FORT BRAGG, CA., 8/13/26 — The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office closed its Fort Bragg front counter to walk-in visitors on Wednesday afternoon. The reason was staffing, and the math behind it is simple. Two people run that counter — one full time, one part time — and when one of them takes time off, the office closes, Capt. Quincy Cromer said. It has happened a few times this year, he said. It is not a new schedule or shorter hours.
The closed counter is a small piece of a much bigger problem. About a third of the jobs at the sheriff’s office are empty. Sheriff Matt Kendall has spent the summer trying to line up money to fill some of them — from the county’s own budget, and from a state cannabis-tax grant.
“Staffing shortages” covers two different things in Mendocino County. Some of the sheriff’s empty jobs are jobs he could not hire for, or could not keep people in. Others are jobs the county decided not to pay for, on purpose, to save money.
Kendall described the second kind himself in an Aug. 3 interview with the Mendocino Voice. Asked how much of the shortage came from people leaving and how much came from the budget, he started with the budget.
“We had the five positions that I was working with the CEO’s office to hold open for a budget savings,” Kendall said. “But then we had eight people go out on injuries.”
The county planned for some empty jobs and got more than it anticipated.
Administrative Capt. Jason Caudillo gave the Board of Supervisors the number on July 21: 33 percent of the office’s jobs were vacant. That count did not include the eight employees out on injury, he said. Cromer said this week that patrol supervisor staffing has not changed since then — the empty-job rate for patrol sergeants is still the one Caudillo gave the board.
Caudillo told the board what that looks like on the ground. One day shift in the county’s central sector — one of the busiest shifts the office runs — was down to a single deputy and a sergeant. The other shift was being covered with overtime.
Kendall told the Voice where the shortage lands hardest. He keeps deputies who live on the South Coast and in Round Valley working in those areas, he said in the August interview, because those are the two places “where our response times are outside of what the norms are.” A call that can be answered in three minutes when patrol cars are free takes 12 to 15 minutes in those corners, he explained.
Asking for $1 million to fill jobs already on the books
On July 21, the sheriff’s office went to the Board of Supervisors asking for money to fill six jobs it already had: one sergeant and five deputies. All six are approved on paper. None of them had money attached in this year’s budget.
The request was spelled out in a memo from Caudillo and William Riley, the sheriff’s office fiscal manager. Four of the jobs would be paid out of the county’s general fund, the main pot of money that covers most county services: the sergeant at $295,694 and three deputies at $249,257 each — just over $1 million in all. The memo told the board the real cost would likely come in lower. The estimates assume top-of-the-scale pay, and background checks on new hires “can take several months to complete.”
The other two deputies would not touch the general fund. A state grant is supposed to pay for them — $498,514 a year for five years.
“I’m just putting deputies back into the original allocations,” Kendall said. “The funding is going to pay for them. So it’ll actually be a savings for the general fund.”
The grant is marijuana-tax money
In 2016, California voters passed Proposition 64, which made it legal for adults to buy marijuana — and put a state tax on every sale. Part of that tax goes into grants for cities and counties dealing with the problems that came with legalization, especially illegal grows. In June, Mendocino County won one of those grants: $4.5 million for the sheriff’s office over five and a half years.
The money is not in hand yet. Cromer said the county has been told the award is coming. A resolution — the board’s formal sign-off — letting the sheriff accept it goes to the Board of Supervisors on Sept. 1. Caudillo told the board the two grant-paid deputies will work as investigators on illegal marijuana grows, and on the violent crime that comes with them, including homicides and human trafficking.
Why the sheriff has to ask
Filling an empty county job is not automatic in Mendocino County. Once a month, Human Resources runs an agenda item the county calls the Strategic Hiring Process. Any department head who wants to fill an empty job has to show up and make the case.
The process exists because the county saves money by leaving jobs empty. When the county writes its budget, it assumes about 6 percent of the money set aside for salaries will never be spent — because workers quit or retire, and their jobs sit empty for a while. Every empty seat is money saved. Every seat that gets filled is savings lost.
The written rules demand two things of a department that wants to hire: show how the county can pay for the job “while maintaining the six percent (6%) reduction in Salary and Benefits,” and describe “the work that is not being completed due to the vacancy” — and why the workers still there can’t just absorb it.
The board voted on the sheriff’s request that day. Supervisor Bernie Norvell made the motion, Supervisor John Haschak seconded it, and it passed. The minutes repeat the agenda’s wording without naming positions or votes.
What nobody has answered is whether the sheriff’s held-open jobs count toward the county’s 6 percent savings target — and who decides which seats stay empty.
The Fort Bragg office already runs a four-day week — open Monday through Thursday, closed Fridays, with an hour off for lunch. The closures that come on top of that, like Wednesday’s, are the unplanned kind: two people at the front counter, and no way to keep the doors open when one is out.
They’re also a very corrupt department who allows their deputies to drive the patrol cars drunk, wreck it, drive drunk more, wreck it more, park the vehicle at the station, gets caught & they let him go scott free. The Sheriff also allows his deputies to murder people while in custody & guess what happens? You guessed right, NOTHING! The lack of money is the LEAST of the problems they have. The sheriff needs to resign now.