Sheriff Kendall told the ‘Like It Or Not’ podcast dudes in Ukiah recently that he will need an additional ten uniformed officers (and probably a few more non-uniformed) to staff the new “Mental Health Wing” of the jail when it opens. This would bring authorized uniformed jail staff up from 55 now to 65 with the new wing. (Frankly, the 65 sounds a little low to us since jails require 24/7 staffing, but we hope we’re wrong about that.)
Presumably the new jail wing will open next year now that the hugely overrunning project is funded and a contractor has been chosen. With the new higher salaries and pensions the Board gave to law enforcement last year, that’s probably at least $2 million a year more to staff the jail. Being new, the jail expansion should require fewer corrections officers per inmate than the dilapidated old jail, except that Kendall said that the mental health inmates (as well as the drug-addled, Kendall also noted) are harder cases to handle in jail and thus would require more staff per inmate.
Assuming there are no more construction cost increases at the jail (we live in hope), the Board will have to somehow find a couple million more dollars for fiscal year after next’s budget (and every year following) to staff the new jail wing on top of finding a way to pay back the $8 million they “borrowed” from Measure B (without a payback plan).
If history is any guide, since the Board is not likely to find $2 mil a year lying around unallocated, the Board will probably be forced to use the remaining Measure B sales tax revenues (1/8 cent in perpetuity) for the additional jail staff, claiming that the new jail wing is for “mental health.” And therefore the 1/8-cent proceeds will not be used for the mental health services mandated by Measure B.
The Sheriff also hinted on the podcast that he’s gathering signatures for a local ballot measure for the November ballot that will require more incarceration for property crimes. While that’s probably a good idea, it would mean that jail population numbers would not go down and the old jail will continue to require full if not increased staffing.
Yet neither the Supervisors nor the Measure B committee have asked the Sheriff for a staffing plan or budget forecast for the new wing of the jail. Nor have they requested a payback plan for to pay back the money borrowed from Measure B.
The Psychiatric Health Facility at Whitmore Lane in Ukiah is also on a fast-track because there are state mandated deadlines that accompany the promised $9 million state grant they hope to use to cover part of the $20 mil or so that the overdesigned PHF will cost. The PHF will also require substantial round the clock staffing putting greater demand on specialized staffers in Ukiah. (Most of whom at present work for the Schraeder monopoly.)
Add in the likely (narrow) approval of Governor Newsom’s Proposition 1 and you’re talking about some serious financial and staffing demands on a mental health and drug treatment system that is already hard to staff and finance.
The Supervisors should be trying to get ahead of this situation by at least asking questions about how this is all supposed to work, how it will be staffed, and how much it will cost. But we doubt they will. Despite their recent $150k “Strategic Plan” given lip-service at every Board meeting, the Supervisors don’t give much forethought to anything, preferring to bemoan their self-inflicted or easily foreseen “crises” after they arise.
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JPA: Just Pay Attorneys, Revisited: The Too Late Sequel
The Supervisors spent most of Tuesday morning’s mid-year budget update discussion babbling on about general ideas and minor bookkeeping (“adjustments and journal entries”) and again avoiding any specific budget issues. The biggest budget overrun reported for this year is in the Sheriff’s Department (including the jail) which is more than $1.5 million over budget. This year, instead of blaming the overrun on unplanned overtime, the CEO’s staff says the Sheriff’s overrun is due to higher salaries and pensions for law enforcement that the Board negotiated — without any consideration for where the money was coming from. Instead of discussing the overrun and how to handle it, at Supervisor Dan Gjerde’s initiation, the Board simply gabbed about how nice it would be if they could get more law enforcement grants. But, as Chief Probation Officer Izen Locatelli reminded the Board, grants are generally not blank check handouts to cover overruns for existing services, but to fund additional or specialized programs and services. So there probably wouldn’t be any overrun coverage from grants, especially not this year. Nobody else had any comments about how badly this was handled or where the money to cover the overrun will come from or whether the overrun can be absorbed somehow in the Sheriff’s budget.
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As we pointed out just last month, “JPA” which usually means “Joint Powers Authority” in the lingo of Mendo’s bargain basement bureaucrats more appropriately stands for “Just Pay Attorneys.”
Why? Because just two weeks ago on February 27 the Board rubberstamped without discussion consent item 3o: “Approval of Legal Services Agreement with Hooper, Lundy & Bookman, P.C. in the Amount of $250,000 for Legal Services Regarding Regulatory Issues Related to Negotiation of the Potential Formation of a Joint Powers Authority with Fire Districts to Expand Ambulance Coverage in Remote Areas Effective Upon Full Execution through June 30, 2024.”
As we said two weeks ago, this dubious “Joint Powers Authority” idea has been drifting around County offices for years. In theory it could (emphasis on “could,” nobody really knows) improve billing and revenues for ambulance services and thus, even more unlikely, “expand ambulance coverage.” Nobody has provided any evidence that it will ever do either of those things. Now all of a sudden they are throwing $250,000 at a fancy law firm for open-ended “legal services” associated with this cockamamie idea.
We looked deeper into the item to see where the $250k is coming from, and found this: “Source of funding: 4016-862189.”
No further information was provided in the consent calendar item; just this cryptic account number. So we looked at the County’s current budget book and found that Budget Unit 4016 is “Emergency Medical Services (EMS)” which is budgeted at about $1.4 million and which probably includes CalFire Emergency Dispatch services out of Willits.
“Funding for support of fire agencies is budgeted in separate locations,” the budget book opens unhelpfully. “The direct fire agency support payments from [the] Proposition 172 fund are budgeted in BU 1940 - Miscellaneous, while the Fire and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) dispatch contract is budgeted in BU 4016- Emergency Medical Services. The costs of this [emergency dispatch] contract [with CalFire in Willits] are covered with EMS provider payments and General Fund dollars (including a specific allocation of property tax that comes from the former County Service Area, CSA #3). Both the previous Proposition 172 budgeting practice and revised process due to the fire agencies support shift [whatever that is – ms], is further described through the chart and tables on the following page.”
But of course that “following page” does not mention how the $1.4 million was arrived at, where it comes from, nor the potential JPA.
On its face, given the grotesque enormity of this off-hand disbursement to outside lawyers with no clear objective, this looks like a blatant, ill-considered waste of $250k. At least it should have been discussed and approved separately by the Board with an eye toward where the money is coming from and what is going to be reduced elsewhere to pay for these “legal services.” And whether a JPA will really do any good. (Hint: It won’t.)
Budget Line Item 862189 is listed as a generic “Professional & Spec Services” sub-account but there’s no separate budget line for “Professional & Spec Services,” within the EMS budget as implied by the “source of funding.”
On page 58 of the budget book there’s a passing reference to the use of the (already over-allocated) PG&E settlement funds for several things including “JPA assessment & implementation.” However, there’s no budgetary estimate of the cost of the “assessment & implementation.”
We can think of several better ways to spend $250k on Mendo’s cash strapped local ambulance services besides vague legal services for yet another dubious Joint Powers Authority. For example, the County could just hand over the $250k to the three ambulance services operating in the unincorporated area of the County (Covelo, Laytonville and Anderson Valley), aka the County Service Area #3. $250k may not be much in the eyes of Hooper, Lundy & Bookman, P.C., but just a third of it, about $83k each, would cover the total operating expenses for our small, rural, mostly volunteer ambulance providers for a year.
This is only the beginning, the so-called “assessment and implementation” of the “potential” formation of the JPA, the camel’s nose in the tent. Once the County takes this first giant step into the JPA quicksand it will be hard to stop throwing more money at it once it gets going, taking years and years of pointless analysis and meetings.
The Mendocino County Supervisors, proclaiming time and again how broke they are, scrounging around for every penny of extra revenue and expense reduction, blithely approved this giant waste of money without the slightest hesitation, consideration or discussion.
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That was last month. Now back to Tuesday’s Board meeting.
Typical of this board’s haphazard, irresponsible and completely upside-down attitude toward budgeting was the following “discussion” of the long-stalled and misguided attempt to set up a Joint Powers Authority (JPA) for Emergency Medical Services:
Supervisor Ted Williams, referring to about $1 million in PG&E settlement money which has been allocated to setting up a Joint Powers Authority (JPA): “For the CEO, if we don't use that money everything shuffles around between departments. Where does it end up? Is that something we should be considering to close the budget gap?”
CEO Darcy Antle: “It would go to the General Fund for this board to consider.”
Williams: “Is it possible to ask for Jen Banks [of Coastal Valley EMS, an expensive EMS administration agency in Sonoma County costing the County hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to “administer” ambulance agencies in Mendocino County] and probably Jeff Adair [Banks’ boss] to at a future date bring a presentation about the JPA progress and let the board decide whether we want to continue?”
Antle: “Sure. I had that conversation with Jen [sic] last week and we discussed that at a future meeting I can try and get it on one of the meetings in April so it's around budget time.”
Board Chair Maureen Mulheren: “Just for clarification, CEO, I'm not sure if April would be the best if there are still questions about the legal and the accounting and the contractor that we have to work through. Maybe that is something we can just leave as an open-ended date.”
Antle: “Yeah. I could check on the status as to whether or not…— and I know she mentioned a couple of things that they have done and we also, to supervisor Williams’ point, hired on the legal firm to help us do that process, so I think an update before the board on the status would be okay.”
Williams: “The concern is spending a quarter million on legal expenses to then pull the plug because it's not financially feasible. We should first decide if it is financially feasible before we spend that money. That million could help us close the budget gap.”
And that was the end of that. No other board members even wondered about the expenditure-first/discussion-second approach and nobody reminded the Board that they approved the pointless $250k on the consent calendar last month without any discussion of whether it is “financially feasible.” (Hint: It’s not.)
By the time this board gets around to even discussing whether to spend $250,000 on pointless legal expenses, the money will have already been committed or spent.
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