Last week Mendolocal.news reporter Elise Cox broke the unsurprising news that “Mendocino County Supervisors’ Approval Rating Stinks.”
According to the results of a Mendocino Council of Governments (MCOG) survey to gauge the level of support a road tax measure might get from voters, only 30 percent of those surveyed had a favorable opinion of the Supervisors. 50 percent had an unfavorable view. Presumably 20 percent had no view or were neutral on the question.
Reasons offered for the unfavorable view were homelessness, a lack of good-paying jobs, the poor condition of local streets and roads, and waste and inefficiency in government.
No reasons were offered to explain the 30 percent with a favorable view.
We don’t blame the supervisors for “homelessness.” But, of course, they could do more about it if they wanted to, which may be why such a visible problem, especially in the Ukiah area, was mentioned first. Nor do we blame the Supervisors for the County’s historical lack of good paying jobs (except for themselves), although they could at least try introducing a living wage ordinance like the one Sonoma County has if they wanted to.
The condition of the County streets and roads in the unincorporated areas of the County is indeed the responsibility of the County. After all, the term “supervisor” derives from the early days of local government when the Supervisors were “road supervisors” and road routes, road construction and maintenance, and road usage were their primary focus. But the County is limited by the paltry amount of funds available for road maintenance — which is why they’re asking about the public’s level of support for a possible road tax.
“Waste and inefficiency,” while likely true to some extent, is too generic a complaint to take seriously. For example, the bulk of the County’s General Fund goes to law enforcement, and we don’t think there’s much waste or inefficiency in those areas. A lot of money is spent on social and human services with the attendant inefficiencies, but such “services” are hard to assess since so much of it is considered “confidential.” Mendo is certainly top heavy with well-paid administrators and the Supervisors themselves. But we don’t hear much outcry from voters or candidates for local offices about that.
Reporter Cox also noted that the consultant conducting the MCOG survey said that the public would be more likely to support a road tax if the proposal contained “accountability provisions.”
That’s where we couldn’t help chuckling.
The late John Pinches, the only Supervisor in Mendo history who actual knew and cared about road construction and maintenance, often said that roads are probably the least transparent and least understood activities in the public sphere. When the public votes for “road” taxes they have no idea what they’ll get or if they’ll get anything at all. Nobody outside of a few contractors and insiders knows how much “roads” should cost and “oversight,” much less road project scheduling is difficult at best.
For example. Phase 4, a two-mile segment of the dubious Great Redwood trail in Ukiah, costs about $2 million. This was relatively small project that did not have any right-of-way costs nor did it have to comply with California’s strict road construction specifications. That $2 million price tag includes engineering, environmental compliance and actual construction, most of which would not be required for ordinary resurfacing of existing roads.
One estimate we found on-line for road resurfacing in rural areas of California said the cost is around $280k per lane, per mile. So let’s say $600k to resurface one mile of the typical two-lane County road. Mendocino County has about a thousand miles of roads in various stages of deterioration. How big a dent could a modest sales tax make? You can do the basic math. Be prepared to make lots of little round circles.
A road tax proposal that simply says the money raised will go to “improve county roads” will guarantee the creation of a giant black hole where the money will be dumped, never to be heard from again. Also guaranteed will be that a large portion of road money raised will be spent on planning and administration. (A state audit a few years ago said that Big Orange (CalTrans) has the highest percentage of bureaucracy and administration of all the state’s bloated agencies at around 30 percent.)
The only way to provide anything close to “accountability” would be to specify which roads are to be improved (i.e., a priority list), what kinds of improvements are to be made, and how many miles must be improved. And even that would be hard to manage and account for.
Close followers of Mendocino County officialdom remember that 2017’s Measure B, the “Mental Health Treatment Act” was sold to the public as a way to reduce the level of street people with mental health or drug problems. It included “accountability provisions,” and look what that got us — i.e., basically nothing.
Measure B specifically called for the creation of “a politically independent ‘Mental Health Treatment Act’ Citizen’s Oversight Committee which shall review the independent annual audit of expenditures …”
No such audit has ever been done much less “reviewed.” Nobody seems to care that the Measure’s specific annual audit requirement has been ignored.
“…and the performance management plan [shall be reviewed] for compliance with the Specific Purpose of this ordinance.”
That “specific purpose” was to “provide assistance in the diagnosis, treatment and recovery from mental illness and addiction…” Not to provide facilities where local agencies can make money by placing a small set of “reimbursable” mental patients to get their meds straight and some limited counseling.
None of the millions of dollars of Measure B money has been spent for that “specific purpose.” No such plan was ever prepared. In the end the Supervisors, not the “independent” oversight committee, threw up their hands and declared that the nearly forgotten 2018 Kemper Report was the “performance management plan,” which has not been reviewed for compliance by anyone, much less followed.
The text of Measure B continues: “This committee shall also provide recommendations to the Board of Supervisors on the implementation of this ordinance.”
The closest they got to “recommendations” was the commissioning of the Kemper Report which has been ignored throughout. For a while after Measure B passed, a Measure B committee member, typically former-Sheriff Tom Allman, reported to the Board about the Committee’s activities. But even that petered out after a couple of years. Meeting frequency has dwindled to a few times a year, not that anybody’s paying attention.
In eight years, the Measure B committee has made no specific recommendations to the Board of Supervisors. The Supervisors quit referring questions to them years ago. The Measure B committee meetings are disorganized gab sessions. Measure B has only done two projects since its passage: The grossly overpriced “Crisis Residential Treatment Center” (talk about “waste and inefficiency”!) next door to the Schraeders’ admin offices on Orchard Street; and the soon to be completed Psychiatric Health Facility on Whitmore Lane south of Ukiah. Neither of those projects were the result of recommendations from the Measure B oversight committee, nor has the committee ever reviewed them, evaluated them, or looked into their operations, staffing and funding to see if the “specific objectives” of Measure B will be met. (Hint: they won’t.)
“The committee shall be comprised of eleven members,” says the Measure B text, “including a citizen selected by each member of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, a Member of the Behavioral Health Advisory Board, the County Mental Health Director or his/her representative, the County Auditor or his/her representative, the Mendocino County Chief Executive Officer or his/her representative, the Sheriff or his/her representative, and a representative of the Mendocino Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.”
By putting board-appointed citizens and government officials on the oversight committee, it was never “independent” and was dominated by the County reps. Later, as the committee proved itself to be embarrassingly useless, the Board appointed the Mental Health Director as the Manager of Measure B.
“The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors is encouraged to include professional experts such as psychiatric and health practitioners, first responders and other mental health professionals among the five committee members selected by the Board.”
No first responders were appointed. The “experts” on the Committee proved to be its least competent members who offered nothing but hours of muddled psychobabble.
“The meetings of this committee shall be open to the public and shall be held in compliance with the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s open meeting law.”
That one they did, not that it helped, not that many people bothered to pay attention to it.
So, given that dismal history, what would “accountability provisions” in a road tax proposal look like if the Board wanted them to be credible and supported by the public?
We’ll address that question in a future column.
Mark Scaramella is the Managing Editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser in Boonville, and a long-time Observer of County operations.
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