I’ve been reporting on the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors for seven years, and I believe that today’s agenda is the craziest one I’ve ever seen.

Sure, there have been plenty of meetings with big-ticket items — public spectacles, essentially. Hours and hours and hours of citizen testimony, battles being fought, stands being taken. The CAC meeting a few weeks ago is the most recent example. But never have I seen so many matters of consequence on one schedule.

The morning kicks off with a budget update, in which some layoffs to law enforcement will be rescinded. In the face of some personal attacks from sheriff’s deputies, County Administrative Officer Phillip Smith-Hanes will fall on his sword and take a five percent pay cut. 

There are time-set special presentations on homeless services and the return of state parks land to the Yurok Tribe.

Those things, amazingly, are nothing more than a little lagniappe for the gut-busting three-course meal to follow: Redistricting, the long-delayed and politically fraught appointment to the North Coast Railroad Authority and the latest and most high-profile chapter in the ongoing Humboldt Waste Management Authority/Arcata Recycling Center drama, which item, alone, staff estimates will take about two-and-a-half hours.

Even the closed session items are juicy: labor negotiations, lawsuits to and from Humboldt Sunshine and the Hummingbird Healing Center and “an oral threat of litigation by attorney Allison Jackson to County Counsel on June 1, 2011,” whatever that may be.

And I have to miss it all. Tell me what happens, will you?