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Though Dean Wilson and Chris Howard sought to tap the brakes, urging their colleagues to conduct a trial-run first, public workshops will be an official step in the county’s annual budget process starting this fiscal year.

Budget hearings were something that the smattering of residents attending Tuesday’s meeting advocated for. Heather Polen, who challenged Wilson for his District 5 seat, presented supervisors with a petition that had 38 signatures on it.

Another county resident, PJ Estlund, who has a background in government finance, said there’s still time to make changes before supervisors adopt the 2024-25 budget in October.

“That’s exactly what we need,” she said of the proposed workshops. “The opportunity to come in here, talk to department heads if necessary, ask questions of the board and department heads, get some responses back from them and make our recommendations. Whether they’re accepted or not, at least we have the opportunity to make those recommendations.”

Administration isn’t sure yet what those workshops would look like or how much staff time it would take to organize them, County Administrative Officer Neal Lopez said Tuesday. But, he said, workshops held in August about two years ago at the request of District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey and then-supervisor Susan Masten didn’t require a lot of extra staff time.

“Our budget’s already developed by then and so the printouts are available,” Lopez told supervisors. “If we get questions beforehand, it would be even less work, because we’re not just sitting here going back and forth answering questions we weren’t prepared for. This is a very complicated process. The budget is extremely complicated and there are very few people in my experience that actually understand the budget completely.”

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to add the workshops to the county administrative manual as part of official budget procedures.

Though Wilson and Howard dissented on that vote, they joined their colleagues in directing the budget team to develop guidelines for those workshops and provide them to general fund department directors.

Budget workshops for the 2024-25 fiscal year will be held next month as special Board meetings. This would allow all five supervisors to take part in the discussion in compliance with the California’s Ralph M. Brown Act.

Lopez said the budget team was planning on doing as many four-hour special workshops as necessary to get through the general fund departments.

Currently, under Del Norte County’s administrative manual, the official budget process starts no later than March 31. The auditor-controller prepares a memo for department heads outlining guidelines for submitting their requested budgets, which include staffing changes and payroll issues.

After meeting with department directors, the budget team, which includes the auditor-controller, county administrative officer and assistant county administrative officer, develops a recommended budget and submits it to the Board of Supervisors by June 30.

After the Board of Supervisors approves the recommended budget, administrators continue working on the final budget, which includes incorporating changes to state or federal dollars as well as revenue and expenditure changes within each individual department.

The Board of Supervisors is then expected to hold a public hearing and adopt a final budget by Oct. 2.

According to Lopez, once the Board of Supervisors opens the public hearing, which lasts no longer than 14 days, the public can submit questions and suggestions to the clerk of the Board. Now, the public will have also chance to interact with county staff and with elected officials during the workshops, he said.

“If you didn’t get public participation, it would be just you guys and the department head,” Lopez said, adding that the Board is also being asked to provide direction to staff on how the workshops should be conducted. “What happened previously was there was a table set up here in front. Supervisor Starkey and Supervisor Masten sat up [on the dais]. The department head came forward with their budget and Supervisor Masten and Supervisor Starkey highlighted certain line items, asked certain questions … just more of an open conversation. How detailed you want to get is up to you guys.”

Howard argued that the county’s current process — the 14-day public hearing before the final budget’s adoption — has served the county well. He acknowledged public comment about a lack of transparency, but said he didn’t feel the workshops were an efficient use of staff time.

Any individual supervisor could go to a department director for answers to their questions and include that information in their individual Board report, Howard said. Or they could ask the board chair to place the topic on an agenda for discussion.

Starkey compared the budget packet she and her colleagues receive every year to the budget presentations the Crescent City Council gets. The average citizen doesn’t have the wherewithal to analyze the numbers in the packet, she argued.

The current process is transparent, Starkey said, but it doesn’t inform.

“It just provides a bunch of numbers and none of us really understand it either,” she said. “We need to be able to start opening up our books and having conversations with the public. They’re our boss. These people are our bosses. And if we can’t tell them this is how we’re spending our money or if we can’t get their input on how we want to spend their taxpayer dollars, we’re not doing our jobs. We’re not listening.”

Starkey, who attended the National Association of Counties conference in Florida recently, said most counties hold open meetings that offer the public a chance to hear from each department about their projects, accomplishments and things they’re still working on.

She said she’d like to have those types of discussions in Del Norte County and have them start earlier in the budget process.

“Instead … the budget team gets all the information, they decide what they want to bring forward to us,” Starkey said. “We don’t get the rejects. We don’t get the stuff that doesn’t make it through. We don’t get the reclassifications that somebody brought forward and then decided no, we want to change that. We don’t get to see that. In order for us to make informed decisions, we should see it all.”

Starkey’s colleague, District 1 Supervisor Darrin Short, brought up an encounter he had with Humboldt County Supervisor Rex Bohn who had to leave a North Coast EMS meeting early because he needed to attend a budget workshop.

“I asked, ‘You guys are doing open budget workshops,’” Short told his colleagues. “And, you’d have to know Rex, but he answered, ‘Oh, hell yeah. How else are you going to get transparency [for] the public?’”

Short also argued that county supervisors, as well as the public, will gain better insight into how individual departments work through those workshops. Short said he learned from the district attorney’s investigator more about why the DA couldn’t prosecute a specific case — a poorly written report from a rookie cop was the reason, Short said.

“Getting into the weeds is not what I’m envisioning here with budget workshops,” he said. “I’m hoping to learn something from department heads about their department and how to be more informed and work with them better.”

According to Wilson, however, budget workshops are more about how each department spends the money it's allocated and uses its resources than their difficulties.

Wilson also brought up the county’s strategic plan and how it sets priorities for each department as they begin developing their individual budgets. He pointed out that the strategic plan is brand new.

“As we go forward, we have to be very cautious that we’re not circumventing our own new processes that we’re putting in place,” he said. “We need to allow those priorities established through the strategic plan to give a roadmap for our department heads as they sit in those meetings and are prioritizing where our budget is going and what our priorities are. And this is the first year we’ve ever done that.”

Wilson said he’s amenable to holding a budget workshop in August “when it is actually going to mean something” instead of in the spring. Del Norte County should also be prepared for changes at the state level.

“I’m not into moving forward and doing all this stuff making it a permanent situation,” he said. “This is going to be the first building block and so we may need to change these timeframes. We may find it’s not appropriate in August. It may need to be earlier, it may need to be later. To codify it now, I think, is not wise.”

District 4 Supervisor Joey Borges said if the Board does decide to hold a public workshop to put it in the administrative manual and “perfect it as we go.”

“Let’s just [consider it] something that’s useful to the public and move forward,” he said.

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