Mendo Gives Away $25 Million On Consent Calendar

You could tell that Supervisor Georgeanne Croskey was nervous about handing over some $25 million to Camille Schrader’s Redwood Quality Management Company. I mean really. Handing it over no questions asked? Handing it over for ill-defined and unaccountable mental health services rendered, or not rendered? That's a lot of money to fork over in one big gulp without even pro forma discussion.

Croskey deserves a bit of credit for at least pulling the $25 mil off the consent calendar where CEO Angelo put it hoping it’d be approved without comment along with the other routine items. Supervisor McCowen also seemed aware of the bad optics associated with that much money sailing on past unremarked.

Croskey: “I asked for these items to be pulled because, you know, we are approving significant amounts of money in contracts. I think that RQMC does a great job. I simply want to pull these so we can highlight what it is that we are approving and the amount we are approving so it doesn't look like we are just stamping the consent calendar and we have a little bit of awareness. I know we had a presentation previously regarding these contracts so I'm not necessarily concerned for further discussion unless it's here at the board. I simply want to pull that to highlight the significance of these contracts.”

Unfortunately, the “presentation” Supervisor Croskey refers to was a generic info-free mental health presentation last month where the Mental Health staff and Ms. Schrader provided page after page of generic service descriptions, made a bunch of unsubstantiated claims and no questions were asked by the supervisors.

https://www.theava.com/archives/82464#3

The particulars of the RQMC contract were not mentioned, no numbers were provided, no trends reviewed, no analysis of how the “clients” were handled, who got what services and who didn’t, no plans for the coming year for the $25 mil. Etc.

Supervisor/Board Chair Dan Hamburg went into Homer Simpson mode: “It is indeed a very large amount of money.”

Supervisor John McCowen: “I appreciate that Supervisor Croskey is pulling these items from the consent calendar. I do believe that approval of the new contracts going forward is consistent with previous Board direction. We have had a general presentation on mental health and the Board did at that time give direction in favor of renewing the contracts for various factors. They were discussed at that time…”

No they were not, unless you consider a non-specific word salad “discussion.”

McCowen: “…However, really with the magnitude of the contracts, to me these are not consent items. It limits the ability both of the board, the contractors and also the public to ask questions or dig a little deeper into the nuts and bolts of these contracts…”

That's right, supervisor. You're getting warmer.

McCowen: “…It creates a situation where they were on consent, we have the day planned out in terms of what items we have time to consider and an in-depth discussion of this would throw off the agenda and creates pressure to not raise questions…”

When you look at what that last Tuesday agenda actually contained you can see where the Board’s priorities are: They spent an hour giving out service pins, another half hour giving awards to the participants in “Leadership Mendocino,” a couple of hours refining some refinements of the failed pot permit program, another half hour on “supervisors reports” which could have been handled in a written report. There was no gol-darn time left for any discussion of the $25 million contracts.

McCowen: “…Maybe we need a policy that contracts that hit a certain threshold should not be on the regular calendar because we are criticized all the time that we have no idea what's going on and we don't know where we're spending the money and these items would be an opportunity for the contractor and staff to give a synopsis of here's where the money's going."

“Criticized all the time”?

McCowen: “…So I don't want to hold up the meeting today…”

Bring on the awards and chuckling photos.

McCowen: “…But in the future these contracts, to me they are not appropriate for consent, just given the amount. I think we could get a brief rundown maybe from the department because we do have the approval of the new contracts going forward and two of them are also augmenting the current fiscal year contracts and I believe that's based on the services that were actually provided and the way the system works is we have to provide the service and pay for the service and then seek reimbursement from the state…”

All of a sudden McCowen seemed to be asking a question, albeit having nothing to do with the contracts or services at hand.

Cue Molgaard The Inevitable.

Anne Molgaard, Acting Director of Health and Human Services: “That is exactly right. In order to pull down the maximum amount [our emphasis] for the services rendered under federal and state laws we have to go back and occasionally make adjustments and the good news of that is, it means that more services were legally rendered to residents than we had initially anticipated. That's much better than leaving services and money so to speak on the table. But that's why they're all here. [I.e., to pull down the maximum amount.] I do realize that this is quite a consent calendar and this has to do with the fact that an edict came down from our former chair of the board of supervisors [i.e., Supervisor John McCowen] there will be no retroactive contracts. [As if.] So we have worked very hard. The actual number of contracts as you said in our budget report last week, or two weeks ago, the number of contracts is not increased, the fact that they are all being done in the month of June is what is different. I see that that is kind of overwhelming. But we can certainly come back and give more detail on anything that you would like.”

Thus commenced an even more irrelevant discussion of mental health services financing including an impossibly complicated “reversion plan” where maybe some money that’s not spent might go back to the state but maybe not because legislation is pending and lobbying is ongoing and Ms. Molgaard’s minions are hard at work getting as much of it as they can, but nobody really knows so they need a reversion plan in case some money reverts… But…

I gave up.

As the consent item discussion wound down, RQMC’s Camille Schrader thanked the board for the “trust” the Board put in her and her for-profit company’s “services.” Whatever they are.

Then Schrader added, “I frankly agree that these are huge contracts and they do need some discussion. In the last month we did a presentation on what those contracts are doing…”

There was no discussion. There was a garbled presentation of data free service categories, not what’s being done or not done for whom by whom.

“… and we have the data dashboard … and it actually shows the accountability…”

This chart from the March “data dashboard” (the latest I could find) is the closest the data dashboard gets to accountability:

So 50 people, 35 of them adults, were sent to outside-the-county psychiatric hospitals because they were a danger to themselves or gravely disabled (not because they were a danger to others).

RQMC is getting $25 million a year or about $2 million a month to do some assessments and process 50 people to outside facilities. You do the math. (But of course you can’t do the math because there’s not enough info. But $2 million a month would pay for several hundred people providing services, depending on how much Ms. Schrader pays her staff and herself. In fact, it looks like there are more people providing services than there are receiving services.)

Schrader: “So when you see those dollars and you have that data dashboard that is reported every month, you are seeing what services and to whom and what they cost…”

No you’re not. Not even close. It’s meaningless data and it’s certainly not clear what it costs except at the contract value level.

Schrader: “…and it is cumulative through the year…”

No it’s not, and even if it was, so what?

Schrader: “So it is a monthly accountability system.”

Oh please. The only thing that would constitute a “monthly accountability system” would be for the County to apply the accountability procedures recommended by highly regarded mental health consultant Lee Kemper, none of which have been implemented.

Kemper: “We recommend the County Executive direct BHRS/MH to prepare and present quarterly ‘Financial Summary Reports’ that provide summary financing, budgeting, expenditure, and service delivery information on all aspects of the Mental Health Delivery System – both ASOs and county delivered services. In the first of these reports, BHRS/MH should provide a description and outline of the overall structure of financing and budgeting for ASO delivered services and county-staff delivered services. Further, we recommend the County Executive direct BHRS/MH to make a recommendation on when an independent financial audit of both ASOs will be conducted and for which time periods.”

Absolutely nothing like that is in place, despite the $25 million recipient’s claims to the contrary.

Schrader: “And finally I want to say that 58% of that contract, or actually it's more like 40% or 45% of that contract goes direct to the provider agencies to provide services [which] is federal financial participation so those are dollars coming into our community for services for the population from the federal government that you are authorizing. So thank you very much for the honor of being able to serve our people.”

We expected someone to reply: “Oh no, thank you for taking our money!” But no.

So there you have it: Molgaard and Schrader confirm that they have achieved their real goal: Pull down the maximum amount of megabucks from the feds and pay their burgeoning staff to provide $25 million per year in mystery mental health services (not counting the County’s own 40-plus mental health administrators and coordinators). What Ms. Schrader specifically does with all that money is so unimportant that the supervisors can approve the contracts without discussion as it sails past on the consent calendar — even after they’re belatedly pulled “for discussion.” 

* * *

Angelo V. McCowen

WILL SUPERVISOR MCCOWEN be the next high-ranking County official to disappear?

A parade of top Mendo officials have departed in recent months, and the thing they seem to have in common is they somehow got on the wrong side of the highly irritable County CEO Carmel Angelo.

FIRST, there was Alan ‘The Kid’ Flora whose unceremonious no-notice Friday morning expulsion was never reasonably explained. He was followed out the door by Interim Ag Commissioner Diane Curry who had had the temerity to point out how cumbersome the pot permit program had become. Then Joe Moreo, a distinguished senior Ag Commissioner from Modoc County who arrived with great fanfare lasted just a week and who left, apparently, when told he would not have authority over the County’s unwieldy cannabis permit program which he was told he was hired to improve.

NOW this week, prompted by an inquiry from Willits Weekly reporter Mike A’Dair, we learn that the County’s much-ballyhooed “Pot Czar” Kelly Overton has abruptly “resigned” without further explanation. (Clearly there was a huge gap between what he was expected to do to “streamline” the permit process and what he could do given the program’s many complexities and outside agency involvements.

THE COUNTY’S POT PERMIT PROGRAM, ultimately the brainchild of the how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-pin mind of Supervisor John McCowen who espouses its intricate wonders at every opportunity, has been declared a financial failure with something like $1 million in “under-realized” revenues while staff costs in several departments were ballooning — and while permit processing and new applications ground to a slow crawl.

WE SUSPECT that a backroom tug-of-war has arisen between Supervisor McCowen and CEO Angelo. McCowen wants to see his faltering Pot Permit Program limp into some kind of budget neutral status in the next year or two. While County CEO Carmel Angelo, whose primary — not to say only — priority is looking good to her outside auditors and rating agencies, wants to make the County’s overtaxed General Fund appear to be balanced this year.

IT DIDN’T HELP when the budget took several big hits on top of the “under-realized” pot permit revenues. The stumbling leadership had to find $1 million to keep the tiny Juvenile Hall open (largely the result of non-management in the wake of the on-duty sexual dalliances of former Chief Probation Officer Pam Markham and associated overhead costs) on top of huge salary increases to the Supervisors and most of the County’s top officials, a large decrease in property tax revenues due to last fall’s destructive fires (although there’s a chance the state may reimburse some of that), and an across the board increase in County employee salaries.

FURTHER EVIDENCE of this ever-growing budget problem was CEO Angelo’s arbitrary zeroing out of Sheriff’s Department overtime even though everybody knows it’ll be well north of $1 million, in spite of Angelo’s promise to keep monthly track of it. (Angelo grudgingly allowed the Supes to put $300k in the Sheriff’s overtime budget line even though everyone knows that’s just as ridiculous.)

THAT BACKGROUND is probably what lead to Supervisor John McCowen proposing a review of the County’s new hiring freeze: a somewhat artificial attempt to keep 10% of the County's many funded vacancies vacant from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019. McCowen is apparently worried that letting CEO Angelo have unilateral hiring authority (or more accurately not hiring) might further jeopardize the pot permit program.

McCOWEN is right that the Board must be involved in salary freezes, of course. It  wasn’t that many years ago when, in the aftermath of the 2009 recession-driven budget crunch, Angelo and the Board went through departmental job title lists together line by line to determine which ones could be retained.

SOME OF THIS is speculation, of course. But given the nature of CEO Angelo’s overheated rhetoric on the subject at last Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting — McCowen had only proposed discussing it — it’s hard to come up with another explanation:

McCowen: “As we are all aware, CEO Angelo invoked a hiring freeze recently in the wake of the Board’s budget approval and the decision to keep juvenile hall open and to fund that with projected salary savings and an increase in the anticipated vacancy rate [from 5% to 10%]. I'm the first to concede that I don't know exactly how that direction will go and where the money will be on that line item. I'm confident there will be money from other line items and that we will have a balanced budget. We have as part of the CEO report 134 approved but vacant positions. Of course many of those are non-general fund. Anyway, primarily I believe that the decision to have a hiring freeze or not ought to be a board direction and so I'm requesting that that be an agenda item at the next meeting for the Board to consider all the merits and potential concerns around the hiring freeze. And then, either ratify the action of the CEO or perhaps revise or rescind.”

Board Chair Dan Hamburg; “Very good. Another thing I want to mention is — what? I'm sorry. CEO Angelo?”

CEO Angelo reacted immediately.

Angelo: “Chair Hamburg, Supervisor McCowen, if this board takes away my ability to do a hiring freeze it is taking away my ability to balance the budget. You are impeding my ability to do the job you have asked me to do. So I'm really surprised at Supervisor McCowen’s comment and request and I would say again that I don't know why you would do that.”

Hamburg: “Mmm-hm.”

Angelo repeated herself: “Again, I don't know why you would do that comment and request. And I would say again that I don't know why you would do that.”

Hamburg: “Mmm-hm.”

Angelo repeated herself again, this time more emphatically: “I mean, first of all we had a 5% and then we had a 10%. If you take away my ability to tell a department head that they can either hire or not hire you are absolutely taking away my ability to balance this budget. It will be a free-for-all!”

Hamburg: “Well, any board member can request an item for the agenda so I don't think I can stop you [McCowen] from making an agenda item if that's what you want to do.”

McCowen: “Thank you Mr. Chair. And I do. And with all due respect I do think that the decision to declare a hiring freeze is really a policy matter and as I stated I think with or without it we will have a balanced budget. But I am concerned about other aspects of the message that it sends. We struggle to recruit and we still have 134 vacant positions today. So I don't know about the reference to a free-for-all. I think we can try as diligently as possible to hire and maintain staff and we are still going to have a significant vacancy factor. And again I do request this be an agenda item. It shouldn't be a total surprise. We have had the discussion previously including today. So if it does become an agenda item it will be a board decision as to what we do.”

At least two other supervisors went on record as being reluctant to cross CEO Angelo.

Supervisor Croskey: “I'm happy to go into further discussion on an agenda item. But in my opinion a hiring freeze is not a policy. I think the policy is that we want a balanced budget. We use carryover funds for our reserves and things like that. I think we give a lot of power to the CEO to follow those policies but I don't think a hiring freeze is necessarily a policy. But I'm happy to discuss things further in an agenda item.”

Hamburg: “I would tend to agree with Supervisor Croskey but I am not sure. I would have to know a little bit more. I'm not sure if it's a policy item or if it is something that I — but I do think the CEO is our— the person that we hire, whose primary responsibility is to balance the budget and I think that if that is her — the way that she has chosen to try to accomplish that —, again, my tendency would be to stand behind that decision. So I don't know. What do you want to do?”

McCowen didn’t budge: “Agenda item.”

Supervisors Carre Brown and Dan Gjerde declined comment on the subject. But given her past record, Brown is highly unlikely to oppose anything CEO Angelo wants. And lately Gjerde seems to have disappeared on all issues.

SO WILL McCOWEN be the next pot permit program casualty?