The majority of our monthly articles have focused on how the civil grand jury functions and why you, the citizens of Humboldt County, should volunteer to serve. From time to time, our articles have highlighted what our members feel is a lack of respect and response from our county leadership with regards to published civil grand jury reports. Today’s article focuses on this lack of respect/response.
It is not news the
Humboldt County Board of Supervisors and the auditor-controller have been at
odds over the payment and reconciliation of county bills. Just three weeks ago,
the board held a special meeting to discuss this issue. The meeting lasted
almost seven hours, and finally ended with the board passing a five-part motion
to address the most critical needs of the county so as to not lose millions of
dollars. The auditor-controller agreed to post and pay Public Works bills by
the end of the week, and to post a cost allocation plan for fiscal year
2019-2020 by Nov. 30, 2020. Our community as a whole has been, and remains,
concerned over the impasses between the board and the auditor-controller.
Now the board has
opened an internal investigation into delays in county payments, money
transfers and reconciliations of accounts. In addition, the board outsourced
some fiscal oversight responsibilities to a private accounting firm at a cost
to the county of $250,000.
What the community
may not know, and the board may have forgotten, is the 2018-2019 civil grand
jury investigated this issue and published a report in June 2019, “The
Mis-Fortunes of Humboldt County.” There were 16 recommendations offered in this
report, the main recommendation being that “the Board of Supervisors ensure
that the Auditor-Controller’s Office is fully funded so that the staffing and
functions of the office can be fulfilled with due diligence.” The civil grand
jury recommended a completion date of Jan. 15, 2020.
So how did the
board respond to the civil grand jury recommendation? As is the norm, the
board’s October 2019 response met the legal Penal Code requirement in that it
indicated the “recommendation has been implemented and will continue to be
implemented.” The board’s justification for this response was that it funded an
additional position within the auditor-controller Office and spent over $100,000
on training, new wiring, office furniture and computers. Nowhere in the board’s
response did it state that the auditor-controller office was now “fully funded”
to meet its obligations as the civil grand jury had recommended. The civil
grand jury report and the board’s response can be found at
https://humboldtgov.org/Archive.aspx?ADID=1368.
Obviously the
action taken by the board did not solve the problem addressed by the 2018-2019
civil grand jury. Instead, it required a fiscal crisis to finally prompt
emergency action on the part of the board in an effort to manage a situation
that could have been addressed months earlier had it taken the civil grand
jury’s recommendations seriously.
One only needs to
review prior civil grand jury reports to find recommendations were ignored by
the board, which ultimately led to the county spending hundreds of thousands of
dollars to address the issues. For example there is the debacle with Child
Welfare Services which led to the state Attorney General filing a lawsuit
against the county. The board had been warned numerous times by the civil grand
jury that CWS was not meeting state minimum requirements. There is the
Department of Justice lawsuit filed against Humboldt County for not enacting
Americans with Disability Act requirements. A 2015-2016 civil grand jury report
had identified the failure of the board to address these ADA requirements well
before the Department of Justice stepped in.
Now it appears we
are headed down a similar path with the auditor-controller issue. Once more, it
is likely that hundreds of thousands of county General Fund dollars will be
spent trying to address an issue the Board of Supervisors had claimed was
resolved in their response to the October 2018-2019 civil grand jury report.
Your Jurors’
Association does not know what it will take to awaken our leadership to the
opportunities the civil grand jury provides them, but we would like to think it
starts by actually reading the civil grand jury reports, taking them seriously,
and providing the community a response that has been carefully considered.
Eureka
Times-Standard
Tim Hafner, President, Humboldt County Grand Jurors’ Association, hcccgja@gmail.com.
December 15, 2020
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