_{Thumbnail photo by Paul Critz}

Among the items discussed at Tuesday’s Del Norte County Board of Supervisors meeting:

NACo Conference: District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey will go to Philadelphia in July as one of two Del Norte County representatives at the National Association of Counties annual legislative conference.

Starkey’s District 3 colleague, Chris Howard, will also attend the conference, which will be held July 11-14. The full Board unanimously approved the use of budgeted county travel dollars for the trip, though an estimated cost for attending the conference wasn’t included on the meeting agenda.

This decision didn’t sit well with Del Norte County resident Sam Strait or Triplicate News Editor Roger Gitlin. Strait, speculating that the cost would be between $3,000 and $5,000, said he didn’t expect Del Norte to get much out of the trip.

Gitlin guessed that the cost is more like $12,000 and urged supervisors to give that money to “people who toil in the county — deputies and SEIU workers at DHHS who are paid paltry wages.”

Starkey, who attended the national conference last year, said she and Howard have vastly different interests, with her District 3 colleague concerned about land-use issues while she focuses on county and emergency services. Last year, she said, the cost to the county for her and Howard to attend was less than $1,000.

“The registration is not quite open yet,” she said. “I’m just getting some pre-authorization so I can get the early bird special if this Board so agrees.”

Howard said there’s no way he could go to all the sessions during the conference. In addition to focusing on payment in-lieu of taxes issues, he said he’s also concerned about the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination dollars.

This program provides funding for schools, roads and other services across 700 counties in the United States and Puerto Rico. Those dollars are based on revenue that used to come to the community from timber sales receipts before the Smith River National Recreation Area was created in the 1990s, Howard told the Wild Rivers Outpost in May 2024.

Cannabis tax: Without offering much discussion, county supervisors kept the cannabis retail and manufacturing tax rates status quo for 2025.

This means the cannabis retail tax rate will be 6 percent and the manufacturing tax rate will remain 3 percent for the calendar year.

The Board’s decision comes about seven years after Del Norte voters approved Measure B. This measure imposed a tax on the gross receipts of a retailer of adult-use cannabis of not less than 2 percent and no more than 6 percent. On gross receipts for cannabis manufacturing, Measure B imposed a tax rate of not less than 1 percent and no more than 3 percent.