How To Waste $200K In Just Five Years

Despite posting a $6 million deficit for this year and maybe triple that next year, and flailing away randomly to reduce the deficit by an official policy of: We Hope A Buncha People Will Quit, Mendocino County still retains a $42k per year Sacramento lobbyist outfit called “Shaw Yoder Antwih Schmelzer & Lange,” formerly Dewey Billem & Howe, Under the radar Mendo has been paying these grifters for at least the last five years. Next Tuesday, SYASL will present a sales pitch, er, summary of their “accomplishments” to the Supervisors, as if Mendo’s mostly Democrat pols have any influence on what Sacramento Democrats are or more accurately are not doing.

Among SYASL’s wonderful achievements was “advocating” for Mendo for a state bill that “prohibits state moneys from being used to initiate or operate rail service, or for projects to rehabilitate an existing operation or facility, including a rail terminal, a railyard, a rail facility, and rail infrastructure, except as specified, on the [defunct] North Coast Rail Authority’s (NCRA), or Great Redwood Trail Agency’s (GRTA), right-of-way north of the City of Willits.”

Get it? This professional “advocate” claims to have somehow helped pass a bill that would prohibit any rail operations on the Great Redwood Trail/abandoned and decrepit right-of-way north of Willits. Prior to this “advocacy,” there was literally no chance of such operations, so this is like paying someone to help keep jumbo jets from landing in your backyard.

Besides being a large load of Mendo-funded public relations for this undistinguished lobbying outfit, Mr. Shaw and his self-promoting lobbyist pals also claim credit for advocating for a bill that “requires Caltrans to pay for relocating or removing the encroachment of a public utility district (PUD) with a ratepayer base of 5,000 households or fewer in the event of a future improvement to the highway and to notify the PUD at each stage of a project.” So, presumably, if Caltrans violates this requirement their PUD could be pulled. How this obscure imposition on Caltrans benefits Mendo remains a mystery.

If, like our supervisors, you still think this waste of $42k per year for “lobbying” might in any way benefit Mendo or be connected to what Mendo wants from our Sacto pols, consider that the lobbyists also list their opposition to AB 946 as one of their priorities. AB 946 applied to Chief Probation Officers in “any county with a population of at least 3,500,000 people.” (Hint: there’s only one county in the state with over 3.5 million people and that unnamed County is represented by Assemblyman Isaac Bryan who proposed the bill. The second most populous County is San Diego County with a population of about 3.2 million.) Apparently, LA County wanted the flexibility to be able to use County staffers besides juvenile probation officers for some probation officer tasks but they were embarrassed about wanting that so they didn’t want to be named in the bill. Whatever their motivation, it has nothing to do with Mendo. Fortunately for Mendocino County, the bill didn’t pass thanks to the advocacy of Mr. Yoder and his overpaid associates.

The rest of the lobbyist’s generic list of accomplishments are nothing but a boilerplate list of bills that passed or failed in the legislature in the last few years that they think align with Mendo’s ineffectual “legislative platform,” as if Mendo’s waste of $42k per year had anything to do with the passage or failure of these bills.

As a glimpse into the otherwise hidden level of dysfunction, upside down priorities and trivialities of the Democrats in Sacramento, the list compiled by “Shaw Yoder Antwih Schmelzer & Lange” has some residual, if negative, utility. But Mendo shouldn’t need to spend $42k per year of Mendo’s scarce taxpayer dollars to find that out.

Should you care to review the lobbyist’s other bogus Mendo claims go to the Board’s agenda packet at: https://mendocino.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx