Housing advocates plan to fill Mendocino supervisors’ chambers Tuesday

MENDOCINO CO., 10/19/26 — Say you’ve lived in a cabin in the hills for 20 years. It was built long before you got there, and nobody ever got a permit. Then a neighbor complains. The county sends a notice.

“Really, it’s always going to be a legalize, remove or alter option,” a county code enforcement official told the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors on Oct. 6.

Permit fees alone for a small home run several thousand dollars, county figures show. Owners who can’t afford to fix a violation can end up with a lien on their property, even if the violation is not a big deal.

On Tuesday, housing advocates plan to fill the board’s chambers to ask for a way out. They want an amnesty for homes built without permits, designed with the people who live in them.

“We will definitely need a packed house on Tuesday,” Geri Morisky, who organizes a housing work group for the Grassroots Institute, wrote to supporters Friday. The group says its amnesty petition has 500 signatures.

Both sides say they want people to stay in the homes they have. They disagree on whether that’s what’s happening.

At the same Oct. 6 meeting, Supervisor Ted Williams asked what the county does when someone lives in a shed that was never permitted as a home.

“Most people who are living in those conditions don’t have a better option or they wouldn’t be there,” Williams said. “Given the choice of living in a car in the Walmart parking lot or that shed, the shed seems a little bit safer in my mind.”

What’s on the agenda

The agenda item starts with a staff presentation on county and state permit rules for homes. It then asks the board to direct staff “to return with a future amnesty program item for consideration.” Williams and Supervisor John Haschak sponsored it.

The county ran an amnesty from November 2023 through December 2024. It drew 135 applications and issued 81 permits, the presentation says. Of 38 housing applications, 19 got permits and 12 passed final inspection.

That amnesty waived penalty fees only for work “not tied to a confirmed code enforcement case.” Owners already caught up in a case, the people advocates say are hurt most, couldn’t use it. The presentation for Tuesday doesn’t say whether a new amnesty would reach owners in code enforcement cases, and it doesn’t address liens or collections.

Morisky wrote that the item “is totally worded for the Planning-Building Department staff to remain fully in charge of the whole code compliance and enforcement process.” The group wants a community-designed amnesty, worked out in public workshops.

What state law allows

Two state laws already open a path for old homes built without permits, the presentation says.

Under Senate Bill 1226, a county building official can permit a home after the fact. The home is judged by the building code in effect when it was built, not today’s. The county’s building division adopted a policy to do that.

Assembly Bill 2533, in effect since January 2025, covers accessory units and junior units built without permits before 2020. Counties can’t deny those permits or charge impact fees just because the unit breaks local zoning rules such as setbacks, lot size or parking. Basic health and safety standards still apply.

Toni Orans told supervisors Sept. 15 that AB 2533 gives owners five years to meet those standards. “None of us affected were offered any of this by the county,” Orans said. A September county memo on AB 2533 says the division tells owners of a unit found to be in use as an accessory unit that they can ask for a five-year stay of enforcement after a notice of violation.

One cabin

Orans told the board her case began with a complaint from former renters she had evicted. It was about a cabin on her property near Fort Bragg. “We were not allowed to know the nature of the complaint nor what other allegations they may have made,” Orans said.

To get a permit, the owners had to strip out the kitchen, bathroom, plumbing and heater, according to a case summary Morisky’s group prepared with the owners. The cabin became a storage building, Orans and her land partner, Donald Hoenigke, said in a phone interview Oct. 14. Part of the parcel is in the coastal zone, the summary says, and after making her gut the cabin, the county referred the case to the California Coastal Commission. Commission staff visited Sept. 15 and told them the building needed to be torn down, they said.

Twice the hit if someone complains

Under the county code, the violation fee on unpermitted construction is twice the permit fee when the county learns of it through a complaint. It equals the permit fee when owners come forward on their own.

Unpaid code enforcement fines, fees and penalties can now go to a collection agency. In June, the board hired Cedars Business Services LLC as part of its consent agenda. A staff report put the amount owed at about $5,939,710 and growing. Cedars keeps 21% of what it collects.

The county’s case

Gretchen McLaughlin, acting assistant director of Planning and Building Services, told the board Oct. 6 that the division has posted a structure as substandard, unfit to live in, about five times. “I can count on one hand,” McLaughlin said.

Some owners can’t afford the fixes, McLaughlin said, and citing them only adds to what they owe. So when there’s no immediate health or safety threat, the division often records a lien instead. She estimated the open cases with a recorded lien in “the 340s.” The department’s Oct. 6 memo counts 343 recorded liens among 646 active complaints and cases.

The division opens a formal enforcement case only after efforts to get voluntary compliance fail, the memo says. It opened 75 in the year ending in September.

Haschak told McLaughlin at the meeting that he thought code enforcement had been “very professional.” He said the housing committee he serves on with Williams had asked McLaughlin about stories told at the board’s Sept. 15 meeting in Fort Bragg, that “seniors were being evicted from their houses or houses were being torn down.”

Williams said that if people saw how staff work with owners, “they would see that that’s actually not the case.”

The neighbors who complain

Code enforcement acts on complaints. Under board direction, it doesn’t look for violations on its own. The same system answers neighbors who want the county to do more.

In 2025, the division got more than 250 anonymous complaints it believed came from a single source. That September, the board started requiring complainants to give their real names, while leaving staff discretion over complaints that don’t. The division closed 220 of those complaints without investigating them, the memo says.

The division had eight field investigators in 2021 and is down to two, interim CEO Sara Pierce told the board Oct. 6.

At that meeting, Supervisor Maureen Mulheren questioned the division’s priority list. She said it didn’t rank neighborhood nuisances high enough. “I don’t think that we’re addressing our community’s concerns adequately enough in relation to nuisances on properties,” Mulheren said.

Supervisor Madeline Cline said she supported Mulheren’s concern. “Regardless of whether it’s priority one or priority three or priority five, it still needs to be taken care of if it’s a legitimate complaint,” Cline said.

Where the board stands

Morisky’s housing work group met with an ad-hoc committee composed of Haschak and Williams on Oct. 14. Both supervisors started out “totally opposed to the idea of ‘amnesty,'” Morisky wrote supporters afterward. They worried, she wrote, that people would think no one had to meet safety codes. By the end of the meeting, she wrote, they agreed to support the amnesty proposal as a study item.

Morisky wrote that Mulheren also supports studying an amnesty, and that Chair Bernie Norvell and Cline remain opposed. 

The meeting starts at 9 a.m. Tuesday in the Board of Supervisors chambers, Room 1070, at the County Administration Center, 501 Low Gap Road in Ukiah.