Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

Start with a roll call please.

Thank you chair. Supervisor Madrone?

Present.

Supervisor Arroyo? Here. Supervisor Bone? Supervisor Bushnell?

Apologies. Present. Chair Wilson?

Present.

All are here.

Alright. Alright.

And

we're doing the next part of this. Kaylee, what's next? Salute to the flag. Here we go. We're ready.

And Excellent. Good job. Before we get into departmental reports, want to make people aware that the county website link to our legislator agenda for the meetings for today and tomorrow, we're having issues. Just wanna say computer issues. IT is working to resolve the issue, and it may take longer than normal to download or view our agenda and any of the other items.

We have published a PDF version of the board of supervisors website or web page their website page, excuse me, for reference if needed. So you can always reach out to our email, which is cob@co.humboldt.ca.us. And the board staff can email you a copy as well. So there are several ways you can get the information, and that's it. That's all I have for you today.

And then we're gonna have public comment at the end of the of all this. But as I need to be more clear about, if you have if you plan on doing public comment online, please raise your hand at the beginning of this event or at least sometime before we start public comment. Alright? I'll give you fair warning when we get close. And with that, we will start into our departmental reports.

Wilson. Before you today is Jessica Maciel, assistant county administrative officer, chief financial officer who will kick this item off and lead your board through the presentations this afternoon.

Good afternoon. Jessica Miesiyal, assistant county administrative officer. Just to start off, I just wanted to go through a little bit of setting of where we're at with the budget. At the mid year, just a reminder, we were projecting approximately 17.78 in preliminary general fund deficit of which those one time contributions to the general reserve and maintaining contingencies for a total of $8,000,000. So the anticipated structural deficit was close to 9,000,000 as of mid year.

Our staff are working diligently working through everyone's budget submittals. So we're looking forward to bringing that before your board. The departments have worked really hard to do some presentations. Again, this year they were optional. So we have nine departments here to present for you today.

We do have one slight adjustment to the order of presentations. The Public Defender will be going last. So that will just move the library and planning and building up just a slot. And with that, first, we have the UC Cooperative Extension, and we have department head, Yana Falcovic, and her staff are here with her to present to you. I

do. It's only coming over as a PDF.

That's

fine. Fine. Okay. Good afternoon,

chair, and board members, staff.

Alright. That sounds better. It's a real pleasure to be with you today. I have a few visual highlights because it's always fun to share a little bit about what we've been up to. And then I have two new team members that I'd like to introduce, which I think is I know we only have a short amount of time, but I thought it would be worthwhile to bring that forward.

And just to remind you all, we are the inaugural county for the Cooperative Extension Program originating from 1913. So the years are getting fun and let's see. Okay, great. And just, you know, also just to level set that we're across all 58 counties, so you are part of a larger network that is connected to a number of campuses as well as specialty research facilities. And we're able to pull from that whole team to be able to work on local issues and bring new ideas and places for innovation and be able to send some of our challenges out and about to be able to connect into that power of the whole Cooperative Extension Network under the division of agriculture and natural resources.

As a team, we're about the same size as UC Merced. And so that's a 10 campus system. And so just to kind of give some orientation around that, our vice president sits as equivalent of a chancellor under the University of California president. So we're just distributed across this whole network. Next slide, please.

And just to bring forward, you know, our departmental goals align with board priorities, but really are about trying support the self reliance of citizens. We do a lot in natural resources and we're certainly a natural resource based economy and landscape. And we are actively trying to engage in discussions of our economic future and really help support our communities to be able to be sustainable within their industries and within their livelihoods here. We work hard in securing partnerships and outside sources of funding and workforce development, which I'd like to highlight a little bit about. I was able to bring in a new $1,500,000 workforce development project this last year that we're just getting rolling on and we're developing a self paced curriculum in fire related topics around fire adaptation and resiliency with the ability to help, for us, kind of non traditional audiences such as building contractors, realtors, insurance agents, and others that are kind of touching homeowners directly, as well as other entities to be able to help us all get better at this fire adaptation challenge that we're all struggling with.

Let's see. So I'll let you advance, Kaylee. Our staff has been pretty set. We're between the two counties, we're about 14 overall with a a few folks coming up and down. The green people or the names in green are supplied by Humboldt County Funds.

So Natasha Curtis and Jennifer Steenblock are our administrative and office staff. The names in black are the ones that are provided by the University of California with permanent contributions. And then the ones in blue are the names related to the folks that we bring in through outside sources of funding grant funds in particular. There's been a couple of changes in the last year and I have a highlight to share. So I'm gonna introduce in a moment a couple folks and to say that Eddie Tanner who was the specialty crops and horticulture advisor resigned to go back to farming and and his other life.

And he was we were sad to lose him but we just finished a recruitment and we have a new person filling that position starting in August. His name is Jared Zaistro and we're very excited to have him come on board with just a huge amount of talent. He's a mid career hire so we should he should be able to hit the ground running and we're looking forward to how he's gonna interact with our couple folks behind us because I think we'll be a really dynamic team in that way. And then I've also been able to take someone from Humboldt State, Gabe Goff. So I'm sorry about that, Humboldt.

But he is working in our fire and our workforce development program and very engaged to the prescribed burn association and other kind of fire science based communications. So now we have two people that are working in that space and that has fundamentally increased the ability for our outreach in that work and training in that way work. Kaylee, next slide please. So we've got as I said a couple of new team members, that's Jared and the top, Gabe Goff from last week's program we offered the Ag Pass program in partnership with Office of Emergency Services, Farm Bureau and others. And so just really excited to be able to to finally teach that program in person and we had about 50 people overall work through the program.

And so getting some experience on how to how to do that as a as a dynamic team. And today, I'd like to introduce when when I finish with these slides, Grace Belt, who's our youth families and communities adviser. She took a role similar to Dorena Espinosa, if you remember Dorena. And so just very excited to have Grace on board. And then Alec Domka, who is our Rural Economic Development Advisor.

And this is part of the cohort that our Vice President Glenda Humiston has brought across California. So we have a whole team in economic development and he joins eight or nine other folks across the state. He's physically located in Del Norte County but has cross services to Humboldt as well as Trinity. All right, Kaylee? So we do lots of training, lots of educational work on a whole range of topics.

And I thought I would just highlight two in the last just this last week, as I said, we offered the Ag Pass program, which is something that we've been wanting to be more engaged in and really look at as an opportunity to help increase just the capacity of our rural landowners to be able to respond in these dynamic situations. And there is a requirement that there is a refresher and that we're continually bringing folks along and up to speed. So we see this as a great opportunity to kind of keep bringing new ideas and fresh ideas and lessons learned from other communities. Because these are things you can't really practice for and so you need more engagement in that field. We also offered tree school just a week ago.

We had a 100 people attend tree school and offered 24 classes taught simultaneously. So participants got to choose what they wanted to take for the day and my entire forestry team from across the state came in to help teach that as well as faculty from UC Berkeley and a number of community partners came together. So it was a really fantastic event. I'm just amazed. Our numbers are just interest never goes away and we're finding new and innovative way to reach folks.

I want to share just this concept that Henry Holbrook came up with where he calls it the fire lighter training, which is like just very much an introduction to prescribed fire. Not necessarily with a lot of live fire, but just bringing you into the fold, helping introduce the ideas. And I think he's offered it maybe 10 times this year and we're getting 40 to 50 people per session. There's just so much curiosity. And from there, we take it to the next level before you come out and join and have a chance to touch the program in a way that makes sense for you.

All right, next slide. And of course, you know us for our specialty programs such as the Master Gardener program, which is going strong. And we're happy to have the work that Eddie put in, Eddie Tanner, to be able to really bring that program up to a higher level and offer the training this year, graduated a whole cohort from that program. We also have the Master Food Preserver Program which Grace oversees and I'll let her share some of those numbers but they're going strong. She also oversees the expanded food and nutrition education program, which is a focus program to target a number of at risk populations.

And I'll have her share some more about that. And And then of course our bread and butter around youth development through the four H program and other activities we do and focused on youth education and the volunteerism that is so essential to be able to develop and deliver the program. Kaylee? And then I'll wrap up here I think with one last slide just in terms of things that we keep in our well, the work that we do simultaneously involves a lot of research covering a variety of topics, some of which we are able to bring scientists from outside the area, some of which we're able to just pull networks together. I'll share one project that we did this year.

It's on the top right. There was a lot of conversation that happened this year about the thought that how we landscape might help our houses be more robust to wildfire. And so there was an emerging narrative that hedges could act as ember catchers and could absorb radiant heat and protect the house from those kinds of forces. So we ran an experiment with folks at UC Berkeley and tested hydrated sheds or hydrated shrubs and replicated it with a burning shed, which is what you see on the top right, to test how long it would take for the shed to either burn away or the plants to ignite. And then we did that in combination with both dry and super hydrated plants.

And the answer was they both burned at the same time. They both burned within two minutes of igniting the shed. And that's because the plants themselves, they close their stomata when they have a lot of heat exposure to them and they can't suck up the moisture into their roots. And so they become additive fuel in environment. So it was a great example of how we're able to work as a team and try and answer some of these tough and challenging questions even when we don't have a full research facility to be able to work in that space.

I think I'll just take the last slide and say we're also in a very exciting time. I don't know if you're all aware, but the Ag Center is about to be remodeled and deal with some legacy issues and some ADA issues and asbestos and failing paint. And so it's going to be a trying but very exciting next several months. We have our meeting on Thursday with a contractor to figure out our launch schedule and figure out what that's going to look like. That being said, we've kind of shifted priorities around what work should be happening at 5630 South Broadway.

And I just wanna remind you all that we have a warehouse. And if you haven't taken a tour of it, here's a couple of its recent pictures. It has been vandalized four times in the last year. We've lost a significant quantity of equipment. Key resources for our four H program, our research programs, we're not able to secure that building anymore.

I thought I'd share with you someone who's trying to start a warming fire in the middle of the warehouse. That's what's on the top left. The roof is gone. So we have a supplemental request for some Connex boxes to be able to move some of our key research equipment and field equipment and supplies that we use for our programming into contact boxes for near term. And when the warehouse finally has its rebirth, then those could be repurposed and made available within the county system.

So we have a small supplemental budget request in that regard. That, I'd like to bring up Alec and Grace and have them just say hello. Maybe we'd go one each here. And then we'll take some questions if you have any. Maybe Alex, since you're sitting down, I'll turn it to you first.

Great. Hi, everyone. I'm Alec Domka. I'm a community economic development adviser. I think I've been able to meet a couple of you, but I'm excited to keep working in Humboldt.

So far, Grace and I have been able to work together on some data analysis and some business support through the Greater Eureka Chamber of Commerce, but that hit the whole county really figuring out what businesses we're worried about, how they wanted to grow, and trying to just help the chamber out as they do development. Humboldt's really different from the other counties I work with because you guys have such a strong economic development team. So it's it's really a joy to work from them or to work with them. And I I definitely take a different role here than I do in other counties because your guys' team is so strong. I can do a lot of different supplemental research with them and really lean into what they need to support them.

So it's it's great it's great working with them. I'm excited to I'm doing a lot of outdoor recreation impact and data analysis around that for how that shapes economies and how we kinda supplement traditional resource uses with outdoor rec. So I'd be excited to lean into the Great Redwood Trail or, you know, some of the other outdoor rec things here. You know? Always open to suggestions on how I can help and support the team and the board.

And then Grace Belt.

Hi, everyone. It's nice to meet you all today. My name is Grace Belt. I'm the youth family and communities adviser for Cooperative Extension. And just a little bit about me, I was born and raised in California, and I moved to Humboldt about six years ago. And I'm a graduate from Cal Poly Humboldt and happy to be able to stay in the region. As Yana mentioned, I oversee a few of our programs. Master food preservers primarily teaches safe food preservation practices to the public. And this year, we are excited to say that we offered our training for volunteers for the first time in three years and the first time in person since prior to COVID. And we were able to double our volunteer numbers.

So starting out, we had 24 volunteers, and we now have 47. So we're very excited about that because it means we get to be out in the community more. We can teach more workshops. We've been partnering with family resource centers to help teach these food preservation practices. And four h, if you are not familiar, it's a positive youth development program.

We have a club model that's pretty popular across the county and across the nation. And this year, focused on bringing four h into after school programs. I think it's a great way to reach youth who have not had the experience in four h before. So we piloted the first after school program this year and we were able to provide programming to 48 youth and 54% said they learned something new which is exciting and we were able to offer seven jobs to high school students at Eureka High to help deliver these lessons to the youth. So it's a great win all the way around.

And we have about 400 youth in four h currently. And then the expanded food nutrition education program or FNEP is focused on nutrition education and food resource management for adults and youth. We served 96 adults and a 105 youth last year, and we're currently recruiting an educator. So we're hoping to bring those numbers up in the next year. So that is a little bit about what I'm doing, and I am working with Alec.

We did the economic survey, and we also are part of a North Coast food systems resilience partnership focused on the food system during disaster across the North Coast, which has been a great project. So thank you all for having me here and letting me speak to you today.

And with that, I'll close and just wanted to give you a chance to meet some of our folks and have a sense of what depth we have to the bench and what you're able to tap into for whatever issue may come forward. So I'll close and thank you for your continued and enduring support to the program and for us being part of the infrastructure of the community. You.

Any questions from the board? Supervisor Madrone.

Thank you, chair. Thank you, Yana. It's great to see you here. And I know you've always had such a great team of people. Welcome aboard to the two new folks. You mentioned working with economic development. You know, with the dismantling of the forest service, there was this wonderful person, was her name Christine, who was doing this outreach work on trying to figure out some new uses of our small diameter wood and other things. Of course, her job ended. But she did work a lot with North Fork Lover, and I assume you guys probably did as well, Yana, but I don't know. But they now are starting to work towards developing mass timber Mhmm.

Products and things like that. They also got a large, I think, dollar grant to study the feasibility of developing a biomass facility there in Corbel because they're currently hauling all their biomass to Anderson, which is a lot of climate fuels and adds a lot of danger to Highway 299. And having just come from a fire summit out in Willow Creek this last week talking about the heavy traffic on 299, especially with big trucks and the dangers that so just, you know, I agree with you. We have an amazing economic development team. Although they're small, they're mighty.

It'd be nice if they're twice the size, but that's up to us to figure out the budget stuff, which is why we're here with departments. But I just wanna, you know, say I think with the Forest Service being dismantled, there's some voids there as far as what we're all gonna be doing with our forest management and other things. So I look forward to the work that you might be able to help us with in that outreach to what we do have left of our our infrastructure here in Humboldt County. And I know that's a very important issue for Yana. We've spoken a lot about that more recently about infrastructure, not just here, but in counties next door like in Willits and Ukiah and things like that. So welcome aboard. Look forward to working with both of you on programs and projects that you're working on. So thank you for being here.

Okay. Supervisor Arroyo.

Thank you. You both spoke about this economic study and I'm really excited about that. Could you say a little bit more about when the is it already done or when the results will be compiled?

Yeah, so the results were compiled I want to say about almost a year ago and Nancy with Eureka Chamber of Commerce has the data for that. And it was a partnership with the economic development commission or department at Eureka City. So they, I believe, presented the report at a city council meeting, and I believe they presented it other places as well. But they house the actual document, which I'm sure we could find for you. And Alec, I don't know if you want to add to that. No.

So it was, yeah, presented at the Eureka City Council. That was obviously fairly focused on the Eureka part of our findings. I don't think that she's released the county wide data yet, But that's something for us to look into and maybe bring that to you guys or to the county economic development department.

That would be wonderful. Yeah. I'd love to see the county version and keep keep that on the horizon. I know we have a lot of economic documents that we've been viewing, but it sounded really interesting. So thank you.

Thank you. Supervisor Bushnell.

Thank you. I I wanna say just thank you to Yana and her team for all the support and classes that you provide to ag forestry around our county. So and beyond the county, but especially to the county and the constituents. It's really important for people to get that knowledge and gain that knowledge and to ask those questions and also grant opportunities come forward for a lot of producers in our county from those. Nice to meet you both. I wanted to ask you especially around the four H portion and the 48 youth that you worked with. I'm wondering what area and are you targeting, like, the the entire county, certain sectors? How does that look?

So that was a pilot program at Pine Hill Elementary in Southern Eureka, but the goal is to expand it out to any after school program really that would be interested as long as we have kind of the power to do so. So one way we're looking at expanding is talking to high school students and training them to deliver the curriculum. It worked well in the pilot so we're hoping to recruit from other high schools across the county. But ideally we'd like to expand it across the county.

That's great information. So South Park High School currently does not have an ag class. They haven't had one for several several years and their principal is trying to initiate that back in. And so I'll have her reach out to you guys.

That would be amazing.

Thank you.

Thank you. I am so glad that you guys are with UC Cooperative, and I wish you guys luck in all of what you're doing for our county and the youth and across the nation, actually. Thank you. Thank you.

Supervisor Bone.

I am glad to see the buildings getting redone, And I'm sure our public works director is gonna make sure that we get more than a two year paint job this time. So as we move forward, I wanna thank you for everything you do with four h. I think you should mention your burn program with Lenya, Quinn Davidson because it's nationwide. I know that they've traveled around and I know Jeff helps her with that. And then Jeff Stackhouse's work is is immeasurable too.

So we get a pretty good bang for our buck up there at Spruce Point. So I I do appreciate it. And that's a that building has the greatest bones of any building we have and it's such a cool building. I would like to I hopefully it gets, you know, the ADA and everything else fixed alongside it so it can withstand some more time, which I'm sure it can. So anyway, appreciate it. Welcome new kids. You guys are like the new kids on the block. Right? It was a dance. No. But anyway, welcome. If you need anything, holler.

Thank you.

Okay. Well, I hope when the building's done that we can have a good I don't know if it's a rededication, some kind of event, open house party, something. There's a few ghosts in there and we'll see if they make it. No.

All right. I want to thank the board for good questions, good comments, associate myself with all the compliments. And thank you for being here and giving us the summary. I just wanna, just, again, highlight what I think supervisor Bone was getting at, which is that this is another department that leads nation on so many issues and provides leadership in a lot of these subjects. I just want to be thankful and acknowledge that. Thanks. All right. We're on to the next department.

Thank you, chair. And thank you, Yana and your team. The next department, I will have interim auditor controller, Michael Evenson, come up for the on the auditor controller's budget.

Good morning, board. I have a PowerPoint presentation to go over with you about the 2627 budget. I'm Michael Evenson. I'm the interim auditor controller. To kick off, think it's whenever we're talking about goals, I like to look at back at the previous year, see where I started, what my plan was, and see how much we accomplished. Self critically, there's some vague goals here. So for next year, they're gonna be a little more clear. I wanted to begin developing instructional guides, particularly two departments. The we started drafting a bookkeeping manual. It's at about a 100 pages right now, and we have three chapters written.

It's gonna be a few 100 pages and five to seven chapters. So it's gonna be a bit before we have it fully published, but it's gonna help that agreed upon set of procedures between the auditor controller's office and department so we can move this county forward faster and with less conflict. We're gonna enhance the functionality software. I'm just crossing that off the list after this year. That's just gonna be forever.

Timely completion of 24, 25 financial and single audits. We missed the deadline this year. We're days away from having that audit, which is a dramatic improvement from three years behind being fifteen weeks behind, but we'll be we'll get it done. We're increasing the percent where we increased the percentage of employees using electronic time cards. A year ago, we were at 37%.

We're at 95% today. That's largely on the backs of the sheriff's department and the department of health and human services. So I wanna thank their staff and really pushing through what was pretty difficult transition in a very short time frame. We're I said last year, we wanna implement a new credit card system because the one that we are using is built in house, and Microsoft is going to shut down some of the functions we use for it. So if they do that before it's done, before we do the transition, we're going to do manual credit card processing, which will be very, very difficult.

So I'm working on transitioning to a new system. Talked last year about automation and AI. We and I think this is something you do with people, not to people. So we we started the business process reengineering committee. We're getting ready to have our inaugural meeting in a few weeks.

The purpose of this is to establish the opportunities at this county for saving on rote tedious tasks that lower job enjoyment and allow people more time to work on the things that they enjoy doing. And a lot of our administrative staff, like so many other things, are doing hundreds of tasks. Some of them for the auditor controller, some of them for human resources, some of them for the department head. They they have fifty hours of work and forty hours of working time. We wanna maximize that.

We wanna minimize the impact of my office so they can spend more time working on the things they like doing for their department head. And then internal audit, we've done a few limited internal audits this year, largely focused on helping departments with funding streams and making sure that they're not billing things they shouldn't. So looking into next year, we still have the management letter item that we have too many funds. It's fortunately no longer a finding, but it does still pop up every year. I'd like to close 15 funds this year.

I wanna focus on funds that are unused. I went through our records, and I found about 20 funds that haven't been used since 2018. So I'd like to figure out what that money is, either get it out circulating the community, get it where it goes, or and get the funds closed. That's the ultimate thing that needs to happen. I want a complete writing bookkeeping manual so that departments we have that agreed upon set of procedures.

This one's big. There's not a whole lot of formal government accounting training out there. We have to develop it in house. I've been working on a system for about six months, about 75% complete on it so that county accounting managers can learn government accounting and the and link it to how we do government accounting. Because as you heard from Clifton Larson Allen a few months ago, government accounting is hard.

It's very different than private sector accounting, and you don't you get half a college course it when you're going through college with to get an accounting degree. That's still there. I wanna get the the 25, 26 audit done on time. I wanna finalize the implementation credit card module. We just talked about that modernization training that we're talking about the business process the the business process reengineering committee.

As a nature of the geometry of when the auditor controller's office got remodeled, we have more desks than we have people. I don't want more staff. I would like to see staff from other departments come in and do their work in the auditor controller's office so they have a chance to talk to us about our concerns, why we might push back on some work, and get that cross training actual practical work done together so that we can maximize the the knowledge throughout the county and maximize the resiliency of this organization. And then internal audit, big thing. It's one of the few things that's coded in government code that your board can tell me to do.

Your board can tell me to perform an internal audit, but I don't have an internal audit division, so I would be the one doing it. There's a caveat there that if we lack the expertise, your board has to provide appropriations to bring some to bring an outside agency in to help us out, but your board can compel me to perform an audit on on a county function. I I'm a fan of interesting statistics, and the 2425 budgeted revenue would be large enough to list the county on both major American stock exchanges. Our revenues are comparable to Traeger Inc, w d forty, and Hamilton Beach Brands. I know I own a few of those brands.

I don't know where my can of w d forty is. I can never find it when I'm looking for it, but I know I own one.

I

would buy a bond from the county. This is our functional area. As you can see, we have six major functional areas and 19 staff. We do a lot spread out across a lot of things to keep this county working every day. We have a few vacancies, largely the assistant auditor because I'm still in both positions.

And the the senior accountant auditor position for the internal audit just is getting unfrozen last year after a voluntary separation incentive program position taken a few years ago. While we were getting caught up, we just weren't able to do both functions, so we're where we can now. Then I always close with the risk environment. What am I looking at over the next few years? What are my likely challenges?

I already talked about limited opportunities for government accounting training. There's organizations out there like Government Finance Officers Association, the International City County Management Association. But these organizations provide high level training. They they're they're there to train people like me who have the expertise already, and it's ongoing continued training. It's not the day to day work.

When you this leads into the skills gap where when people onboard with the county, they may have taken half a college course on government accounting. So we have to get that it takes time to train that difference in knowledge because everything's different in government accounting. But the finance cycle is a year long. So it takes two to three years for people to get up to speed and understand the full cycle of what they do. And then recruitment and retention nationally, the AICPA just recently put out a bulletin that they're expecting the American Institute of Certified Accountants are expecting that retirements of accountants is going to surpass new entrants into the field in the next year.

The result of that is a dip in supply, but demand is going to stay stable. Locally, fortunately, Cal Poly Humboldt has a pretty stable enrollment in its accounting program. But increasingly, those people are fleeing the area to go to work for big four firms or and or they're getting attracted by the more attractive cash compensation of becoming an auditor at local CPA firm. So it's becoming increasingly difficult to to entice people to the county at our current wage level for for accountants. That's all I have.

Tried to make it quick for you.

Bring it back to the board. Supervisor Bone?

Yeah. I I do like the way that the auditor controller's office is being run now. Your new digs are pretty cool, which was was nice. But, I mean, what you're doing I'm wondering if you I imagine you guys have an auditor controller group together, which must be just a hoot, but I'm just saying. Is there a chance that you guys is there somebody in there like the retired ones that could come in and maybe bring them in for a week and just teach maybe like four different genres of of at 10,000 feet instead of 50,000 feet just so it helps some of the newer staff and some of the staff that's been there understand a little bit more about government accounting to make things a little bit easier for you.

You could set up the curriculum of where you think they're lacking and and have somebody with thirty years experience come in, and I'm sure they probably have. I mean, they have them for CAOs. They have them for sheriffs. They have them for everybody. So, I mean, I imagine they have them for you. Is is that worth your while to Then you have to come back and grapple with us for money to do it. But, I mean, it's it's it's it's money saved as you'll find out. I mean, we're actually getting reports now that we didn't get before and stuff. So

Our professional organization is discussing in how we can improve training out to the the office to the the counties. They also have training in all of the revenue generating functional areas. It's the the expenditure side really where we lack the training. So we can I have the ability to send people to hosted trainings by other auditor controllers as well?

Yeah. Because I think it'd be beneficial for Trinity and Del Norte and Mendocino. I mean, the smaller counties. Mhmm. It would be nice to maybe even group up and and and do some combined stuff. So

Supervisor Royall?

Thank you. I had a chance to talk to you recently about the business process reengineering ideas, and it was really exciting. So I appreciate that you're leading the charge there, helping get people together around that. And I was wondering if you could provide us with like a tangible example of something that might be I know you're just getting started with that committee, but is there something that comes to mind?

The the classic case for business process reengineering is accounts payable processing. AI is not good at a whole lot, but it is pretty good at reading documents. So it it cannot they can establish establish what the invoice number is, what the individual line items are, what the data that the invoice is, and handle a lot of that preliminary data entry in seconds and twenty four hours a day. So when an employee comes into work the next morning, they code the transaction, and they move on. Let the let the computer do the tedious part.

Let the human do the thinking part. That has the capacity to save people huge amounts of time throughout the throughout the whole organization. I have my doubts it'll save positions, but it will save people time and improve morale, which ongoing saves costs.

Thank you. Yeah, really appreciate it. And we were able to have a discussion about how I think people are afraid that AI will take jobs and that your take on it. And the discussion seemed like other department heads felt similarly that it's unlikely to reduce our current workforce but make people enjoy their jobs more and have more time for things that involve connection with others. Yeah I appreciated that. Thank you.

Supervisor Bushnell.

Thank you. You know when I first got elected there was difficulties in the community with receiving checks on time timely fashion all the things that happen with the outside folks, not just internal county stuff. And so I've heard from many folks how that process has improved, and I really really wanna recognize that through your office. I know, Michael, you've worked really hard to work with outside companies and agencies and fire departments to make sure that your office is more available and more proactive in requests. And I hear really good feedback.

I think that's huge for the community. I don't hear, you know, whatever sent over three months ago, and we can't talk to anybody. So I just appreciate that and your attention to constituents that really feel that you guys are working so much better with the communities. And I think the training is great bringing that in. It's always great to have that information and to upgrade yourself and do the things around training that are so important. Changes every day. Things change every day. So it's really important to get that information. So thanks for all you're doing and ask for not asking for a supplemental. Thank you.

Steve? Yeah.

Thank you, mister chair. Yeah. I agree with the comments made. I mean, really wanna applaud you and your staff for the hard work working with Jessica and our team as well as the cross department training. I really love that idea. You're not asking more for more staff, but you got desks and bringing people in even if it's on a temporary basis one day a week, whatever it might be to have that cross training work being done together. That's that's brilliant. I think that sounds really really good and could be very productive. Because we hear a lot about that that, know, department submit stuff and they get fed back, well, you need to do this or that. People don't understand.

So anything we can do to remove those barriers, make that process go better, that's going to reduce stress and get things done quicker. So I applaud you for coming up with concepts like that. So keep up the great work and yeah, we're catching up on audits. Thank you and your team very much for doing a lot of catch up for the last number of years.

Thank you for all your thoughtful advances in helping us move forward. Really appreciate it. And thank you for the comments and compliments from the board. So

Thank you.

We'll see you. Next.

Thank you so much, Michael. Next, we will have the public works department, and we have public works director Tom Matson here.

Good afternoon, chair Wilson, members of the board. Tom Matson, director of public works. Like everybody else, I also have a PowerPoint here somewhere. There we go. Just a random picture of different things that we do.

We have a 185 full time employees spread throughout the Department of Public Works, the majority in our maintenance divisions of facilities and road maintenance. Our budget this year is approximately $126,000,000 across all the different divisions. Start with our engineering division. We managed 18 storm damage projects, one bridge replacement project, one trail project, one fish project, and one pavement rehab project, and one facility rehab project in this fiscal year. Next fiscal year, we will be managing 28 storm damage repair projects, four safety projects, three fish passage projects, one accessibility project, two pavement rehab projects, and one facility rehab projects.

And, again, designing a whole bunch of things for the following year. Most of our projects through the engineering come in phases, which require approval for each different phase. So we're designing at the same time. We're constructing things that we designed the prior years. Couple of typical things, Maple Creek sinkhole repair.

We had a culvert failure there. Bull Creek box culvert replacement and honeydew bridge replacement, which will be coming back to you in June for a naming and hopefully for a ribbon cutting cutting ceremony this summer. Our environmental services division covers many different things, water management, natural resources planning, roads, natural resources, that's our permitting of our road projects, parks, trails, McKay Community Forest, brownfield remediation, and man monitoring the Table Bluff closed landfill. Some of the things we're involved in in the Eel River Valley sustainable groundwater plan, the Eel River dam removal and regional water planning, and levee management and flood risk reduction. We do have the Sandy Prairie Levy, the Blue Lake Levy, and the Oreck Levy, Redwood Creek.

We were in the completed the fourth year monitoring reporting for the groundwater sustainability plan this year. We joined with Fish and Wildlife, California Trout Mendocino Inland Water and Power, Round Valley Indian Tribe Sonoma Water and Trout Unlimited in signing a water diversion agreement related to the removal of the Scott And Dan's Van Arsdale Dams on the Eel River. We're continuing to working with, building and planning in Cal Poly on a multi year project to develop strategy for strategies for adapting to flooding and sea level rise in the communities of King Salmon and Fields Landing. Collaborated with a Humboldt County Resources District, City of Arcadia, Jacoby Creek Land Trust to secure a bit a little over a million dollars for the RCT to lead the planning and design of a large landscape scale restoration project along Lower Jacoby Creek, to enhance aquatic habitat and reduce flooding. We're hearing, further in the freshwater area of people in the community wanting to step up and have a similar thing going on on Freshwater Creek.

So that may be coming to you in the future. And we've been cooperating with the state water resources bay board and HCSD to initiate a feasibility study for extending public water into the communities of Elk River. Our natural resource planning is our North Coast resource parts partnership, the seven county and tribal collaborative that brings in a significant amount of funding to Northern California and our Humboldt County Fire Safe Council work. Planning, we got we support the fire council in what they do. We turn plans into action helping with deliver funding to groups that can do wildfire prevention activities and the continuing, of course, our grant administration for the North Coast Resource Partnership.

We've been significantly we've delivered a significant number of water water resource projects over the years with with this group. Rhodes natural resources, they were compliance for all of our capital projects under engineering or storm damage repair or road maintenance, gravel mining, and quarries. We did environmental reviews for over 50 storm damage projects. We continue to administer long term permit agreements with the regulatory agencies to allow designated road maintenance activities to proceed with streamline compliance repairs. That goes way way back to our days with the five county salmon group and developing best best practices for maintenance.

And we worked they worked with road maintenance on replacing 56 culverts throughout the county as well as environmental compliance for all of our emergency projects. Just some of our features, we have swimmers to light on the Van Dusen River Campground and river access. Jimmy Smith Fields Landing boat launch facility out in Fields Landing, and we completed Humboldt Bay Trail South. We're still working on improving and opening up the McKay Community Forest, so we're working on more trails and trail easements. We have advisory committee group that we meet with quarterly for to receive feedback and get recommendations from the public on improvements to the park.

Again, we installed the seasonal dam and fish loader at Freshwater Park for our our popular summer swimming area, provide exceptional camping experience at Pampla Grove, Swimmer's Delight, AWA, Big Lagoon, Clam Beach, and Samoa. And with the county ADA compliance team, we had a really nice project at Big Lagoon County Parks with both capital projects, parks fund funding and ADA funding. And we're designing repairs and improvements to the water treatment system at Swimmer's Delight Campground with funds from the deferred maintenance fund, and I thank the board for allowing us to access those funds. Bicycle and trails, of course, we completed the Humboldt Bay South. We're working on a completed a planning study for a four mile extension of the Humboldt Bay Trail between Eureka College of the Redwoods, coordinating with the the, Greater Redwood Trail on that project as they may want to be involved in the construction of that and looking at the long term maintenance and who will be taking that over.

But that will basically extend the trail access from all the way up to Clam Beach, all the way down to CR, and with, some other projects coming forward up into scenic, up into Trinidad on Scenic Drive. And we're continuing design and technical studies on the Hammond Bridge over the Mad River. We had a a $5,000,000 earmark by congressman Hoffman that allowed us to begin this begin this project some years ago. Just some of the things we've permitted are bridge work, emergency work, groundwater sustainability, Powder Valley Dams, really work working on the water contract for the releases from the Trinity River that have been promised to the county for many, many, many years and not delivered. Here's some photos of the overview of the Humboldt Bay Trail, McKay Community Forest on the backside of Cotton.

We've worked to to stabilize the county park parks budget. We're kind of reaching a crisis with deteriorating facilities, staffing shortages, and loss of traditional funding sources for road maintenance. The board did approve an allocation of the $100,000 and a budget increase of 80,000 moving into 2627. We greatly appreciate that. We are working to catch up on a long backlog of repairs and upgrades.

We've got increases general fund allocation increase are offset by cost increases in insurance and workers' comp, IT communication, and ADA charges. So all costs continue to go up no matter what we do. It's it's hard to keep costs from rising. Maintenance costs for the Hammond Hammond Bay Trail and Humble Bay Trail will be charged to our RSTP program, which is a different source of funding that we're gonna be tapping that we haven't tapped before for our trails. That's gonna offset some of the funding we lost out of the TDA funding, which is now used to be a little bit that go into parks each year and now it all is allocated out to transit.

Facilities management, 45 positions, 33 field. We're looking to develop and bring forward our capital improvements plan. It'll be a yearly process. You could look at this in detail on your own, but it is a cyclic process where we will be getting new projects and figuring out how we're going to deliver them, through meetings with other department heads. We completed a number of small maintenance projects.

We've got a draft capital improvement plan ready. Two of you have seen that on the ad hoc committee. It's getting ready to come fully live in front of the board. We do wanna adopt and implement that this year. Complete an update to the facilities master plan, and continue to work with departments to consolidate lease spaces and identify new approaches to reducing the lease burden for the county.

We have restructured our capital project staffing. Thanks again to the board for your increases in funding for critical positions. We've got major DHHS and capital projects coming forward for the 45,000,000 grant for design and construction of new psychiatric health facility to replace sempivirans. Completed grant funded design and construction documents for a new public health laboratory that we will be working with DHHS to try to achieve funding to make that go to construction. We are just wrapping up the Garberville Veterans Building.

You will see that close out, I believe, on tomorrow's agenda. Got the courthouse transformers replacement project, which is a project coming forward real soon, which is a major major need for the county courthouse as our transformers are ancient and working with public health to identify and funding finalize funding for so we can bid out the public health laboratory replacement project. This is the current active project list. This is certainly not all of our projects, but this is our major list of projects. I have the county architect, Jake.

We have Tyler Holmes, a retired annuitant, and we have a new hire as a project manager, Jace, who's hit the ground running. We will have two architects, licensed architects with extensive experience in project management, coming to us this summer. Again, this is further detail into our capital improvements project list, where everything is, when we expect them to to be built out. We do hire a lot of architects as consultants and other to bring other help in, but they also have to be managed. Unfortunately, there's only a small pool of local consultants that can help work on buildings.

So staffing up and filling our positions is clearly very important to us delivering projects for the rest of the county. The Veterans Building, we completed installation and startup of the Ferndale's HVAC replacement project. We're negotiating updated management agreements with all of veterans groups, and construction nears completion for the Garberville Veterans Building. We want to amend the existing Eureka Veterans Building building management agreement to allow for new and innovative uses of the building, complete negotiations of new management agreements with all the veterans, and complete cosmetics seismic repair projects at multiple veterans' halls all using state emergency repair matching funding. As an example, the John Haines Veterans Memorial Building under construction, the Ferndale HVAC project, and the public health generator replacement project.

Jump down to general services. Does all of our project financing. They work very, very closely with the person that presented just in front of you or and our Cal OES. We do all the Cal OES billing, all of federal highway building. We're working on the franchise agreements.

They do all the transit contracts and issue all of of the fuel cards throughout the county for all of our employees. We wanna we have maintained a knowledgeable and informed staff to keep people, a strong workforce. We've broadened the scope of documents being scanned for electronic road retention, reducing our our paper filings, and we've moved our cost accounting management system to a web based system. We wanna continue to track ongoing, outstanding, and on ongoing, outstanding, and ongoing projects for project reimbursements, bring public works ICRP rates up to date once county audits are complete. This is very important to us, and we are very, very happy with our county auditor moving as he's done to get everything up to date because the r c ICRP will increase our reimbursement reimbursement rates drastically from our state and federally funded projects and continue to work with other county departments on projects, motor pool logs, and outside agency billing.

Transportation services, we worked at we do mainly funding through all of the different transit operators in the county, helping, HTA operate a new weekday express route. We ride humble extended services began February 19. We're trying to make sure that all unmet transit needs are met at a reasonable cost. Continue to work with HTA tightly as they are the main recipient of our funding, and we wanna work on transportation providers on connection rights to routes to services throughout the county. Solid waste services.

We oversee county wide solid waste services. We lead coordination with state agencies and jurisdictions. We administer s b thirteen eighty three compliance programs, which should be coming to fruition later this summer into this fall. We're working on a revised our franchise agreements, implementing rate adjustments. We cooperate on organic waste processing processing infrastructure with not only HWMA, but all of the cities in the county as well.

We are a very strong coordinated solid waste county. We support the edible food recovery programs, and we pursue and manage every grant we can find. We hosted dump dump days in Orleans and Garberville, launched county edible county wide edible food recovery program in partnership with local jurisdictions, secured cal recycle lost local assistant grants. We wanna consolidate our container sites to streamline operations. This is an item we will be bringing back to you in the next in the new few in the near future.

We wanna continue our community education and outreach on the upcoming s b thirteen eighty three implementation, including regulations and compliance that people have to do, expansion and continuation of the edible food recovery program as we can, and host workshops and public engagement sessions on sustainable waste practices. Of course, we always wanna identify new funding sources to as you're all aware, the Clean California program from through the Caltrans was very beneficial through the county and the cities, and we would like to find different sources to replace that funding that did a lot a lot of cleanup in the county and paid for a lot of good things. And continue to strengthen our regional partnerships for organics organics processing, recycling innovation, and waste reduction strategies. It's just an example of some things that happen behind the scenes when you throw things away, the recyclables that are processed at Sonoma Samoa and a typical county solid waste transfer station, which is really a bin and a shack that's open a couple of days a few hours a couple of days a week, but it's critical in our rural portions of our county. Jump to our land use division.

Land use is very small division, very tight division. We try to ensure orderly development. We inspect subdivision improvements. We issue encroachments, special event, and transportation permits, and we administer the permanent road divisions and impact fees. As you can see, the county has undergone a a severe reduction in development over the past few years.

The last year is year to date, so that's not quite standard. But you can see the last two to three years, we've kinda stabilized, but at a much lower level than we were at in the early in 2019, down from over 400 projects a year to around a 100. Right away, we work the we we require right away works to acquire right away for our road projects through all the legal requirements. We administer vacations, abandonments, and terminations of maintenance of county roads, and we administer the county road system, maintain mileage that has to be logged and certified every single year. County surveyor, surveys for county road projects.

He does legal descriptions and right of way engineering, map, corner record, and document review. Monu he manages the Monument Preservation Fund and the legal requirements of the county surveyor under county code, government code, and business and practice code. Again, county surveyor workload trends have varied a little bit differently. But, again, you can see that's the that they're the downward trend. We wanna continue to work with building and planning to implement Accella across public works.

Planning already has this program, but we wanna extend it to public works so the public can see everything that they get in a one one look without having to call us for additional information. And we need to analyze every year. We analyze our fee for services to ensure that our costs are recuperated for our services that we provide. Road maintenance and fleet services. Amazingly, our calls for service have gone down over the last couple of years.

Last year, of course, we had our first year of Measure O where we touched about over 40 miles of roads. So that went out to the public in a lot of ways. We've seen increases in fuel and maintenance costs year to year. Our mileage is pretty much turning around 5,000,000 miles a year. That's 5,000,000 vehicle miles traveled by county vehicles in a single year for all different departments all throughout the county.

We put in service our new crusher equipment. We replaced three off road vehicles, two backhoes, and one loader to keep ahead of our car requirements. We lease purchase a new excavator primarily to work with our new crusher. New crusher loader coming, old brooms that are continually break down. We are replacing we replaced our out of date compliant rollers and trailers, replaced our stencil truck with one that we can keep running.

That was actually a very old truck as well. Replaced approximately 600 feet of failed culverts or culverts in need of repair throughout the county, graded 300 miles of dirt roads, and patched approximately 800 miles of surfaced road. And, again, 42 miles of surfacing work at various locations in throughout the county. And and we increased the amount of drainage maintenance performed throughout the year as well, and we harvested and crest approximately 45,000 yards of rock for use on our county roads and county projects. Of course, we always wanna increase our our ability to respond to road maintenance service request.

We are working with Measure Row to improve the overall condition of the county maintained road system. We still have new equipment that we need to replace to keep up with in compliance with carb rolls, continue to utilize a better system of assessing road conditions, really relying on our pavement management index and our consultants that come up every four years to analyze our system, and then using that data to develop our Measure O surfacing projects. We are rotating our gas powered plow trucks to diesel motors to save fuel mileage and get better trade value. We wanna increase the miles of of road surfaced every year and increase rock production and backfill some of our empty positions. Again, this is heavy equipment, and the main thing here to note is that we are ahead of carbon.

We are proud to be there. It's a very expensive to replace all the equipment, but we've been managing to do it over all the years. We have 549 total vehicles throughout our our service, 12 which are currently electric, and we repaired one we did 1,300 repairs internally on those vehicles over the year. Again, these are some of the projects we did with funding from the city of Fortuna after they did a waterline project on Carson Woods Road. We were able to match their funding and pave the entire road instead of just the trench.

We had the Shively Road slide, which was over a million dollar project that we teamed with a contractor on to open up keep that road open this winter. Lots of dig outs on Alder Point Road and a Roanerville grind and repave project. Redwood Drive grind and repave project, Alder Point Road. We had a fire under the bridge that we had to repair some bridge work with. We did a number of culverts on Sprowl Creek with the legal settlement funding, and then we repaved Sprowl Creek.

We did a bunch of culverts up on Mitchell Road, Centerville Road paving where the the we did the emergency project, Mitchell Road paving, and Mattoll Road paving. We do all of these small projects in house. We've done some work out on Heiden Road with the culverts and paving, on Liscom Hill Road, Ishiipishi Road with paving and culverts with a very, very experienced contractor. You can see our roads dispatcher busy at work, our mechanics in their shop, our tool our tire technician and our mechanics. And if you look at the 0 River, whether it's flowing right now, we have two very good boat operators.

I would not wanna take a boat across the Ole River in that flood condition. And finally, just a summary again of the measure o that we presented a couple weeks ago. This is where we were at as of that presentation for fiscal year twenty five twenty six, and with the rollover projects and the baseline funding, this is what we're projecting to spend out of Measure O this year both across our engineering and environmental division I mean, roads division. Noticing, again, I wanna highlight the fact that was 7,000,000 in match funding. We are leveraging an additional $40,000,000 in outside funding.

So measure o funding will actually be about $60,000,000 next year with all the funds that we are leveraging. And with that, I am done with my presentation and open for any questions that you may have.

Great. Thank you, Tom. A lot there. Who wants to go first?

Was gonna say a

lot. That's supervisor Mondroney.

It's impressive. Thank you for all that work and to all your staff for all the hard work. It's a massive program especially from where we're at so just wanna say wow and thank you.

Okay. Supervisor Bushnell.

I just wanna say thank you as well, and thank you to the voters too for measure o. It's allowed for your department to do a lot of things throughout the county that have need needed to happen and has taken some financial stress off your department. I I do recognize that the parks is something that's ongoing, park funding, which is utilized by so many folks from out of the area and folks within Humboldt County. And so I think we do need to try to work towards better solutions for the parks. They're valued assets in Humboldt.

And your staff as well, all of your staff that, you know, twenty four seven on storms and all of the stuff that they do. They're very attentive to their areas, and they they really do work with the constituents really well. So thanks, Tom, for all you and your department do.

Supervisor Ruehl?

Thank you. I'm so glad to hear in particular about the vacancies being able to be filled for facilities. Could you say just a little bit more about that? We went through so quickly. So I just wondered if you could highlight some of the recent successes there. I know I know folks are always really interested in project delivery with facilities kinda throughout the county.

So we had been recruiting for a long time and not getting good applicants. So we went through and worked with the CAO's office and you, the board to increase the payment for the architect and the project manager positions, and we did a a really good recruitment. I think we had 11 applicants for architect with licenses before before we were getting none. The two that we are hiring, one lady will start in August. She has twenty two years of experience, and the other person will be starting, I the end of June and he has eleven years experience. So they should be able to hit the ground, and pick up some major projects.

That's great. Thank you. Yeah. That's good to hear and I know there's a lot of, county staffers in the room who are also you know interested in and concerned about facilities so that's that's much appreciated.

Supervisor Bohn.

Well, since we keep playing dancing buildings and stuff like that, You hit on your work with planning and building and then you know public works and things like that. This will be another way of speeding the even though the the arrow is going down about projects and as was stated, we don't do commercial projects here anymore. Being in one building is going to be advantageous to permitting and

and

doing the work we're supposed to do is helping the applicants get through the process without go see, go see, go see. So I you're gonna state the obvious here, but I to hear that that's going to be People have to hear it because people go, why are you buying? You know, why are you getting another building? I says, for efficiency. I mean how old literally, how old's the blue building? 1945?

It's probably as old as my own house, which goes back to '37.

Okay. And John, I I know 55 year old people were born in that hospital and they were born long before that. So I'm trying to make what that's going. So I think this this as we keep you know trying to find somewhere to do a one stop shopping which has been on this board for fifteen years. I I I know it's not easy but hopefully we can see it in our lifetime and make it happen because it will make a lot things a lot easier for for our contractors, for our for us firstly, because it may come with parking and things like that. And I do have to compliment the city of Eureka. They've created a fully empty parking lot in back of you now. So

Alright. Thank you. Thanks, Tom. I just you know, along with sort of the the overarching job of public works, which is part of keeping the wheels on the bus of civil society in terms of all the functioning parts. I just want to and extremely important, and thanks to the staff who's doing that on the daily.

I wanna also just just for a second highlight that you your department does interface with our ag department and our planning department on on long range sort of out the windshield of that bus. Right? And and some of those issues, and we've talked about here, but some of them are even bigger and broader, our work on getting water back in the Trinity River, our work on getting water back in the Eel River, our work that was in support of the removal of the Klamath Dams, and and in the interagency and interjurisdictional work done on fire management, land management, and other watershed issues across the Northwestern California. And I just want to emphasize, you know, again, another way, Humboldt County is a leader on on issues not just locally, regionally, but nationally. And so I just want to kind of highlight that and put a pin in it and thank you for that work and support of this board on that.

And I just I do want to emphasize again, we need to figure out a way to support, enhance and grow, I think, our recreational capacity. And what I mean by and that the infrastructure around that because I think it it isn't just for our folks, our families, and our citizens to enjoy the the fruits of where we live in terms of getting outside and health and the wellness around that. But it also supports our economy because it's when people come to visit these places and they see those are I will say these organically built spaces from a community by a community being used by a community in a really positive way. That just is one of those experiences they will take they really enjoy. And I this board is really thinking hard about how we can support that, and we're gonna hope to, at some point, engage the community more on what we can do in in terms of that.

So thank you, Tom. Thanks for being here. And we're on to the next subject.

Thank you. Yeah.

Thank you Tom. And with that the next presentation is from the district attorney's office and district attorney Stacy Eads is here.

I think I have a

PowerPoint too. Yes, great. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. I'm Stacy Eads, your district attorney.

And before anything, I wanted to really thank you, Chair Wilson, as well as the other board members, CAO Hayes, and her supportive, hardworking staff for making these budget presentations happen. It's really a great opportunity for us all to share the work that we do within our offices. Really, I recognize that budget time is an extremely busy time for you all, busy time for my office as well. But it's also really a great time to kind of like reflect back on the work that we've done, where we are now, and where we are headed. In kind of going through that process, I really recognize that a lot of emotions come with all of that as well.

Working through all of that, one of the things that I came down to was that ultimately strongest thing that I feel is pride and pride in the work that we do for Humboldt County within the district attorney's office. So I'm really happy about that. The other thing that, you know, really comes to mind is the power of perseverance and the fact that working with so many people within my office, I just have that great privilege of working with people that are truly committed. They're givers. They give back to the community.

They're doing the work that they do because they want to and that it has a purpose. I think that's probably true of a lot of the folks that are here in this room this afternoon. That's really quite the opportunity and privilege. So thank you for that. Clicker.

Okay. I think I might be the only one that uses the podium. Let's take a look at what we do. So at the district attorney's office, you know, we have now 57 employees that are budgeted. We're a professional team of administrative analysts, legal service professionals, victim advocates, investigators, IT professionals, and deputy district attorneys.

We all work very closely together as a team. This upcoming budget cycle we have three less positions. So we were de allocated three deputy district attorneys. This de allocation occurred so that my deputy district attorneys as well as the public defenders could be given a modest raise by this board. So thank you for doing that.

That was a really important piece of work on your part to help us with recruitment and retention. And so I certainly appreciate that. And I, you know, but at the same time, we're very much understaffed. And I do anticipate, you know, as the landscape hopefully improves, that we will be coming back and asking this court or this board for not a court revisit the number of positions that we have within our office. We have though expanded the number of positions that are filled for deputy district attorneys.

That's been an ongoing challenge, we've got some great new deputy DAs who are certainly juggling the demanding workload and they're really blossoming into excellent prosecutors. We've they're also had our struggles with retirement and folks that have various health challenges, both physical and mental health challenges, and also those who have seized new opportunities that may have come their way. So we have some significant shortages, particularly feeling that I think in our investigations division at this time, but that's also allowed for some transition and some new opportunities for other folks. It's really a mixed bag. And again, I think with perseverance and hard work that we will do just fine.

Looking at our actual budget for the upcoming season, we are going to be just below $9,407 is where we're at. So just below $10,000,000 for our overall budget. We are asking a little bit more than we had last budget cycle from the general fund, so about $330,000 more. We also anticipate less funds coming from Measure Z, about 60,000 less than last year. But we continue to have a really healthy ability to bring in funds through grants, so that's a really good thing, and we're very grateful for the Measure Z funding as well.

Our other funding, in particular, the asset forfeiture funding is what's dramatically lower than in years past. Looking at our accomplishments over the last year, again, I just really can't emphasize enough that we have a great team of hardworking individuals serving victims and protecting the community. A really dedicated staff that they do what they do not because they have to, but because they want to and they they help each other. And that's really kind of one of the most beautiful things about it, in particular with our tremendous workload coupled with the limited number of staff, everyone really has to pitch in and help each other. And they just do that because they want to and it's because they care.

So I think overall that's our number one accomplishment. The number of case that we've received from our law enforcement agencies locally increased by 500 law enforcement referrals in 2025 relative to 2024. So that's a dramatic increase in workload. And in particular, we're shorting shortages of staffing. Looking in terms of, like, how those cases played out, we filed about 200 more felony cases than we had in the prior year, but were dramatically lower in the number of misdemeanor level offenses that we've filed.

We've also been utilizing our case management system prosecuted by Capelle quite a bit more in terms of reviewing referrals and making the initial charging decisions. So that has been, you know, in many ways a move forward. But it's also been a really big challenge because of the time that it takes to process the cases through the case management system. And then also, we've had to do what's called race line charging for many of those, offenses. And so that involves, additional time, additional resources, and that's really been quite a strain on the, office within the last year trying to meet that unfunded mandate that the state handed to us.

So it was kind of a

really good example of, like, good intentions that somewhat gone wrong. So we'll be taking a close look at that. This is just sort of a snapshot, a moment in time of what sort of cases we're handling in court that are very actively being prosecuted. So we have, at this point in time, 926 active felony cases. At this same time last year, we were at 796.

So right now, we're at a 130 more felony cases that are in the courts being prosecuted by the same basically the same number of attorneys. We have also seen a significant increase in the felony level elder abuse cases, as well as crimes against children, burglaries, and robberies. What's down relative to last year are the number of felony level assaults, manslaughter, attempted murders, and murder. For our misdemeanor cases, we are still, you know, just looking at this moment in time, we even though there are less filings, we are handling more cases in court. We have five fifty more misdemeanor cases actively in the courts right now at this moment in time relative to compared to last year.

The trends are that we see less domestic violence cases at the misdemeanor level. It's about half of what we had at the same time last year that are in the courts. We're also down on the simple assaults and simple batteries, And we're down in the misdemeanor level of elder abuse, although we're much higher in our felony level of elder abuse. DUIs have been dramatically increased. So we have five ninety four.

That's about three times the number of DUIs that we were prosecuting actively in the courts this time last year. So that's a pretty big issue for the community. As previously stated, we fund a large portion of our office through grants. As this board is aware, locating grants, applying for grants, maintaining compliance with the grants, performing the audits, preparing the reports. That whole process is very time consumptive and it is a huge demand on staff, the very same people that have all those other requirements.

So I just kind of want to give a little bit of a shout out to, you know, Rochelle Davis, who's our business manager that does a tremendous job working on the grants and also working directly with our staff. Know Chelsea, she's helped prepare a number of staff, excuse me, a number of grants this last year. She's become quite an expert. Nikki Miranda, within our victim witness program coordinator, she has also done a tremendous amount of work with the reporting and looking for grants. And also chief investigator Kyla Baxley has done a lot of grant work along with her team.

And I know that senior recently promoted senior district attorney investigator Braden Bronner also has done a lot of work preparing and reporting out on grants. So this is tremendous work that really makes a big difference and it's that much less money that we need to ask for from you all from the general fund. So thanks to them. We also have great partnerships within the community other county departments. So with the Department of Health and Human Services, we have a lot of important partnerships that help make it happen for us within the office as well as the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office.

We work with local tribes, the North Coast rape crisis team, and the Northern California coalition to safeguard communities. In terms of the cases that we've taken to trial, we took 31 cases to trial to verdict. Lots of cases are set for trial. A lot of them take different paths at the end of the day. This last year, 21 of the cases that we tried to verdict were, felony level offenses, and then 10 were handled at the misdemeanor level.

Six of the so about a fifth of the jury trials were handled by or defended rather by private attorneys. The rest are going to be with our county's public defender offices. We continue to work with our local tribes and have some cases that are referred for tribal diversion to the tribal wellness courts. Those are programs where the participants are given culturally appropriate interventions and they all have like a restorative justice format and the level of supervision and support is really substantial compared to a lot of other diversion programs. So that's pretty exciting.

We're continuing to increase the number of participants. I think right now we're at about 21 participants. Mental health diversion is another type of diversion. That's a statutory framework. And what we've seen is a steady increase in terms of the number of petitions.

Those are filed typically by the defense attorneys seeking a grant of mental health diversion. So the individual is placed on a mental health diversion plan. And if all goes well, you know, within a two year period, their case would ultimately be dismissed. What we're seeing is, again, a dramatic increase. And so all of these involve, you know, quite a bit of litigation in terms of, well, first the eligibility and then also the suitability of the candidates for mental health diversion.

And I think that, you know, it's it's it's kind of a taxing process, you know, that takes a lot of resources, you know, not only from my office, public defender's office, also Department of Health and Human Services in terms of meeting these needs, assessing things, supervising the persons if they're granted mental health diversion. And so this is just sort of a whole new landscape for people that are in the criminal justice system. And another challenge that just is it's a matter of this is what the law allows is that a lot of the mental health diversion petitions are come to us on the kind of the eve of trial. So while we're gearing to present our case for trial, making sure our witnesses are under subpoena and working with schedules the best we can, make sure the attorneys are prepared and have what they need, make sure we've complied with all the discovery, All of those steps. Then just before we're ready to hit go on trial, we might receive a mental health diversion petition.

So it kind of takes the case on an entirely different track. But, you know, this is all process that through communication and I think, you know, particularly of late, I'm really appreciative of the heightened communication between the courts and the public defender's office and my office. I think that's been really helpful for everyone within the justice system. So I'm hopeful that we'll continue on that particular track. And also I know that there's some legislation that's being considered that might reduce down the eligibility, suitability a little bit.

Ensure that those folks that are granted mental health diversion are the same folks that really the voters and people of state of California are contemplating as appropriate for mental health diversion. The district attorney's office continues to participate in community awareness and education activities. We really like working in particular, of course, with our local youth. We have some of our staff go to the police academy and they teach classes. So that's a really great thing.

We have a district attorney investigator who helps run the parent project along with probation. Another very positive thing for the community. We go and speak to classrooms. Sometimes we have classes come visit us and the courts and get to see what we're doing here and hopefully educate folks on, you know, not only what the criminal justice system does, maybe future litigators. Who knows?

It would be nice. And also hopefully deter folks from becoming engaged, in the criminal justice system. So we also have a really robust internship program at the district attorney's office. I'm really excited about that. So we get lots of applicants and they're amazing young people that are you know get the opportunity to you know work hands on with attorneys investigators the support staff and oftentimes they get to help prepare presentations that, you know, will be provided during the course of the jury trial.

So that's pretty exciting stuff too. And we certainly do go out to other community events and try to educate what we do, what services are available, in particular with our victim witness program. So we have a lot of programs where we talk about the victim services, what we can do in terms of theft, the prosecution of theft, reporting of theft, combating human trafficking. So those are some of our focus areas. Turning a little bit to specific accomplishments of our victim witness program.

So forty four years, which that's an awfully long time for the program to be running. So it's a great team of professionals that have been here serving Humboldt County since 1982. Our district attorney victim witness program has helped and served so many individuals within the community. And when I saw the numbers for, you know, 2025, I was just like, wow. We just added another 2,000 victims that were served.

So that's that's pretty pretty impressive and really just goes to speak to these folks despite the fact that they've had a decrease in in staffing numbers. They've had this tremendous increase of people that within our community that they're helping. Things So that they do, they'll help with courtroom orientation. They'll guide them through forensic interviews. They attend meetings where victims are there with prosecutors and investigators and other scary people.

And they, you know, will also make referrals to counseling and other services. And a big one, of course, is helping victims with victim compensation, preparing the applications to ensure that they're able to be made whole, perhaps get assistance, you know, if they need some sort of transitional housing, maybe they're getting out of a domestic violence situation and they need a new place to live. So these are all the types of services that our advocates are providing to members of the community that have been victimized. One of my favorite things every year as well is just getting to hear all the thank yous that are provided to our advocates and investigators and prosecutors for the work that they do. So this slide is typically really hard to read.

But thank you, you know, for the advocate and investigator for your time today. I really appreciate all the guidance, and I will stay in contact. That's from a domestic violence and attempted murder victim. Thank you for everything you and the program has done for us, for keeping us updated on the court progress. We really appreciate it. That was from a victim of assault with great bodily injury. Thanks, ladies, for always being there. That's from a mother of a child sexual assault victim. Thank you for helping me. I appreciate the support and updates.

That's from a human trafficking and domestic violence victim. And then finally, a victim of DUI incident indicated victim witness helped pay my medical bills and helped me understand the system without their help, I would not have survived financially or emotionally. So these are some of the folks that do the hard work. And they are advocates who absolutely go above and beyond. They're positive.

They're active listeners who really empathize with their clients. And as they put it themselves, we help give a voice to the once voiceless. Turning now to our CAST team. And as this board is aware, that's a multidisciplinary team that works to serve children and families of children who have been abused. And this last year, I think, in addition to, you know, just kind of our ongoing work in serving the families and victims and conducting the forensic interviews and taking the cases to trial, we also, in order to continue doing that work, it's really important for us to have an accredited child advocacy center.

So we worked through that process, and we were reaccredited. So that was actually it it sounds like not that big of a deal, but frankly, it really is a big deal because of all of the different agencies that we work with and all of the requirements and there's always a lot of new stuff that the National Child Advocacy Center wants their advocacy centers to be doing. And so we worked, you know, to ensure that we were in full compliance and checking off all the boxes. And I just have to really give a shout out to chief investigator, Kyla Baxley, as well as our CAST coordinator, Katrina Horton because together they did a lot of outreach and ensured that everything was taken care of, worked with our individual advocates, law enforcement agencies, child welfare services, behavioral health, St. Joseph's Hospital, the SART nurses.

So anyhow, a huge thank you to all of those folks to helping make it happen so we can continue to do the good work there with CAST. And EVAST is our elder and vulnerable adults. Again, we work closely with the Department of Health and Human Services, Adult Protective Services, as well as the Sheriff's Department, Public Guardian. This is through Measure Z funding, so that was really key for us to be able to sort of create this collaborative team to help address elder and vulnerable abuse vulnerable adult abuse that was happening within the community. And as you can see, like the number of cases and filings has increased.

I don't don't know that that's necessarily reflective of that there's more incidences of abuse, but I think perhaps it's more awareness and communication between the different agencies and and just having having those conversations about the potential victims and potential offenders and who really needed to have the attention of my office. So that's a great success as well. We also have an organized retail theft vertical prosecution team. So that particular team has really worked hard to focus on retail theft within our community. And we've seen some great trends.

We've seen a lot of successful prosecutions. We've also developed our own in house diversion program that to help divert low level, you know, more first time type offenders away from the criminal justice system and then focus our efforts and our monies on the more serious repeat offenders. So we've seen that initially most of the reports were coming out of, you know, kind of the big box stores, kind of those stores that you would expect expect. But other smaller stores, local businesses, they they had kind of stopped reporting. But as we're getting out there in the community, we're seeing a definite increase in the more, you know, the businesses in rural locations, smaller businesses, making those reports and just knowing that if there is a theft, that we will prosecute.

It's very helpful. We also have a vertical prosecution team that's dedicated to crimes involving violence against women. And this particular caseload has a dedicated prosecutor and a district attorney investigator and advocate that also are assigned to the particular team. It's really important for this particular team to have a reduced caseload. So those cases that are funneled into the violence against women prosecution team are those where the there's a higher risk of lethality that's presented.

And so cases that involve offenders that might use weapons or have a history of acts of violence or they're engaged in types of conduct that could result in death. So strangulation, for example, know, severe injuries that are inflicted upon the victims. All of these factors are kind of taken into consideration as well as, you know, you know, specific threats of violence or death upon the victim. And so then the team has the opportunity to have additional time to provide those direct victim services and work closely with the victim and have additional meetings and interviews and orient them to the court and provide them with additional supports that might not be something we can do otherwise for other types of cases. So our future goals continue to be really to enhance community safety by prosecution of crime and a fair and timely manner, and we're always going to prioritize violent crimes and those perpetrated against, the most vulnerable victims in our community.

We will continue and we will engage in community outreach and education efforts that are designed to prevent and to reduce crimes. So focusing on the organized retail theft, the elder abuse, and then also focusing on fentanyl and opioid substance use reduction. We will continue to protect our local businesses and have consistent accountability measures for repeat offenders in particular as it relates to theft. We'll enhance our data collection capabilities through interface with the court system and heightened efficiencies through continued case management and tech improvements. With our law enforcement partners and county IT, we want to establish an electronic report submission.

Hopefully that would enhance and expedite the referral process. And so all of that we can also do with our case management system. Then we want to maintain and expand a highly competent team that's committed to professionally serving with integrity, compassion, and respect. And as alluded to earlier, we're we're always looking for qualified candidates. And it's, you know, it's it's really difficult to bring in, in particular, deputy district attorneys, people that are looking to go into that line of work.

You know, sort of the the public sentiment has changed over the years in terms of what it means to be a deputy district attorney. I, of course, you know, think that it's one of the best jobs that you could ever have. Extremely rewarding and you get to really have a sense of seeking justice. But, you know, here in our rural community, these historically low WDDA applications across the nation are really impacting us. And so it's just it's just a different climate. And but, you know, I think as folks get the word out and as they get to meet our team, that we will maintain and add to our really good hard working

team.

And I think, you know, with perseverance, we will absolutely get there. So thank you so much. It's really an honor and happy to answer any questions.

Thank you for that review. Supervisor Bushnell.

Thanks. Very detailed. And I I wanted to ask if there was one area that you think is suffering because of the budget issues in your department, what would it be?

So it's staffing. I mean, we just need more people to do the work that needs to be done.

Yeah. I mean, it's clear when you look at how many cases you have compared to how many staff you have that it's a huge workload and and the amount of interaction you have with in and outs of courts and all the things. I wanna thank you and your department for all that you do for the residents of Humboldt County. It's super important. And the advocacy around keeping people safe in Humboldt County and keeping criminals off the streets.

It's really important. And the work is tireless, and sometimes it doesn't always go your way, and it's hard it's a hard job. I can't imagine the frustrations that happen within your department. And I hope that our budget improves so that we can help you with that dedication that you have to Humboldt County families.

Thank you.

Supervisor Bohn.

I think the outreach on the retail side, the retail theft and everything else because I can tell you a lot of your retailers are just on their hands in the air because they'll get the problem being is they don't get a you know, the response time sometimes is slow, and they're expected to hold that person. That person knows full well they can walk out and nothing's gonna happen to them. Literally, they'll be back in that even if they get arrested, they'll be back that afternoon stealing again. So the as you said, the the hardcore, you know, this idea of everybody, you know, I saw it the other night. A guy walked out of there with a shopping full of at Safeway in the on on Harris Street.

Walked out of there with a shopping cart full of groceries, and they tried to stop me, wouldn't stop, and they let him go. Knowing

that

I feel well I'm paying for his groceries when I pay for my stuff. So I mean, if we can, know, and I know there's a lot more important things on the the plate, but both for the preservation of our tax dollars and the preservation of of at least the the semblance that we're, you know, providing some sort of avenue of defense for the retailer who's who thinks he's paying for it and, you know, because that's we saw that in August, almost a 35% drop in misdemeanor because they've just quit calling.

Right. Right. And I mean, you're exactly right. But I have to say I

don't wanna be right. I wanna be exactly No.

No. But I mean, but it it I I think another thing that, you know, is really helpful is prop 36, which the the voters brought. And so we do have now penal code section six six six point one for the repeat offenders, and that has been a helpful tool that that we want to use appropriately though, of course. And and then the other thing is that, you know, if if the retailer has the video evidence, and a lot of them do have that, we can proceed on prosecution even if the the offender walks out with with the items so long as we we can prove it beyond. So that's

And there'll be a is another frustration. They a lot of them have video and and don't see anything happen. And that's that's a frustration. Yes. So I and I I know it's I I know this is never ending and there's there's no shortage and now that everybody has a ring phone, everybody gets caught, hopefully.

Well, I I encourage those retailers though to reach out to our office if they're not getting a response and and and that's why we have an investigator assigned to retail theft. I mean, that that's quite a dedication of resources. Right? And because I do appreciate the significance and the impact that it has, you know, when folks are committing thefts not only on the direct victim, that particular retailer in their business, but the community as a whole. It not only becomes part of the climate and culture, but it also impacts the services that you all can provide to other parts of the community. So it's like when you're talking about housing and children, basic needs, you know, that that really has quite the ripple effect. So it's it's a big deal.

No. And and like I I appreciate that you're doing that. But if you could get the reach out out there a little bit more, and I know that you're limited, but so people know things have changed. We are gonna do 36 made a difference. 47 killed this. But you know, some of those things have passed when nobody reads what is actually written in the ballot. But I appreciate it. Thanks.

Thank you.

Okay. Thank you again. We are going to take a ten minute break. We'll be back at ten after two so that folks can do the things we do during breaks. Running.

Alright. We are back from our break.

Take it away.

All right. Thank you, chair. And with that, the next department is the Department of Health and Human Services. And we have DHHS director Connie Beck here.

And joining me today is Travis Green, the finance director for health and human services. Or I should say deputy director. Director. Sorry, Travis. So good afternoon, chair and board members.

I wanna thank you for allowing us to present today on our proposed budget for fiscal year 2627. After looking at all of the beautiful photos in the last two presentations, I am feeling bad that I focused so much on just the budget and not so much on our accomplishments because I could go on all day and all night on the accomplishments for DHHS and the staff that work for us. So, in addition to that, I do want to take a moment to thank staff. I want to thank the CAO and Jessica, human resources, risk management, and the auditor controller's office for working with us through some pretty difficult budget times and decisions that have been needed to be made. So I want to thank them and then also thank the DHH staff that are here in the room.

A lot of those staff have participated in the budget process this year and are also available to answer any questions that you might have. We were able to submit a very tight balanced budget on time working with what we are currently aware of. There are still many unknowns. As you are aware, the states may revise as being released soon. We may know a little more then, and of course when the state budget is passed we'll know more. So I'm gonna turn it over to Travis now to go over some of the high level budget information.

Good afternoon Chair Wilson and distinguished board members. It's a pleasure to be here. Again my name is Travis Green. I'm the Deputy Director of Financial Services for DHHS. What we see before us in this slide is the total budget for fiscal year twenty six-twenty seven broken down by branches and by budget.

You can see the total there is $315,000,000 We are also asking for two additional general fund requests. One for $250,000 to replace the carpet in our 445 West Washington campus and another for $250,000 for IS switches and server equipment that will be costed across the entire department. Next slide. In the previous slide, general relief is oh, I'm sorry. In the can we go back one?

Nope. Can't reverse.

There you go. Thank

you.

General relief is not in the pie chart, but it is listed up there as separate item. General relief is a general fund budget however it's administered by social services. GR being administered this way is how it is done in other counties because the systems and benefits are connected with social services. And so that's why we we house it that way and administer it. It is important to have some history of the integration of DHHS.

DHHS was created with public health, behavioral health, and social services in August 2000. Public guardian and veterans service offices came to DHHS beginning in 02/2005 during budget challenges. When DHHS received veteran services office and public guardian, the county general fund was less than a $100,000. Now the budgets are 600 and 18,000 and 1,300,000 respectively. The programs have grown and caseload and costs have increased requiring additional funds to support them.

As a result more and more of social services county general fund has been carved out to support these two county programs. Since the department of health and human services is the department of health and human services inception, the department has held to a minimum or no impact to the county general fund beyond what the board of supervisors agreed to with the administration at the time of its formation. At that time, the county general fund represented 4.8% of the total DHHS budget and now is less than 2%. This slide represents the total budget amounts year over year for three years. The increase for twenty six-twenty seven is coming from behavioral health solely.

While it is an overall increase for twenty six-twenty seven, public health had a decrease of 1,300,000 and social services had a reduction of 12,200,000 for twenty six-twenty seven. The increase for behavioral health is largely attributed to a $10,000,000 investment in the new Sempovirans crisis stabilization unit building, a $4,430,000 grant for diversion, and $10,800,000 in placement costs. The placement costs are anticipated to be offset by increased revenues from billable bed days, Medi Cal, and the addition of a new patch rate for claimable costs. We have been decreasing the number of allocated positions since fiscal year 'twenty three-'twenty four. Earlier on, deallocating positions was easier because they were often positions that were vacate vacant and or hard to fill.

In the previous budget year, we held all admin positions vacant. And in the current year, we have had a hard freeze, a hard hiring freeze in social services only filling three total FTEs. We are down to minimum staffing levels in many areas. To balance the budget, we are decreasing another 55 positions in the proposed budget. There have been a number of positions identified that have been held vacant in the current year that will need to be filled going forward and have been budgeted in the new fiscal year cycle.

This chart illustrates that the majority of our funding for DHHS comes from federal, state, and realignment sources. A number of Health and Human Services programs were realigned to counties, and that's what came up out from realignment in 'ninety one and 2011. Not mentioned in the earlier slides, the HOME program, which stands for housing outreach and mobile engagement, became a Cal AIM provider this year, enabling it to bill for community supports. Claiming will be more robust for fiscal year twenty six-twenty seven. While the claiming makes a significant difference, it does not fully fund staff, so other sources of revenue are still needed.

The home program has gone from two outreach crews to now just one. Medical administrative activities known as MAW is a source of revenue. The public health branch and public guardian access having built the administrative structure for it many years ago. It allows for federal claiming for medical administrative work already being done. Other divisions and programs plan to leverage that structure and expertise in order to begin claiming mod dollars for program activities.

The upside is the strong existing structure. Public Guardian has been reimbursed for $334,000 out of its $1,200,000 budget in fiscal year twenty four twenty five. The downside is that it will take twenty months for the funds to start coming in. The next slide. When we talk about realignment, is really the effort two efforts.

One in 1991 focused on health and human service programs, and 2011 realignment focused on adult services and law enforcement. This diagram shows what realignment funds can be used for. There is some flexibility. However, it is designated funding that must be used for one of the covered programs. It also cannot be used for funding outside programs like veterans or public guardian.

In this slide, see a breakout of the county general fund and realignment across public health, behavioral health, and social services. So up there where it says three, that would be behavioral health, public health would be number one, and two would be social services on the realignment chart, and it follows the same for county general fund. And with that I will turn it over to director Beck for the rest of the presentation.

Thank you. In order for changes to be included in the proposed budget, we met with the CAO and HR director to discuss possible scenarios to be included. IS and IT was a pilot in the IS and IT security was a pilot in the current year, so we are moving positions and costs to IT to formalize implementation. Employee services and HR consolidation consists of two analysts and the deputy director. With the reduced number of staff in DHHS employee services, it is no longer to have the same level of supervision.

Staff continue to meet regularly to plan a good transition of work. Something that could assist in this transition is for your and board to support implementation of the employee online software. During the also during the attorney general judgment against child welfare, we moved the social services director position to child welfare welfare to provide direct level of support to make all the necessary changes from that judgment. I took on other supervision responsibility of benefit programs during that time. Those changes have been accomplished, so we are transitioning back to the previous structure.

Programmatically, Public Guardian has been under the behavioral health program oversight for several years, but the budget has been in social services. So in this budget cycle, we are proposing to move this budget under behavioral health for complete oversight and to strengthen other claiming mechanisms. These changes total 752,000 for 2627. Also in discussions with the CAO in February, we also proposed moving Veterans Service Office back to the county since it is not a social services mandate. Since then, we've come up with a couple of other possible funding solutions for the Veterans Service Office.

During that discussion, Jessica provided information around the general relief budget having additional funding available and so we are able to use that county general fund portion for veteran service office and then we're also gonna start claiming ma where it's possible. We also reduced a number of contracts $1,900,000 just in social services for fiscal year 'twenty six-'twenty seven. As your board knows, there's impacts of HR one pretty extensive to health and human services. The state has yet to put the significant additional funds in the budget. Counties will incur additional workforce costs to implement the eligibility requirements of HR1, including Medi Cal and CalFresh.

In California, counties are responsible for verifying initial and continued eligibility, processing applications, and working with individuals and families to ensure they can access the safety net programs that they are eligible for, including Medi Cal and CalFresh. HR1 requires CalFresh recipients who are subject to able-bodied adults without dependents, we call it ABOD, rules to be subject to expanded work and documentation requirements. Effective June 2026, the county eligibility workforce will be responsible for screening, verification, and engagement that is needed to comply with the HR1 CalFresh rules. Over 3,500 Humboldt County CalFresh recipients will be impacted by this change. On 01/01/2027, HR1 requires Medi Cal expansion enrollees and applicants to re verify every six months instead of annually and verify exemption from the work requirements to continue receiving medical and to re verify eligibility every six months instead of annually.

The county eligibility workforce will be responsible for supporting clients in navigating these complicated new requirements. Of the more than 55,000 residents enrolled in Medi Cal, over 20,000 Humboldt County residents will be impacted by the new HR one requirements. Expanded work requirements for CalFresh, new work requirements for Medi frequency and complexity for Medi Cal eligibility determinations, verifications, and ongoing case management will increase county eligibility workforce costs. Counties will also incur new costs to provide indigent health care to individuals who lose Medi Cal coverage due to HR1. Counties are required by state law, Welfare and Institution Code Section 17,000, to provide basic medically necessary care to medically indigent lawful residents.

Humboldt County is one of 35 rural and small counties that participate in the County Medical Services Program or CMSP to collectively contract with clinics and hospitals to provide this state mandated care. County costs to provide indigent care were formally paid for with 1991 realignment funding under AB 85 a budget trailer bill from 2013 that fund that funding was redirected by the state for other purposes and the growth of those funds was significantly slowed leaving counties without resources to serve the individuals who come to counties for services. Humboldt County will incur at least $430,851 in additional CMSP costs in fiscal year twenty seven-twenty eight, likely growing in twenty eight-twenty nine and beyond. Counties assume that 33% of those who lose Medi Cal coverage will seek care and be eligible for services from the county indigent care program. Public health has lost more than $4,000,000 under the under this federal administration.

First when the Department of Government Efficiency known as DOGE rescinded nearly $3,000,000 in epidemiology and laboratory funding. More than 1,000,000 of which was intended to help build the new public health laboratory. Then H. R. One eliminated the SNAP Ed program known as CalFresh Healthy Living, which took more than 250,000 in annual funding that supported the community partners such as schools and clinics.

Public health has also lost more than 180,000 in emergency and hospital preparedness funds due to the changes at the federal level. Your board has supported CSAC efforts to secure additional funding for county health and human services impacts resulting from HR1. These items are included in the board's 2026 legislative platform, and we thank you for that support. We look forward to seeing the governor's May May budget revision proposal and then the budget being passed. For behavioral health, behavioral health is starting to recognize increased revenue from payment reform, including increased revenue from reimbursable bed days and bed bedside visits at Sempervirens.

We continue to have increased expenditures for mandated placement costs as the need within the community increases at approximately 1,000,000 year over year. We continue to see ongoing staffing challenges with the three year average of 26% vacancy rate overall in behavioral health. We struggled to hire qualified and licensed staff to do some of this work. Behavioral health's mandate requires that we have a minimum level of services that meet the needs of the community. We continue to struggle with this given our staffing levels.

Due to hard to fill positions, behavioral health is no longer providing services in the jail. WellPath has taken over the behavioral health services, so staff have been working on that transition. New initiatives continue in behavioral health. Mental Health Services Act changes to Behavioral Health Services Act has been a huge lift as the funding buckets are changing with new requirements. Changes coming to mobile crisis benefit make this benefit an optional benefit instead of a mandate, which will reduce the funding currently available and increase behavioral health costs, limiting our ability to provide those services.

And those are those those services that that we provide with our missed staff and and with law enforcement with the sheriff's department. S oh, care court is another mandate that comes without funding and requirements. We struggle with due to our staffing shortages. Although our care court has been implemented, it seems better than most in other counties. SB 43 is another change we are working through with limited staffing as this has expanded the criteria for grave disability to include those with serious substance use disorders and impacts the number of clients requiring services.

There are no facilities currently to place those individuals with substance use disorder only criteria, and this will continue to be impactful to our systems. Prop 36 is also another mandate that came with no funding. Behavioral health did apply for a grant to assist in getting these services lifted, but that's not sustainable long term and it is not an ongoing funding source and could prove challenging over time. With the impacts of HR one, behavioral health is projecting less individuals eligible for Medi Cal but still needing services, which will be another impact on decreased revenue in the coming years. Behavioral health does continue to look for ways to reduce expenditures and maximize billing when possible.

We continue to follow required changes and seek resources with other counties facing similar challenges. In public health over the last few years has reduced their expenditures through program restructuring and deallocation of positions. The clinic and communicable disease programs are merging under one supervisor, now called the communicable disease prevention and response unit budget. Several funding sources for public health ended in fiscal year twenty five-twenty six, including CalFresh Healthy Living Mental Health Services Act, which for years funded suicide prevention education and training in the community. A smaller amount of funding from CDPH through the new Behavioral Health Services Act rules will replace the allocation public health received previously under Mental Health Services Detection grant that funded the design and construction plans for the new public health lab.

Along with preparing their budgets for costs for of staff and program delivery, public health has been preparing for major facility improvements. This next fiscal year will include a new roof for public health main building, which is estimated to cost a million dollars, and staff would be preparing for future construction of the new public health lab. As noted here, we're looking at double the renewals for 40% of the caseload from HR1 to our self sufficiency programs. Currently, there's 21,374 individuals on CalFresh and 53,902 individuals on Medi Cal. We anticipate a large expansion of CMSP.

Currently, our caseload for CMSP is at seven. In IHSS, there's not enough funding to do the work. There are penalties for not processing timely. There are 3,114 authorized cases and 3,228 providers. The average social worker ratio for IHSS is one to three fourteen.

In child welfare, we are continuing to hold vacant positions in child welfare except for promotional opportunities. Child welfare is currently meeting all of their mandates. We've always focused on maximizing use of federal and state funds. Per your request, we looked at mandated and non mandated services and social services. The programs listed here are the major program mandates.

Our programs go through audits often, both scheduled and unscheduled. There were 30 audits in 2025 for these programs. If an audit identifies we are not meeting a mandate, for example authorizing CalFresh cases timely per regulation, then the county receives corrective action plan. These plans require additional dedicated staff time as well as potential fines. And IHSS counties became liable for penalties for late reassessments in specific types of IHSS cases that require a lot of caregiving hours.

Beginning July 20 07/01/2026, counties will be liable for an additional penalty if the state of California loses federal Medicaid funds because of late reassessments. Corrective action plans require additional administrative time to come into compliance at the time is oh, staffing is least available. This is a list of the non mandated services provided. These are services that are provided to enhance services and are connected to our mandated programs. Most of these programs are claimable for reimbursement.

We could choose not to do them, but based on the needs of our community, we choose to. We have always gone after every funding opportunity to better serve the community. There are some counties that choose not to do these non mandated services and not receive the the funding that's available. And to and to just do the bare minimum for health and human services. It is an administrative workload to build a program and then scale down if the funding is lost.

We experienced this this last year with bringing families home. Funding ended. We wound down the program, and then we then we had to begin again when the associations that that work with us helped secure funding again. If you if your board is interested in reducing these programs because they are not mandated, we should have conversations around this. I do want to say I do not recommend this based on the needs of our community.

CalFresh outreach is not mandated and is claimed through our administrative allocation. And due to the lack of match funding, we have scaled back outreach services by over 1,200,000 in the proposed budget in in this proposed budget. Is a great example of where the lack of county general fund and realignment is reducing DHHS's ability to claim available funding. Even before the big beautiful bill increased the state portion of the match, humble DHHS was under spending and under claiming approximately $5,000,000 due to the lack of match. If there are additional budget actions that are taken by your board this year impact DHHS's budgets like increased wages for staff or IHSS, this would be a good opportunity to draw down additional funds to help with that funding gap.

Here are our big projects that we're working on. We do need funding still for the public health lab. We also are looking at our ongoing services and how they will how the Mad River Crisis Triage Center will help meet the needs of the community. The navigation center should be breaking ground this year. We we've really done some really good work with Public Works and the architect for the project, so I'm feeling pretty good about that.

And Sempovirans, the budgeting for the architect and other public works costs are included in the proposed budget for fiscal year twenty six-twenty seven. If you have any questions and I apologize for the lack of pictures because I I noticed that I'm the what I didn't include goals and accomplishments because we are. Yeah we're so focused on this darn budget.

Okay bringing it back to the board. Is there any. Comments? Supervisor Arroyo.

Is there I mean, the indigent care expenses going up proportionate to other programs going down is it's sort of keeping me up. How counties

how are

folks looking at that issue?

Other counties with clinics and other services are probably in worse need than we are. There is funding available for one year is what understand. So I'm not sure if we will see funding for CMSP in this current budget. It may be in the next budget. Jessica, do you have information?

I just wanted to clarify that currently and prior to the Affordable Care Act, we have funded the CMSP participation fees through the County General Fund, not through the Public Health Fund,

Which is the 430,000, but we also need funding for the workers to do the work and, you know, to pay for services to clinics and hospitals.

Supervisor Bushnell.

Thank you for the updates. I'm not offended that there weren't pictures. Know you guys have been I know for your staff, though, you wanted to highlight, you know, what your staff's been doing. I know this budget cycle has been difficult for you, and you and I have talked about that and how you've been working with the CAO and Jessica and really, coming up with ideas around what that looks like. And I appreciate some of the collaborations that you've talked about that your department's doing to try to reduce costs.

And I think finally, I just want to say that, you know, it's been a difficult couple years with a change in administration and how things look for your department and having sudden funding streams cut and then having to pivot to try to figure that out. It's affected a lot of people, and that's difficult on everybody's fronts. And I just wanna say thank you to your staff and you for your continued thoughtfulness around all that happens with DHHS in our county.

Supervisor and Madrone.

Well, I would say that there are pictures all around us in the community. I mean, your staff, the breadth of your department, and the programs and projects you do, we encounter every day in our communities, you know, with the help you provide in public health and behavioral health and social services, family resource center support. I mean, on and on and on. So I see the pictures every day. So don't worry about that. I think we all are very, very aware of the incredible work that your staff do every day. And to do that work and to not bring it home and to carry that load every day for not very much pay, to

be

frank, is just frankly amazing to me. So we see you. Thank you.

Thank you. Alright.

I I just wanna say I I didn't I didn't miss the pictures. I actually like the numbers. So it's it's relevant and it's and it has its own picture. Obviously not the one we want to see. And so much of this is external to to what we're doing. And and it's being felt by counties across the nation. It's not just California, for sure. It is this is, we are gonna see the the fallout from this very soon. And, people will understand where that came from and vote accordingly. So thank you for this.

And I I'm not proposing to cut back on any of those programs that you were talking about there. So yeah. I think we're ready for the for the next report.

Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank your staff as well.

Alright. Thank you, chair. And the next department we will have up is the assessor's office, and assessor Howard Levy is here to present.

Alright.

Well, thanks thanks for having me here today. This is my last budget I'm going through. So as most of you probably know is I will be retiring at the end of the year. But I do wanna say to start off with thanks to Jessica over the years who have guided me through this budget process many times, same with the CEO, and then with the Board with their support. And I really appreciate it, but thank you.

So the the assessor's office is mandated by the state of California. We are required to assess all taxable property in the county, which is real property, business property, personal property such as tractors, boats, aircraft. And we're also required to do a minimum of 24 audits of businesses per year. We apply the property tax exemptions where appropriate to nonprofits, homeowners exemptions, disabled veterans are a few. We are the oversight of the assessor's office is the California Constitution and the California Revenue and Taxation Code and essentially the Board of Equalization.

This requires us to to reappraise when we're required to using fair and impartial reassessment per the tax laws in the state of California. The Board Equalization, they make sure that we are doing our appraisals fair and equitable. Direction when we come to areas that are fuzzy. And if you read tax laws, a lot of it is fuzzy sometimes. And so we do rely on them for guidance many a times.

They do surveys of all the counties. It rotates every five years. And Humboldt's been selected this year to be surveyed, is basically an audit to make sure that our assessment practices are within line of the state laws. Talk about our workload. So we average about between 5,000 to 6,000 recorded documents annually that we process each year.

This year this last year was about a little over 6,000. We're looking we're seeing that trend to probably start to decline somewhat, but we're still in the 6,000 document range. For appraisals, we average about 4,000 appraisals a year basically for change of ownership, new construction, and possessory interest. And so if you're not aware what possessory interest is, it's when a private individual or company is using government owned property. Obviously, the government agency is not taxable, but the person using that property is taxable.

And so we do provide assessments on those properties. For personal property assessments, we do about 10,000 per year. Right now, for business properties, we're doing close to that 10,000, then about 115 or so aircraft, and about 2,400 boats that we assessed annually. For exemptions, right now we have a little over 21,000 homeowners' exemptions that are applied to the property taxes. Other exemptions such as welfare, church, religious exemptions, there's a little over almost 800.

And for disabled veterans, right now we have about five seventy of those. Which the disabled veterans exemptions have increased over the last few years. Think about five years ago we had in the neighborhood of 400 now we're up to about five seventy one which I think is a great program. There is some state legislation right now trying to increase that exemption for veterans so we'll see where that goes. It's come around a couple of times and trying to increase the exemption amount.

Right now, for someone who's considered low income, it's right around 270,000 per year in exemption. And so there's legislation trying to do 100% for disabled veterans. So we'll see where that goes. So currently with our assessed values so right now we're almost $18,000,000,000 in our net assessed value which this last year was about a 3.5% increase over the prior year. For 'twenty six, we're looking my projections are going to be right in that same neighborhood at about 3.5% increase.

We are starting to see some flatlining in real estate market right now, which will have an effect on that. Current staffing, we have 27 staff, which has been reduced since 2019. We used to have about 31, 32 staff. We're down to 27. Right now, I think that's probably the minimum that we can really function to continue doing our mandated job and to keep the assessments going through timely.

Our auditor appraisers are required to do annually continuing education trainings every year. And so they're kept up to date on current laws, assessment practices, and so on. So they're required to do that annually. Investing in the assessor's office. If you're not aware, the property taxes are the biggest revenue for the County General Fund.

And especially when their sales tax decline, property tax revenue is critical to keep the general fund afloat. The tax dollars, you know, fund public safety, schools, fire districts, county roads, library, the cities and all the special districts, and of course, the general fund. There was a study done several years ago by the state auditor's office, and they said there was a loan grant program that every dollar invested in the assessor's staff created about $11 revenue in the general fund. How about some of our accomplishments? So last year, like I said earlier, we completed the tax roll with about a 3.5% increase.

We reduced our deed processing backlog at one point. We're almost a year behind. We're down due to a couple of weeks. Part of that is due that we implemented a few years ago some AI technology that helps us process the the deeds and thanks for this board approved some one time fund some funding for us to do that and we appreciate that it's helped not only our office but the public as well to keep our records up to date. We increased our e filing the business property statements right now we're in neighborhood about 1,700 pre filings per year we're hoping that increases which helps efficiency for our office And I think that some of the large filers, tax reps and stuff, it helps them be able to do that online versus to handwrite everything like they used to in the old days.

We've increased our review of Proposition eight reassessments decline in market value that is. A big one that recently is we were able to reduce our business property statement mailings which we do in our exemptions annually. Before, it was taking us about a month to go through that whole cycle. We've got that down to about a week and a half to two weeks. So which is a huge time saving not only for our staff, but it helps the public get their documents in a more timely manner.

We've also our website was one of the first in the county of some of the other departments to be ADA compliant way before the deadline in April this year. So that was a big accomplishment for us as well. Some of the challenges. We've had some staffing issues in the last couple of years. We've had about a 25% turnover rate.

Many of the folks that had left was due to salary issues. They took jobs whether within the county with higher paying positions or left the county altogether. We've lost several of the Caltrans, right of way agents and other agencies and stuff. And it really makes it difficult to for productivity when you're constantly in a training mode. So when you're constantly getting new employees, your productivity is just not there.

Know, not that they're not good employees. They just haven't had the training to fully accept the to be able to do the job on their own. Our workload, even with staff especially with staffing shortages, Prop 19 has really increased our workload. That was passed a few years ago when there was a parent child transfer, we have to reappraise it. We just marked it on the records and we moved on.

Now we have to track all that and we have to appraise it even though they may qualify for that. So it's increased our workload. And of course, just like all the other departments with the current budget issues and stuff and working as doing business is getting more expensive. And so trying to find creative ways to save money internally but still be efficient and get our job done. It's been quite a challenge.

The current assessor's budget about 80% of our budget is our salaries and benefits. Again, like I said earlier, our staffing level we're at now hopefully we can maintain that moving forward is I think that any reduction would be severe hardship not only for our office but for the county as well. We are requesting a one time additional funding for 169,000. What we plan to do is digitize all of our property records. Right now we're old school.

We have everything is hard copy. And this will create more efficiency in our office. It'll if those records are ever lost in an actual disaster, not only our office but the county would be in deep trouble because it has the records going back to the 40s and 50s and from valuation to ownership and so on. So it's critical that these are maintained and that we don't lose those. Right now, you know, just from human error sometimes they get misfiled.

We go through our vast records. There's, you know, 76,000 records. We go through them every couple years to look for misfilings. And we average probably about a 100 misfilings, if if not more, every time we do that. And so this will eliminate that. And you figure if every misfiling, if every person spent fifteen minutes searching for a record, you add that up. It adds up pretty quickly. And how much time and staff is is time is used on that. So that's a one time request to do that. And that's all I have. Any questions?

That's a good update. Any questions from the board? Seeing none, oh wait, supervisor Arroyo?

I was just gonna comment that I appreciate that you're digitizing those records and I I think that, you know, sounds like a time saver in the future. So thank you.

Yes. Any other questions?

No. You know what that means. Alright. I you're doing a great job. Yeah. We really appreciate it. And I appreciate that you letting us know of the staffing level and and where that is relative to what you think is needed or minimally required to to get the job done. Appreciate that.

We have eliminated a an appraisal tech position to add another appraiser this year. We did that through the budget processes last year. So we're hoping that our any backlogs we have in our current appraisal process will once they get up to speed will be reduced dramatically as well.

And it sounds like Supervisor Bushnell has something.

Yeah. Go ahead. You

on would be good. You kinda answered my question because I have gotten some phone calls about backlogs and the appraisals and how long it's taking.

Yeah.

And the other question was your short staff is it from budget constraints or because you don't have enough qualified people applying?

All the above. Okay. We've with the appraiser position the qualifications they basically they have to have a bachelor's degree and they can qualify. What's really challenging is our auditor appraisers. They have to have an accounting background and to find those those individuals can be really challenging.

And

and then the pay is another big piece of it. Especially someone coming out of college with an accounting degree. They can work for a CPA, for instance, and make almost twice as what the county's offering. So it's been really challenging to recruit. Today, we actually have an honor appraiser who started today. This is the first time we've been fully staffed for over a year and a half and so to answer your question about some of the appraisals you know we we had an appraiser just started a new a real property appraiser just started a couple weeks ago And and so and I think she's working in some of the Southern humble areas.

Mhmm.

And so those unfortunately have been, you know, not done timely because we just didn't have the staffing to do it.

Can I ask a question around how it can impact our budget with back appraisals and say a decreased amount of, you know, property values in Southern Humboldt are falling drastically?

They are.

And they were inflated because of cannabis

Correct.

World down there. And so how could that say if you had an appraisal I I understand you have, like, a year to do. There's some mandate around that. Right?

Yeah. Technically, legally, we have four years to we can go back four years to assess something. So for instance, if something was to change ownership four years ago and if we're just getting to it, hopefully we haven't gone that long. But if we had, we call it escape assessments for those four years.

So around that question then, because you I anticipate that in Southern Humble, especially, the values are quite a bit lower. And so then if they apply if they are due like, the appraisals are lower, then they get a credit or they get you know, what could that do to our general fund budget?

Yes. It could have a negative effect on it.

Mhmm.

If the taxes are paid in current then anything that was paid on a higher amount there would be a refund for the difference. So yes, you're correct.

Sometimes

if we are trying to get to decline market value for a lot of those properties and we've done we've addressed a lot of them and I'm sure there's others we haven't gotten to yet or we don't know about yet. I mean we don't have the staffing to go through 76,000 properties in the county. And so if people are having they believe that they're they're being over assessed they need to please have them contact our office.

Right. And I've been telling telling them that. I just I'm glad that you have a new person. I would it would be could be detrimental to the budget if we get in a position where we're four years backlogged and then Right. You know, you see a lot of declining values, especially in those rural properties down there.

Yeah.

And then lastly Yeah. Congratulations on your upcoming retirement, and thanks for the service that you've done for

the Thank you. Appreciate it. Questions?

Supervisor McBrone.

Boone was before me.

Supervisor Boone, wow. We're doing a full round.

Should've got up when you had the chance. And just for my own knowledge, when you do an assessment, are they all done physically or nowadays with all the technology we have and then you have the support of what the two neighbors sold for. And then you know you can get within a one foot radius if you go on to go by satellite so or whatever.

The answer to your question depends. If we hadn't been out to the property in numerous years and depending on the satellite imagery that we're we have access to, if we feel that we need to get out there to verify the structures that are on the build on the property, especially in the rural areas, then we do go out there. But if it's something we maybe we were out there last year and we look at the aerial, hey, you know, looks nothing's really changed and there's not really a necessity to go out there. And so as long as we have sales data to support it, then we can avoid having to go actually go out there.

I'm just thinking off the top of head, if you went to 25% less places using the technology at hand, it would save the mileage, time and probably get a lot more because I know if you're going out to the rural areas and if you're only doing one or two Right. It gets pretty high in costs up there when when when we have people buying property online just because by from out of state, they're just looking at it. Right.

Yeah. We we do do that. I mean, like I said, if we hadn't been out there for numerous years and we're not sure exactly what's there, then we would definitely need to go out there and verify it. But there's a lot of times we don't have access. We can't get on the property. The prop we try to communicate with the property owner, and they don't respond. And so we do the best we can. And we take the information that we have, and we do the best assessment we can on it at that time. Try to be fair and as as accurate as we can be with the information that we have.

Alright. I know this is budget hearing.

Or Yeah. Yeah.

Go ahead. Come back to me. That's fine. Go ahead. See see professor Madrone.

Sometimes being too quiet is although I never get in trouble when I'm quiet. At any rate, thank you. I mean, your staff and you have always been very responsive to my constituents when they've had questions or concerns or confusion over prop eight versus, you know, prop 13, you know, and all the differences there. So I wanted to really thank you for that very responsive effort by your department. And I look forward to buying you seven up to toast our achievements when we both retire at the same time coming from the virus.

Alright. Thanks, Supervisor Bushnell.

Hi, Ken. I'm gonna ask you offline.

Yeah.

Well, I wanted to ask about with the you know, you guys assess cannabis cultivation sites, and a lot of those sites have gone away, and so you're having to reassess, I guess. Is that the same process?

We we don't assess cannabis in directly. We do not

Build structures.

But you need the structures and

And tanks.

Greenhouses, water tanks

Mhmm.

And stuff like that. Yes. We do assess that.

And so is that a backlog also of three to four years to get that reassessment done as the cannabis cannabis is going away?

Not necessarily. It just depends on the area where it's located.

Okay.

And if we've been there, how you know, when's the last time we've been there and so on. But

Okay. Yeah. Thank you for that update.

Yeah. No problem.

Alright. I don't think there's any more. Okay. I'm just gonna say that, likewise, supervisor with supervisor Madrone, every time I've had a constituent that hasn't had an issue, I've been really impressed with the quick response that we've that they receive from your office, and follow-up. I just wanna say and thorough. So thank you so much.

Alright. Thank you. Thanks for that positive feedback. Yep.

Alright. Thank you, Howard. And the next department, as I mentioned, the slight switch up in the order here. So the next department will be the library, And we have interim library director Sean Hinman here to present.

Thank you all for having me here today to speak about the library. Is this better? Yes. Thank you so much for having me here to speak about the library. I'm the interim director of library services, Sean Hinman.

Just jump right in. The Humboldt County Library connects communities by offering free services that strengthen our community by educating, inspiring, and connecting people. We do this through our 11 locations. These locations serve patrons as far South as Garberville, as far East as Willow Creek, and to our Northern Trinidad branch. Each of these communities with its own needs, interests, and expectations regarding library services.

We provide resources for lifelong learning, research, entertainment, and socialization. The library provides outreach to those who can't make it to any of its locations. And the library provides programming that serves the many different interests of all the ages and patrons all around the county. Acting as two more service points to various to various locations in the county, we provide mobile outreach through our bookmobile and our library at your door programs. As a small branch on wheels, the bookmobile makes 14 different stops in the seven days and month that it's on the road.

It travels to five geographic locations, Orleans, Van Dusen, Mattoll Valley, Avenue Of The Giants, and Orec. We're pretty widespread around the county with our mobile outreach in our locations. The bookmobile consistently outperforms three of our small brick and mortar branches, highlighting the importance of connecting with these communities further out. Our Library at Your Door service serves communities in Arcata, Fortuna, and Eureka by providing library materials to people who cannot make it out of their homes to one of our locations for whatever reason. What we do, we provide print and digital material, things like books, audiobooks, magazines, AV materials, Internet and computer access, and access to historical and research documents.

We provide access to digital databases for research and learning and nontraditional items also for available for use, like our library of things at the Kim Yerton Memorial Library in Hoopa, some a place where you can check out tools or various cooking supplies, or our telescope checkout program where you can get a little closer with the stars at our Arcadia branch. We also have an ability to provide experiences through our state parks pass program and also our partnership with the zoo to provide patrons with access to their facility. We provide outreach to community organizations. We table at events and markets. We create connections with schools through field trips and site visits and even parade attendance with our mobile outreach vehicles.

Especially through the library especially through the bookmobile, the library is able to provide outreach to schools that have no library or resources that meet their needs. Some metrics we use to gauge our growth in these areas are through program attendance, checkouts, and patron registration. For this fiscal year, we're anticipating over 350,000 physical items and over a 160,000 digital items available to check out to Humboldt County residents. Our program attendance we plan to see over 21,000 individuals. At our at our ongoing programming at all of our locations throughout the year.

And at this time we anticipate seeing about 4,400 new patrons welcome to the library for this fiscal year. For some current accomplishments, we really wanna emphasize our work with the California State Library Building Forward grant, where we're able to make some of our improvements to facilities. Pictured here, have our Fortuna branch, where we're able to make ADA renovations in partnership with the city of Fortuna. And at our main library in Eureka, we saw some major infrastructure improvements. We replaced two failing boilers with two new efficient ones in partnership with Public Works, And also a new HVAC system was installed in the library server room, also in partnership with Public Works.

Our Humboldt Room hosted weddings for the first time in partnership with the clerk's office. And some of the programs that we offer countywide, our summer reading program, our tiny art show, and story walks for exploration of spaces, literacy, and engaging imagination. More accomplishments that we look forward to this year. We were proud to start work on our replacement of our bookmobile. This project is largely funded by the Humboldt Library Foundation and through community support.

This is an example of what our vehicle will look like in the end once fabrication is finished. As you can see, it's much more nimbler to get up through those areas like Panther Gap than our giant buses. This vehicle is we are excited to announce this vehicle has moved into production. They are waiting on the chassis, and they'll move into fabrication right after. We're able to find some cost savings through reduction of some supply and energy use, and we'll continue to audit areas where we can find savings.

For the upcoming twenty six, twenty seven fiscal year, the library has submitted a balanced budget. In order to do this, the library used $350,000 in one time reserve funds. We are very thankful to our library foundation to increase their contributions this year by 95,500. And we also deallocated one FTE, a library division manager, of over 130,000

in savings.

At this time, the library is exploring reduction in service hours as another as another cost saving measure. We have already reduced shipping runs and streamlined our courier services to our locations, reducing the amount of times we go out to the more further outreaches. The the the times that we can reduce smaller drops to smaller branches that don't necessarily need them, we've reduced those from the from the shipping notes. We are having current discussions with municipalities to evaluate dated MOUs and their support for the library. And all locations are now split into individual budget units, providing more transparency and a better understanding for the needs of each location.

Time studies will also be conducted this year to better evaluate staffing needs at all

of our

locations. And the major concern the library is facing is going to be a potential deficit of 350,000 in the following year. And lastly, we did make an ask of 106,000 to replace our failing integrated library system. This is our system that manages all of the ingoing, outgoing materials. It audits our everything that we have in our possession, inventories. It's the it's the heartbeat of the library outside of the people. And with that, that is my presentation.

Alright. Thank you for giving that to us. Any questions? Supervisor Bushnell.

Well, first of all, thank you. I know that you really did this on the fly, so I appreciate that. And, you know, there are some, you know, questions that have gone around library's budget. And I know you've been working hard with Jessica and CAO staff to kinda look see what that looks like in the future. And I, you know, I I hope as you settle in as interim for, you know, a while that can you know, that path can work well when we come back for budget.

I was curious about the so the 106,000 that you're asking for, is that system not working currently, Or you don't have that system?

So currently, we have a system in place. There's essentially two systems that are offered to public libraries to to provide those services.

Mhmm.

And the system that we're on is a is what's called a self hosted environment. We provide our service servers on-site. We maintain everything. IT helps us maintain those services as well. As far as the physical equipment goes, at this time, our physical infrastructure is not capable of moving forward with this

software. Okay.

And so we'd like to move to a cloud based system that would it would reduce the need for staff to be involved. It would also provide incredible efficiencies for training going forward.

Mhmm.

It would create more accuracy and less manual processes for library staff.

Okay.

And it it would also be further supported by our IT department. Currently, they don't do not support any sort of Linux environment programming.

Mhmm.

So this would move it to a more Microsoft based program that that would allow them to support us further.

Okay. And then I also wanted to say, you know, the library in Rio Dell and Garberville and Fortuna, which are my districts, and the Bookmobile are real lifelines for those communities. And especially in Southern Humboldt, the community down there, it's very small. And there's good I go to the library often there, and, you know, it's very well utilized by the constituents, and the people really enjoy it. And it it is kind of a lifeline for folks down there.

And the update, and thanks to the ADA team in Fortuna, is really beautiful. And Fortuna is really loving that. So I just want to thank you for all that work. Thank you.

Anybody else? Yeah. Thank you. And I I I receive compliments often from constituents. Some of them are my family members who use the library in Southern and in Arcadia. So thank you so much.

Alright.

We're good to go.

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Yep. That we had oh, there you are.

Thank you, Sean, and thank you, chair. Our next department will be the planning and building department and we have director John Ford here to present.

It's a little off from the list I have here so

The public defenders just moved to the end.

Okay. I did.

Thank you Jessica. Good afternoon chair and members of the board. John Ford with the Planning and Building Department to present the budget for the Planning and Building Department. We'd like to thank the CAO's office, not only for their continual help, including this year, but in past years when the budget has been far more tenuous and difficult, really appreciate the fact that they've stood by us to help us get through that. So moving directly into our budget, I just we do have four budget units and I'm gonna go through each one of them today.

But one of the things I hope that you see is that we're really kinda trying to break down the silos, maybe not because it's the best thing to do, but it is the the best thing to to do from an organizational and a budget standpoint. So I'll present that. So currently, we have 54 positions that are proposed. There is one new position, and that's for a code enforcement manager. So overall, this is really a kind of status quo from last year.

We have 46 filled, which means there are eight vacant, and I'll explain those momentarily. One of the things that we are doing, as I mentioned, that we are moving this the people around a little bit and putting them in different budget units to provide support where there is a demand and remove them from jobs where there's not as much work. So the the kind of the I guess it's a periwinkle color, the kind of blue, is Budget Unit 262, and that's the building inspection budget unit. The kinda salmon color is a code enforcement. The green is, two seven seven, which is current planning.

That also currently is cannabis planning and also the post approval monitoring. The gray is long range planning. And over to the right, we have the kind of the support team and then also the business team. But they're they're funded out of February. So one of the things in my pointer can be seen.

So I'm gonna kind of point this out is up here we have a senior planner. And this is in February. It's funded out of February. But at the counter, we have a senior and an associate planner there. And the reason we do that is that so things that come in that don't really need to go into the back and sit there for a while can be acted on right at the counter.

That gives them that opportunity to do that. The yellow colors are currently vacant positions. One of the things that we currently have going on, we're not proposing in this budget unit, but it's being done right now, is that we've got a planner out of two seven seven working with the permit team to help answer questions to to actual building permit questions. And that may seem a little out of place, but it does give good cross training. And so there's not that hard silo between a planner and the building team.

We also have a planner stationed in code enforcement. That's the green there. They're functioning as a code compliance officer. And so we can see there's three vacant code compliance officers. But we've moved a planner there and we're gonna refill one of the other code compliance officers in the near future.

But that gives us the ability to take the pressure off of two seventy seven and give aid and help to another budget unit. And then we've also moved two planners out of two seventy seven and into long range planning. One of those is a senior planner. The other is an associate planner who's actually form functioning as the program coordinator, which is the yellow down at the bottom. And what that gives us the ability to do is fill those positions with existing staff while the number of current planning permits is drastically dropping.

So the trends that we're facing are are kind of interesting. I'll point out the building permit trends in a minute, but the building revenue is is actually going up. And it's going up by a lot. And it's all it's it's just a interesting dichotomy of what's going on there. Planning permit revenue was down a little bit.

It's only down by 3% this year. Some of that is because there are still cannabis people who are paying their bills to keep their permits active. And so we've got that going on, but the number of permits are going down. So it's kind of difficult to predict the future with external factors, economy, interest rates, the cannabis market. So we're being pretty conservative and using this opportunity to cross train people.

So this is the overall department budget. You can see that our revenues come in at just under $3,400,000. The budget would spend about $9,500,000 and the general fund contribution is about $6,100,000. The way budgeting is done is that our grant revenue that does pay for some of our planners pays for some of the work that's done, doesn't show up in our budget. It shows up in the grant's budgets.

And and so that's what the little star is. So here's some just some things from the building division. They did almost 7,400 inspections this year. They plan checked 890 permit applications, they issued 1,783 applications, and they issued 258 stop work orders and substandard housing inspections. And then correlating that with the types of permits, 69 of those were new single family dwellings.

18 were for manufactured homes. Many of those were replacements of existing manufactured homes. And then there was 35 accessory dwelling units and junior accessory dwelling units. Says 12 new commercial. That that's a little bit misleading because those are not 12 new commercial buildings.

Those are largely things like charging stations, telecommunication facilities, other things that are done that are are stand alone, but are are not new commercial buildings. There was 83 modifications to commercial buildings. The big addition is people are remodeling their existing homes. We had 600 of those permits and you'll see on the next slide, that is a substantial increase and that number has been going up each year. We also had 247 photovoltaic applications.

That won't add up to the number I presented previously because we also have reroof permits and solar permits, and those are actually done by the computer. Those are just issued online. Nobody even touches those. So here's some of the trends, and you can see new single family residences are going down. The ADU, JEDUs have been somewhat constant, but the residential additions have gone up dramatically in the last five years.

Years. The new commercial has gone down from 2021 dramatically. The commercial remodels has been fairly constant, manufactured homes fairly constant, then photovoltaic is somewhat constant, although it's gone down a little bit in the last couple of years. So what are the things or the accomplishments from February from building is that they did implement and maintain a digital referral process. And this made the whole referral process and permit process more efficient.

The counter team process 95 short term rental applications that would be to approval. And then the Exela system is now automated and issuing communications. Right when something's done, the the system immediately sends out an email. The goals for this coming year are to transition into the 2025 California building code. We're also looking to enable people to rather than having to call in to schedule inspections that they can get right online, choose the time that they want the inspection done, and and do that online.

And then the building inspectors are being equipped with tablets. So when they're out in the field, they can make real time updates to permits and things that will feed right back into Accella. And and they also see what's going on there. So this is the budget for the building division. The projected revenue is $11,000,000 about $700,000.

The expenditures are about two point little under $2,800,000 and the general fund contribution is just a little bit over $1,000,000. The personnel are 14 within this this budget unit. So moving on to code enforcement. The code enforcement unit this year closed a 108 cases. 215 new cases came in.

We did perform two abatements. By the end of the year, we will have taken four properties into receivership. One of the strategies that we're currently pursuing is that we're looking at receiverships first as a first alternative to clean up a site rather than trying to pay for an abatement. And with the receivership, the thing that happens is when the property is sold, the county, we get our cost back immediately. So it's not taking it out and putting a lien on the property.

That's almost a real time reimbursement. There's over a thousand active cases. And then one of the things that has been done that is becoming helpful is that investigators, the way that cases are assigned and pursued, they've been assigned by district. So the county's been broken down into four districts. And so the each investigator has a district to work with it.

And then this is the budget. The revenue is pretty small for code enforcement. A lot of that is because with liens and things like that, you can't tell when the money is gonna come back for staff expenses. The projected expenditure is about $1,600,000 and the general fund contribution is just a little bit less than $1,600,000 There's eight full time positions budgeted here. We are looking at adding a code enforcement manager.

Then the objectives for this year is that as the board is aware, we've been undertaking the organizational analysis of code enforcement. That should be done within the next budget year. And so we'll want to implement those recommendations, hire a new code enforcement manager and allow the code enforcement unit to just become more efficient and more effective. Under current planning, the current planning has approved a 170 permits. They did 820 compliance inspections.

Those are largely for cannabis permits. 300 of those were not completely in compliance. One of the things that we've done is we've written letters to those folks letting them know that they have until October of this year to come into compliance. And then at that point, we're going to start suspensions. And if that doesn't work, we'll begin revocations.

We've also done sixty one minuteing inspections. So the accomplishments is that we processed two thirteen permits action. You'll notice that that is different than the 170 I just mentioned above. The other numbers were related to permits that were denied largely cannabis permits. I didn't really want to say denial of a bunch of permits is an accomplishment because it doesn't feel good.

But it did represent a substantial amount of work. And we've been working to reconcile the permits that are out of sync with their major s taxes. And so we're moving forward with that as you will see tomorrow. So the objectives for current planning is to continue to prioritize housing projects. We are actively reassigning planners to other units to address workload, not only the workload in other units, but also the fact that there's a declining workload in current planning.

And it's good to have that kind of cross training. We're also gonna have planners rather than having a separate permit approval team or permit monitoring team is to have them do both the compliance inspections and work on staff reports and work on administrative permits. And then we continue to become more effective using technology to do remote inspections. I think our goal this year is to do at least 50% of all permits remotely. And then it's just time to clean up the legacy twenty sixteen cannabis applications.

So the current planning budget, we are projecting just a little bit over $1,000,000 as revenue. And then expect to spend about $3,300,000 to address the things that we've got to address, which requires a general fund contribution of $2,200,000 And this is the biggest unit of the budget of the department. It's got 27 filled positions. Which brings us to long range planning. In the last year, we were able to see the regional climate action plan adopted.

We're able to see the policy for vehicle miles traveled adopted. We were able to complete the general plan housing report. We were able to see the McKinleyville Town Center zoning amendment adopted. And then we're actually able to have seven ordinances certified by the Coastal Commission. And so going into the next year, we're going to continue to work on coordination on a regional basis.

And that includes working on the King Salmon Fields Landing, resiliency planning project to do a feasibility analysis to determine if there's anything that can be done to address the sea level rise there. We're also working primarily with HCOG and other entities within HCOG to do a comprehensive transit analysis of the entire county. And then we also are working on a natural and working lands carbon stock inventory and feasibility study that will involve a lot of different people and professions on that. We're also working through the Humble Bay Area plan update that needs to be adopted this year and we've got to complete the seventh cycle of the housing element. And that one of our request is related to doing that.

We plan on doing that in house. And what we're doing to accomplish that is we're moving a planner up into long range planning to do that. And then we've also included within our budget funding the regional climate committee manager. That is a position that will be within the regional climate committee, which may be in HCOG, it may be in RCEA. But there is an obligation from each of the jurisdictions to fund that.

So we've included that money for that, the county share within our budget. So this is the long range planning budget. You can see that a lot of the money comes in from grant revenue. And some of the and then there's just work that's done within the department itself. We have five fill positions, two are related to housing and grants, three are related to planning.

We're moving one up to work on the housing element. And then our ARPA is to fundamentally work on the housing element, we're also bringing up the idea of sharing some of the work with the aviation department to do a planning study for land for land use plan and economic development plan related to the airport. And and so that's that's what that request is about. So I just kinda wanted to show we've got four basic planners. There's also a manager in here.

But the first FTE is working on the housing element. The Glendale Field or Glendale that's not Fields Landing, it's Fieldbrook. Sorry. Glendale Fields Field Brook plan and the Scenic Highway designation as to kind of second and third work in their work program. Those aren't nearly gonna consume as much time as the housing element, but so that people stay busy.

There's a primary and a secondary and a tertiary assignment so that they keep working on stuff. And then FTE two is gonna be working on implementing the cycle six housing element. We've still got a number, think about six or seven ordinances and action items that we need to do to finish off the twenty nineteen housing element. That position is also going to be working on the rezonings associated with the general plan to implement the general plan. And then there's another change to state law that has changed to the ADE regulations that we need to update our ordinance to reflect.

And then FTE three is largely engaged with the Humboldt Area Plan That is a very compressed schedule at this point. And then FTE-four is working on King Salmon, Fields Landing, carbon sequestration study. They're currently actively writing the low impact camping ordinance and then a noise ordinance. And then we also wanna come out with kind of a ordinance to address recreational facilities within our natural and working lands. I just probably shouldn't do this, but I thought I would just because it's likely that these are gonna be in front of the board at some level in the near future.

I'm hearing a lot about addressing these issues. One is detention facilities. People are scared to death that if we approve a new warehouse, it's gonna become a detention facility. And then there's a lot of talk about onshore support facilities for offshore oil. And then onshore support facility for deep sea mining and then also concerned about data centers.

So those are things that are floating out there. They're not on our work program currently, but they're likely to be brought forward to see if the Board wants to take a look at those. So just our path forward, really we are being budget conscious. We're working at not hiring new people. We're working at filling gaps with existing staff even if it's cross training from another department.

Primarily the current planning and code enforcement efforts are gonna be to address the backlogs that exist there to clean those things up. We continue to place a high emphasis on finding grants and particularly grants to fund planning work, but also other work that's needed within the county. And then really we the the big emphasis is long range planning to fulfill the board's strategic initiative. With that I'd be happy to answer any questions. Sorry I went so fast. No, that's great.

It was a

good.

Alright. Supervisor Madrone, let's start with you.

Well, said it earlier today with another division, another department, but wow. I mean, you know, the breadth of work in your department is just amazing. I really appreciate the reorganization work you're doing and trying to look at ways to be more efficient and always have that filler work in their box. So, yeah, maybe they're done on their primary assignment, but what's next? Right? So thank you for all that, John. And I think we're very lucky to have you moving all these things forward. Yeah. Your last list, I know you said probably shouldn't do this, but it was good to do it because, yeah, the community is talking about all those things. So I don't know how we get it all done, but I appreciate all the hard work in in your department. Thank you.

Mhmm. Supervisor Bushnell.

Thank you. I want to also thank you for the reorganization that's happened within the department. You know that that was came out of budget crisis a few years ago, and you continue to look for ways to manage your budget within your budget. Appreciate that. It's for my district and for Humboldt, your staff has been very responsive.

I know that there's been, you know, submittal of permits are online now, reduced hours, closed on Friday. All of those things have been in response to the budget crisis and has made it more difficult for constituents to access. But I I continue to hear how your department is responding well to to those risk restricted hours and restricted times and still trying to serve the communities. I encourage constituents to continually reach out, email, do those things which seem to be working. And, lastly, you know, with cannabis, especially in my district, it's been a lot for your department.

It's been a lot for the community. And the work continues forward, and I think that there's a better process that has come out of that. And I hear really good things about inspection processes, interaction with staff, and just really want to thank your department and know that we're always moving trying to move forward and to better processes.

Thanks. Supervisor Roe.

Thank you. I know public works also mentioned surface or mining operations. Could you I didn't I realized I don't know how the work is divided. Could you speak to that briefly?

We we Public Works does the mining. We do the regulatory part. So they have permits that to to do the surface mining. And we administer those permits. And Public Works has some of those permits.

Okay. And then so some are held by Public Works, some are held by other entities?

Yes.

And we do. Okay. Thank you. That's good to know.

Alright. On this side over here. I have just a couple of questions. And it has to do with and again, thanks to everybody who does the everyday of what you do. Unsung heroes on helping us, you know, maintain civil society and function, you know, and and get along.

And these are the you know, you're part of that construct of how we how we do that and live on the land, and so I appreciate that very much. You brought up the offshore oil measure, which we took a we took a position here on the board on that. But also in 1988, there was measure b that the that the county passed. And subsequently, there's been no action from the from the board of supervisors to codify measure b as was I think was directed by the vote of the people in 1988. So how hard do you think that would be to sort of get that over the over the, you know, the finish line to actually do what was asked of us of this this board in 1988?

I don't think the work itself is all that hard. I think that, you know, it really just needs to I was planning on bringing that in and allowing the board to say yes, go and do that. And then give a priority to it. Because really the department shouldn't just pick something up and run with it without the board saying yes, go do it.

Okay. And do you anticipate because you're right. I think we are hearing, at least I am hearing from folks in relation to the things you just mentioned, which is now we're just seeing it in news feeds all over the place that that local jurisdictions all over the country are having land use ordinances around data centers, which is huge, exploding all over the place Yep. And detention centers, like you mentioned. And so have you been looking at some of those? And I'm just kind of wondering how if that comes to if that if that gets prioritized to from the sports perspective, what do you think? Is that is that would that be a heavy lift

I don't think those are a heavy lift. The best ordinances are really clear. The hardest, not hardest but critical part will just be the findings upon which it's based to take that action.

Right. Okay. Yeah. Because, I mean, those seem fairly finite. They're not broad land use issues around accessory re dwelling units or noise ordinances or signs or, you know, that can just be there's not a lot of detail that goes into defining what is a detention center and what is a data center.

Right.

Okay. I was just wondering about that. And I appreciate it. And then I wanted to also thank you for working with the aviation department, but I also assume the economic development department as well in terms of getting to getting it together for doing some land use planning and around our well, specifically around the airport in McKinleyville, but I assume we could have opportunities development, ancillary development on our other airports as well, and we should be thinking about that too. So I appreciate that.

Thanks for being here. Thanks for running through this. Thanks for letting us know what's going on at this report, but also the community at large. Really appreciate it. And with that, I think move to the next.

All right. Thank you, John. Thank you, Chair. Our final presentation is from the public defender's office, and we have public defender Luke Brownfield here to present.

Thank you. Luke Brownfield, public defender here to present both our public defender's budget, conflict council's budget, and alternate council budget. I'm gonna focus on alternate council budget mostly because we've never done that before, or we haven't done it in fifteen, twenty years. The budget for the main public defender's office and conflict council are pretty much staying the same. They are increased a little bit, and that's from the raises that you gave to the attorneys.

And I wanted to thank you again for that. Alternate conflict counsel is something that we've been working on with the CAO's office, trying to come up with a plan on how to deal with the increasing costs and difficulties of finding private attorneys to take criminal cases. Right now, I think we only have two private attorneys that are willing to take criminal cases. And they are it's been increasing in price. So the thought is by creating conflict counsel or alternate council, we can get better representation, more consistent representation, but also save the county money in the long run.

It may not save the county a lot of money right away because they will still have quite a few cases that have already gone to private attorneys.

I'm sorry. Can you do a little reminder on what the I I I conflict counsel, but can you remind me about alternate counsel? Okay. Is it like secondary conflict counsel?

Second secondary office. So when both offices have conflicts, it would now go to a third office. But why do conflict councils and not those offices even exist? Well, when individuals are charged with crimes, they are we are constitutionally entitled to have them get legal representation. Ethical conflicts prevent one office from representing codefendants in a case as well as related parties.

So victims, witnesses, adverse witnesses, things like that. Separate defense offices are required to maintain the independent representation confidentiality of clients. And the increasing conflict cases in Humboldt County have exceeded the capacity of the two offices that we currently have. Like I said, the increased complexity of criminal cases with body body worn camera, all the video evidence, it's getting more difficult, taking more time for each case. There's also just a higher volume of conflict related appointments, more more codefendant cases being charged.

Once we've, you know, some of the higher profile cases that we've had lately, multiple codefendants in that case, and then lots of that both officers have already represented. We have had a limited capacity to absorb these additional conflict cases internally because we can't just put up ethical walls and still have the same staff working on these cases. That has created the heavy reliance on the private attorneys taking appointments. These private attorneys, over time, are more expensive. Often time, those cases go to trial, some sometimes needlessly, and they oftentimes cases last a lot longer with a private attorney rather than a public attorney.

It's also difficult to get it find attorneys right now for appointments, so people are sitting in jail having never seen their attorney and not knowing when an attorney will be appointed to them or come to see them and even talk about their case. Also, private attorneys are often withdrawing from cases even after they've been appointed, especially when it's a difficult client or a very complex case. So the creation of alternate counsel. This would be a third tier indigent defense office, structurally independent from the public defender and conflict counsel office. We would change our design on how we took cases to hopefully maximize the amount of cases we can take and limit the amount of cases that would go to private attorneys.

Hopefully I mean, we're not going be able to completely eliminate it because that just doesn't exist. But hopefully make it so that it's extremely few cases that are getting private attorneys. This will create a better defense system for those that are accused with crimes. It'll be more more coherent, cohesive. I would still oversee the third office as well.

However, maintaining the ethical walls, I couldn't get involved with the specific cases, mostly for management and things like that, not with specific case questions or motions or anything like that. So, yeah, it's separate case management and independent ethical structure, but still with me overseeing it. What would be the benefits of an alternate council? It obviously reduces the reliance on private appointed council, and that's probably the main benefit that the county would see. I would estimate that it's gonna be a year or two until we really see benefits of this because it's going to take time.

A lot of these cases, as most everybody knows, drag on for a year more before they see trial. So we'll still have a lot of cases that we're still paying private attorneys for. Also would expand the internal representation capacity. Now we can take more cases as a whole. Between the three cases, we'd be adding five more attorneys.

We can take on all these other cases. Would improve the continuity and consistency of the representation. We would have more oversight as right now we're just hiring private attorneys that don't really have any oversight at all except from sometimes with the courts. It would enhance the long term budget predictability as we're seeing now with one particular case that's going to be very expensive that we had to hire private attorneys on. Having this third office would hopefully eliminate that, and we wouldn't have if there were other high profile cases that are gonna be expensive, we should be able to handle it internally instead of hiring now.

It would also support sufficient case management and strengthens the overall indigent defense infrastructure. The long term goal is to improve the accountee's ability to manage increasing conflict caseloads, maintain ethical and constitutional compliance, use our public resources more efficiently over time, and create a more stable and sustainable and the defense system for Humboldt County.

That's a lot

going on. A lot.

Yeah. There are

Feel for you.

So I'd I'd should add. This is a great plan. We're gonna implement it. It's gonna probably take a little while to implement this. Hiring five attorneys is gonna be very difficult. I had a misdemeanor attorney position open for the last two and a half years that is just getting filled on June 1. With the turn, I think we're getting more applicants now. The pay raises really helped with that. So we are seeing more applicants. I think I will be able to fill it, but it's going to take some time.

Also logistically, we're going to have to find an office that's big enough to fit a whole another, you know, 12 employees. Right. Okay.

Supervisors. Alright. Supervisor Royale.

I'm sorry did you say what the cost relationship to current expenditures was?

I don't know exactly what the current expenditures. Yeah.

So a couple things there. We're estimating the alternate council budget based on the budget for conflict council. So just under $2,000,000 As Luke mentioned, we're not expecting that we'll get even close to that $2,000,000 in the coming year while we're hiring and finding a place and all of that. Our current indigent defense costs are that range between $1,500,000 to $2,000,000 a year as is. But as Luke mentioned for the coming year we will be recommending a contingency for one particular high profile case that is likely to be very expensive.

And so all it takes is one case like that and it blows that budget out of the water.

Supervisor Madrom.

Thank you chair. Well Luke thank you for the hard work you're doing there. Appreciate trying to come up with a plan to try and long term reduce costs because that's unattainable you know to keep doing what we're doing. So thank you for that. I also wanted to thank DA Eads for her cooperation in deep funding three positions letting those go and sharing that change not only with the DA lawyers, attorneys, but also yours.

So thank you Stacy for that incredible team effort there. I know that was not easy, but without it, we wouldn't have had it. And my sense is, I mean, the hope was that that would improve retention. Are you seeing that? It

has. Yes. It definitely has.

Well, again, thank you, Cause that was a big part of it. Appreciate that. So thanks. And I know you appreciate it. Oh, yeah.

Alright. Well, I'm just glad to see there's a plan. And I know it's taken a while to sort of get there, but it takes a while to make a good plan. So I I I just wanna appreciate that. And I know I know there's been, that transition in in relation to that. So, unless there's anything else that anyone wants to say to close this out, yes.

I was just gonna clarify for your board that adding the alternate council office in the long term is not likely to reduce costs regularly but make them more predictable and contain them.

Right. That's that has value. Supervisor Madrone.

So we didn't do everything. We did a lot of departments today, nine of them, but we have what four or five others still to go or more?

This was optional again this year and this is all of the departments that elected to participate.