MENDOCINO Co., 8/15/21 — The Board of Supervisors is looking at a busy week with quite a few items of public interest on the agenda for their regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday morning, including the emergency alert notifications we depend on in natural disasters, housing, appointments to several key boards and ad hoc committees and a consent agenda that will earmark nearly $20 million of disaster settlement money from Pacific Gas and Electric.
One item on the agenda is a public hearing on a plan to allocate nearly $2.1 million to fund renovations, operations and case management services at the Live Oak Apartments facility in Ukiah — which was a hotel purchased with public money through Project Homekey and converted into housing for the homeless. This funding is part of the Permanent Local Housing Allocation Program.
There’s an ad-hoc committee update on the county’s efforts to improve early warning alerts in emergencies and natural disasters, with a focus on the county’s options for collaboration with other government agencies. This matter is being continued from the Aug. 3 meeting.
There are a handful of other ad-hoc committees up for discussion and possible action or appointments, including a committee to respond to the recent civil grand jury report finding that efforts to modernize the county government’s Information Technology (IT) infrastructure were several years behind schedule. There’s also a number of applicants who may be interviewed by the board for appointment to the redistricting commission, which will help guide the county through the arduous process of redrawing district boundaries based on new data from the decennial census, and a resolution to establish a new “cannabis standing committee.”
This week’s consent calendar, all of which is assumed to be uncontroversial and slated to pass without discussion unless otherwise requested by one of the supervisors or a member of the public, leads off with $19.6 million in earmarks for disaster settlement funds from Pacific Gas & Electric. The revised spending priorities before the board read like a grab bag of one-time expenditures for local firefighters, water districts and other local agencies. The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office is slated to get $500,000 for a new Emergency Operations Center facility and $1.1 million for vehicle replacement. The Mendocino County Department of Transportation is getting $1.4 million for road and bridge repair, and the Redwood Valley-Calpella Fire District is getting $1.5 million for new fire engines. The list goes on, but these are only earmarks based on roughly estimated expenditures. The next step is for county staff to prepare contracts for the distribution of funds.
Elsewhere on the consent calendar, there’s $47,529.23 for upgrades to internet technology equipment at county libraries and an emergency coastal development permit for the Mendocino Unified School District to install four new portable classroom buildings.
Tuesday’s meeting begins at 9 a.m. and will be available on the county’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSYcX7uSxr-GyRh20JtuwFg.
