Tuesday morning’s meeting a closed session item during which the Board was to do a performance evaluation of their Cannabis Program Director, Kristin Nevedal. After about an hour of closed session, Board Chair Glenn McGourty announced that the Board had voted 5-0 to accept Ms. Nevedal’s resignation.
Ms. Nevedal was hired two years ago in March of 2021 at which time Supervisor John Haschak was quoted in a formal County Press Release, “Kristin [note the friendly first-name use] has an excellent history of cannabis experience at state, regional, and local levels. Her ability to work with stakeholders and governmental entities will serve Mendocino County well.”
Supervisor Williams said “Implementing Mendocino’s cannabis program has been a chronic problem for the county; it has changed departments and hands multiple times compounded with problematic local policy and hundreds of legacy cultivators stuck in the pipeline for years. Untying this knot requires a special candidate. Kristin Nevedal is that candidate, and we are fortunate that she accepted the charge. Her extensive experience in cannabis policy, advocacy, and compliance makes her uniquely qualified to hit the ground running in managing the cannabis program and resolving our permitting backlog. Having such a competent person in this role will allow the Department of Planning and Building to function more effectively and work on other deferred countywide needs,”
Williams assumption that anyone, much less Ms. Nevedal, could magically “untie” the pot permit knot that the Board itself tied indicated how naïve he has been about the County’s fundamentally unworkable pot permit program.
Ms. Nevedal was criticized for bad budget management and the Department’s failure to get more than a few permits into state licensing. But it’s unfair to blame her for the County’s unworkable pot permit mess which the Board, along with a few stalwart pot applicants and their equally naïve reps and advocates, has spent years tweaking but never really improved. After her recruitment, the Board also decided to have Ms. Nevedal report directly to the Board so it’s safe to conclude that the Board bears most of the responsibility for Ms. Nevedal’s pot permit shortcomings, most of which were visible in her first few months and shouldn’t have taken two years to deal with.
Nobody said anything about what happens to the Board’s bloated Cannabis Department or if anyone will be “acting” Cannabis Program Director, a high paid position that was created after Ms. Nevedal was hired so that she could get substantially more pay than “Cannabis Program Manager.”
The County has gone through at least six cannabis program managers since the program was begun back in 2017. They were always hired with great fanfare and hope, but never lasted very long for one reason or another. Ms. Nevedal’s two-year tenure was the longest.
Ms. Nevedal may not have lived up to expectations, but since the Board has never taken responsibility for creating or trying to make Mendo’s unworkable ordinance, this “resignation” seems has an element of scapegoating, especially since the Board had no questions about what will happen next with the Cannabis Department.
Soggy Pancakes
The Supervisors have hired an expensive consultant to help various water projects around the County apply for grant funding. The consultant has prepared a list of possible projects, a rather pathetic list that has been floating around for more than a year now, so the consultant didn’t have to do much to assemble the list.
The list is unique in that even though its intent is to better prepare Mendo for future droughts, there’s nothing about water storage or conservation. Instead, it’s a list of water system repairs and upgrades, meetings, analysis, workshops, etc. Of course, it does not contain any mention of former Supervisor John Pinches’s ideas about projects like Scout Lake east of Willits (planning for which was near completion before Pinches left the Board back in 2010), a downhill winter-only Dos Rios water pipe to supplement Willits’s haphazard supplies, or fish hatcheries along the Eel. The only project on the list that might have to do with mitigating a future drought isn’t a Mendo project, but a small groundwater recharge project on Indian land in Pinoleville which shouldn’t need much, if any, funding in the first place.
Apparently, despite years of talking and meetings and workshops, nobody (with the conspicuous exception of Fort Bragg) in Official Mendo has any ideas for water storage or conservation. And they’ve already demonstrated that they have no intention of considering any of Pinches’s ideas.
To make the subject even more ludicrous, the Board couldn’t even decide which projects the consultant should devote grant prep time, other than maybe the top five.
Supervisor Williams thought they should just pursue all ten.
County Transportation Director Howard Dashiell ended up with what’s left of the Water Agency after it was closed back in 2010 to save a few bucks. Dashiell offered an odd bit of homespun wisdom on how to handle the problem.
Dashiell: “If I go down to Maple [the Maple Café in Ukiah] and get five pancakes and some butter to put on ’em, I get pretty thick butter. But if I keep the same amount of butter and get ten pancakes, I’ll spread it thinner. So as we work with the applicants, if we can spread the amount of resources they have for this we might get a little bit of butter spread on ten pancakes. Or I’ll have to call the waitress, in this case the Board of Supervisors, and ask for more butter. More money, in other words.”
Supervisor Maureen Mulheren disagreed:
“Mr. Chairman, some of the pancakes might be hotter than others and the butter might spread more quickly. I think that’s what we’re headed down. The butter is not going to be spread equally. We can do all ten and move forward.”
Supervisor Glenn McGourty commented: “It must be near lunch, the topic has turned to food.”
Dashiell: “It sounds like the motion is for nine projects and for me to come back if we can’t get give ample assistance.”
McGourty: “That’s correct.”
The trouble is, soggy pancakes like these projects will do nothing to improve Mendo’s drought preparedness no matter how much butter is spread on them.
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