In the fall of 2008, the Supervisors shoved their long-time Planning and Building Director Ray Hall out the door, wishing the portly bumbler well in the insincere fashion characteristic of Mendo farewells. In a deposition the previous year when the local legal aid society successfully sued the County for having a totally deficient Housing Element in its $2.5 million “updated” General Plan that nobody liked, former senior subordinate planner Pam Townsend described Hall as proprietor of an escalating in-box he seldom looked at. Hall had put in 31 years for Mendo’s taxpayers, years accompanied by a steady low roar of complaints about his job performance but the complaints never quite achived critical mass of three Supervisors to cause him to lose his job.
Hall was hired as a junior planner in 1977 and was promoted to Planning Director in 1985 by Supervisors John Cimolino, Marilyn Butcher, Jim Eddie, Norman DeVall and Nelson Redding. Hall was immediately attacked by the right-wing who complained that he seemed hostile to their projects. Hall outlasted repeated frontal assaults from Frank Creasey, to name one of his most fervent critics, but managed to survive them. In the years since it was the libs on his case, if you can call hippies unhappy with his increasing demands for more stringent Class K rules “on his case.”
Early on, apparently, Hall wisely ceased even noticing that he had an in-basket; he just rolled on, out when he was in, in when he was out. Hall was famous for taking months to approve even the simplest permit or finding one more petty hoop that had to be jumped through.
Supervisor Jim Wattenburger praised Hall’s “leadership, humor, baseball analogies, and duck-hunting abilities.”
Hall himself claimed credit for the amazing feat of using vehicle license fees to fund the first phase of the years-long General Plan Update. He also claimed credit for developing a way to merge lands in Williamson Act and timber production zones to keep them in ag, which the state, he said, later adopted to “save resource lands.”
Supervisor John Pinches congratulated Hall in a backhanded manner by saying that Hall’s service was “unprecedented” because Hall “told everybody in the county ‘no’ at least once and still survived.”
Supervisor Mike Delbar simply said, “It’s been an honor to work with you. Some things never change.”
And Supervisor Kendall Smith thanked Hall for his “efforts for citizens,” adding that Hall had taught her that she had to ask the right questions to get answers from him, implying that the planning boss was also something of a mystic — if not an oracle — while acknowledging that Hall kept a lot of his department’s activities a secret. Not that anybody asked much.
Supervisor Colfax asked Hall, “What's the secret of survival when everything’s coming down around you?” … And, “Thanks for dealing with complex issues and more,” a reference to Mendocino's Historical Review Board, famous for endless discussions about not much at all that continue to take up many hours of County staff and Board meeting time.
Hall replied, “The secret is to get the person who voted against incorporation the last time to vote for it.” (In other words, if the pretentious town was incorporated, their constant bickering would be contained to Mendocino and the Supervisors could wash their hands of it.)
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