Painful Watching

CEO Darcie Antle placed the following item on the Board’s Tuesday agenda:

“4e) Discussion and Possible Action Including Review of Board of Supervisor's Directives Requiring Follow Through from County Staff and/or Other Agencies; and Deletion of Outdated Directives as Determined by the Board of Supervisors (Sponsor: Executive Office)”

County Counsel Christian Curtis added a companion item:

“4f) Discussion and Possible Action Regarding Board of Supervisors Standing Committee(s) Including 2023 Final Reports Out of Committee; Approval to Clear Referrals from Committee; and Formation of an Ad Hoc Committee to Further Review Any Matters Previously Referred to a Standing Committee if Necessary. (Sponsors: Clerk of the Board and County Counsel.)”

At first we thought these items were a little joke the CEO and County Counsel were playing on the Board. Surely, they must know that such items are catnip to these Masters of Inaction who are constantly looking for new ways to waste meeting time. They can’t resist talking about talking and talking about meetings and talking about themselves — anything but the real workings of the County.

On the other hand, CEO Antle and Counsel Curtis may have simply been looking for a way to divert the Board from actually looking at the County’s financing or operations. 

Either way, it worked wonderfully. The Board spent almost three hours on these two items with nothing to show for it.

Supervisor Maureen Mulheren at first seemed to see through the joke, if that’s what it was, when, about halfway through the interminable blather session, she commented: “I really don't want a presentation. I think we spend so much time having these conversations over and over again and you look at the directives and you look at what was highlighted and it's the same thing multiple times, sometimes month over month. It's our job as supervisors to pay attention and for us to track what's happening and to not continue to provide directives for the same thing over and over. I think it's clear that we should be working with our department heads and the CEO's office to make sure that we are using appropriate workflows. I have not heard anybody say, No we don't want to use a better system, or, No we just love Excel files. So I think that it's clear that we are going to use a tracking system and it only makes sense to use these.”

Board Chair Glenn McGourty, seeing that Mulheren was drifting toward ending the blather, quickly brought the discussion back to their usual nonsense: “It sounds like you are agreeing with Supervisor Williams that we need a tracking system.”

Mulheren took the bait: “I am letting you know that we have tracking systems and we just — some staff are using them, some team members can get better at it, they understand and we can move forward without a presentation.”

McGourty: “So you don't want a presentation, but you want a tracking system?”

Supervisor Ted Williams, of course, didn’t let Mulheren answer. He interrupted to take the opportunity to veer even further off track into techno-speak: “I think Mo is asking that staff use the tool that we are paying for and we all use the same tool. If we use four different tools we cannot do dependency analysis and we’re stuck.”

“Dependency analysis”? Oh yes, the Board is poised to get deep into the techno-jargon to figure out that problems in one department can affect other departments (as if the Board cares), if only they had the right gol-darn “tool.”

Supervisor Dan Gjerde went even further down the rabbit hole: “I agree that we need a presentation on what this unified tool is. We don't want to rehash the content in the tracking report, we just want to see, this is how you access it and this is how everybody's using it now.”

Williams: “I want to mandate that everybody in the organization use a tool and I don't care which tool although the one we are paying for is probably a good starting point.…”

They tooled around like this for literal hours, getting nowhere, deciding nothing. 

Finally, it came time for public comment from the only masochist besides us who seems to be paying attention to this waste of time.

First District Supervisor Candidate: Carrie Shattuck 

(with her subsequent introduction and following comments):

Tuesday’s Board meeting agenda item 4e, Discussion and Possible action including review of Board of Supervisor’s directives requiring follow through from County staff and/or other agencies; and deletion of outdated directives as determined by the Board of Supervisors.

This item lasted over two hours and absolutely nothing was done.

Directives Review. (Starts at time stamp 1:11:08 in the on-line meeting video.)

My public comments (time stamp 3:09:44)

“I would just like to say that this agenda item has been extremely painful watching. Thank you Supervisor Mulheren for bringing it up. I think that this subject has gone in every direction. Ok, there’s 40 total directives on these lists. 12 directives state: Discussion and possible direction to staff regarding a presentation on the Mendocino County preliminary fiscal year 2023-24 budget. We’ve already approved the budget, there’s 12 directives, poof! Gone! Ok, there’s 12 that are Planning and Building. She’s sitting right here; you could address those 12. That leaves 16. Some of them are, Space Needs Assessment, Short Term Rental Ordinance, Like For Like Re-Roofing… We could have had the entire discussion of every single directive. Instead we’re veering off into time tracking and all these different directions. The actual agenda item states: ‘Review of Board of Supervisors directives requiring follow through from County staff and/or other agencies; and deletion of outdated directives as determined by the Board of Supervisors.’ You guys are talking about tracking time, and money and JPAs… Just discuss the directives and let’s move on. I mean some of these agenda items go on and on and on and we’re taking up precious hours of the Board’s time when we could just be resolving the issues.”

These are the Board’s own directives and they didn’t delete a single one, in TWO HOURS!!! There was no leadership, as usual, on this item to stay on task and get something accomplished. This Board puts all the responsibility for their jobs on everyone but themselves. It’s really not that difficult to follow-up with departments heads or the CEO on these items, on an on-going basis. These are their directives. Do your jobs!

PS. Not one First District candidate has attended an entire board meeting. Second district candidate, Jacob Brown, was there for the entirety of Tuesday’s meeting.

These other First District candidates are silent. It shows me that they agree with the current direction, or lack thereof, of the Board. Why aren’t they involved now? The outgoing supervisors have one more year left on their terms. My perspective is, that if you are wanting to make it better, you have to know how it is, or isn’t, working now. Otherwise it’s going to be more of same, which our County cannot afford.

Dedicated, Driven, Determined

Carrie Shattuck

* * *

Adam Gaska: Re: Painful Watching

It was painful. I am glad I was at home working, doing something productive as I listened to the five on the dais very actively being unproductive. I had to mute them to finish watching later as I hit my quota of worthless.

Thinking about it, I realized the issue is the BOS doesn’t know how to effectively manage. They should be more hands on, setting goals for the departments then be evaluating the department head based on the achievement of those goals. They should be doing quarterly check-ins to have a conversation about progress, ask if the department has all the resources they need to achieve said goals, see if they have some extra bandwidth. This is employee performance evaluation 101. At the end of the year, there is an evaluation of the department head. They get graded on performance where they get an attaboy or a corrective action plan, new goals are set with input from the department head themself allowing some goals to come from the BOS and some come from the head so they feel like they have some buy in. If the department head gets an attaboy, maybe they get a bonus. If they get a needs improvement, they get supported to do better through training. That would require the BOS knowing what the departments do, have a basic idea of the resources needed to carry the workload, and have an idea of what are reasonable expectations of staff.

This should be an ongoing process. This shouldn’t be a haphazard process where the BOS just throws things on a departments plate on a whim then throws them in the garbage at the end of the year. This will require working with multiple department heads when there is overlap between departments on different functions and services of the county. The process as it is now looks to be lacking structure which it is the responsibility of the board to give it structure through policies, procedures and leadership.

. . .

I have been paying attention for quite a while. I watch/listen to all the meetings, mostly on Youtube, while I am working when I can and watch the remainder in the evening after my kids have gone to bed. I have a full time job that I have to work at to keep a roof over my family’s heads and food on the table and don’t have the luxury of sitting in chambers for the entirety of meetings. When I feel passionate enough about an item, I will go in person to watch and comment. I sat through most of the meeting when they were looking at cutting a lot of boards and committees to save money, including the MAC’s, to defend the MAC’s of which I serve on the Redwood Valley MAC.

I do have a lot of experience with organizational structures having started and running my own business, managing employees and serving on the board of the Co Op for 11 years.

The County and BOS needs to focus on and get a better handle of its core business which is providing services. Just like a business, they need to make sure they are sending out invoices and following up on accounts receivable, which in the County’s case is properly assessing and collecting property taxes, in order to have the funding to provide services. If and when they are doing a good job at that, then they can move onto bigger and better things. Right now, they are looking at all the places they want to go while their ship is sinking.

* * *

A Belated Comment On An Item That Arose Back At The December 5 Supervisors Meeting.

Supervisor Glenn McGourty said in his “Supervisors Report” that “we” — whoever that may be, certainly not Mendocino County — “will have a new JPA in place that could take over the Potter Valley Project by the end of this year.”

Oh, sure. A Joint Powers Authority to take over the Potter Valley Project by the end of 2023. Right, Glenn. What other jokes have you got up your sleeve? Even if Mendo had competent people involved they couldn’t get a Joint Powers Authority in place for anything for years. They’ve been working on a JPA for county-wide ambulance services — a much more pressing and important subject — for years and are still only in the discussion phase. It is unlikely they’ll ever get there. (PS. A JPA for ambulances is an awful idea in the first place, but…)

McGourty went on: “It will take four years after 2025 for the Federal Energy Commission to review PG&E’s decommissioning plan and nine to ten years before anything will happen. Until then, the diversion will continue.”

Does McGourty even listen to what he’s saying? 

Obviously, there will be no JPA this year or even in the next year or two, if ever. 

If the Potter Valley diversion is going to continue in some form for at least nine or ten years, why are McGourty and his Potter Valley Project bunch so worried about something happening in the near future and trying to rush things? At a previous meeting, McGourty declared that “things are moving pretty fast” on the Potter Valley Project. Apparently to McGourty nothing happening in nine or ten years is “pretty fast.”

Of course there are others in the loop with different opinions and proposals for who or what might end up with some kind of control of the Potter Valley Project and when. McGourty, who pretends to be some kind of authority on the subject, seems to have no idea what he’s talking about. At one meeting he says things are moving fast, at the next he says things are a decade off. Maybe he’s retiring after one four-year term because he’s no longer capable of being the Cheap Water Mafia’s Board rep and he’s lost their support.