Commentary and Opinion by Samuel Strait – July 18, 2024
Vi-tal, adjective, absolutely necessary or essential, important, is the Webster dictionary definition of “vital. This is a word that our local Board of Supervisors know nothing about in their efforts to spend the County into oblivion. Since Measure “R” passed in the fall of 2020, our County’s residents, with a little help from visitors, has ponied up over $4 million for what was meant to be used as support for VITAL services in the County’s government. Initially we were given the fiction that the money would be used to SUPPORT fire, sheriff, emergency services, and road repair. No salaries and benefits to be paid from Measure “R”. By the time it reached the ballot, it had morphed into a laundry list of services that should have been the PRIMARY expense to be found in the General Fund. Not so! The list of “vital” services contained support for nearly every one of the County’s services, law enforcement, repairing pot holes and maintaining streets, dispatch services for fire, ambulance, and law enforcement, maintaining jail and criminal justice services, addressing blight and public nuisances, and other GENERAL SERVICES and infrastructure. It is better known as the Del Norte County Slush Fund.
The Supervisors, within the wording of the Measure “R” ballot, have set themselves up nicely to determine just about any wish list project can be listed as an acceptable expenditure of Measure “R” funds. With that, the Board has the ability to not only fund projects that should correctly be a General Fund expense, but also allows the money saved in the General Fund to be spent on the various “ideas” propagated by the Board Members themselves as well as the County’s Bureaucracy. Quite often these “little projects” amount to thousands, even millions of taxpayer dollars spent for employees and services that are not remotely vital or are necessary in a County with a dwindling population and resources.
From 2020 to the present time, the County has lost nearly ten percent of its population. By 2030 the County is projected to shed even more residents largely due to the fact that Del Norte County has become as expensive a place to live than many of California’s urban centers. Our current Board is spending what little it has with grandiose visions in “strategic plans” without local resources, becoming nearly entirely dependent on State and Federal “grants”. As the local government has grown and its expenditures increase, the path forward is unsustainable.
As long as taxing authorities continue use increasing taxes that do not measure up to being “vital” expenditures our local problems will only increase, driving yet more local citizens out of the County. Likely as not, those that leave will be our most productive.
Measure “R” spending has clearly become wasteful spending, and makes no pretense that it is in any way vital. Our “Citizens Oversight Committee” has transformed itself into an “advisory” committee that clearly cannot distinguish between expenditures that are “vital” and those that the County really cannot afford, nor do they achieve any useful value to the Community at large. According to the the Chairman of that Committee, 80% of Measure “R” money is encumbered by Measure “R” salaries and benefits. Funding that was deemed to be “vital” to support fire, law enforcement, emergency services and road repair has produced nothing that can be considered vital or successful by any measure.
Measure “R” funding has not in any way supported or improved dispatch for fire, the Sheriff, or the ambulance. In fact no money can be allocated from Measure “R” for fire department support. Our current Sheriff’s department is in worse shape than preMeasure “R” days. Emergency Services is an expensive joke, and road repair consists of the oh so vital resurfacing of the Veteran’s Hall parking lot and that of the Sheriff’s station. It is hard to imagine $387,000 being spent on two parking lots and put it into the same framework as “vital” to the well being of County residents.
The County’s bureaucracy and BOS have lost all credibility when saying that Measure “R” expenditures are “vital” when parking lots are considered vital road repairs. A second planner, another code enforcement officer, animal control, and a once a year disaster known politely as the Emergency Services Department are the ‘GENERAL SERVICES AND INFRASTRUCTURE expenditures of Measure “R”. The Sheriff has managed to tap into Measure “R” for new vehicles, weapons and equipment, hired three Measure “R” deputies, yet has few additional patrol officers, ten vacancies of budgeted positions, and can only field a single patrol officer for each shift. With so few of deputies there should be plenty of new cars and equipment to go around. Plenty of Measure “R” money spent with zero appreciable differences after three years of gouging the public and most departments with money left over at the end of the budget year that must be hurriedly spent to justify next year’s bloated budget. The County has certainly taken the “vital” out of the Measure “R” expenditures and is in “business as usual mode”, spend money until there is no more to spend. Will the last person out of the County please turn the lights out.
