County Agenda Notes: Doing Less With More

For next Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, lame duck Supervisor Glenn McGourty has prepared a “presentation” (i.e., a few casual notes typed into a PowerPoint format-template) alleging that the Supervisors need more “staff support” so that they can “develop an annual work plan,” “report and track progress on the Strategic Plan,” “follow up and track Board directives and initiatives and grants,” and assist with research and constituent service.

McGourty proposes an ad hoc committee be assigned to “gather information” on the subject of “developing more support for BOS either with existing staff … or plan for future staffing.”

McGourty concludes by suggesting that the Board could “address additional support when future budgets allow for new staffing.”

Instead of this casual blather masquerading as a “presentation,” McGourty could recommend a much more practical step of returning the Clerk of the Board office to Supervisors instead of being under the CEO where the Board doesn’t even have control of its own agenda. Former CEO Carmel Angelo snatched the Clerk of the Board office away from the Board back in 2010 as part of her initial power play, saying it would save money. (As usual, of course, it didn’t. Mendo officials are great at claiming unquantified savings to try to justify their own agenda.) Her ever-obedient board at the time didn’t bat an eye and the Supervisors have been high-and-dry ever since.

After that, but only after that, McGourty might be able to argue that the Clerk of the Board office needs another staffer to keep track of their so-called (and poorly worded) “directives.” But we haven’t seen much interest from Board members in asking about the status of their own “directives,” so why this belated need for “tracking” them? For years, these Supervisors have been content to accept status reports that list the status of most directives as “ongoing” in report after report. But even that “reporting” has been discontinued. Like a lot of other marginally useful material in the CEO report, the list of directives has disappeared. The CEO has managed to dumb-down her report to the point that most of it is departmental filler with minimal actual “reporting.” So if they can’t generate even a passing interest in their own directives, another Board Clerk staffer would become just another feather-bedding project too, although at least there would be some rationale behind it.

Previous boards have discussed whether each board member should have an “aide,” but that idea never went anywhere because even the Board members in those days could see that “aides” for each Supervisor would simply provide a political flunky to each Supervisor at taxpayer expense, not an impartial staffer to help advance the County’s best interests. The hand-picked and well-compensated “aides” would also have a clear inside track when they later decided to run for their boss’s Board seat. (For example, if McGourty had had an aide slot to fill, it’s highly likely that he’d have picked Trevor Mockel and Mockel would then have claimed his experience as an aide would qualify him to be supervisor… And so on.)

But this board is so lazy that they’ll probably think that McGourty’s “presentation” is just peachy and they will unanimously bemoan the fact that they don’t have enough money to pay for more time-wasters on top of the six we already pay more than $1 million a year for (five board members and the CEO).

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On next Tuesday’s consent calendar there’s an item proposing that the Board rubberstamp an “agreement” to “provide facilitation of Restorative Justice Youth Court Services” for November 2024 to June of 2025 (eight months) for about $134k. According to the state court’s website (www.courts.ca.gov), Restorative Justice Youth Court Services involve “identifying the youth’s personal strengths” after which the young person “agrees to repair the harm that was done while also restoring relations with their families, schools, and communities.” This is not the place to dispute these seemingly imaginary benefits or the effectiveness of trying to “restore” a few of our local incorrigible delinquents to upstanding citizen status via another unaccountable handout to a local service provider. But there’s no indication that the proposed “agreement” (as opposed to a contract) was put out for bid. Guess which contractor (agreer?) County staff has selected to provide these dubious, unbid, sole source services? If you guessed the Schraeders and their Redwood Community Services Inc., you’re a lot more savvy about these insider deals than we are. We naively thought that since this is not about mental health, the County might at least try to make it look like they had a normal bidding process and give other outfits an opportunity to bid. But no, just another hand-out, er “agreement,” for the Schraeders.

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One of the recommendations in the recent State Controller’s office’s report which was highly critical of Mendocino County’s financial management was, “For future reorganizations, conduct a risk assessment before implementing significant changes, such as consolidating two elected offices.”

This is the state controller’s office’s passive-aggressive way of saying that Mendo screwed up in consolidating the Auditor-Controller and Treasurer/Tax Collector offices and did not conduct any kind of analysis, much less a “risk analysis,” before doing so.

In their draft response to the State Controller the Board writes that their “corrective action plan” is simply: “County Chief Executive Officer and Board of Supervisors agree with the recommendation.”

We’re supposed to believe that the next proposed half-cocked consolidation (or unconsolidation; these things are kinda random in Mendo) proposal will be accompanied by an in-depth risk assessment (not to mention a financial evaluation) now that the Board has belatedly recognized the error of their ways, albeit two years after the fact and in the face of unanimous public and official input against the consolidation at the time they did it.

And who will make sure that such “risk analyses” are conducted in advance? Why, the Board itself, of course. Because, by complaining (albeit in soft terms) about the Board’s rash consolidation decision after the fact, the State Controller’s office has demonstrated that there’s no teeth in their “recommendations” and lame “corrective action plans” that say “we agree” are a perfectly acceptable way to move past this particular fiasco.

Official Mendo Board Meetings in a nutshell: go through the motions, blunder, waste, shrug, nod, and blame-shift twice a month. Then give yourself a raise.