County Notes: The Mockel Debacle

(Mockel who? Mockel being shoved down our throats by the Democrat's Northcoast machine.)

Last month, at the time I filed my Brown Act complaint to ferret out the Supervisors’ unanimous, simultaneous endorsement of recently declared candidate Trevor Mockel to replace Glenn McGourty as First District Supervisor, I also filed a Public Records Act request for all correspondence between Mockel, state senator Mike McGuire and the Supervisors in 2023. Somewhat surprisingly, after a couple of routine delays, on Friday we received what the County said was the relevant correspondence responsive to our request.

The correspondence, mainly text messages over County cellphones, shows that Mockel simply fired off casual requests for endorsements and all five Supervisors snapped to attention and immediately, unquestioningly, provided them. 

The correspondence does not include any messages from Supervisor Williams, but at a couple of points while lobbying for endorsements from Supervisors Haschak and Mulheren, Mockel notes that Williams had already endorsed him the week prior. Presumably, Williams didn’t use his county phone to converse with Mockel, but both boys are clearly on the same team.

The endorsement exchanges with the Supervisors were primarily about timing and questions of who would do what and when. At no time did any Supervisor ask Mockel about his qualifications or experience as it relates to the position of Supervisor for the First District. Nor did Mockel offer anything besides his info-free generic candidacy announcement. 

Supervisor Dan Gjerde was the last Supervisor to fork over a blurb after being peppered with several requests from Mockel. Gjerde’s response sounds like he just wanted to make Mockel go away: “If the County is to improve services, we need to effectively maximize use of State and Federal dollars. Trevor understands this and will leverage scarce local funds with outside resources. — Dan Gjerde.” 

But there’s nothing in the exchange about the subject of improving services nor how Mockel, an invisible low-level aide to McGuire, would somehow “leverage” local funds.

In the exchange with Haschak, Haschak first asks, “Are there themes you’d like me to cover?” Later Haschak finally provides a generic blurb, but puppy dog like, he adds, “Edit as needed.”

Rather than ask Mockel about the First District and what he sees as important local issues, Supervisor McGourty jokingly asked: “You don't have any dark secrets I should know about? Illegitimate children, scorned women, drunken brawls with local police, etc…? Just asking!”

Mockel replied: “I've never even gotten a speeding ticket. I'm pretty boring and SMM [Senator Mike McGuire’s — hint, hint] office kept me so busy I haven't even been dating. Honestly, the only thing I'm embarrassed about in my past would be busting my shoulder before I could even attempt OCS for the Marines. When I was younger I made it a huge part of my personality, and failing was a very humbling experience. Apart from that I might rely a little too much on my personality and extroverted nature to get me through professional situations. I probably should have more attention to detail. I try to surround myself with people who counter my deficits if possible.”

There were a number of unrelated emails to the Supervisors from the time Mockel briefly worked as a “Field Representative” for State Senator Mike McGuire or as a Ukiah city staffer/gofer, which are not relevant to the position of Supervisor or the endorsements. Mockel's duties included arrangements for zoom meetings, forwarding of routine emails from others, common notifications of humdrum matters, copies of State Senate press releases, etc.

For the record, there’s no indication that the Board members conversed with each other about the endorsements in a way which might have technically violated the Brown Act. But it’s damn close to a violation, so close that they should have known better than to risk it. 

The closest they got to a Brown Act violation was when Mockel asked Haschak: “Wondering if you think it would be better to have the individual supervisors write an endorsement or just state that I have the full endorsement of the Board?”

Haschak replied: “I would think individual statements. Later you can tout the entire Board's support.”

Haschak didn't seem to realize that “touting the entire Board’s support,” would be a clear Brown Act violation as he casually suggests that Mockel do just that.

To summarize, all five Supervisors endorsed Mockel at about the same time, in very friendly terms, with one Supervisor giving Mockel permission to “edit as needed,” before the filing deadline had even expired, without asking a single substantive question about his experience or abilities or knowledge of the issues in the First District or the County. Mockel has not attended any Supervisors meetings, has written nothing and said nothing about the issues in the First District other than claiming to care about the drought, wildfires, education and local business, as if no one else does.

Based on these exchanges, one can only conclude that our current Supervisors don’t really care who is Supervisor, or what their abilities or experience might be, as long as they have had some casual, trivial contact and the prospective candidate simply asked for an endorsement. The fact that Mockel once worked for Democratic Senator McGuire for a short time and is presumed to be a loyal young Democrat Party team player, ready to do the Democrats’ bidding was all the Supervisors really needed to know.

Another State Hospital Fiasco?

Let’s clarify and highlight what the Ukiah School Board announced a couple of days ago when they issued a press release entitled: “Ukiah Unified Trustees Declare Intent to Sell Redwood Valley Elementary School Property.”

Here we have a functioning school facility of about ten multi-room buildings, with all the associated infrastructure including water and septic and substantial amount of pavement, excellent traffic access and parking, apparently unused since 2010 when it was closed and later declared “surplus,” on a large 12.4 parcel of primo land right paved for roads and parking and recreational activities, including about four acres of bare land in the back, right on the Russian River.

According to the District, “Between December 2017 and April 2020, a variety of transactions were explored, and community input was sought. …Ukiah Unified offered the property for sale or lease to certain public agencies, such as city and county parks and recreation entities, as well as to additional public agencies, such as the Department of General Services, California universities,” after which they were “not able to sell or lease the property to any of these entities during this process.”

They don’t say why they were “unable” to sell the property. Was the price too high? (Unlikely.) Were there disclosure issues? Did somebody object to the sale? 

And now they want to sell it on the open market with a minimum bid of only $900k, the price of a nice four-bedroom house in Ukiah Valley on maybe a half-acre of land.

Some of the buildings have detectable amounts of lead paint and asbestos which a new owner would have to deal with if they demolished them. But as existing buildings they should be usable as is for some public purpose and that should not be too big an obstacle to overcome. 

Some old-timers will remember back in the 80s when the State offered the Mendocino State Hospital to the County for $1.00 Mendo refused at the time saying, almost insanely, that they couldn’t afford the upkeep. Not long after that the Buddhists bought the 90-acre site with thousands of square feet of usable buildings complete with large gardens and a vineyard for around $250k. That site could have been used for all kinds of useful public purposes. Instead, (some of) it is now being used by the Buddhists for their quasi-religious purposes with zero public benefit.

A number of points apply to this terrible development with the Redwood Valley Elementary School:

It amounts to a large gift of public funds if it sells for anywhere near $1 million.

There is no record of the Supervisors ever formally considering the acquisition or lease of the property during the period that the School District says they offered it. 

The County is about to waste over $20 million on a Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF) after having previously wasted about $5 million on a “Crisis Residential Treatment Center” on Orchard Avenue and about half a mil on an unused Training Facility in Redwood Valley — all with Measure B funds. There is no indication that the Measure B Committee or County staff ever considered this abandoned, “surplus” property.

The County claims that they are trying to do something about the shortage of affordable housing in the Ukiah Valley. 

Conclusions: We doubt that a serious effort was made to sell the property. We doubt the County seriously considered buying it or leasing it for a public purpose. The combination of incompetence, timid and unimaginative officialdom making up the School District and County Administration, and overall official sloth will likely result in another Talmage Hospital-style fiasco where the property will either continue to lie dormant or be converted to some very limited private purpose while the County continues to whine that they don’t have any place to build affordable style multi-family housing.

Measure P At Risk?

Local Fire Services are very nervous about an upcoming state ballot measure that could retroactively rescind Measure P, the “Essential Services Sales Tax” measure approved by voters last year by a fairly narrow margin last year of 51.2 % to 48.8%. The Supervisors passed an accompanying resolution promising that the proceeds would go to fire services and fire prevention. Normally ballot measures for fire services these days pass with a much larger percentage. But the public doesn’t have much faith in this board of Supervisors, so the vote was close. Nevertheless, the Supervisors have since included the allocation of the proceeds, estimated at around $2 million a year, in the 2023-2024 budget, although they are not legally bound to do that. (The board could revise or rescind their resolution at any time, especially if money becomes even tighter than it already is.)

Even Measure O, November 2022’s popular dedicated library tax passed by only 58.5% to 41.5%, less than two-thirds, indicating that there’s a significant underlying opposition even to relatively popular taxes that are designated for a specific popular purpose.

This Latest Threat to Measure P comes in the form of a ballot measure likely to be on the state ballot in November of 2024 which would retroactively rescind any new general sales tax approved after January of 2022 and require it to be re-voted on with a 2/3 majority requirement. The Measure is being advanced by California’s “Business Roundtable,” which is an anti-tax outfit. So far the Measure has received little attention and nothing is official since the filing deadline is still months off. 

We were surprised that a ballot measure could be retroactive, but so far there are no legal challenges to that provision in the proposed measure, tentatively entitled the “Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act.” 

The measure states that any tax adopted after January 2022 and that fails to meet the requirements of the initiative would be deemed void 12 months after the act's effective date unless the tax is reenacted in compliance with the new measure. These include a clearly stated duration for the tax and a statement for how the revenues would be used.

According to the proponents, the proposed measure aims to “ensure that taxpayers have the right and ability to effectively balance new or increased taxes and other charges with the rapidly increasing costs Californians are already paying for housing, food, childcare, gasoline, energy, health care, education and other basic costs of living.”

The initiative would, among other things, explicitly prohibit advisory measures similar to the Measure P resolution that indicate that "the revenue from the general tax will, could, or should be used for a specific purpose."

Local government agencies around the state have started to gear up to oppose the initiative, but we haven’t seen any legal arguments about the very dubious retroactive provision in the proposed measure. 

Catching up on an interesting consent calendar item from the May 9 Board meeting:

“Item 3am: Approval of Agreement with Russell A. Cormier (DBA Nutmeg Consulting, Inc.), in the Amount of $121,880, to Serve as Administrator of the Mendocino County Homeless Services Continuum of Care’s Coordinated Entry Data System, Including Oversight and Management of the System and Data Entered by Homeless Service Providers, Effective Upon Signing Through June 30, 2024.”

Translation: The new automated cellphone app they paid tens of thousands of dollars for is still not good enough. They have to pay another consultant to provide “oversight and management” of the grossly exaggerated homeless point in time count and the information that the supposedly trained staff people who run the County’s various homeless shelters enter about their “clients.” The levels of bureaucracy of the local Homeless Inc./Continuum of Care Inc. continue to expand into even more amazing layers.