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Plain Talk
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Our Proposals to Deal With This Debt
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Data Sources and Downloads.
Between 1997 and 2002 our County's Board of Supervisors and Administration made several decisions that led our County into what may be the deepest debt hole in the State. The people have been set up to pay a heavy price through reduced services and the payment of $10 million in debt service each year over the next several decades.
This didn't need to happen. If the County had at least understood that our local economy could not pay for rapidly increasing staff and pension expenses, they might have avoided this debt. It would have been much better if the County had recognized the broader problems caused by the melting away of our historic economic foundation and taken responsibility to do its part to rebuild that economic foundation. Instead, the Board of Supervisors, encouraged by the County Administration, rapidly increased staff and pension expenses without the means to pay for them. That's what caused the debt.
Most of the current Board of Supervisors and our new County CEO were not in their positions when these decisions were made. But we believe the people will not tolerate being asked to bail the County out in any way until the County government that put the people in this position proves it can bite bullets and make hard decisions and do hard things. Previous Boards of Supervisors led us into the deepest County debt hole in California. The current Board is going to have to lead us out.
Unless someone can show us where we went astray in this report:
We are unalterably opposed to paying down this debt with new taxes or fees, and will oppose all new fees or other ways of getting more money from the people until the County adopts a believable plan to fix the problems identified in this report.
- Serious Down Payment: The County must pay down significantly more debt than scheduled this year and must not increase other spending anywhere near the 9% recommended by staff in the current Proposed Budget. "Business as usual" just won't cut it anymore.
- Plan to Get Out of Debt: Develop and implement a believable plan before the next budget cycle that will get us back to normal debt levels fast.
- Pension Fund: The County's Pension Fund is the main cause of our extraordinary debt; its problems are not solved. The County's Pension Plan must be intensively studied this year as a part of the larger Debt Reduction Plan.
- Reform Budget Process: The County needs a "financial strategic plan".
- Create Jobs, Raise Incomes and Tax Base: Either protect and increase jobs, incomes and tax base in the private sector or significantly and permanently cut County expenses. The Board of Supervisors needs to learn the difference between spending for curent expenses and investing in the future.
- Properly Define the CEO's and Supervisors Roles: We became perhaps the most indebted County per capita in California largely because previous Boards of Supervisors lost themselves in micromanaging the County while ignoring the long-term impacts of their most important decisions. Our qualified CEO should manage the County's operations. Our Supervisors most important responsibilities are to solve our huge debt, budget, economic and water problems.
We stand ready to help.
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Our data comes from two reports from the State Controller – Counties Annual Report and the Public Retirement Systems Annual Report. We also used 11 years of County of Mendocino Final and Proposed Budgets, County Population Estimates from the State Department of Finance, the Slavin Study, the Joint Tourism & Agricultural Marketing and Promotion Feasibility Study published 3/98, a number of job related reports from the Employment Development Department of California, County Business Patterns from the US Census Bureau, and An Analysis of Government Payroll and Employment for Counties in California from the Center for Government Analysis.
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Click here to go to the first page of the Full Report.
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