Tax Sharing & Annexation: Back To The Drawing Board Or Red Pencil?

Supervisor Ted Williams’ proposal to rescind Supervisor Maureen Mulheren’s Tax Sharing Agreement from last June was considered premature by his colleagues on Tuesday.

Instead, after a couple of hours of discussion and public input the Board decided to proceed with the existing ad hoc committee of Supervisors Madeline Cline and Bernie Norvell and wait until Ukiah submits an official, hopefully scaled-back, annexation proposal.

Supervisor Mulheren opened the discussion by speed reading a long self-serving prepared statement, the gist of which we still don’t understand. But it seemed to have something to do with explaining how she got to the controversial tax sharing agreement that has precipitated the highly unpopular Ukiah proposal to annex an unwieldy 2600 parcels both north and south of Ukiah which everyone now agrees would put a big dent in County finances by turning over an unknown but large amount of tax revenues to Ukiah without any corresponding reduction in services.

Ukiah Mayor Doug Crane told the Supervisors that he didn’t like what Ukiah has put forward so far, calling it “a big fuck up,” which was also “awkwardly” and prematurely proposed. Crane reminded the Supervisors that at this point nothing has been formally approved by the City Council and nothing has been submitted to the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo).

City Councilperson Mari Rodin, one of the biggest tax sharing agreement cheerleaders, said the City of Ukiah is already looking at changes to the proposed map, the map that most people don’t like and which has not been approved by the City Council.

In fact, the Monday night press release from Ukiah Assistant City Manager Shannon Riley — which we posted yesterday — had already made that point, although nobody mentioned it during Tuesday’s lengthy discussion.

Supervisor Williams was skeptical of Ukiah’s “this isn’t final” arguments, implying that he thought what Ukiah would re-submit would probably be substantially the same as the current unofficial proposal and will be met with similar public opposition.

Supervisors Norvell and Cline were clear that while they disapproved of Ukiah’s current proposal, they wanted more info and data before they would considering scrapping Mulheren’s tax sharing agreement outright.

A woman commenter (name illegible) said that she had obtained a copy of Ukiah’s current annexation proposal from LAFCo last January, meaning that Ukiah staffers had not only made it kinda official and that Ukiah has been working on their large land grab proposal for months or more and they probably knew that they wanted to annex a large swath of Ukiah Valley while they were negotiating with Mulheren in her secret ad hoc in the year before it was prematurely approved by the supervisors last June.

Councilmember Rodin said the idea for their annexation proposal stemmed from (unspecified) requests from various Ukiah water and sewer districts which, Rodin said, want to dissolve themselves since Ukiah is already operating the water and sewer systems in the Ukiah Valley and the small districts are having trouble financing major system upgrades.

Supervisor Cline wanted to know if annexation was the only way to address that problem, suggesting that district consolidation and coordination could accomplish essentially the same result.

Cline also chided Rodin saying that the Cline-Norvell annexation ad hoc committee had already had one meeting and nobody from the Ukiah City Council showed up.

At the end of the discussion, after more than a dozen Ukiah area residents made many good points, Williams reluctantly agreed with Norvell and Cline that their existing ad hoc committee should proceed to examine both the agreement and whatever annexation proposal Ukiah ends up submitting. The ad hoc committee would then return to the board in the future — at “a date uncertain” in Ukiah’s euphemistic bureaucratese” — after more data about the impact of the annexation on the County is assembled.

Meanwhile, the ad hoc says they’ll report monthly on the progress of their annexation examination. As usual, given Mendo’s historical aversion to monthly reports, we doubt these reports will be anything more than an occasional “we’re working on it.” Everybody is understating the amount of bureaucracy and process steps that are involved here — unless, of course, Ukiah submits a MUCH smaller annexation proposal, perhaps as step one in a long, drawn out but manageable process.

Despite the usual talk about listening to the public and transparency, nobody suggested a standing annexation committee which would follow Brown Act public meeting rules for the next chorus of Tax Sharing Blues and which would dispel the complaints of most of the complainers about the secrecy involved so far. If whatever they (Ukiah and the County’s ad hoc committee) come up with is another pre-cooked proposal cobbled together without public input, we’re likely to see a similar level of opposition to the Ukiah’s next proposal, whatever and whenever that may be.