“We’re all over the place,” said frustrated First District Supervisor Madeline Cline after listening to her colleagues bat around the question of how the County can help fund volunteer ambulance services in the unincorporated areas of the County, principally Covelo, Laytonville and Anderson Valley. Supervisor Cline could save some meeting time by replacing her name tag with that slogan as a reminder to her windy colleagues at future meetings.
The Supervisors seem to agree that they have some nebulous obligation to help fund volunteer ambulance services in the unincorporated areas, but how to do it remains elusive — especially for local pols with limited understanding of the situation or the options.
Supervisor Maureen Mulheren repeated the obvious several times: “We need a plan,” presumably referring to a plan to present to the voters as a possible tax measure.
But…
Should it include “public safety”? Should the County’s Fire Chiefs Association work something up? Should the individual districts prepare their own? Should the Bed Tax be increased to fund the volunteer ambulances since tourists represent a large percentage of ambulance responses? Should they hire a consultant? (They’ve already hired a consultant to look into a possible road tax. We haven’t heard about that lately.) Should they ask “staff” to work something up? Should a tax apply to the entire County or just the three underfunded and understaffed volunteer ambulance districts? Should the fire agencies be included? Can some of the “excess” revenues from the Measure P emergency services sales tax increment be allocated to ambulances? Should the County’s well-funded, Sonoma County based “Local Emergency Medical Services Agency: (LEMSA) be included? What restrictions apply to sales tax proposals? What exactly is the County’s legal responsibility? Should a tax measure be initiated by the Board or by the public (or the Fire Chiefs Association)? Would an ambulance funding tax measure conflict with other tax measures under consideration?
Round and around they went with no end in sight; where they’d stop nobody knew.
Finally, Supervisor Maureen Mulheren rescued her colleagues by volunteering to prepare an agenda item on the subject in the future, probably next year because she’s so busy and the holidays are coming up and so much work is involved, and….
Board Chair John Haschak, desperate for a way to end the seemingly endless discussion, quickly jumped on Mulheren’s off-ramp and everybody agreed to essentially give up for the year in hope that Mulheren can come up with something worth considering next year.
Mulheren’s track record on the subject is mixed. She attends many inland fire service meetings and had a hand in preparing the complicated allocation formula for the Measure P sales tax for fire services. But last year’s tax sharing agreement between the County and the incorporated cities that she prepared in secret and sold to her colleagues without staff review has fallen flat, especially after the City of Ukiah based their highly unpopular large parcel grab annexation proposal on that Ukiah-centric agreement.
Unfortunately, confusion, inaction, ignorance, delay and blunder pass for policy in Mendocino County too often these days.
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