Supes Muddle On

At the December 15 Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Dan Hamburg raised a question during the review of the first quarter budget presentation:

Hamburg: “When I was looking over these what really stands out in 4010, 4011, 4012 and onward in HHSA that not only are they under budget, they are under budget by a lot — 30, 40, 50%. And it's all due to unfilled positions.”

CEO budget staffer: “Correct.”

Hamburg: “So, I mean, I think it was great that we took the steps that we did, you know, tried to incentivize people and — but, that just jumps off the page to me. I don't know if it did do the other board members. But those are not small deficiencies, if you want to call them that, in terms of having those positions filled. Of course, not having positions filled means not having services delivered. I can't see it any other way. So I don't know. I know it's just the first quarter. Maybe we will be in better shape in future quarters. But it certainly struck me very strongly.”

Supervisor John McCowen: “I'm sure we all noticed the same item that Supervisor Hamburg just commented on. Just to go into a little more detail: Public health administration under budget by 40%. Environmental health, 36%. Alcohol and other drugs programs 46%. Public health nursing 51%. California children's services 44%. All due to unfilled positions. Which highlights a number of issues really. One is, not filling the positions obviously means that there are either fewer services being delivered or more work for the employees who are delivering the services, or both. It also creates a situation where we are likely faced with a significant budget carry over due to unfilled positions which potentially highlights the problem with how we budget. If we are not accurately anticipating the level of unfilled positions then we wind up with a somewhat artificial carry-over at the end of the year. And that kind of flies in the face of realistic budgeting projections. So there is potentially a couple of very significant things here that are out of sync. And that is our apparent inability to fill positions. We are aware of some of the issues involved with some of these. And yet we don't seem to be making progress in getting these filled and that's a concern and then the issue that goes along with that is what it does in terms of budgeting. So I know the executive office is a very aware of both of these issues. But they definitely are a concern potentially both with our process on one or more levels and then also the impact on either service delivery or the impact to our employees.”

CEO Budget Officer Alan 'The Kid' Flora: “The first point is that as far as I understand it, this is not an unusual situation. This is just information that really hasn't been shown to the board previously this early. One of the reasons that we had asked the departments to provide this information to the board at this time was because of what Supervisor McCowen mention related to budgeting and how we end up at the end of the year. We come in and often have a large fund balance. In a lot of cases it is related to the salary savings in some of the budget units. So we are continuing to work with fiscal staff on this and trying to make sure that the budget is something that is going to be as close to reality as possible. Also, this is a large organization, the county, you have 1000 employees, so there is always a lot of natural turnover for a variety of reasons. I do want to make sure that your board is aware that as I understand it, this is not essentially an unusual phenomenon that all of a sudden now services are not being delivered that were being delivered in the past. It's just that we are providing information to your board earlier on that. Of course we are hopeful that a number of steps that the board has taken with recruitment and retention bonuses will begin to — as well as the salary increases that have been provided by the Board — will start having an impact on these percentages.”

Health and Human Services Director Stacey Cryer:

“Recruitment has been an issue for several years in the agency. When I started there were 12 public health nurses working in health and human services. And now there is 1.5. We are having a difficult time as we have had for years recruiting the professional positions in addition to eligibility workers and various classifications. We have done a lot to beef up our recruitment efforts and we will continue. Job fairs. Internships. I told you at one boarding board meeting I was going to start to grow my own employees. I meant that. We're in the high schools. We are getting into the colleges. Trying to get into different intern programs. Doing what we can. We're going to work with the residency program at the hospital. Whatever mechanism we can to help people get the education and training they need to meet these criteria. The wage increases will help. I don't know if they will solve the problem. We had the problem before. We had tried to deal with the wages before. I think that we as a county we need to look outside the box. The retention bonuses are great. The recruitment bonuses will be helpful. Other counties are looking at alternative methods. I don't know when or if we start looking at those kinds of other alternatives. Some are work from home projects. Different kinds of job-sharing. I don't know. We have not had that conversation. We have to start doing something to get these positions filled. Services are being delivered because you have amazing staff. I call them superheroes and I mean it. They are doing an amazing job. We are not doing everything as well as we should. You have talked about reorganizing my agency. That's one reason we have started working with some positions and get some work done differently. So you will see different kinds of classifications being recruited for and hopefully that will make a difference too. The public health budget units don't contribute to the carryover I don't believe. They stay in realignment costs. That's a different issue I think. Thank you.”

Supervisor Tom Woodhouse: “I would like to see — we've talked about this before. When we work on retention there are challenges about that and unforeseen consequences of that. So everything we try to touch we create more problems. I want to encourage you to bring us more options of what other counties are doing if anything and look at paying the nurses more money and the board does want to be involved and I know it is hard when you're working full blast just to keep afloat so thank you for everything you do. We really are interested in making a difference rather than hearing another report next year about the same facts. We are going to have to do something and I know you want to too. Thank you.”

Board Chair Carre Brown then cut off the discussion so that the Board could spend almost an hour giving out employee service awards.

This is what passes for “management” in Mendocino County.

Here we are in mid-December and the Board is reviewing budget information from July-September (more than three months ago) and County Supervisors are a tad concerned about staffing shortfalls which previously had been the subject of a very pointed grand jury report. Yet the Board of Supervisors is only now getting around to even bringing up the issue, albeit lamely and under a discussion of the budget, not a management report which departments should give to the Board monthly addressing such issues as staffing, budget status, workload, cost drivers, and unresolved issues.

Translation:

Hamburg and McCowen: Looks like lots of slots were vacant a few months ago in Health and Human Services.

Flora: Yup. Been goin’ on for years, but we’re finally getting around to telling you. We don’t want to deal with the management and morale problems in HHSA (please don’t ask us how many people have left in the last few months or why), so we just offered a little more money to a few carefully chosen positions so we can pretend we’re doing something about it. But, of course, it’s not working because money isn’t the problem, never has been.

Cryer: We’re reaching out to local high schools and colleges because those kids have no clue how bad we are to work for so a few of them might sign up and maybe a few of the dimmer ones will stick around for a few years to become real trainees. Of course, that won’t really address our lack of senior qualified staff. The staffing shortfalls are still a problem, but our “amazing” “superheroes” are still doing something (we don’t know what, for whom or how much, of course, or how much backlog has built up because we prefer amazing blather to actual numbers and reports and the Supes never follow-up with specific questions anyway.

Woodhouse: We’ve talked about this before and got nowhere so let’s do that again and again. Oh, and thanks for whatever you do!

Brown: Who cares? It has nothing to do with water in Potter Valley so let’s just stop talking about it and give out some awards to the people who haven’t left yet.

Why Tom Parker ‘Retired’

Supervisor John McCowen clarified why the $250k item to pay the Sacramento based Thomas Law Group for legal work concerning the lawsuit against the County demanding that Mendo cease using the Federal Wildlife Service's lethal predator control methods was on the agenda last week: “What we are doing here is not necessarily authorizing a forward-looking expense. We are essentially rectifying an error that was made where a previous incumbent of the County Counsel's office was incurring legal fees — significant legal fees — without properly advising the board and the Executive Office. But they have been incurred. I believe the County is bound to pay them. I will make the motion to approve the item as presented.”

McCowen didn't identify which previous County Counsel or when the unauthorized expenses were “incurred,” but it was probably former County Counsel Tom Parker who abruptly “retired” back in February of 2014, saying, “It is with regret that I am resigning from my position as county counsel due to personal reasons. I will be taking early retirement from Mendocino County as well. I want to thank all those who have worked and supported me during my tenure here." Parker’s kiss-off letter from the Board was minimalistic: “On behalf of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, we wish Mr. Parker the very best in his retirement,” carefully avoiding even a “thank you for your service.” Maybe now we know the reason (or one of the reasons) that he did not voluntarily “retire.” In fact he didn’t “retire” at all. He now has found new employment as a deputy County Counsel in Los Angeles County where he specializes in redevelopment law.

The motion to pay The Thomas Law Group the $250k was approved 5-0. (Covering up these kinds of near-thefts this way is common in large organizations. Nobody wants to admit that controls were so lax that such things could go on, so they just let the official go rather than charging them with misappropriation which would make everyone look bad.)

Privatizing Emergency Dispatch?

Last week County CEO Carmel Angelo issued a press release saying that for the time being the County will continue to use CalFire’s Howard Forest Dispatch Service (for about $650k per year), but that they also plan to put the service out for bid to the lowest bidder which could include a bidder from somewhere far from Mendocino County. It’s hard to tell what Ms. Angelo’s purpose is. We do know that the County’s Fire Chiefs Association volted unanimously to oppose privatizing the CalFire dispatch service. If the County were to do so, they’d further irritate the chiefs who are already irked about not getting any Proposition 172 funds. $650k sounds like a reasonable price for round the clock professional service for covering something as important as fire and emergency service dispatch service. Jeopardizing that service to save a small percentage of that $643k seems like a major fool’s errand. And even considering it is a slap in the face of the local fire chiefs and the “partnership” with CalFire. The County has already created one privatization fiasco with mental health. Obviously, they haven’t learned their lesson.

Little River Airport: Still No Resolution

Last Tuesday (Dec. 15) Supervisor Dan Hamburg gave his colleagues an update on the Little River Airport tree situation. This issue started out as a logging plan years ago on the theory that the proceeds would help reduce the red ink on the County’s budget books. The County has wasted upwards of $100k preparing for logging the parcel only to have the job delayed and delayed and delayed and finally stopped and converted into an attempt at forest conservation for the 50-plus acres of second growth forest on the Coast.

Earlier this year Supervisor Hamburg told his colleagues, “We do intend to recover our investment in this latest round in trying to go forward with the NTMP [Non-industrial Timber Management Plan].”

Recover their investment? This assumed they could somehow get a conservation group to pay upwards of $100k for the 53 acres of trees, which have, according to Hamburg last week (see below), now gone further down in value.

The logging job paperwork should have cost no more than $10,000 in the first place, but the County’s alleged “forester,” Roger Sternberg, kept finding new nits to pick in preparing the perfect Timber Harvest Plan (which later morphed into the NTMP). Every time they thought they were close, Sternberg found a new agency to “coordinate” with, thus delaying the job time and again — and increasing his already stretched out fees.

Last Tuesday Hamburg reported, “This is another issue where we have not achieved resolution. [sic] We had several meetings [on top of a whole bunch of meetings in prior years] with environmental groups looking at the possibility of a land exchange [now it’s an exchange, not a buyout, meaning no chance of “recovering” any investment] that would involve the southeast runway and exchanging that for some [“some”] of the timberland. We have been in touch with FAA which has demanded that any trade that we made, any land exchange, be of equal value. [Where does the FAA get off on land exchanges in Mendocino County?] So the proposal that we arranged that we initially talked about with the Nature Conservancy which would have been a trade of roughly 80 acres for roughly 36 acres [down from 53] is probably not going to fly with FAA. We had a report from Howard [DeShield, County Transportation Director] regarding his staff meeting with the FAA and there are still a couple of questions that they have not gotten back to us on. [Now the entire project has been turned over to the County’s Transportation Department and all that money for Sternberg’s THP “work” is now officially wasted.] The Department of Transportation did get the trees cut that were of the most concern because they were the closest to the runway. [They didn’t need a THP after all!] So we are currently in compliance with regard to FAA instructions. The main issue that remains is the second growth redwood and old-growth residuals that are in a special five acre area. [Now it’s down to just five acres.] These have been marked for removal by Caltrans Aviation [which also apparently needs no THP] so that issue still remains. FAA of course controls the property rights. [If that were true, why did the County prepare the THP in the first place all those years ago?] We really need to get a complete answer from Mr. Lee [not identified] and the FAA before we know how to proceed.” [And why wasn’t that done before all the THP and conservation work?]

Official Mendo at work!