If you’re looking for interesting entertainment this morning, you might take a gander at the Board of Supervisors meeting round about 10 a.m. or so. That’s when the board is going to be doing another dosey-do in its ongoing reorganization of the Community Development Services Department – ostensibly to save money, or to streamline county operations, or to accomplish any of dozens of other high-minded goals, but actually to conduct the far less noble business of politics as she is played.

The fun in all this is to watch how the Supes and staff decide to drape the sausage-making in finer garments. In this sense, the Times-Standard’s playbill for this morning’s festivities is perhaps a bit lacking. Let me give it another shot.

Back in February, the Board of Supervisors voted to split Community Development Services in two. The veil at the time was that the powerful department had just grown too big; that heading effectively was more than any mere mortal could accomplish. Presented like that, it almost seemed coincidental that CDS’s rump portion – the much smaller part of the old staff concerned exclusively with economic development, rather than planning and construction – was handed to longtime CDS head Kirk Girard. Someone new would be hired to head the more important planning department.

Now, as some background: Girard had, in previous years, become politically hot. Pressure groups like the Humboldt Coalition for Property Rights had been hounding him for years, principally because he served as a convenient whipping boy for their efforts to undo the Humboldt County General Plan Update, which has been a decade or more in the making, thanks in no small part to said organizations’ legal threats. Eureka kazillionaire Rob Arkley went on the radio to call Girard “a habitual liar.” To a board racing to complete the general plan update before its makeup changes in December, such political pressure couldn’t be of much help. Bone: tossed.

So Girard had lost political backing, and the easiest way to dispose of him would be via remotion. Whatever his actual faults, the majority of the board seemed to agree that he had faithfully fulfilled the charge that previous boards had given him vis a vis the general plan update, which is an ambitious document. So it wouldn’t do to let him go completely, and to do so would possibly raise sticky legal complications besides. So Supervisors Bass and Sundberg’s effort to put Girard’s new position out for applications – to force the man to reapply for his position with the county alongside all the other schlubs who might like a shot – quietly failed.

If you still need more evidence to build the case that this whole departmental reorganization was nothing more than an ignominious attempt to drop the hot potato – to move around whole divisions of county employees in order to neither stand with Girard nor against him – than you need only look to today’s agenda. Last week Girard announced he would be scooting off to greener pastures in Santa Clara County, and all of a sudden, what do you know – maybe we don’t need that standalone economic development department after all! Maybe there’s a better way! According to the report filed by Supervisors Smith and Sundberg, the board’s budget subcommittee:

At this time, the Board is faced with a new decision whether to appoint a new Director of Economic Development and Natural Resources when Mr. Girard leaves County employment or to modify the previous reorganization plan. Your Board’s Budget Subcomittee believes that the most fiscally prudent course is not to fill the department head position and merge the two divisions within EDNR into other existing County departments.

So, uh, yeah. That’s a good idea now.