County Notes: The First District Supes Race

There are four candidates for Mendocino’s First District Supervisor seat being vacated by retiring Supervisor and former UC Ag Extension wine advisor Glenn McGourty: Madeline Cline, Adam Gaska, Carrie Shattuck, and Trevor Mockel.

Ms. Cline is the most well-funded and polished candidate. On the County’s candidate roster Ms. Cline lists her current job as “Businesswoman/Agriculture Advocate,” aka Wine Industry Advocate. She has testified as a paid lobbyist against the proposed State Water Board vineyard discharge regulations. Based on her campaign financial statements most of her financial support comes from local wine interests including Chevalier Vineyard Management ($1750), Barra of Mendocino County ($1500), and Beckstoffer Vineyards ($12,500). So far. Ms. Cline has also received $5,000 from her mother, Regina ‘Gina’ Cline, widow of Potter Valley contractor Eric Cline, and $1,000 from the wife of Ukiah mini-industrialist Ross Liberty. Ms. Cline has received a total of around $30,000 from these and other smaller contributors. Ms. Cline is endorsed by, among others, former First District supervisors Carre Brown and Michael Delbar, both of whom are long-time fixtures in the inland Farm Bureau/wine industry; both of whom saw their jobs as supervisor primarily as the Board’s taxpayer funded wine industry representative. Ms. Cline has spent thousands of her campaign donation dollars on political consultants, media and photography. According to the County Election filings Ms. Cline’s home is across the street from the Barra of Mendocino County’s winery in Redwood Valley.

Even though outgoing Supervisor Glenn McGourty also sees himself as the wine industry’s rep on the Board and received their support when he ran to replace retiring Supervisor Carre Brown three years ago, he is oddly on record as having endorsed political neophyte Trevor Mockel, who has been unanimously (and miraculously) endorsed by all five of Mendo’s incumbent supervisors for literally no reason at all other than, perhaps, his short tenure as a state Democratic Senate aide/hack/local rep. Mockel has received a few financial contributions. The biggest one, for an impressive $5,000, is from Ms. Minal Shankar, the Ukiah-based venture capitalist who tried to buy and restore the dilapidated old Palace hotel but got aced out of that opportunity when the current owner (who bought it out of receivership) refused to sell at the price Ms. Shankar was prepared to pay. Mr. Mockel also received $500 each from his father Jim Mockel and County Schools Superintendent Nicole Glentzer, also a well-connected inland Democrat. Mr. Mockel has recently been hired as “Public Information Officer” for Lake County and, on the County’s election roster Mockel lists his current job as “Public Information Officer,” an unchallenging position which he probably sees as another brief stepping stone in his nascent political career.

Candidates Shattuck and Gaska have not filed any campaign financial statements as of last week, which presumably means they have taken no political contributions and have spent very little on their campaigns. Neither Shattuck nor Gaska have touted any major endorsements that we are aware of. 

If we had to guess today, we’d say that none of the four candidates are likely to get over 50% of the primary vote (which is coming right up in March) and that Gaska and Cline are favorites to enter a run off in the November election. The Democratic Party/wine industry dominate the demographics of the First District. Ms. Cline has received significant financial and political backing from the wine mafia and the Farm Bureau — basically the same people in inland Mendocino County. Additional wine mafia donations are likely to be funneled into Cline’s candidacy for the November General Election, so Cline will get a sizable chunk of District 1 votes. We like Carrie Shattuck for her independence, outspokenness and deep interest in Mendocino County operations and finances. Gaska also impresses based on his deep roots and extensive knowledge of the Redwood-Potter Valley area and his experience on the Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Council and the Redwood Valley Water District which give him a solid base of support. The winner of the November run-off will probably depend on how the Shattuck and Mockel votes break down. Ms. Cline may be a political newcomer, but her financial support and wine/Farm Bureau backing will make her a strong possibility to replace McGourty.

Of course, much of this could change by the time the November election arrives.

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Tuesday morning’s Supervisors meeting got off to a disturbing start when newly seated Board Chair Maureen Mulheren tried to keep Supervisor Dan Gjerde from responding to a public comment about animal care and control. Gjerde refused to be squelched and went on with his simple comment. But Mulheren had successfully signaled that she doesn’t want the Board responding to the public, at all.

At the end of the meeting, Supervisor Mulheren tried to justify her attempt to shut down Board responses.

“When one person gets a response and others don't that is also… a kind of an interesting dynamic that happens in that way so as we move forward and try to figure out, we can have brief comments, I think, um, some supervisors may be interested in certain things and not others and that can be challenging as a member of the public to have one member engaged by the supervisor and other members not. So it's really a matter of fairness if items are brought forward as agenda items or brought up later. But we will continue to work, I am happy to continue to adjust that process.”

In other words, according to Mulheren, responding to some public comment is unfair to those who are not responded to. Best not to respond to anything.

Supervisors Haschak, McGourty and Williams all disagreed, while agreeing that the Board responses sometimes take a few extra minutes and “efficiency” would be nice. 

* * *

The Big Anti-Climax of the Day came when, after an hour or so of bookkeeping chatter, the outside Auditor and the recently appointed Auditor-Controller Treasurer Tax Collector (ACTTC) Sara Pierce told Supervisor Haschak that they still don’t know what the carry-forward was from a year and a half ago. After months of browbeating former ACTTC Chamise Cubbison on this subject (which Ms. Cubbison answered months ago, albeit with a preliminary but as yet unchallenged estimate), the Board still doesn’t know precisely how much money was left over from the 2021-2022 budget year. The Supervisors had hoped that their hand-picked ACTTC replacement would at least be able to answer the carry-forward question which, they said, hampered their ability to compile next year’s budget and negotiate with their employees. (Neither of which appears to have been true.) 

But Ms. Pierce said she’d “have to get back” to the Board on the carry-forward question. The outside auditor suggested a few improvements to the County’s “internal controls” and shifted some payments from one account to another, but none of the kinds of larger financial problems that the Board had wanted to blame on Cubbison in the last two years were highlighted. 

* * *

Newly contracted County Counsel James Ross introduced himself to the Board Tuesday morning, but Assistant County Counsel Charlotte Scott was sitting in the County Counsel’s chair advising the Board during the formal board session. 

However, just before the Board came out of closed session later in the afternoon, Mr. Ross was seen exiting the board chambers and returning to his seat in the audience just before Board Chair Mulheren blandly announced, after the closed session, that “direction was given to staff.”

* * *

Planning Director Julia Krog told the Board that her department didn’t have staff to work on several Board requests, including the Water Extraction regs that Supervisor Haschak started pushing for back during the height of the drought. Krog also recommended “deferring” any attempt to regulate inland short term rentals for at least a year. She recommended deferring a Board proposal to double the allowable number of residential structures on parcels in the inland zone. Krog recommended delaying several other board ideas including the a Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Council procedure that everyone seems to like, and some new or streamlined pot regs. Apparently, Ms. Krog’s staff is too busy with state-mandated planning paperwork to deal with the local Board directives which she insists are very time consuming both for her department as well as for the County Counsel’s office. In the end, the Board agreed that the local stuff the Board wants done can be endlessly delayed while the planners waste their time on state-mandated documents.

Despite minor grumbling from a couple of the Supervisors who had originally proposed these now-low priority items, the Board rambled on and on endlessly about whether to “defer” or “rescind” (a distinction without a difference) their own Board proposals and directives. 

* * *

County Sits On Millions Of Dollars Promised To Local Fire Services. 

County Measure P was passed in November of 2022 by a relatively low margin of 55-45 for a fire services measure, even though the Board promised via resolution that all of the sales tax revenues received would go to local fire services and prevention. 

It is now some 15 months later and millions of dollars of sales tax revenue have been collected.

The Title of Measure P was: “Shall Ordinance No. 4510 be adopted to impose as a general tax, an additional transactions (sales) and use tax of one quarter cent (0.25%) within Mendocino County to fund essential services, including fire protection and prevention? Such tax is estimated to raise $4,000,000 annually for ten (10) years, after which it will expire.”

Guess how much of this long-awaited funding has been delivered to local fire districts and the fire prevention council?

That’s right: zero. 

Apparently, the County has been conducting some kind of head of a pin analysis they call “the Evergreen Contract” to combine all sales tax fire services revenue into one batch then disburse the funds according to a consolidated formula, even though the basic formula has been in place for decades and is specified in the resolution that the Board passed to accompany Measure P back in July of 2022. 

County Resolution 22-159 (July of 2022) promised:

“…The Board intends that the 90% used for direct aid to agencies providing direct fire protection services be allocated in the same manner as the Board has allocated Proposition 172 funds. Specifically, 40% of the 90% (36% of the total new revenue) will be distributed evenly among local agencies, with the remaining 60% (54% of total) allocated based on relative population size of those agencies…”

Apparently this math, already in use for Prop 172 and campground transient occupancy funds, is too much for Mendocino County to handle without holy water from the County Counsel’s office. Instead, the County is sitting on the millions accumulated for more than a year and local fire districts are still unable to budget for use of the promised funding, much less spend it for fire protection services.

The week before the passage of Measure P, Dave Latoof, President of the Mendocino County Fire Chiefs Association (MCFCA) wrote that: 

“…all local fire departments are in need of additional funding to keep up with rising costs and services. Emergency response calls are increasing - fire related calls have increased 52% over the past 5 years,” and, “All 20 [County] Fire Chiefs support Measure P and the allocation formula outlined by Resolution 22-159, passed by the Board of Supervisors July 12th 2022. Our organization is prepared to ensure each dollar is allocated as intended…” 

So far, not one word of formal complaint or effort to “ensure” the allocation has been delivered to the Board/County staff (although we have heard that some internal communiques have gone back and forth to no avail), as they continue to fiddle-fart away, month after month after month. None of the Candidates for Supervisor have raised this no-brainer of an issue. Nobody even knows if there’s a target date for when the money will be disbursed. (Previous guesstimates passed months ago.) As noted above, some say the roadblock is the County Counsel’s office, where all good ideas go to die. But as long as nobody says anything or puts public pressure on the Board, wherever the holdup is, none of the promised millions will be delivered to the local fire agencies the Board promised it to.