New Year’s again? It feels like we just did this. Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future – thank you Steve Miller. Every year seems to go by more quickly. When we were kids, summer seemed endless. Now a year feels like a month, a month like a week, and a week like a day.
No native NYer has ever voluntarily been in Times Square for NYE – prove me wrong. photo courtesy @timessquarenyc/Instagram
Mr. Standish and I don’t stay up until midnight on NYE anymore. We watch the ball drop in Times Square at 9pm PT and call it good. One of my favorite things about living in this time zone is being three hours behind New York. It’s especially convenient during baseball season, when most Mets games start at 4pm and are over around 7, when it’s time to head out to do the evening chores. I don’t know how you Giant, As, and Dodger fans do it, honestly.
2022 was a pretty good year, don’t ya think? Not nearly as horrific as 2020 and 2021, it started off on a high note in Tehama County when the carefully planned but poorly executed attempt to remove Supervisor Candy Carlson from the board fell flat on its face. Totally fabricated charges were levied against her by former members of the board to the Grand Jury. The irony was that one of the aforementioned schemers self-sabotaged the whole thing by allegedly blabbing about Closed Session stuff to family members. I won’t go through that whole story here, but that board member resigned soon after the Brown Act violation was reported to the DA. So when the Grand Jury demanded the Supes place an item on the agenda to censure Carlson in January, the two remaining schemers of the original four were suddenly in the minority. Hah. That had a lot to do with them being voted out in the June 2022 primary. Plus a laundry list of other evil-doings.
Supervisor Candy Carlson
2022 was the year Tehamans took their county back from the people who were running it into the ground and should be damn proud. Those folks didn’t start out trying to bankrupt us. I’m sure they all began in their positions with the best of intentions. But, over time, dipping into the reserves became a habit, just like anything you do on the reg. The reserves dwindled, creative bookkeeping became the norm, and we began to rely on fund balance carryover to save the day every fiscal year. Like this year, for example. Without the $6 million CARES Act funding that was used to bridge the budget gap in 2021, who knows where we’d be today? Thank you, COVID.
Former CAO Bill Goodwin, former County Counsel Richard Stout, former supervisors Burt Bundy and Steve Chamblin were already gone when 2022 began. Now the final two of that cabal, former supes Bob Williams and Dennis Garton, have been forced into retirement by the voters. The Good Ol’ Boys network at the county level has been disbanded completely and that is a freaking miracle.
And it’s all because people took an interest. Eagle Eye Jenny Alexander has spent countless unpaid hours pouring over spreadsheets, budgets, and check warrants and has single-handedly uncovered many inaccuracies and downright misappropriations of funds. Pizzagate for instance. Illegal stipends paid to department heads for refreshments. That’s how she got the Eagle Eye moniker.
Eagle Eye Jenny Alexander
The bee currently in Jenny’s bonnet is the continued closure of the Social Services office in Corning. It has been over a year that Tehama County has been paying thousands of dollars a month to the Corning Healthcare District for office space that is not being utilized. There simply isn’t enough staff to offer those services in person in the satellite office.
I had a nice chat with CHD director Tina Hale in the ladies room in the Admin building – where all the big deals go down – and she kindly gave me her card and asked me or Jenny to phone her with any questions. Of course, the question is not for Ms. Hale. We should be asking ourselves how long we are going to continue paying rent for an office that is not being used.
The across-the-board employee raises that were just implemented as a result of the Comp Study should improve the staffing levels. Being able to offer higher salaries will result in applicants, but they will need to be trained. Social Services is highly regulated and the job skills are complex. So how long should it take to get the doors open in Corning? A year seems like way too long and certainly a month wouldn’t be enough time.
The new board will have to decide and maybe SS Director Laura Hawkins will update them on how recruitment is going with better salaries on the table. Nobody wants South County to be without whatever services can reasonably be offered there. But we can’t go on paying for empty space forever, either.
District 3 Supervisor Pati Nolen
District 4 Supervisor Matt Hansen
And speaking of the new board, the ceremonial swearing in of Matt Hansen and Pati Nolen will take place this Tuesday, Jan. 3, at 8:30am in the old courthouse rotunda. It will be a time for celebration, but then the hard work begins. Both of them ran campaigns with transparency and water as their priorities and it will be refreshing to witness the new directions this board will take.
The glorious rain and snow we are experiencing now will not solve our water woes, but the new board members bring knowledge and ideas to replace the head-in-the-sand attitudes of their predecessors. They can’t change the climate, but they appear willing to implement policies to stop the acceleration of the overdraft of our aquifers.
So, goodbye 2022. You were a fine little year, but you had your 365 days and 2023 is chomping at the bit. As longtime Mets announcer Howie Rose would say, “Put it in the books!”
