Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

Found Money

by Mark Scaramella

NEIL MARTIN is the county's new Assistant Administrator; he's been assigned as the County's labor negotiator. Martin was hired by County Administrator Jim Andersen a few months ago when former Assistant Administrator Bruce Mordhorst was dispatched to Child Support Services to replace Ralph Freedman after Freedman was fired in the wake of charges that he tended to suffer more work site psychotic breaks than even Mendocino County could reasonably tolerate. Freedman was also accused of putting some unseemly moves on one of his more comely single-mother co-workers. Freedman was subsequently found not guilty of the disturbing the peace charges arising from his office tantrums and the DA didn't pursue the sexual impropriety allegation, apparently to spare the victim the mortifying experience young women are routinely subjected to by ignoble defense attorneys who always suggest that they somehow are at fault when they're set upon by boorish males.

MORDHORST, of course, has no more experience with the operations of Child Support Services than Freedman had when he was hired (i.e., zero). But experience or qualifications, or even ordinary reading and writing and thinking abilities have always taken second place to Mendocino County's palsy-walsy hiring practices. A large number of County employees are related to one another, if not tied by the knots of holy matrimony then by mutually carnal histories from the days of big naked piles and full moon solstice parties.

MR. MARTIN, however, doesn't seem to be the neo-respectable idiot hippie who cleaned up and got himself a County job, he's new to local government service, and apparently new to Mendocino County. He gives the impression of being more savvy than Andersen or Sue Campbell, the latter being the County's alleged personnel manager who testified that she was "very, very close" to Ralph Freedman whom neither she nor anybody else supposedly in a position of County authority could quite remember being responsible for hiring. Andersen and Campbell were bumbling along as the County's negotiators before Martin was assigned the task.

MARTIN has a tendency to tell the union that he doesn't know anything and has no positions of his own, claiming that his own opinions are theirs or that he can't answer questions but will transmit the union's proposals and questions to Andersen and the Board of Supervisors whether he will or not. It's obvious to the union that Mr. Martin's negotiating positions are his own because Andersen and the Supervisors are not capable of coming up with intelligent and/or reasonable negotiating positions on their own. Martin, his critics say, comes across as too smooth to be trusted, and his "I'm just a messenger" style is a transparent negotiating ploy which the union is rightly suspicious of. One can hardly function as a messenger if the persons on the receiving end of the message are non-compis, as is the case in this county.

LAST WEEK the County announced that they were no longer considering Mandatory Time Off as a budget balancing device because, the County said, they had recently "found some money." The source and amount of the found money isn't clear, but it's just as likely that it will be lost again before the negotiations are over, and certain to be misplaced after the state's final budget numbers are in. As of last week the County says they now only have to lay off four more people and the budget for July 04-June-05 will be balanced.

SOME OF THE "found money" was a reallocation of about $35k previously earmarked for the expensive (and unnecessary) study of raising Coyote Dam. The County's new $90k/year Water Manager position is itself is a luxury which could only be afforded if there was plenty of money on hand, but even in flush times would be an obvious extravagance. A much better use of the County's limited Water Agency money would be for immediate installation of gages on all non-domestic pumps and a serious water conservation program in Ukiah Valley based on real water usage data.

HOWEVER, negotiations are at least moving forward since Martin took over the lead negotiating role from Sue Campbell, the County's ditzy Human Resources Manager, who will be remembered for the time she testified in one of the Freedman hearings that she'd "made a few phone calls but [didn't] recall who they were" when she was asked to do a background check on her "very, very good friend" Ralph Freedman before the County hired the diminutive psycho basically sight unseen. (Although Freedman's record of flipping out at previous NorCal job sites was easily available on the internet and was front page news in the two NorCal communities where he'd also 5150'd.)

THE OVERSTAFFED MENTAL HEALTH Department had to be split off and addressed first in the negotiations because Mental Health's bloated staffing levels posed unique financial obstacles to the County and the County's employee union. (Every old joke you've ever heard about shrinks being crazier than their clients has come true in Mendocino County. One literally can't tell the nuts from the nutcrackers in Ukiah, the former unable to cope with an objectively insane contemporary reality, the latter having done much in their youths to create that reality.) It appears that there's tentative agreement on some layoffs and mandatory time off among Mental Health's super-abundant staff, so the negotiators can now proceed to tackle the rest of the County budget, although progress is still very slow. The County is stonewalling in responding to the union's requests for department by department budget plans and management information, and no one knows when negotiations will be complete. Meanwhile the union continues to work without a contract.

ANOTHER DEPARTMENT which has ballooned in recent years is Public Health. The union would do well to see if they can apply some of the budget cutting ideas used for Mental Health's redundant functions on Public Health. But at this point there's no indication that Public Health is getting any special scrutiny.

SIX OF THE SEVEN Probation Assistants who were abruptly laid off last month have reportedly been rehired. An inside Probation source tells us that the gang-firing of the seven assistants was not an attempt by Chief Probation Officer Bob McAllister to ingratiate himself with the Supervisors. (McAllister works more for the judges than the Supervisors.) Nope, the firing was a move designed to get rid of perceived "troublemakers" in the department — especially the troublemaker who has not been hired back, and now a troublemaker who should have very good grounds for a union grievance, Civil Service Commission complaint or claim/lawsuit against the County, if true. If no complaint is filed, the Department Heads will get a green light to use the layoff process to disencumber themselves of people they simply don't like without regard to job performance. (cf the AVA Theory of Public Employment as Social Evil.)

THE ELIMINATION of the annual $350,000 giveaway to the Mendocino County Alliance was reinstated to the full $350k last year when the wine mob, beating their booze bowls, gang-rushed the Supervisors Chambers when tax-funded advertising for wineries and tourist spas was about to be cut $150,000. The Supes, spineless as always, reinstated the full amount.

THE COUNTY'S WELLNESS PROGRAM has been scaled back, but not eliminated. The County agreed with the union that the Wellness Program could be eliminated to avoid laying off line workers, but Public Health Director Carol Mordhorst (wife of the aforementioned Bruce Mordhorst) counter-proposed that the Wellness Office be cut to half its present size. Whether MCWOW (The Wellness Program's acronym) can survive even at that level is not yet clear.

WHAT'S A 'WELLNESS PROGRAM' you ask? A wellness program is two Nice People and a secretary who publish an occasional employee newsletter warning County employees that if they pound down Big Macs, smoke, don't exercise, and live in the La-Z-Boys after work hours they'll die young, costing the County's employee health plan lots of money as they go and wasting all that tax money spent on their training. The Wellness babes are probably somebody's girl friends to have lasted this long.

THE ENTIRE budget situation is in a state of flux because the State is playing the same kind of games as Mendocino County supervisors and their ineffable administrator, only a much larger scale, "finding" and borrowing money, pressuring the casinos to hand over big bucks to the state in return for permission to expand their casino operations, and trying to negotiate job cuts with uncooperative unions like the Prison Guards. (If I see one more cry baby cop or over-stuffed, over-paid tier bull whining about how he puts his life on the line every day for a bunch of ingrates who don't have any idea how dangerous his job is, I think I'll have to ask, "Is there somebody off-stage forcing you to do this work at gunpoint? Could there be something terribly wrong with a society that produces so many kamikazes? Do you think there might be something fundamentally wrong with modern penal practices that makes the bull job so hazardous? Have you asked our career officeholders why they've rent the social safety net? Ever wonder why people who are screwed over cradle to grave get kinda violent when they see on option to the hand they've been dealt?")

THE LOCAL PUBLIC EMPLOYEE'S UNION has told the County that their members are already paid less than their counterparts in neighboring counties, and they get two fewer holidays, therefore they should not be asked to give back any more pay or benefits. (The supervisors themselves have offered to give back exactly nothing out of their lavish pay and perks.)

UNFORTUNATELY, the "found" money has removed some of the pressure that had been put on the department heads by DA Norm Vroman's proposal to work for free one day a month. Apparently that subject has been put off until the next round of cuts, depending on the final state budget, as has the reconsideration of Mandatory Time Off. So it's clear that Vroman's proposal forced CAO Andersen and the Supes to "find" the money necessary to reduce the pressure on themselves and the department heads to suffer budget cuts themselves.

DA VROMAN is the only guy in the County, including the Superior Court, whose moral compass seems fully operational. He actually tries to do the right thing. When the County refused to protect its employees from Freedman's rampages, Vroman filed on the guy. It was Vroman who forced the Freedman issue, Vroman's initiative eventually compelling the County to fire Freedman. None of the Freedman contretemps would have occurred in the first place if the Supervisors, its CAO, the County Counsel's office (an eternal County source of bad advice), the dingbat of a personnel director, and the County's gutless grievance panel had done the right thing early on.

BUT EARLY MANAGEMENT RETIREMENTS are on the negotiating table — retirements where the retiree would not be replaced, resulting in de facto consolidations being implemented as other managers get juggled into "acting director" positions — until the budget picture improves.