Nobody is happy with the Mendocino County Air Quality Management District’s (AQMD) proposal to raise residential burn permit fees from $19 to a ridiculous $135. Even the Air Quality Management District representatives — Interim Air Pollution Control Officer Doug Gearhart and Deputy Air Pollution Control Officer Efraim Lopez — acknowledged the drastic fee increase was pretty high, noting that it hasn’t gone up since the early 90s. Even more striking, the District’s cost analysis consultant calculated that a residential burn permit’s “actual cost” is $1,183 apiece.
The District paid the fancy consultant to do a detailed analysis of their budget, breaking down the various burn permit categories (some of which don’t even apply to Mendo) and allocating costs to each to achieve the bureaucrats’ fantasy of “full cost recovery.” It’s not clear how much the cost of the consultant’s analysis itself contributed to the large proposed fee increase. The consultants concluded that at present the District only recovers about 42% of its costs.
A large range of industrial and commercial burn permit fees were proposed to go up as well. Fees for large volume debris burns would range from about $1400 up to over $5,000. Fees for incinerators and power generation range from $1,500 to $2,200 per.
Several supervisors wondered why the district charged several thousand dollars for electric motor burn permit fees.
We were (not) surprised to see that at present an “agricultural burning multiple site permit” is free — no cost at all — and the consultant said such permits actually cost the District only a little more than a residential permit at $1,531 per. This amounts to yet another subsidy to the local wine industry giving them free burn permits when they want to burn down trees to plant vineyards, such as the burn that blanketed the entire Anderson Valley in smoke a few years ago when George Bergner burned down the Tin Man apple orchard to make way for a huge vineyard that he later sold to William Hill who bought the vineyard with teachers’ pension fund money. Predictably, there was no proposed increased fee for these “agricultural burning multiple site permits.”
Most of the industrial, commercial and vehicle-related fees are simply a cost for polluting, the bigger the burn, the bigger the fee. There’s nothing in the analysis that addresses actual pollution reduction or burn bans, however, you’re only supposed to burn on “burn days.”
The AQMD is an odd hybrid state/county office. The staffers are state employees, not county employees, but the District’s “Board of Directors” is the County Supervisors. Although the AQMD is a state office, the state provides essentially no funding for the office, and it must fund itself through grants, fees and penalties.
The Supervisors — minus former Supervisor Dan Gjerde who quit a month before his term was up last month to take a job as a transpo planner with Caltrans — and everyone else who commented tried their best to contain their outrage at the eye-popping size of the proposed increase, saying that not only is it too high, but it will increase fire danger because people will either burn their debris without a permit (less safely, presumably) or they will not burn it at all causing an increase in “fuels” (dry brush and leaves) resulting in less “defensible space” around their structures.
Supervisor Ted Williams thinks the residential fee should be zero to encourage people to reduce fire hazards; the other Supervisors agreed that it certainly shouldn’t be as high as $135. But nobody had any suggestions for alternate funding sources (except, perhaps, the County’s alleged $13 million surplus/carryover from last year as reported by County Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Sara Pierce last month which, of course, is already attracting multiple funding requests.
Williams also pointed out that since a $135 permit fee would likely result in a drastic reduction in permit applications, the problem would just get worse in subsequent years.
It turns out that the biggest cost driver the District faces is responding to smoke complaints, mainly from neighbors, from all over the far-flung reaches of the County. Each complaint requires that the District dispatch a deputy pollution control officer to investigate. Site conditions can vary depending on weather, time of day, time of year, size of parcel, etc. Most of the time the burning is determined to be legal, even though the complaining party might not like it. Accordingly, not that many fines are imposed and the violation process can take a long time. So in most cases the “investigation” is a one-off trip, up to a day-long in travel time, to some outlying burn site, only to discover that a burn is legal, but smoky.
There was no discussion about the actual nature of the material being burned. (For example the controversial aggregate plant on the Willits grade which generated lots of complaints when their operating permit was up for approval a few years ago, creates a much more acrid smoke than ordinary woody debris.)
Supervisor Williams wondered if there couldn’t be some way to have local fire departments or county code-enforcement staffers pre-screen the smoke complaints to reduce the number of long-distance enforcement trips, but nobody followed up on that idea.
In the end the Board decided to — as usual — do nothing this year. Board Chair Maureen Mulheren asked CEO Antle to work with the District to review the proposed fee analysis and the issue will be postponed to early next year when the new Board, including Supervisors-elect Madeline Cline and Bernie Norvell, can determine how best to avoid or further postpone the issue.
As a practical matter the Board could take a two-pronged approach to this situation with the goal of eliminating residential burn permit fees entirely as a public safety measure: 1. Require the District to develop a cost reduction plan centered on reducing the number of long-distance responses to non-violations (via coordination with county code enforcement or memorandums of agreement with outlying fire departments, and/or simply ignoring certain complaints that are either chronic or vexatious), and 2. Solicitation of some of the Fire Safe Council or state/Calfire fire prevention money where it can be demonstrated that the expense is prevention-related.
Of course, the Supervisors have not demonstrated the basic managerial abilities to pursue any such approach, so don’t expect this issue to be addressed, much less solved, any time soon.
STRATEGIC CYBER TRAILS TO NOWHERE
Jim Shields of the Mendocino Observer wrote on Thursday:
“Got a kick out of the December 17th Board of Supervisors agenda. Under the CEO's Report, is the following caption: ‘In May 2022, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors approved the first five-year strategic plan that will help guide the critical decisions the Board of Supervisors will face over the next five years with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of life for County residents. Departmental reporting will align with the strategic plan. Click HERE to download the Strategic Plan.’
“When you click the hyperlink for the strategic plan, there's nothing there. Which has always been my opinion regarding the value of ‘strategic plans’: There's nothing there and never has been.”
Following in the footsteps of this latest County gaff associated with the entirely pointless $130k “strategic plan,” we noticed the agenda item recommending the Board’s proposed response to the Grand Jury’s recommendation that:
“The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors create a committee whose sole mission is to independently and accurately evaluate the status of timely court filings by FCS (Family and Children’s Services). They will report their findings quarterly to the Board of Supervisors. (To be completed by October 2024.)”
Supervisors’ response: “The recommendation will not be implemented because it is not warranted or reasonable. The status of court reports is information that is available through reports generated in the Family and Children’s Services computer systems. This information will be presented to the Board quarterly through the CEO Report, beginning October 2024, without the need for a committee.”
The only possibly relevant item in the October CEO report was in the Social Services section which said: “The department has released a new monthly data dashboard which you will find on the Social Services webpage.”
So we went to the Social Services webpage to look for the “reports generated in the Family and Children’s Services computer systems” where we found, among other irrelevant diagrams:
Whatever one’s opinion of this “report,” may be —we find it a. nearly impossible to find, b. skimpy, c. obtuse and meaningless, and 4. self-serving — t certainly does not amount to anything like the “independent and accurate evaluation of the status of timely court filings by FCS” recommended by the Grand Jury.
Unfortunately, as with Mr. Shields’ observation, this is typical of the Board’s attitude toward even a simple Grand Jury recommendation: A token non-response which doesn’t remotely pass the smell test.
The point of the Grand Jury’s original report was to point out that Family and Children’s Services (FCS) is woefully understaffed and overworked causing, among many other things, late submissions of reports for court consideration. Instead of dealing with the staffing issues, the Board and executive office, like they do with many other “reports,” simply says, ‘Here’s some random numbers, we’re done. Next.’ Nobody bothers to ask what’s being done about the staffing problem or the other items addressed in the Grand Jury report, many of which the County “agreed” with, but nobody checks to see if they’re implemented.
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