Mendocino CEO Darcie Antle issued the following Press Release on Friday, essentially asking the public to do her job for her. Antle offers no background budget information nor does she provide any options for the public to comment on.
“2025-26 Budget Listening Session
The Mendocino County Executive Office will be hosting a listening session on the Fiscal Year 2025-26 budget from 2:30PM to 4:30PM on Tuesday, April 15th at the Veteran’s Hall in Fort Bragg located at 360 N Harrison St, Fort Bragg.
This Listening Session is for you to provide input on the County budget, potential budget reductions, and what we need to preserve for a balanced budget for Fiscal Year 2025-26. Each speaker will have three minutes to provide comments.
Feedback on closing the budget gap can also be submitted online here: Suggestion Box | Mendocino County, CA”
Remember, at the last budget session, Antle agreed to provide the Board with budget packages from a few randomly selected departments (not the right ones, of course) at their meeting next Tuesday. But Tuesday’s budget “presentation” not only does not provide any departmental budgets, it simply lists the gross, unreviewed requested budget amounts from the departments and claims that even using over $9 million in one-time funds (largely a bad idea) will still leave the County with about an $8 million deficit. Antle’s “presentation” offers no suggestions or options about what might be done to deal with the deficit, on either the revenue side or the expense side. She simply says that “Scenario 1” is not using one-time funds leaving the deficit at about $17 million. Or, “Scenario 2,” use the one-time funds and reduce general fund deficit to about $10 million. No possible new revenue sources are mentioned, no mention expenses that could be delayed, no lists of top general fund expenditores, no proposals — Nothing.
Ominously, under “operating transfers out,” Antle lists the almost $4 million from Measure P that is earmarked for emergency services, implying that the Supervisors could snag that essential money from cash-strapped emergency services in the County to help balance her budget.
For the last several weeks Antle has been crying wolf and and saying the sky is falling — albeit in her typical ho-hum/oh well droning style — as the Supervisors sit back and wait for somebody to do something. Clearly, not Antle. (Each week of delay costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost savings opportunities.)
At their last meeting, after Board Chair John Haschak asked his colleagues for budget balancing ideas, only Williams responded, asking for ridiculous lists of invoices and transactions. Williams’s colleagues not only hadn’t the slightest idea what to do, but they didn’t even know what basic budget info to ask their CEO for.
In our report on that meeting last week (“Budget Bungling, er, Balancing”) we offered some practical suggestions: Consult with the former Supervisors who dealt with a similar deficit back in 2010, look back at what the 2010 board did to reduce the deficit, ask the departments to list their top budget balancing proposals, stop wasting money on outside attorneys, cut their own fat salaries and benefits, renegotiate the barganing unit pay increases (by, say, delaying some of them, especially the management and department head bargaining units)… But of course none of that has entered their thick skulls, despite their claims to be “listening.”
Instead, they schedule an ill-prepared “workshop” in Willits on Tuesday with no useful budget balancing information to work with, followed by an even dumber “listening session” in Fort Bragg the following week asking the uninformed Mendo public for their ideas. Oh, and keep them to three minutes each please.
If history is any guide, after “the public” offers no workable budget balancing proposals for the board to “listen” to and then ignore, the CEO and the Board will turn around, throw up their hands and blame “the public” for the deficit.
This is blatant managerial malpractice and dereliction, but it is what passes for leadership in Mendocino County in 2025.
Darcie Antle,
Below are three simple cost saving ideas.
Reduce the county workforce by 10% (except the Sherrif’s Department). The remaining staff can all work 10% harder.
Eliminate all budgeted funded but not filled positions that have been open for six months or more.
Stop doing stupid things like combining departments and the Cubbison Conspiracy.
The public is responsible for the supervisors we presently have on the board. We need to elect people with fiscal knowledge. And we need to replace our present CEO..
Bingo!
Well I know how to budget and I’m no CEO. Why was she elected in the first place? This is pure negligence she needs to be fired immediately
With our budgets I would like to comment on an item that always has, and will continue to, bust our county budgets.
From 2023 to 2024 the employer side of pension expense went from an average of 40.07% per dollar of employees payroll to 41.29%.
The dollar increase is about another $1.1 Million a year (to $36.6 Million), a material item for our budget.
Remember we also pay social security for our county employees and we are still paying off the Pension Obligation Bonds that supposedly took care of the prior unfunded liabilities a couple of times. These costs are not included in the percentages above.
Employee contributions from 2023 to 2024 went from 10.47% to 10.32%, or DOWN about $140 Thousand.
Although I have heard the supervisors say “it is getting better”, since I left the pension board about 8 years ago the unfunded pension liability (debt) has gone from $185 Million in 2016 to $248 Million in 2024 (about $8 Million in debt increase per year).
These numbers are all as of June 2024 when the market was really high.
For some Safety Members we pay 86. 5% per dollar of payroll into the pension fund for them (they pay 13.98%, down from 14.14% the prior year). This does not include social security or the pension obligation bond load.
We have some very good county employees, but there is nowhere in the private sector any business could survive with this load (and constant increase in debt for a paid for item).
The actuarial valuations are always wrong and the county, by law, always picks up the mistakes.
The pension boards are rigged to have a super majority of foxes counting chickens. It is what we call a “Moral Hazard” in economics.
I left the pension board because they refused to evaluate the difference in the rate of return our investment manager was projecting compared to the one the actuaries were projecting. The actuaries rate suggested lower employee contributions, which would be picked up later, by law, by the taxpayers. The pension board was bold enough, in a public meeting, to not even be concerned about the optics of not evaluating the discrepancy. As a result we have this expense that is supposedly “pay as you go” that has always been the taxpayers need to pay more today for yesterdays’ expenses (that were lowballed due to the Moral Hazard).
GENERAL INFORMATION
The County of Mendocino is a general law County. The Board of Supervisors, which serves as the legislative and executive body of County government and many special districts, is comprised of five full-time members elected by their respective districts. Pursuant to the California Government Code, the Board enacts legislation governing Mendocino County and determines overall policies for County departments and various special districts, adopts the annual budget, and fixes salaries. The Board also hears appeals from decisions of various Planning related committees and commissions in addition to considering such Planning matters as General Plan amendments.
The Chief Executive Officer is appointed by the Board and is responsible for day-to-day administration of County affairs.
County Counsel, appointed by the Board, advises and represents the County and Board in all legal affairs.
The Clerk of the Board, also appointed by the Board, is responsible for maintaining the official records of the Board, attending all sessions of the Board, and managing Board business.
The current CEO is expensive dead wood.
Bring back John Pinches and four more like him.
Just dreaming
With this extreme level of milquetoast leadership, I think there is a high possibility that the county will declare bankruptcy as a deliberate strategy. Just hand it over to the courts to figure out. It probably wont happen for another year or two. It allows the Mendocino leadership to continue to do essentially nothing while claiming victim-hood and the end result will be a restructuring. Everything would be on the table, including criminal justice and pensions. The milquetoast leadership can then deflect the fallout and blame the courts or “the system” or prior Boards for something “out of their control.” This all assumes the CEO’s read on the current budget picture is accurate and as bad as she claims.
Let’s not forget that either her, or her predecessor Carmel Angelo, perjured themself on the stand during the Cubbison case. Either way, the county CEO needs to be eliminated in favor of a CAO. As Carmel proved, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The supervisors lack the willingness to rid us of this self imposed problem. My guess being that they are all implicated in collusive schemes, likely to be uncovered during the upcoming civil portion of the Cubbison case.
The Street says, that if Low Gap is reading the room, which is doubtful, they should give Ms. Cubbison whatever she wants to go away. If her lawyers are as good as advertised, they eventually could have someone in handcuffs before this civil business is over. And, rightfully so…
Ask around,
Laz
Let’s pray that day will come & come soon.