Haschak put his bold item on the agenda, County Counsel Christian Curtis issued a formal and carefully considered opinion citing applicable sections of The Timberland Productivity Act of 1982, as well as sections of federal occupational safety rules, refuting MRC’s claim that their hack&squirt tree poisoning was a “timber operation” under the law which would be entitled to immunity under the Right To Farm ordinance. Therefore, Curtis concluded, Mendocino County “does not see a basis for concluding that MRC has blanket immunity to Measure V.”
A few days after that MRC requested and was granted a private meeting with Haschak, CEO Angelo and County Counsel Christian Curtis. Obviously, no memo or record of that meeting was prepared.
Then, the week before Haschak’s agenda item was scheduled for discussion, on December 7, Haschak’s position on Measure V had morphed into: “I have placed on the Board agenda for our Monday, December 16, meeting a discussion of the County’s enforcement mechanism. As your Third District Supervisor, I would like to see positive economic development happen rather than a drawn out legal battle with MRC over this contentious issue. … My hope is that jobs can be created and MRC’s forest practice of wasting this valuable resource can be ended.”
The word “Enforcement” had suddenly disappeared and Haschak had magically shifted to a wimpy opinion that somehow the standing dead tanoaks could be a wonderful raw material and that MRC might somehow hire a bunch of woods workers to chop down the poisoned trees to create… what? Firewood? Flooring?
Never happen, of course. Local firewood companies have made it clear that they’d never sell poisoned wood to their customers as firewood and tanoak simply has no commerical value.
Several Measure V enforcement advocates quickly accused Haschak of meeting privately with MRC in the weeks between his enforcement statement and the December 19 meeting, presumably to soften his earlier position that Measure V “should be enforced.”
It was obvious that MRC had correctly observed that Haschak had no backbone and was susceptible to the timber industry’s standard delaying tactics: “Let’s discuss this,” “My hope is…” “Jobs…” “positive economic development,” etc. — these kinds of irrelevant phrases are intended to obscure and further delay the question — already three years had passed before Haschak even brought it up.
“Enforcement”? Haschak had removed the word from his Measure V vocabulary.
Predictably, at that December 16 Board meeting, the Board voted 4-1 [McCowen dissenting] to turn the enforcement question over to an ad hoc committee of John Haschak and Ted Williams — after Williams amended his ad-hoc committee motion to include a requirement that the County’s Code Enforcement staff look into a pending complaint about MRC’s tree-poisoning practice and report back in around 30 days.
The Board didn’t even consider demanding that MRC “voluntarily” offer a plan to mitigate the nuisance and then the County could evaluate it and perhaps negotiate further improvements before deciding whether to go to court to dispute MRC’s bogus claim.
Adding personal insult to public insult, during the Board discussion Supervisor Dan Gjerde took an entirely uncalled for shot at Supervisors Williams and Haschak, accusing them of “grandstanding,” adding, “Why are the two new supervisors determined to be in the minority? They are just looking for an opportunity to be outvoted. Supervisor Williams refused to support this [enforcement] before, and now he’s looking for an opportunity to be in minority again.”
Supervisor Williams replied, “I would prefer to be in majority. We have only asked that Code Enforcement follow up on the pending complaint. We need it to work on this. The ad hoc is still necessary.”
The Haschak-Williams ad hoc committee met once on January 29 and issued the following statement: “Code enforcement was directed to investigate the [one pending] complaint and return and report to the Board their findings. The ad hoc committee will report on their findings from their January 29 meeting. [There were none.] The Board of Supervisors may provide additional direction or take action as appropriate.”
At the following meeting, Mendocino County’s chief code enforcement officer, Trent Taylor, told the Supervisors that he had “investigated” Comptche resident Terry d’Selkie’s nuisance complaint about Mendocino Redwood Company’s standing dead trees on property adjacent to hers. Taylor said that he was unable to determine if there was a violation because nobody was home when he arrived and he couldn’t see from her residence which trees were dead. He added that the photos that Ms. d’Selkie provided weren’t good enough, and that he didn’t have authority to go onto MRC property, and he didn’t have the staff or resources to do a full assessment even if he did have permission.
During the ensuing discussion, Supervisor McCowen claimed that Measure V was “self-enforcing” since with Measure V anyone who was burned out of their home due to a standing-dead tree fire could sue for damages. Hence, the County didn’t need to be involved.
Ms. d’Selkie was among several public commenters who refuted Mr. Taylor's ridiculous claim.
“I went into the Code Enforcement office to see what the process was to do their investigation. They had called me probably about a week after the last Board of Supervisor's meeting, right before the winter break. I'm a teacher and I had left town for two weeks and I told them I would not be home but that they could probably see those dead standing trees from the road. When I spoke with the gentleman who was here earlier [Mr. Taylor] yesterday, he said that it was no secret that MRC was hacking and squirting and leaving standing dead trees everywhere. We see evidence of that. I asked if he saw it when he came out to the road. He said, ‘Well, we couldn't really see unless we went onto somebody's property,’ as he told you. But at no point did he say that the pictures I've provided were not good enough to show where the dead standing trees were. It's pretty obvious there are standing trees there. I told him that if he was looking from the road he probably could not tell which parcel number was which, but it was definitely MRC land. So I guess there was some miscommunication there. My complaint addressed the issues we have been talking about. There is an increased risk of wildfire to my home. I took the initiative to make sure I've done fire suppression around my home and on my land. This also lowers the value of my land because of the dead standing trees in my viewshed. And it is my only viewshed. That's what I see, dead standing trees, every time I look out there. The law says they need to be removed within 90 days of the poisoning. If this is not done, what's the penalty and what is the point of the law? Why is there no penalty for breaking the law that is the will of the people? If I break the law, something will happen to me. It's no secret they are violating the law. None of you think it's a secret. It's happening. If this were your land and it was in your viewshed and you looked out into the forest and saw dead standing trees, would you be sitting here saying, 'Oh, well, too bad, we don't have any enforcement, we can't do anything?' I don't think so. I think you would make sure that something was being done to enforce this law that was voted in by the people.”
Supervisor Ted Williams, who aggressively promoted Measure V as Chief of the Albion-Little River Fire Protection District and used it as a campaign issue, added, “I don’t think it’s appropriate as we approach the three-year mark of the passage of Measure V to leave it dangling. A decision needs to be made. We need to determine where we stand.”
After some more discussion, Supervisor Williams made a motion to direct County Counsel to come back to the board at the next meeting with an “enforcement plan” on March 24th which was to “focus on mitigating expense and a firmer intention to collaborate with industry to reach compliance with a willingness to fast track alternatives where possible.” However, several officials noted that the board's agenda was crowded for the next few weeks and it probably couldn't be discussed until late March. Supervisor Williams reluctantly agreed, “if that's the best we can do.”
In March of 2020, as we all vividly recall, Covid took center stage and Measure V disappeared from everyone’s radar and has never been discussed since. The Board Directive to Mr. Curtis to prepare an “enforcement plan” and return to the Board on March 24, 2020 remains on the Board’s growing list of ignored Board Directives to this day, two years after the very belated “directive” was issued. Status: “IN PROCESS.”
The CEO’S Record Of Mismanagement
Contrary to CEO Carmel Angelo’s claims that criticism of her lushly-compensated performance as Mendocino County CEO for twelve long years had something to do with her gender or management style, our indictment against the outgoing CEO had only to do with managerial shortcomings.
Our main indictment is her failure to properly report on County operations, both budgets and projects. Without proper reporting — which no one in authority has ever really demanded of her — the checks and balances, the course corrections, the avoidance of problems, the focus on service delivery that normally would obtain in a properly managed operation are impossible, consequently Mendocino County has become bogged down by its own inertia.
Our other indictments include personnel mismanagement leading to unnecessary staff turnover, departures and liabilities, lying to and undermining the Sheriff thereby jeopardizing public safety, continuing to keep control of the Board agenda when there was no need, and mostly ignoring board directives.
Mendo has never provided regular, informative departmental status reports to the Board and CEO Angelo’s persistent refusal to provide them — the CEO report is a highly filtered monthly sales pitch — can only be explained by the CEO concealing matters.
Under Angelo, maintaining high vacancy rates and building reserves took priority over departmental staffing and county functioning. Angelo personally decides which personnel vacancies can be filled and when.
CEO Angelo has shown an untoward preference for friends like the Schraeders who receive contract after contract without competitive bidding, doling out large sums of public money to them on the consent calendar with no attempt to develop or consider better or more cost-effective alternatives for parts of that huge contract (upwards of 20 million a year). The CEO has made a number of dubious senior Executive Office hires with no open recruitment or input from the Board of Supervisors.
She has steadfastly refused to stop putting retroactive contracts and pay raises on the consent agenda despite regular requests from the Board to the contrary.
She has shown a pervasive empire building, spendthrift mentality, typified by her approach to Measure B. At a 2019 Measure B committee meeting CEO Angelo said that County construction projects are equivalent to a private citizen contracting for a $50,000 kitchen. Back in April of 2019 Angelo, referring to Measure B construction projects, declared, “This is a major project. Think of all the people that come in and all the people you have involved in something like a $50,000 kitchen. We are talking $30-some million dollars; we are talking three services, one building, two buildings, three buildings — who knows?” Adding, “We want to use as much of this money for services and that’s the right thing to do.”
In this statement to her fellow Measure B committee members, while claiming that as much Measure B money as possible should go to increased services as the Measure called for, the CEO made it clear that she wanted to lard up the building and construction projects with as much costly and burdensome bureaucracy as possible, leaving as little as possible left for additional services, especially for the currently unhelped unreimburseables.
CEO Angelo was good at maintaining and expanding her empire, keeping the Supervisors and the public at a distance, and was much more effective than her predecessor at convincing the Board that things were being effectively managed when they were not.
We were not the only ones pointing out these shortcomings. In 2019 the Grand Jury weighed in on many of these same complaints. CEO Angelo simply brushed the Grand Jury’s findings aside like she has the Supervisors.
Here’s a classic CEO statement, this particular one in response to the Grand Jury finding that Board directives were “not adequately tracked.”
Angelo: “When a directive is issued without a timeframe, the Executive Office verifies if the project/directive is feasible, if resources are available, and if legal barriers exist. Following the analysis of the directive, staff determines if the project can move forward. A priority level and timeframe is then developed by the appropriate department based on available resources and the information is reported out to the Board.”
Translation: The CEO, not the Board, determines which directives are followed and what priority they will be given.
The Grand Jury also found that: “The CEO Report does not include substantive department updates, e.g. new jail addition, Sheriff overtime, BOS directive status, departmental statistics and major road project status.”
The CEO simply disagreed, declaring that her CEO report was fine as is.
The Grand Jury found that: “The Consent Agenda has often included controversial items, e.g. salary increases and cost overruns.”
CEO Angelo simply denied the obvious: “The criteria for inclusion on the consent calendar is that the item is considered to be routine and non-controversial.”
“Considered” by whom? The CEO, of course.
And our personal favorite. When we asked a few basic questions about departmental budget variances in one of the CEO reports, CEO Angelo replied that “The very nature of your questions is the reason the County budget team has been hesitant to present a ‘budget to actual’.”
Translation: Don’t ask any questions, and if you do, we'll clam up.
Unfortunately, with the selection of Angelo-loyalist Darcie Antle as “Interim CEO” combined with the weakest, most out-of-touch Board of Supervisors we’ve ever seen (and that’s saying something), there’s no indication that any of this will improve.
NO SOONER did the Supervisors decided to make Assistant CEO Darcie Antle Interim CEO for a year and keep with a mostly “CEO Model” because, they said, it’s so much work to deal with department heads, we see that next week’s limited Supervisors Agenda for Feb 24-25, 2022 features closed session reviews of most of those very Department heads:
Closed Session, Feb. 24
Any public reports of action taken in the closed session will be made in accordance with Government Code sections 54957.1.
3a) Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957- Public Employee Performance Evaluation - General Services Agency Director
3b) Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957- Public Employee Performance Evaluation - Social Services Director
3c) Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957- Public Employee Performance Evaluation - Agricultural Commissioner 3d) Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957- Public Employee Performance Evaluation - Transportation Director
3e) Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957- Public Employee Performance Evaluation - Cultural Services Agency Director
Feb. 25
3a) Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957- Public Employee Performance Evaluation - Public Health Director
3b) Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957- Public Employee Performance Evaluation - Behavioral Health and Recovery Services Director
3c) Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957- Public Employee Performance Evaluation - Cannabis Program Director 3d) Pursuant to Government Code Section 54957- Public Employee Performance Evaluation - Public Health Officer
Nothing else was on next week’s agenda as of Friday afternoon.
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