From the Attachment to Consent Calendar Item 3m which was approved without discussion or comment along with the rest of the consent calendar on Tuesday, April 5, 2022:
“Clerk of the Board has established an overflow/viewing room in Conference Room B, which will have two sets of open double doors leading to the Administration Building quad, in order to provide air flow for attendees. For the safety of others, we request that attendees watch the meeting from the more ventilated overflow room, and enter Chambers when it is time for Public Comment on their item(s) of interest. Once they’ve provided their comments, we request that they return to the overflow room for continued viewing of the meeting.”
Translation: Members of the public must sit in a little isolation-room and watch the meeting on tv and wait for their name to be called, then immediately leave and skulk back to the isolation chamber after having been officially ignored. If a member of the public wants to comment on something that comes up at the meeting, it’s not clear how that person will be able to be noticed for comment — if at all. This is worse than the zoom meetings, completely unworkable, and hardly in the spirit of public participation. In other words, just like the Supervisors like it.
PS. This is what former CEO Angelo was apparently doing for all those months she kept insisting that the Board chambers were being “remodeled.” PPS. The “Clerk of the Board” is CEO Darcie Antle.
Excerpts from New Protocols…
Unruly behavior or harassment by a member of the Public or County Employee/Elected Official (non-immediate):
The Chair of the Board of Supervisors should speak with the offending individual and request they sit or remove themselves from Chambers. If they continue to be verbally abusive, the Chair should immediately call for a recess and direct all Supervisors and County staff to exit via the Board Chambers back door/hallway door, while directing members of the public to exit out of the main chamber doors.
Secure the office door with a door blocker.
Contact UPD or any on duty Security Official. Document the threat or inappropriate behavior in writing in an Incident Report and provide it immediately to Risk Management.
Written threats or harassment (internal or external)
Deliver any written threat or harassing correspondence via email to both the CEO and Risk Management.
Complete an Incident Report and attach the correspondence to be officially documented. …
Public Comment forms will be available in the back of the room for attendees. Once filled out, they are to be deposited into the pocket affixed to the chambers wall (near the podium). The Clerk will collect the forms and deliver them to the Chair, for use when Comment is called. All public comments will be limited to 3 minutes, unless explicitly stated otherwise by the Chair. All comments will be timed, by way of a timer displayed on the Chambers projectors.
* * *
As expected, the Supervisors blindly approved the retroactive $4.2 million five-year Calfire dispatch contract on the consent calendar without a word of discussion about savings that might result from the dispatch consolidation they committed to a couple of years ago, or the amount of the contract or the reason it’s nine months late.
The Board also considered an extremely abstract and poorly prepared item about getting some allegedly un-assessed properties onto the assessor’s rolls.
A Mendo citizen named Redhawk Pallesen (once upon a time a great linebacker at Ukiah High School) said he’d looked at some census data and some parcel data and some permit info, apparently from his inland (Ukiah area) neighborhood, and concluded that there are building addresses on the census data which don’t appear to be permitted or are listed as “vacant.” Mr. Pallesen said that using his rather small sample size he estimated that the County was missing out on upwards of $15 million of additional property taxes if his research was applied to the entire County.
Which reminded us of the old story about the guy who heard that the Mississippi River delta was receding at the rate of about half an inch a year and concluded that 70 million years ago the Delta was just south of Buenos Aires and in 15 million years it will be just north of Detroit.
While not saying so directly, the discussion implied that most of the non-vacant, unassessed properties are connected in some way to unpermitted pot ops because Mr. Pallesen talked about cannabis operations at some of the addresses he sampled and County Assessor- Clerk-Recorder Katrina Bartolomie said even if she had the staff to go look at some of the parcels, they could be expected to be met with pit bulls and guns, making it difficult to do appraisals from behind a locked gate or two without law enforcement backup.
Supervisor Ted Williams, who sponsored the item, offering no evidence or presentation, said he thought maybe upwards of one out of four existing Mendo buildings were not on the assessor’s rolls. But he acknowledged it might be one out of ten or one out of a hundred.
Supervisor Dan Gjerde pointed out that most property taxes don’t go to the County’s general fund, but to the state and the schools, so the County could only expect to get about a third of any new taxes derived from increased assessments.
Supervisor John Haschak thought the County should go after unpermitted structures, not just un-assessed ones.
Supervisor Williams disagreed saying the County is already short of housing and they shouldn’t go around demolishing unpermitted buildings where people live. (Of course, nobody is seriously considering demolition. Even back in the hippie shack days of the 70s and early 80s, the right-wing bulldoze-em-all talk was mostly just anti-hippie rhetoric. Williams may have used the word “demolition” to appear reasonable to his Fifth District constituents when they don’t demolish anything.)
By way of contrast, the Anderson Valley Community Services District, whose primary funding is property tax disbursements from the County and a parcel tax based on those property taxes, doubts there’s any significant number of unassessed parcels in Anderson Valley. Every year knowledgeable district staff look closely at the AV portion of the County’s tax rolls and permit applications and satellite maps and even go out on inspections with local firefighters to sometimes verify the accuracy of their assessments. (Apparently, there were some hiccups this year which the locals think might be associated with the County’s new property tax computer system conversion, but they won’t know until the end of the year when county tax disbursements are compared to last year.)
So if the Board’s property assessment discussion seems abstract and unrealistic and ill-focused and out of touch to you… Well, you’re probably not a Supervisor.
Assessor-Recorder Bartolomie said she carefully keeps her property assessment info close to her vest and doesn’t release it to code enforcement because she’s only interested in assessments and doesn’t want property owners to hide their property for fear of getting slapped with a red tag.
In the end the Board voted to ask the Assessor to come back to the Board “at a later date” — unspecified, of course — with a plan to maybe hire more staff (Ms. Bartolomie said she’s badly understaffed with six funded positions unfilled, another legacy of CEO Angelo who required that all new hires be personally approved by her; we have no idea if Interim CEO Darcie Antle is continuing that policy, but she was a major devotee of CEO Angelo), or contract with a consultant (who probably would want a substantial bounty for each additional assessment they can verifiably snag) or look at more satellite images or get some help from the overstaffed “executive office” or something, and see if they can get a few more un-assessed properties added to the tax bill mailings. Ms. Bartolemie noted that the process can get complicated if people who get new assessments dispute their assessments or argue about whether a hoop house that’s not there anymore was a structure or not, or didn’t belong to the assessed party.
Even if there are some properties out there that need to be added to the assessor’s list, the entire discussion is several days late and many dollars short. By the time Mendo gets around to even figuring out a “plan” (much less funding it or staffing it) to address the problem, many of the “structures” Mr. Pallesen apparently thinks are unassessed will either be gone or abandoned by their pot-growing “owners” (or renters, or employees, or squatters, or…?) in the wake of the collapse of the pot market.
* * *
Supervisor Haschack asked Interim CEO Darcie Antle about the status of the Public Safety Advisory Board which the County enacted into County Code last year with some fanfare but hasn’t yet convened.
Ms. Antle replied that she’s working on an agenda item for a future meeting. (Which probably means she hasn’t done anything at all, but will start thinking about it now.) After Ms. Antle’s “I’m working on it” reply (reminiscent of former CEO Tom Mitchell), the subject — already almost a year since the Advisory Board was put in place — might make it back to the Board agenda before the understaffed Assessor’s assessment review plan materializes.
* * *
The Supervisors grudgingly agreed to give Sheriff Kendall authority to provide hiring bonuses to both experienced cop transfers as well as new cops who paid for their law enforcement training out of pocket. Transfers would get a one-time bonus of $20k (in recognition that the County doesn’t have to pay for their training), and new hires would get $7k to cover their out-of-pocket training cost.
According to the agenda item: “Discussion and Possible Action Regarding Sheriff’s Deputy Hiring Incentive of $7,000 for Police Academy Graduates Who Self-Financed Their Attendance and $20,000 for Lateral Transfers from Another Law Enforcement Agency”
Discussion:
The agenda item avoids the subject of how much this would cost by noting: “Annual recurring cost: Varies.” And “Budget clarification: N/A”
Kendall said law enforcement recruiting has become tougher across the state and the nation in recent years and that to have any decent chance at filling some of his vacancies he needs to provide bonuses comparable to what cops are getting elsewhere now, although the problem has been building for a couple of years now.
Kendall told the Board that he has 15 corrections officer vacancies at the jail plus three out on injury causing about 13 hours of overtime a week for current jail staff. He also has 10 vacant patrol slots with six out on long-term injury causing about 10-12 hours of overtime per week per patrol deputy.
Despite the County’s own lack of budget impact info, Supervisor Ted Williams questioned Kendall’s request saying that the County is facing what he considers to be an “austerity” budget and making his usual claim that giving any additional money to the Sheriff will translates to a one-for-one cut somewhere else — never mind that he and his fellow board members hand out raises to senior staff and their beloved mental health services contractor on via no-bid, sole source consent calendar contracts, or that they handed out more than $80k for a useless “strategic plan,” with no budget impact questions, plus the Board is overrunning its own budget and both the CEO’s office and the County Counsel’s office are way over budget with no questions asked about what cuts that will engender.
Nevertheless Kendall’s request was approved unanimously as a “pilot program” to be reviewed in six months and again in a year. (That would be a first; nothing else is ever “reviewed” as called for in the enabling approval; take for example the Board’s stated plan to review the Mobile Crisis Response unit status on year after it was funded by Measure B. That never happened.)
Meanwhile some union contract formalities will have to be ironed out before the program actually hands out any money.
As usual, nobody asked the Sheriff about his budget or overtime status (another subject that was supposed to be monitored “monthly” when it was last discussed) or how much overtime savings might result from any new hires, even though the Sheriff teased the Board and the public with his estimates of how much his chronic staffing shortages are costing in overtime and implying that more staffing will mean less overtime.
* * *
County Failures Piling Up
Commenting on our partial list of failures at the end of our report about the lack of Dispatch consolidation follow-up, an on-line reader asked: “I want to hear more failures and so does the general public.”
Sure. But first let’s review the original list:
Failure to deal with non-reimbursable mental health and drug-addled residents as Measure B called for.
Picking a pointless fight with the Sheriff over computer independence and liability for ordinary budget overruns.
Failure to enforce Measure V to reduce standing dead tree fire hazards, consigned to the County Counsel’s office two years ago and never mentioned again.
Failure to revise the pot ordinance after their latest use-permit proposal was withdrawn in the face of a pending local initiative, leaving the County and well-meaning applicants in permanent limbo.
Failure to plan or budget for their ill-considered consolidated Chief Financial Officer office despite voting it into existence with no plan or analysis.
Failure to convene their Public Safety Advisory Board despite its incorporation in County Code more than a year ago.
Failure to follow advisory Measure AG which was supposed to allocate the majority of pot tax revenues to Mental Health, Roads, Emergency Services and enforcement. In fact, nobody has even asked for a tally of those revenues for purposes of proper allocation.
* * *
To that list, on request, we added:
Failure to set up permanent emergency operations center so that disasters can be responded to quickly.
Failure to develop a single project to submit for grant funding to mitigate drought.
Failure to provide promised paramedic subsidy to local ambulance services.
Failure to get Measure B funded Redwood Valley remodeled church/training facility up and running.
Failure to fill critical third position authorized and funded for mobile crisis response.
Wasting about $80k on a “strategic plan” that a large percentage of their own employees described as “a waste of time” while saying they are operating on an “austerity budget.”
Failure to set up a re-established water agency in a timely manner despite drought emergency — $330k consultant will only deliver a ‘work plan” by August after which no one has any idea what will happen or when or how much more it will cost.
Failure to impose water restrictions on local water agencies.
Failure to set up a budget line item for Sheriff’s overtime so that overtime can be managed and planned for as incidents occur, instead threatening the Sheriff with personal liability for overtime.
Failure to provide monthly departmental budget and status reports to the Board and public.
Failure to plan for significant impact of new courthouse on affected county offices: DA, Public Defender, Probation, Sheriff.
* * *
IN HIS WEEKLY COLUMN, Mendocino County Observer Editor Jim Shields writes: “The Supervisors can make this problem go away overnight. Their CEO caused this problem, and they need to get themselves out of it by providing the Sheriff with a settlement letter that says the following: 1. The Sheriff’s Office shall maintain full control and autonomy of its computer systems. 2. The Sheriff shall not be held personally liable for budget overruns, as there is no precedent for such action. Problem solved.”
Shields is right. Something as simple and obvious as that would probably solve the ongoing and costly dispute the CEO and the Supervisors initiated last June, costing both the Sheriff and the County money they say they don’t have.
(We say “they say” because the budget has not yet been fully explained given that CEO Angelo said she left with an overlarge $20 million “reserve” but her successor, Interim CEO (and former Budget Team honcho) Darcie Antle, immediately said there was a $12 million deficit — except her numbers don’t say when those deficits will occur, presumably over several years at least, and she did not propose any immediate cost-cutting measures.)
Anyway, the issue is not how easily this pointless dispute could be solved, but, since it’s so easy, why it came up in the first place and why it has not already been solved.
Court filings show that the computer issue arose when the CEO tried to create a Chief Information Officer position for long-time loyal pal, Deputy CEO Janelle Rau, despite everyone involved knowing that she is not technically qualified for such a job and it’s illegal to include the Sheriff’s info system in a system open to non-law-enforcement personnel.
We don’t know why the hypothetical threat of holding the Sheriff personally responsible for overruns even arose, but we suspect that it stemmed from the former CEO Angelo’s personal dislike of Sheriff Kendall who caught her misrepresenting and undermining several important Sheriff’s issues since he was appointed Sheriff. But we pointed out at that time that the problem is not ordinary budget overruns, but the County’s and the Board’s failure to do monthly budget reporting. We also don’t know why the threat seems to apply only to the Sheriff when the original discussion included all department heads — including County Counsel Curtis who is currently experiencing the largest percentage projected overrun for this fiscal year.
The budget liability dispute would have simply passed into the Board’s weekly memory hole as a passing silliness when it first came up if it weren’t for Supervisors Ted Williams and Dan Gjerde knee-jerkingly falling into the CEO’s trap by idiotically piping up in support of imposing it after then-Assistant CEO Darcie Antle included it on an annual budget slide.
Williams immediately said, “Can we decide today to follow this?”
Gjerde agreed: “If it’s county code, I don't know why it's not being followed already.”
Williams: “Maybe we can give direction that we expect county code to be followed.”
CEO Angelo, clearly prepared on the subject, remarked, “When I started in 2007 [as Health and Human Services Director] this was one of the policies that was explained to me by then interim CEO Al Beltrami. All department heads were very well aware of this policy. This policy has never been enforced. If this board would like me as the executive officer to enforce it, what we would do is, we know when a department, whether it's run by a department head or elected official, as you know when we come back every quarter we can project if the department is going to be over budget.”
Never mind that the CEO has never provided such department by department quarterly budget projections.
Angelo continued: “Let's take the Department of Transportation and say they are going to be $200,000 over budget. I would notify the director at midyear most likely with a written letter that they are projecting a $200,000 overage and attach this policy which everybody is aware of and this makes the department head personally responsible for that $200,000 overage. You can see that it's quite a drastic policy and I understand why it's never been enforced. But if this board wants it enforced we could send it out again and notify the department heads. We could actually have them sign something. The department heads will sign, I don't know about the elected officials. But we could have them sign that they have received the policy and they are aware of it and they understand it and we could attempt to enforce it. That's the best I can say we could do.”
Williams: “I support that. Let's do it.”
Angelo went on and on about an enforcement process, adding, “The Sheriff comes in $1.6 million over. Am I going to send him a bill for $1.6 million? And when he says he won't pay it and he goes public is the board going to say he's going to have to put up $1.6 million? The policy is a bit unrealistic but it's on the books. We need to decide if we are going to go forward with it or amend it in some way.”
Williams: “It's not really a budget if you set a limit and then department heads are able to spent outside of the limit.”
Gjerde: This is the time to do it. It's part of the budget process. People would get advance notice from day one when their budget is approved. It's likely that any department head who sees their department over at the end of the year is going to say, Well, I asked for more money and your budget didn't approve everything. So that will be the argument made. But they certainly will have known what their budget was at budget approval time. It is pretty drastic. But on the other hand management employees and department heads and deputy department heads are paid top dollar — they may not think that but I think they are by Mendocino County standards — and with that comes responsibility. So I don't think it's that drastic in some respects. I think people should be able to manage their budget one way or the other and they need to make choices.”
County Counsel Christian Curtis: “This is not just county policy, it is state law.”
Williams: “It's a mistake to allow these overages. The board is never in a position to say, No, you cannot spend that money. It's already been spent. We need to align with state law.”
CEO Angelo suggested that the question be referred to the General Government standing committee “and a timeline be given to bring a recommendation back.”
They did that. But no timeline was given, of course. And the General Government Committee (Supervisors Maureen Mulheren and Williams) never reported back on the subject. Mulheren later issued a personal statement that it was not the Board’s intention to send any bills to department heads. But 1) none of her colleagues are on record agreeing with her, and 2) that was after the Sheriff had taken the threat personally because of all the pompous rhetoric from Williams and Gjerde.
Remember also that the Sheriff was not on hand at that June of 2021 board meeting when this stupid discussion arose. If he had been we suspect that the issue would have been quashed on the spot.
But now here we are nearly a year later and CEO Angelo is gone, yet this Board still seems unable to solve these pointless problems of their own creation with the kind of simple declaration Shields suggests.
These are the same people who are supposed to lead Mendo through much tougher issues in the times ahead.
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