There was a sea of purple shirts in the Board Chambers. The people wearing these purple shirts were all supporters and people represented by SEIU 1021, a union that bargains on behalf of Del Norte County employees.
After the Consent Agenda concluded at the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, several employees of the County confronted the Board of Supervisors. The volley opened with Norma Williams, Chapter President of the SEIU 1021 branch for Del Norte County.
Curry County commissioners considered two proposed uses for opioid settlement dollars on Thursday. The first proposal was an agreement with Gold Beach for a school resource officer position, while the second involved opioid use disorder treatment at the jail.
Competing proposals on potential uses for opioid settlement dollars put jail commander Lt. Jeremy Krohn at odds with the Curry County Board of Commissioners on Thursday.
Krohn’s request for $36,000 in opioid settlement dollars to provide telehealth services to inmates struggling with addiction came after commissioners supported a proposed five-year intergovernmental agreement with Gold Beach to create a school resource officer position.
Under that proposal, Curry County would pay Gold Beach $149,100 in opioid settlement dollars for the first year. This cost would cover the officer’s salary and benefits, vehicle accessories and insurance, outfitting for the officer as well as software. The county would continue paying for those expenditures throughout the five-year term of the agreement, which includes a 5 percent cost of living adjustment and step increases for the officer.
During the summer, the school resource officer would transition into a community resource officer, according to Commissioner Brad Alcorn.
Though Curry County Finance Director Keina Wolf said there were enough opioid settlement dollars to fund both programs, Krohn took issue with the SRO proposal. He said he was perturbed that he had to make a presentation to obtain approval to use those funds, but Gold Beach and the school districts benefiting from the SRO position didn’t have to make a presentation.
Without naming who they were, Krohn said he sent the proposed intergovernmental agreement between the county and Gold Beach to “colleagues who handle opioid settlement funds” for review.
“They said you could not fund a full position based on that IGA through opiate money,” Krohn told commissioners. “They conservatively said 20 percent to fund it. So, with that, be prepared for that to come up — that we’re over funding out of the opioid settlement funds. There will be an audit for that.”
Commissioner Jay Trost called for a forensic audit of Curry County’s treasury department and its accounting practices on Thursday, saying that an investigation of past practices revealed it may have short- changed the area’s special districts.
Trost told his colleague Brad Alcorn that he, Finance Director Keina Wolf and the current county treasurer, Nick Vicino, had conducted a reconciliation of the county treasury for two fiscal years leading into the 2023-24 budget season.
That reconciliation revealed that the county had been holding on to tax revenue that belonged to other special districts and had erroneously recorded the transfer of those dollars when they were never actually transferred, Trost said. When the error was discovered, the dollars were no longer available to be transferred, he said.
The reconciliation also uncovered several other errors, Trost said, including bank fees and $66,000 in deposits that hadn’t been recorded and $3.7 million that had been transferred into other accounts “other than those recorded in the fiscal system.”
“We had overdraft charges to the county bank account that had rolled over for 11 months,” Trost said Thursday. “We had $601,180.32 in deposits that weren’t recorded in the fiscal system for up to three months — we were obviously behind in our reconciliation by two years. And we had over $32 million in bank adjustments during that time period.”
Crescent City cut the ribbon Saturday on the first amenity at Beachfront Park built using Prop 68 grant money. | Jessica C. Andrews
Wesley Phillips’ experience with pump tracks is limited — the new course at Crescent City’s Beachfront Park was his first taste.
Though the official grand opening wasn’t until last Saturday, Wesley’s dad, Tom Phillips, said his son had already been practicing. Wesley and his friends Aidan Evans and Landon and Chase Feight were demo riders — zipping over the jumps and scaling the wall ride, the wooden structure towering above the rest of the track — while Tom looked on.
“He’s blown away by it,” Tom said, watching Wesley and his buddies. “He had always ridden bikes and asked [me], ‘Can you build me a jump?’”
As the bike pump track took shape over the last two months, Wesley’s thoughts have been “nothing else but BMX,” his dad says.
To make her case for why voters should favor Measure H, Coleen Parker drew the Crescent City Council’s attention to another proposed bond — this one aimed at improving school facilities statewide.
If Del Norters approve the $59 million general obligation bond Del Norte Unified School District placed on the ballot this presidential election, DNUSD stands a better chance at receiving state facilities money should California’s Proposition 2 succeed, Parker told councilors on Monday.
“The way the Office of Public School Construction works is … if you are in a community that has passed a bond, now your community says, ‘Yes, schools are important to us.’ They help with matching dollars in a variety of things,” said Parker, who retired from DNUSD about two years ago and is part of the Support Our Kids — Yes On Measure H Committee. “If our [Measure] H doesn’t pass and the state bond does, the chances of Del Norte seeing any of that money is very slim.”
An effort to set parameters for the amount of open space housing developers need to provide their residents made Crescent City councilors realize that the municipal code contains landscaping standards that likely aren’t applied consistently.
Some don’t make sense, Councilor Kelly Schellong Feola said Monday. One example she gave is a requirement that at least one tree from an approved list be planted in a residential front or side yard every 30 feet. The other is limiting the use of non-vegetative material in residential landscaping to 25 percent, Feola said.
“I know a lot of older people that can’t get out and mow their lawns,” she said. “They like to decorate their yards with river rock and such, and this is saying you can’t do that for more than 25 percent of your property.”
It’s these inconsistencies the Community Development Department and the Planning Commission have been working through, according to Ethan Lawton, a planner with SHN, a Eureka-based engineering and planning firm that is contracted with the city. When it comes to landscaping standards in residential zones, developments that are less than four units aren’t required to submit site plans to the city that verifies their landscaping plans, he said.
But, while there’s no special permit required for a single-family home, for example, under the municipal code, city staff should still review those landscaping standards, City Attorney Martha Rice said.
“No building permit should be issued unless [the development] meets these landscaping requirements,” she said.
Del Norte’s legal counsel called the new fireworks ordinance an administrative tool that uses fines to discourage people from bringing their Roman candles, sky rockets and other “dangerous” pyrotechnics into the community.
California law already makes it a crime to possess “dangerous fireworks,” County Counsel Jacqueline Roberts said Tuesday. These include sky rockets, bottle rockets, Roman candles, aerial shells, firecrackers and other pyrotechnics that explode, go in the air or move on the ground in an uncontrollable manner.
Possessing less than 2,000 pounds in California is “just a misdemeanor,” Roberts told supervisors.
“What this ordinance does is give the county an administrative way of dealing with them — through the fine process,” she said. “It’s sort of another tool in our tool belt to try to deal with the dangerous fireworks situation in town because, as you know, it’s difficult to prosecute criminally, especially when you’re dealing with something as low-level as a misdemeanor. But, perhaps if someone is getting a $1,000 fine, it might deter that behavior.”
Del Norte County supervisors will get their first look at an ordinance that seeks to discourage folks from bringing illegal fireworks into the community.
The proposed regulations are expected to come before the full Board on Tuesday about three months after a fireworks explosion created a mass casualty incident on South Beach during the Fourth of July.
They’re consistent with an ordinance Crescent City already has on the books, said District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey. The proposed regulations also coincide with an ordinance the Harbor District Board of Commissioners is considering, though Starkey noted that harbor commissioners are considering banning all fireworks.
“That was super important for us to have very consistent ordinances across the board,” she told Redwood Voice Community News on Monday. “At our last ad-hoc meeting we decided that we couldn’t really move forward with messaging and education until we have those ordinances in place.”
Wednesday’s Curry County Board of Commissioners meeting
Roughly two weeks after they retired one of the county’s police dogs, the Curry County Board of Commissioners faced tough questions from the man who made the canine’s purchase possible.
Dick Wilson, a Brookings-based realtor who donated $14,000 to the county to purchase D’Arvit, asked commissioners Wednesday why they hadn’t contacted him before turning the dog over to his former handler.
Commissioners spent about 35 minutes giving Wilson a timeline of the circumstances surrounding the dog’s retirement, including Sheriff John Ward’s statement at a July 29 meeting that he was a “dirty dog” because he didn’t have enough training. At the end of the exchange, Wilson said he wouldn’t do anything more for the county.
The day after their former CEO’s resignation became official, Crescent City Harbor Commissioner Brian Stone stood at the podium, faced his constituents and apologized.
Stone referred to a verbal altercation he had with then-harbormaster Tim Petrick over staff’s response to the Del Norte County Civil Grand Jury at the Board’s Sept. 17 meeting. On Tuesday, Stone said Petrick was less than forthcoming and that he was continuously denied information about the former harbormaster “continuously.”
Though he wasn’t able to go into detail about what occurred in closed session, Stone spoke to why the Board of Commissioners didn’t fire Petrick.
“Legally, since we are a subdivision of the State of California, we are unable to just fire someone outright. We have to give them a warning and we have to go through the legal steps,” Stone said. “I cannot tell you what was discussed in closed session, but I will tell you this: Mr. Petrick, upon being confronted decided to resign. Now, that’s up to him. I think what needs to happen is true healing on the part of the community as well as reflection by the Board as to what has happened.”
