County Notes

We are now reliably informed that the Veterans Service Office really is moving back to their original office at the cottage on Observatory Avenue where they were prior to January, although we still haven’t heard a date certain. The Air Quality office will be moved to an as-yet undisclosed leased building somewhere in Ukiah. The “good” news? Things for the Veterans Service Office have returned to a semblance of the status quo ante. The “bad” news? Things have returned to a semblance of the status quo ante. After several months of pointless thrashing and gnashing of teeth in the aftermath of the ill-conceived and abrupt relocation of the Veterans Office, things have finally returned to something more or less similar to the way things were before the thrashing and gnashing of teeth. Most ironic? The approximately $3500/month “rent” that the state was paying to a private landlord for the Air Quality offices that County had hoped to capture by moving Air Quality into the Veterans Service Office cottage is now going to be paid to a different landlord and will not be captured, despite the apparent opportunity to put the Air Quality office into the county-owned Public Health facility on Dora Street. Let’s review just the entirely unnecessary moves involved: Public Health offices rearranged and vacated for VSO, VSO to Public Health, Air Quality to undisclosed leased offices, VSO back to Observatory cottage, unidentified somebodys back to Public Health offices… All for nothing. Is there are metaphor for County operations in general here? Is this typical of Mendo’s executive thinking? Have any lessons been learned? Is anyone accountable? Have the Veterans who engineered this reversal of the County’s decision had their eyes opened? Will the veterans reps continue to “thank” the Supervisors for undoing what they shouldn’t have done in the first place? Have the veterans been energized to the extent that they will engage in other County matters? 

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Mendo’s Supervisors will consider an appeal of a Planning Commission denial of a minor use permit for a large gas station in Redwood Valley next Tuesday. 

Item 4b: “Noticed Public Hearing - Discussion and Possible Action to Consider an Appeal of the Planning Commission’s Denial of Minor Use Permit and Variance to Establish and Operate a Gas Station with Ten (10) Gas Pumps, Two (2) Separate Illuminated Canopies, Twenty-Eight (28) New Parking Spaces, Landscaping, Conversion of Part of an Existing Structure to a Convenience Store, and Concurrent Variance for a Sixty-Five (65) Foot Tall Business Identification Sign, Increase in the Allowable Sign Area, and to Reduce the Front Yard Setback; Located at 9621 and 9601 North State Street, Redwood Valley; which May Include Adoption of a Resolution or Additional Direction to Staff.”

According to an attached previous Planning Commission resolution: “The Planning Commission hereby determines that the granting of such Minor Use Permit would constitute a nuisance or be detrimental to the health, safety, peace, morals, comfort, or general welfare of persons residing or working in or passing through the neighborhood of the proposed use and would be detrimental or injurious to property and improvements in the neighborhood.…”

The Appeal filed by Ukiah attorney Brian Momsen for the applicant, Faizan Corp, asserts that the Planning Commission “did not proceed in a manner required by law and its determination was not supported by substantial evidence in the record. There was no evidence (only vague complaints from the public) that the proposed project would be a nuisance or would interfere with an easement.…”

We expect that Redwood Valley residents will show up in substantial numbers on this one, few of whom support the gas station. 

It will be interesting to see what, if any, contribution the County’s new twice-the-price contractor County Counsel James Ross has for the Board.

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Although CEO Darcy Antle’s latest CEO report has a section entitled “Air Quality Management,” there’s nothing in that section about where the AQ office is being moved to in the wake of the Board’s decision last month to move the Veterans Service Office back to their cottage on Observatory Avenue. 

The CEO report also has a “Human Resources” section, but again, there’s nothing about the promises the Board and the headless Department made in response to last year’s Grand Jury report in which the Board and the Department promised to correct a number of HR problems by the end of 2023. 

Despite the Board’s directive to include a written monthly report in the CEO report about the status of the effort to bring additional unpermitted properties onto the County’s assessment/tax rolls, there is still no such report. 

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But Supervisor Maureen Mulheren submitted a 38 page “Supervisors Report” for January of 2024 in the Board packet for next Tuesday’s meeting. There’s her usual pro-forma summary of what the Board discussed in January (the Board minutes are more interesting), but nothing besides routine rubberstamping is included. Most of Mulheren’s lengthy report is a re-post of a 2023 Homelessness Continuum of Care report which described the status of homelessness funding in Mendocino County. To judge by the millions of dollars Mendo spends on homelessness, you might be impressed.

The County’s Continuum of Care concludes: “In the past five years, the County of Mendocino, together with community partners and local agencies, has made significant progress in building collaborative and creative solutions to addressing homelessness in our county. We have much work still ahead. Resolution of homelessness requires commitment, dedication, communication and a willingness to participate from every stakeholder in our community – public, private, faith-based, and individual. The conditions that bring individuals and families to a state of housing instability are numerous and intertwined. Our solutions, in response, must be both complex and creative. We are up to the challenge.”

But if you want to see actual homelessness statistics, the CofC is clearly not “up to the challenge.” Near the end of the Homelessness report there’s a chart from back in 2022 claiming that a few hundred people had “moved into a private rental” in 2022. But there’s nothing about whether those movements had anything to do with the millions they’ve spent or whether any of them stayed in a “private rental” for more than a few months.

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Without board approval (i.e., retroactive rubberstamping is requested) the County Counsel’s office has farmed out $10k worth of legal services for “Legal Advice and analysis regarding the negotiation of tax sharing agreements between the County of Mendocino and other local entities” for “the period of March 15, 2024 to July 31 2024.” They don’t share which “local entities” they are so generously “sharing” taxes with. It could be the never-ending tax sharing discussions with the City of Ukiah, but we doubt that because the amount is a comparatively low $10k. The only other “tax sharing” we can think of that this might be for is the millions owed to local fire agencies from the Measure P sales tax that have been accumulated since January of 2023 that remain undistributed. Given the relatively short duration of this latest handout to private attorneys we now expect more months of delay for the Measure P funds to at least July 31 of 2024. This would indicated that the hold up in distributing the long-overdue fire service funds is indeed in the County Counsel’s office, and not, as Supervisor Williams suggested on the radio recently, associated with any kind of request from the fire districts themselves.

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Years ago, before marijuana was legalized, we transcribed a conversation we had with a local defense attorney who was deeply involved in pot cases. We have removed most of the names from the transcription, but the attorney’s blunt remarks are representative of the kind of things that were going on inside the local legal community during the weed wars that normally don’t make it into the public discussion. 

“The problem is this goddamn grant money. The DA’s office is still taking grants. I think they’ve got two grants. They’ve got a methamphetamine cases grants and the COMMET grant. I have this feeling that the grant stipulations and the conditions of grants… I don’t know what they are. I think I’m going to have to use the public records act. I want find out what they have to do to keep the grant. Marijuana cases, I think you have to make a certain number of busts or they look at your productivity at least as far as getting plants. And the more plants you pull up the more money you get and the more money the DA doesn’t have to get from the County. I don’t know how to resolve it. There was a Deputy DA who had a stat rape grant to prosecute the 17 year old Mexican guys who were having sex with 15 year old white trash. But they’re not doing that, I don’t think. The COMMET thing is kind of unconscionable. I don’t think the DA should be doing that. As long as he’s getting that grant money, he and the Sheriff, ultimately they’re both responsible for their soldiers. And they’ve both got their soldiers, although there are only two or three on the COMMET team now, nevertheless they’re still out there going through the friggin’ woods, pulling up everybody’s plants. Both of them. COMMET is essentially the Sheriff. Sgt. Rusty Noe is a Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputy/sergeant. He’s kind of the unrestrained one. The DA can say, Well I don’t prosecute them, and the Sheriff can say, We don’t go after them, but the fact is that Rusty Noe is out there tracking through people’s backyards. He’s doing the same gestapo kind of shit and he’s just takin’ people’s weed. And the stuff really does work for the people who are really bad actors. But lots of them are not. The DA just dismissed another case last week, on this real pathetic guy who I now have as a client. I’m glad he dismissed the case. But that was after the guy had gone to court god knows how many times and his pot supply was gone. He’s dying and he’s in pain and they’ve got his grow lights and everything else. He’s my client. He says he spent two or three thousand dollars just buying raw replacement pot to sell because he couldn’t grow it and he lost his own grow to Humboldt Sheriffs. It’s actually not much of a consolation that they don’t get charged. We get these cases ready for trial and then at the last minute they say, Well, they got these medical things, so we’ll drop it. We say, Well, at least give us the friggin’ weed back! Oh no. We can’t do that, the CHP won’t do it. I have a feeling their destroying it now or burying it. I think it’s under the rubric that We can’t keep it in good condition so we just have to destroy it. They consider it a perishable type of thing. That’s a way of avoiding the question. But then there’s ‘just compensation’ that the Constitution talks about. My client has a legitimate beef, as do other people. I just think they should stop takin’ that COMMET money. The DA is going to say, Well, we’ve got this increase of Mexican growers, and there are! I support the County going after the big plantations, and they can use that as justification. But they’re also still taking ordinary people’s plants, their livelihoods, their only income.”