Crossed wires. Photo by cottonbro studio via Pexels.

The latest report from the 2022-2023 Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury paints a not-so-pretty picture of the first floor of the Humboldt County Courthouse, where the Board of Supervisor, the County Administrative Office and the Office of the County Clerk Clerk of the Board — the latter two of which support the Board’s work — are quartered.

These offices are the head of the snake of county government. As the GJ notes, the Board of Supervisors is both the legislative and the executive head of the county. Supervisors not only decide how the county should spend an annual budget in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars, but also oversee the projects that they undertake with that half a billion.

So it’s not so good, in the opinion of the Grand Jury, that the firehose of information that comes into these offices isn’t adequately tagged and managed and forwarded to the appropriate inbox for action and/or information. The result, it alleges, is “poor direction, poor oversight and missed deadlines.”

One way this chaos manifests, according to the Grand Jury, is in the sometimes very slipshod and haphazard way in which various county-created advisory boards and commissions meet … or don’t. The Jury writes:

The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors is at the center of a complex “input” and “output” information flow, but there is no log or calendar of communication received or due to be received or sent systematically distinguishing information from action items. The BOS is, for example, unaware that several committees may only be meeting sporadically, may have vacancies, may lack diverse community representation, may not be submitting mandated advisory reports to the BOS, or may be inactive. The Audit Committee, Behavioral Health Board, and Disaster Council are cases in point.

What’s the problem with these cases in point? Well, for instance, the Disaster Council, which was instituted in 2015 and to which the Board of Supervisors appoints a member every year, appears not to have ever met since that date. The Audit Committee has met only three times in the last two years. 

Why do we have committees and commissions and councils on the books that meet rarely or never? The GJ believes that the County has more or less forgotten that they exist, or hasn’t been able to unbury itself from the informational deluge long enough to get them going again.

“It appears the BOS has a reactive approach to County tasks instead of a proactive approach,” the GJ writes.

What’s the solution? The Grand Jury doesn’t care for the fact that the Board of Supervisors share clerks from the County Clerk’s office to help manage the  info flow. Hire more clerks, the GJ says, and also assign each supervisor her or his own, dedicated clerk. Do that starting in January! Also, get those functionally inactive committees up and running again. Simple!

Elsewhere in their tour of the top offices, the Grand Jury finds that: 

  • There’s a general lack of representation from Humboldt’s eight federally recognized tribal entities in the Board’s advisory bodies. Get more tribal representation on those committees, please!
  • The county should employ a full-time grant writer, so as to go after more grants.

Read the full Grand Jury report at this link.

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