Characterizing the County Supervisors recent tentatively approved 2025-26 budget as a “budget-balancing shell game,” Mark Scaramella, of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, posits that the facts just don’t cooperate with those who might disagree with his analysis.
OK, I’m on board.
Scaramella says, “Another dubious assumption in the County’s projected budget for 2025-2026 is that the “carryover” from this fiscal year (2024-2025, ending June 30, 2025) will be around $6 million and that this carryover, which just happens to be about the same amount as the dubious estimate of the amount to be saved by keeping positions vacant for the year, will be drawn on to cover whatever savings don’t materialize from not keeping funded positions vacant.
“Get it? First they assume there will be millions in carryover (unspent money) this year (a number which won’t be known until the books are closed sometime in the fall), and then they assume that it will be a whopping $6 million, and then they tell everybody that if they don’t meet their ridiculous vacancy target that they will use the mythical $6 million carryover to cover the mythical vacancy savings which nobody expects to save because they know that they will have to replace many of the vacant positions. Then they call all these rolling assumptions “one time funds,” and — presto! — they have a ‘balanced’ budget.
“The whole idea of a ‘balanced budget’ when there are always unknowns and variables and assumptions involved is a fishy pretense to begin with on top of a very fluid process. But when the budget builders put in ridiculous and precarious assumptions just to make the budget appear to be “balanced,” it makes a mockery of the process and makes their empty claims that ‘we don’t have the money’ for this or that hard to believe since they can cover millions of costs with assumptions that don’t stand up to scrutiny … When the budget is seen as a perfunctory requirement built on financial number manipulation, it gives the Board and the CEO an excuse for not dealing with actual budget gaps because they know that underneath it all the ‘budget’ is just a pile of false assumptions and self-serving estimates.”
I’m sure the Supervisors take exception with Scaramella’s characterization of the budget, but it doesn’t gainsay that once again the county is at a crossroads with numerous issues that must be addressed.
Several years ago, the CEO and the Supes implemented a so-called “Five-Year Strategic Planning Process” that was touted as a “help guide the work of county government through 2027.”
Do you have any idea of just where that much-ballyhooed plan is now in 2025?
I know I don’t have a clue and neither do the Supervisors.
Instead of talking about amorphous, indecipherable strategic plans, how about focusing on something called priorities or a fix-it list.
Here’s short inventory of what needs to be accomplished and/or overhauled and fixed.
• Fixing 5 decades of failed homeless policies and programs.
• Fixing 5 decades of failed mental health policies and programs.
• Fixing the ever-deteriorating road and bridge infrastructure.
• Fixing a monstrously failed marijuana ordinance that has devastated the economies of the county’s unincorporated areas.
• Fixing 30 years of a housing shortage brought on by short-sighted and nearly non-existent affordable housing planning.
There are many other items that could — and should — appear on this list, but let’s keep it to a manageable work load of just five priority items for the Supes to address, and hopefully make demonstrable and verifiable progress on.
Of course, permeating the entire local governing process is that both previous and current Boards of Supervisors have functioned basically as a rubber-stamp for virtually every proposal emanating from the County Executive Officer and staff.
That dynamic must change, and the Supervisors must reassert their control over the CEO and staff who are un-elected bureaucrats whose primary role is to support elected supervisors in their duties to articulate and represent the best interests of their constituents.
That reversal of roles is without a doubt the number one item on the Supervisors’ list of priorities.
AI To Cause Unemployment?
Was streaming CNN the other day and heard an interview that shivered the timbers of this former airline union president.
I’ve believed since I first became aware of Artificial Intelligence, that it should be closely monitored and probably regulated by government because we have no idea or understanding of where it’s going or its potential uses and consequences.
The chief executive of one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs is warning that the technology could cause a dramatic spike in unemployment in the very near future. He says policymakers and corporate leaders aren’t ready for it.
“AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview. “AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.”
Amodei believes the AI tools that Anthropic and other companies are racing to build could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to as much as 20 percent in the next one to five years. That could mean the US unemployment rate growing fivefold in just a few years.
Still think AI is a good idea?
Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, [email protected], the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: www.kpfn.org
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