Mendocino’s watchdog for 50 little governments says it has no hammer

MENDOCINO CO., 10/17/26 — The one county agency charged with checking up on Mendocino County’s 50 special districts says it can’t make any of them do anything.

“We have no hammer,” said Uma Hinman, executive officer of the Mendocino Local Agency Formation Commission, in a Sept. 30 interview. “We’re not like code compliance.”

LAFCo, as everyone calls it, is the state-created referee for local government boundaries. It approves annexations, mergers and dissolutions, and it’s supposed to give each district a periodic checkup called a municipal service review, or MSR, asking whether the district can still do its job and whether its boundaries still make sense. The first story in this series described the 50 districts. This one is about the agency that’s supposed to watch them.

Boundaries are LAFCo’s bread and butter. On Oct. 5 it approved, 7-0, the Russian River flood control district’s annexation of about 9,610 acres of the Redwood Valley County Water District, so Redwood Valley can use its 328.85 acre-feet of contract water anywhere in its service area instead of only in a 200-acre overlap. The staff report said the change “would not create or guarantee an additional water supply.” 

Hinman calls LAFCo “a daylighting agency.” Her office writes up what it finds, and the commission adopts it in public. If a district is in trouble, the commission can ask staff to check back in a year or two.

“If there’s a concern and it’s brought to our attention, we usually contact the district, let them know, and let them know the rules,” Hinman said. The agencies that can actually act, she said, are the civil grand jury and, in egregious cases, the district attorney.

Two tiers

Mendocino LAFCo’s staff is Hinman and one analyst. Its own policy, quoted in a Sept. 9, 2024, letter to Superior Court Judge Ann Moorman, sorts the 50 districts into two piles.

Policy 10.1.3(a): the commission reviews every five years “each governmental agency providing municipal services. Municipal services include water, wastewater, police and fire protection services.”

Policy 10.1.3(c): districts “not providing municipal services including, but not limited to, ambulance, recreation, hospital, resource conservation, cemetery, and pest control shall be updated as necessary.”

Speaking of the first group, Hinman said, “Those are the ones that we prioritize, and then we fit the other agencies in as we can.”

The goal, she said, is to get to every agency “on a kind of a five- to ten-year mark.” Then the cycle repeats. “It’s one of those Golden Gate Bridge things. You start at one end, and then you have to start all over again when you get to the end.”

LAFCo’s own June 2026 tracking sheet, released in response to a public records request, shows where that cycle stands. Eleven water and sewer agencies had their boundaries updated in 2024 or 2025. Most of the 18 fire districts were last updated in 2018, and a countywide fire and emergency medical services study covering all of them is the biggest item on this year’s work plan, with $75,000 budgeted. The eight cemetery districts were last updated together in 2017. The Noyo Harbor District, the county Resource Conservation District and the Mendocino Coast Health Care District: 2016. The health care district’s last full service review, on the commission’s own list of completed reviews, is dated 2014.

Hinman said all 50 districts are “active to the best of our knowledge.” Of the 50, she said, 49 are independent, with their own elected or appointed boards. The one dependent district, County Service Area 3, is governed by the Board of Supervisors. It was formed for ambulance service around Point Arena, and the state controller’s office flagged it as doing nothing. A 2022 LAFCo study found it has no active powers. The county has never applied to activate any, Hinman said, though she believes money still goes into an account for it.

Complaints that a district has gone quiet reach her office “once in a while,” she said, usually from someone who can’t get an agenda or a call back. Her office typically lacks the capacity to chase them, she said. “And also, it’s not really under our duties, I guess.”

The district that asked

The one district in the as-necessary pile with an updated review is the one that raised its hand.

The Mendocino Coast Recreation and Park District asked LAFCo for its own review in February 2025. Its boundaries hadn’t been looked at since 2008. The commission adopted the result July 6. Dave Shpak, the district’s board chair, told the commission that the 2025 audit showed the district “significantly upside down,” that 45% of its property tax across a 77-mile territory goes to the city of Fort Bragg under a 2012 agreement, and that the board has never been shown how that share is calculated.

Shpak backed the review. “We’re not a fire district. We’re not a sewer district, not a water district,” he told the commission.

Burch told the commission that the 2012 agreement is tied to Fort Bragg’s Measure A, a city ballot measure, and can’t be amended without another vote of city residents. Shpak said the district isn’t trying to get out of the agreement, only to figure out how to live with it. The commission voted to have Hinman report back in two years on whether the district and Fort Bragg’s new recreation department are duplicating programs.

The district that didn’t

The Mendocino Coast Health Care District, MCHCD in LAFCo’s files, didn’t ask, and the record of what happened instead runs two years.

The district owns the hospital buildings in Fort Bragg that Adventist Health has operated since 2020. It collects lease payments and a parcel tax worth about $1.6 million a year, and it is charged with the state-mandated seismic retrofit of the hospital, estimated at $30 million and due in 2030.

In June 2024, the county civil grand jury reported that the district had kept public money in accounts that paid no interest, had gone years without an audit and had lost more than a year of board minutes. Its Finding 11 said the district’s troubles “should have initiated a LAFCo MSR,” or service review. The grand jury’s recommendation told LAFCo to review the district “on a priority basis” and finish by December 2024.

A grand jury can’t compel a public agency to act. It can require a written answer, and LAFCo’s answer came in the Sept. 9, 2024, letter to Judge Moorman, signed by Maureen Mulheren, the commission chair.

“LAFCo partially agrees with the finding,” it said. The commission agreed the district’s restructuring “warrants an update of the 2014 MSR.” But money and staff were limited, and the water districts came first: nine of them that year, budgeted at $75,000. A healthcare district review would cost $15,000 to $30,000, the letter said, depending on whether staff could do it in-house or had to hire a consultant.

The letter also noted that the healthcare district hadn’t paid its annual share of LAFCo’s funding “in many years.” That’s lawful. State law exempts healthcare districts whose operating revenue is negative.

The review “will be initiated by December 2024,” the letter promised.

On Dec. 31, 2024, Hinman wrote to the grand jury foreperson to say it wouldn’t be. Adventist had opened a 60-day renegotiation of its hospital lease in October, and reviewing the district “when the district is in such flux is counterproductive.” She added that “an MSR for MCHCD is not in the current work plan,” and “the MCHCD board has not yet authorized funds.”

The emails that followed, released under the records request, show LAFCo trying to get the district to pay for its own review. On July 11, 2025, Hinman sent district administrator Katharine Wylie a draft memorandum of understanding under which the district would pay for the study, spreading the payments over three years, a schedule the district itself had suggested. The commission, she warned, “may not agree to a schedule of payments spread out over several years.”

On March 27, 2026, she wrote Wylie again. “Time flies and another year has gone by.” The review “remains in our Work Plan per the Grand Jury recommendation,” she wrote, and the district had asked LAFCo to wait for its multi-year audit and strategic planning to finish. On April 15 she asked whether Wylie had time to talk the following week.

The budget the commission adopted May 4 for the year that began July 1 puts the healthcare district review on the work plan at last: $25,000, outsourced to a consultant. It was to start once the district finished the audit and financial planning it had asked LAFCo to wait for, “anticipated to be complete by June 2026.”

At the commission’s July 6 meeting, Hinman said she was coordinating with Wylie “to initiate that study and discuss next steps.” On July 29, according to the work plan status report in the Oct. 5 agenda packet, staff sent the district board a letter starting the review and asking it to consider a funding agreement. A draft of that agreement had already gone to district staff. The district’s administrator told LAFCo the board would discuss the letter at its October meeting.

Asked Sept. 30 what she wants districts to know, Hinman said they should treat her office as a resource.

“They’re not going to get in trouble by contacting us,” she said.

The coast hospital district’s board takes up LAFCo’s letter this month, and with it the question of who pays for its first review in 12 years.