UKIAH, CA., 7/21/26 — The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors approved a three-year contract with the county’s largest employee union Tuesday, after months of workers telling the board it had broken the services the county provides residents.
The agreement with Service Employees International Union Local 1021 runs from July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2029, superseding the contract the board adopted in January 2024. Supervisors adopted the resolution, approving it unanimously this morning, then adopted two more on the same 5-0 vote, both covering Teamsters Local 856 units — probation employees and the county’s public attorneys.
The county’s own staff report puts the cost of the SEIU agreement at an “approximate increase over 3 FY years [of] $6 million,” drawn from “various budget units.” The report says explicitly that the money is not budgeted in the current fiscal year.
The contract gives all classifications a 3% cost-of-living increase in year one, plus a floor of $23 an hour at the fifth step of the pay scale. Years two and three are listed as “2-3% COLA based on identified triggers.” Neither the staff report nor the union’s announcement says what those triggers are, and only the first year’s raise is guaranteed.
What the contract does
Beyond the first-year raise, the agreement raises the county’s health insurance contribution to 100% for employee-only coverage on the Bronze plan. On the Gold and Silver plans, the contribution goes to 80% for employee-only coverage and 78% for dependents. On-call premium goes up $1 an hour. Bilingual pay goes up $10 a pay period. Employees with eight to 15 years of service get more vacation accrual. Juneteenth becomes a holiday, and the existing floating holiday stays.
The union’s members voted on the agreement before the supervisors tackled it. Balloting closed at noon Monday, and A’Kesh Eidi, chapter president of SEIU 1021. told the board Tuesday the agreement had passed with 96.94% approval. Eidi thanked supervisors for bargaining in good faith.
“No unfair labor practices were filed this time around,” Eidi said. “Marked improvement over last time.”
The union has spent months warning supervisors the county can’t hold onto the people who deliver its services. In announ1cing the ratification, SEIU said Mendocino carries a 47% vacancy rate in public health, 38% in mental health and 32% in substance use disorder services, and that the board has eliminated nearly 300 full-time positions in two years.
Those are the union’s groupings rather than the county’s. Public Health is one county department; Behavioral Health and Recovery Services is another, offering both mental health and substance use disorder services.
The county also counts differently. Measured by bargaining unit — the group of employees a union represents — its own report puts the vacancy rate at 16.08% among SEIU-represented workers and 15.67% countywide. The two aren’t measuring the same thing: SEIU broke its numbers out by service area, while the county reports its own by bargaining unit.
The two Teamsters contracts
The two Teamsters agreements are less alike than they look.
The probation contract runs the same three years as SEIU’s. The public attorneys’ agreement is backdated a full year, to July 1, 2025, meaning those lawyers have been working without a contract since last summer, and the first year of their four-year deal is already spent.
The unit is also an unusual one. Its classifications are listed in an appendix to the agreement. They span three offices: the district attorney’s, from deputy district attorneys through the chief deputy; the public defender’s, including the Alternate Defender office that takes the cases the public defender can’t; and the county’s child support attorneys. Prosecution and defense sit in the same bargaining unit, represented by the same union.
The agreement doesn’t treat them identically. Deputy district attorneys are expected to be available after hours and are credited 48 hours of administrative time off, replacing a 218-hour cap on the time they could previously bank. Public defenders and alternate defenders have their own provision.
A million dollars for positions the county cut
Minutes before taking up the union contracts, the same board agreed to fill six sheriff’s positions that already existed on paper but had been left unfunded, at a cost to the general fund of $1,043,465.
Administrative Capt. Jason Caudillo told supervisors the positions had been defunded on purpose, “as a cost-savings measure that we’ve worked hand-in-hand with the CEO’s office to show some cost savings for the county.”
Sheriff Matt Kendall said his office is short-staffed as violent crime rises, with eight employees out on injury leave, several of whom he doesn’t expect back. Caudillo said the vacancy rate, reported to the board at 33%, climbs to “40 or 45 percent” once those absences are counted.
The sheriff’s office patrols the unincorporated county but not the city of Ukiah, which has its own police department. Its busiest patrol area is the central inland sector, run out of the sheriff’s office’s Ukiah headquarters, covering the unincorporated Ukiah valley and the inland county around it. Half of all the office’s calls for service come from there, Caudillo said, and that is where the shortage bites hardest.
Two of the office’s sectors are running without first-line supervisors, leaving lieutenants to cover sergeant duties.
One central-sector day shift is staffed by a single deputy and a sergeant, and the other shift is filled with deputies working overtime.
Two of the six positions carry no cost to the general fund. They are paid for over five years by a grant from the Board of State and Community Corrections funded through Proposition 64, the 2016 cannabis legalization measure. The sheriff’s memo values that grant at $498,514 a year, and says it has been awarded but not yet executed. The remaining four — one sergeant and three deputies — are what the county is paying for.
Caudillo said hiring takes about six months, so the positions likely won’t be filled until December or January. The office swore in a deputy hired from another agency Monday and expects three more such lateral hires in August.
Who is left
Tuesday’s agenda also set aside a closed session on labor negotiations covering eight employee organizations, with Interim Chief Executive Officer Sara Pierce and Human Resources Director Cherie Johnson listed as the county’s negotiators. Two of the eight — SEIU and the probation employees — had agreements in front of the board Tuesday. The other six did not: the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, the Law Enforcement Management Association, the Management Association, the Association of Confidential Employees, the Department Head Association and the county Public Authority.
The county is bargaining under financial strain it has already acknowledged in writing. In grant filings obtained under the California Public Records Act, the sheriff’s office told a funder it had been “forced to remove personnel from specialized units (including narcotics) and shift personnel from those assignments to patrol and homicide investigations” because of what it called a “vacuum of law enforcement personnel.”
The same filings say the office is now seeing “a dramatic increase in applications” for peace officers, and that “funding for personnel will begin to encroach on our budget for training and supplies.”
The Board of Supervisors met at 9 a.m. Tuesday in Board Chambers, Room 1070, at the County Administration Center, 501 Low Gap Road in Ukiah. The board does not meet in August. Its next regular meeting is Sept. 1.