Ignoring Voters; Hiding Info From Supervisors

For years Supervisor Ted Williams complained that the County was on the verge of bankruptcy and, contradictorily, that he was not getting some financial reports he wanted. Williams aimed much of his criticism in the past at County Auditor-Controller Chamise Cubbison instead of (former) CEO Darcie Antle who should have been providing the Supervisors with monthly or at least quarterly budget status reports.

These days, Supervisor Williams now says there’s millions of dollars in the budget to re-allocate to maintenance of Mendo’s deteriorating roads but he is strangely silent about financial reporting weaknesses or gaps.

In fact, at their last Board meeting Supervisor Williams said he would be happy to accept newly appointed CEO Sara Pierce’s First Quarter budget reports without question or comment, although he worried that the “balanced” budget is precarious because there will likely be additional public safety costs (presumably overtime for major felonies), and that road maintenance was being underfunded. Williams suggested that since the Board was unable to find the necessary four votes to put a road tax on an upcoming ballot a couple of months ago, some amount the County’s reserves should be dipped into for road maintenance.

There are several problems with Williams’ latest position.

Despite having belatedly realized that he should get budget status reports from the CEO and not the Auditor, and despite getting improved monthly budget status reports indicating that the departments are mostly on budget so far this year, he and his colleagues accepted CEO Pierce’s budget reports without attempting to delve into the various departmental budgets, especially the larger General Fund-funded ones where there may be opportunities for cost savings or re-allocation.

In addition, Supervisor Williams conveniently forgets that in 2016 local voters overwhelmingly voted for Ballot Measure AJ directing the Supervisors to allocate half of the millions of dollars of cannabis taxes — well over $20 million at last count —to roads, mental health, increased emergency services and cannabis program enforcement.

Any reasonable interpretation of Measure AJ therefore would have allocated at least $2.5 million to roads and another $2.5 million to the County’s disparate and underfunded Ambulance services in the unincorporated areas like Covelo, Laytonville and Anderson Valley.

In March of 2021 the Mendocino County Association of Fire Districts wrote an official letter to the Supervisors highlighting this Board failure, saying, in part:

“Currently, there is no direction in place to provide any distribution of Measure AI [the basic cannabis tax measure approved by voters] funds to Fire/EMS as advised by the voters. Transparency in these revenues and their allocation is problematic. This situation confirms that Fire/EMS (as well as the other designated funding recipients) is still being locked out of the budget process…”

“The cannabis tax revenue must be used as approved by the voters. On April 20th, 2021, the BoS will dedicate the majority of that meeting to cannabis related issues. This would be a good opportunity to include discussions about Measure AI, Measure AJ and the how the BoS will respond moving forward regarding the allocation of these funds.”

That letter was signed by emergency services officials from Anderson Valley, Elk, Brooktrails, Hopland, and Comptche.

It was totally ignored. There is still no direction or allocation. There is no mechanism to even track where the cannabis tax funds went.

A couple of months ago, newly elected Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison, fresh off her delayed vindication after false allegations of misappropriation were thrown out of court, told the Supervisors that because the cannabis permit program has been so badly managed there is an unknown amount of cannabis taxes that cannot be collected because record keeping was poor and many original delinquent permit applicants have fallen out of the program and cannot even be found or contacted for possible payment.

The Fire District Association’s letter/demand from 2021 has continued to be ignored ever since as year after year of the cannabis tax receipts were dumped into the General Fund and unaccountably used for whatever the CEO wanted to cover. No questions from the Supervisors about how the money was used, why there were overruns to begin with that needed to be covered, or what to do to contain future departmental overruns, despite now getting detailed monthly reports from the CEO for the last year or so. Those budget status reports are buried deep in the monthly CEO report providing a department by department breakdown in all accounting categories. Yet the Supervisors have never even mentioned that report’s existence. Instead, they simply “accept” whatever brief summary the CEO offers which glosses over possible overruns in a few departments with minimal explanation or comment.

If Williams and his colleagues were doing their high-paid jobs they’d be looking into those departmental budgets, asking why they aren’t following the voters wishes and allocating at least a couple million of the tens of millions of cannabis tax revenues to the purposes specified by the voters in Measure AI, not looking at already depleted reserves to backfill their own negligence.

Looking back at the experience of former Third District Supervisor Tom Woodhouse might provide part of the explanation for why the Board doesn’t explore their own departmental budgets. Woodhouse resigned as Supervisor in 2017 for mental health reasons, contributed to in part by the difficulties he experienced as Supervisor. Supervisor Woodhouse tried to look into the County’s private mental health contract because he had heard a number of complaints about poor or non-existent service.

Then-CEO Carmel Angelo clearly didn’t want a Supervisor meddling in her contracts. So much so that, according to Woodhouse in an interview he did with then-Mendocino Voice reporter Adrian Baumann in late 2017, “Woodhouse stated that he had told Mendocino County CEO Carmel Angelo that Ortner was a problem, from the beginning, and that she had dismissed him, adding, ‘A month later she [Angelo] met with her top people and said: Whoever is talking to Woodhouse stop it, right now. So I knew from the first 60 days what I was up against.”

Ever since 2010 when the County hired Angelo as Chief Executive Officer — meaning she had hiring and firing authority over most of Mendo’s non-elected at-will department heads, an authority no previous Chief Administrative Officer had — Angelo ruled with an iron hand.

Imagine being an elected Supervisor trying to get some information about a perceived County operational problem when the CEO has told her staff not to cooperate with the Supervisor on penalty of the department head’s head (and by extension everyone else in the department). Based on the record since Angelo’s retirement in 2022, we suspect that Angelo’s hand-picked successor, Darcie Antle, continued the Angelo approach, albeit in a somewhat less brusque style. Will newly appointed and very well paid CEO Sara Pierce continue in Angelo’s dictatorial tradition and obstruct Supervisors from inquiring about departmental operations and budgets? Or will she cooperate to help keep the Good Ship Mendo afloat? Only time will tell.

Ignoring Voters; Hiding Info From Supervisors

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