This week’s Supes meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 26, was Zoom-bombed by three or four idiots who called in with racist and anti-Semitic rants that were immediately cut-off by Board Chair Glenn McGourty. I believe they all used phony names, including one clod who identified himself as “George Lincoln Rockwell,” who in reality was a mid-20th Century, notorious American fascist, racist, anti-Semite, homophobe and founder of the American Nazi Party. The Mendo Rockwell and his embryonic Nazis need to be dropped head first down a mine shaft.
Back to adult business.
You are all aware of the fiscal mess that is wrecking Mendocino County and casts deep shadows across its entire landscape.
There is a state audit currently underway, in addition to the ongoing but incomplete annual federal audit.
For months, I’ve called for the County to stop talking about this fiscal crisis and start doing something, take some action.
The main reason that governing here is so dysfunctional is the people who make the decisions have always confused activity with productivity. They believe and practice, that holding tons of endless, tedious meetings dominated by their hard-working staff of selfless public servants is governing par excellence.
Here’s the most recent recommendation I made in response to Supe Ted Williams asking me what I think should be done about this crisis.
Among other things, here’s what I said several weeks ago:
“Ted, as I’ve suggested, as well as Supe Haschak and I believe Supe Gjerde also, the Board should call in former officials responsible for fiscal matters (Treasurer-Tax Collector, Auditor-Controller, Assessor, CEO) and interview/question and, hopefully, learn from them how they did their jobs. This is critical information the BOS admits it is lacking. This process would include but is not limited to such things as assessments of their responsibilities and how they performed their duties, how they exercised fiscal oversight and the identification of internal financial controls, systems that were utilized (manual vs. electronic/software, etc.), staffing levels (classifications and job descriptions) narrative descriptions of interdepartmental and third-party (ex.: outside, independent audit) working relationships detailing scope of work and information disclosed and received. Since no one has explanations or answers to what caused the ongoing, untenable fiscal mess the county is in, you need to conduct an inquiry and start finding answers to all of the current unknowns prior to launching a substantially, momentous alteration to your organizational structure with this idea of a Department of Finance. By the way, if the Board does decide to hold an inquiry, it won’t be necessary for former officials to attend in-person. That’s the beauty of zoom meetings.”
Williams never responded to my suggestion.
Why talk to these former officials?
There’s probably a lot to learn if you do.
History — institutional and otherwise — is all about knowing how you got from “there” to “here.” Otherwise, as the old saw goes, you’re condemning yourself to repetitious failure.
For example, in February of 2022, about-to-retire CEO Carmel Angelo was farewell-addressing on various media platforms. In an interview with Mike Geniella, he reported, “As she prepares to step down, Angelo said she is especially satisfied that the county, facing near bankruptcy in 2010, is today on firm financial footing with $20 million in reserves in the face of an annual budget of $340 million. ‘I leave knowing the situation today is much healthier than when I was appointed CEO in 2010,’ said Angelo.”
Several months later, the Board discovers it is facing a “structural” deficit of $6.1 million, and at this week’s meeting, Supe Dan Gjerde said the structural shortfall is somewhere around $10 million with another “three, four, or five million dollars on top of that $10 million structural deficit” if an agreement is reached in negotiations to bring employees “up to market.” He also said the CEO and the so-called “Golden Gate Initiative team” has “found $5.5 million in cuts and cost-savings that are ongoing savings, but that’s by my count only about a third of where we need to be … this may be small potatoes but we still have to balance the budget with small and big cuts.”
Near the end of this week’s meeting, Williams said the following to his four colleagues:
“I know you’re probably not happy with me for brining this up but I’m really worried about we started the year off in a really bad place. We gave some direction (to staff) but we’ve been talking about everything else, acting like we don’t have a financial crisis. I don’t know how you figure the numbers but I write them down and look at them, and go through the position allocation table to see what we can trim. I just don’t see an easy way to get there without a major re-structuring. And the time to do that is not in March or April. The time to do it is before the end of the year because it will take time for staff to execute and implement whatever we come up with. And we’re going to come up with ideas that require research. We gave a commitment that we were going to work on it as soon as we passed the budget. And more than quarter is gone by and we’ve really done nothing in this direction. The CEO has done some work, and the Golden Gate Initiative has really been working hard, they’ve been putting a team together. But the rate it’s moving we’re not going to get there unless they accelerate. I don’t see it accelerating. I see it resource constrained and they’ve picked up the easy gains already. I don’t want to be throwing cold water on anybody’s meeting, but I’m looking at it thinking we need to get realistic. My job is to start planning how we’re going to balance the budget next year.”
Assuaging Williams, Chairman McGourty said, “I think we all agree with you. That’s why we have an agenda coming …”
Williams cut in saying, “Well, you know what happens to the messenger.”
McGourty answered, “Yeah, sometimes it’s tough.”
Paraphrasing both myself and Williams, it’s high time to stop talking about the mess they’re in and start working to get out of it.
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Brown Act Remote Meeting Procedures…
Both personally and as someone who has been involved in the governing process and served as an elected and appointed official (federal and local levels), and as someone whose opinion on the Brown Act has been sought out by former judges when they served on the Superior Court, as well as by current local government officials, I have this to say about these aspects of the local governing process:
1. One of the few positive consequences of COVID emergency orders regarding local agency meetings is the opportunity for the public to participate remotely in those meetings. All reasonable measures to stimulate and foster participatory democracy should be embraced and supported by all, including elected officials. Remotely conducted meetings are a Godsend for handicapped individuals and others with medical or physical restrictions that make in-person meeting attendance difficult if not impossible to do. Additionally, those with work schedule conflicts, childcare responsibilities, and transportation and distance of travel obstacles, now have the option to participate via remote meeting technologies.
2. Regarding the issue of Zoom-bombing public meetings as we experienced at the most recent Supes’ meeting, there’s an easy solution(s). My radio program’s engineer told me there is an FCC regulation that mandates a minimum three-second delay in all over-the-air broadcasts. He believes that rule applies to related media such as Zoom programs. If that’s not the case, then the County’s IT staff can surely tweak their remote systems for a five-to-10 second delay, allowing any and all jackassery to be dumped. Likewise, the County’s remote applications come equipped with the means to identify phone numbers and ISP and email identification. Once that information is acquired, just simply block all traffic from that source(s) for the duration of the meeting. Any sort of permanent blocking action would most assuredly trigger Brown Act, as well as Constitutional challenges, you know free speech and all that stuff. The during-meeting cut-off of racist, anti-Semetic, anti-whatever, is permissible under the Brown Act due to its presumable non-relevance to actual agenda items and related matters. But strictly as legal and constitutional considerations, the utterance of racial and ethnic slurs are, with just a few exceptions, protected by the First Amendment: It protects hate speech from governmental regulation, punishment, or censorship.
3. I could care less about whether local government officials are gathered together physically for quorum purposes in a central meeting place. If such a rule would improve an elected official’s performance, or make them more accountable to the public, or more amenable to actually listening to and processing constituent comments, then I’d be at the head of the line supporting it. But as we all know, that’s not the case. Pragmatically speaking, from real practical experience, I know from my long-time roles with our Water Board, Town Council, and other local government bodies I’ve served on, that complying with in-person quorum mandates is a perpetual predicament. It’s especially problematic in large rural counties with sparse but far-flung populations. For example, here in the Laytonville area, the jurisdictional boundaries for our Town Council, School District, Fire District, and Water District are massive square-miles of land mass. For many board or council members, travel distances from where they live to meeting locations in town are 20-mile round trips, and the trip to town doesn’t get easier in the winter. So allowing board members to virtually attend meetings (and thus count toward forming a quorum) is a reasonable and doable solution. By allowing virtual attendance, I know that more people would be willing to perform public service because it would eliminate travel distance as a primary obstacle.
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