_{Thumbnail photo by Paul Critz}

District 1 Supervisor Darrin Short and his District 3 colleague Chris Howard were absent. Among the items discussed at Wednesday’s Del Norte County Board of Supervisors meeting:

Grant confusion: Three supervisors endorsed two Crescent City grant proposals, though it took a last-minute visit from City Manager Eric Wier for them to arrive at that conclusion.

Supervisors agreed to sign a letter of support for Crescent City’s efforts to obtain a Sustainable Planning Grant through Caltrans for its Redwood Highway Multi-Modal Transportation & Land Use Plan. They also approved a support letter for the city’s pursuit of California Ocean Protection Council grant dollars for its Coastal Resiliency Plan.

Both letters were added to Wednesday’s agenda as an urgency item since the grant deadlines are Nov. 21. Deputy Clerk-of-the-Board Kylie Goughnour read the two letters into the record.

Still, supervisors were reluctant to sign off on both grant proposals, especially after public commenter Sam Strait confused the latter project with Smith River Alliance’s efforts to restore parts of the Elk Creek watershed. Strait referred to the Smith River Alliance project’s focus on public access in 420 acres of wetland that was once the site of an old sawmill as well as co-director Grant Werschkull’s testimony about coastal resiliency. 

Strait also insisted that a “climate change fantasy” has existed for too long and cost the country trillions of dollars and has yet to appear.

“You’re depending on coastal resiliency,” Strait told supervisors. “We’ve been waiting for 35 years for the sea level to rise and I believe in 2015 it managed (to rise) a whopping 4/10ths of an inch.”

Wier assured the Board that the city’s Coastal Resiliency Plan has nothing to do with restoring the Elk Creek watershed. 

The city is pursuing an SB 1 Sea Level Rise Adaptation Planning Grant from the California Ocean Protection Council. According to the supervisors’ support letter, the city aims to assess potential vulnerabilities and develop strategies to protect its citizens.

“A lot of the times when we are applying for grants, they ask us how are we going to address climate change and resiliency,” Wier told supervisors. “There are opportunities to have these studies behind us so we can point right to (them) and they would be able to give us that information.”

Crescent City will be working with SHN Consulting on creating that plan.

The city is also pursuing Caltrans Sustainable Planning Grant program dollars to develop the Redwood Highway Multi-Modal Transportation & Land Use Plan, which focuses on ensuring the main thoroughfare “considers the wellbeing of its residents and visitors as well as traffic passing through the city.” According to Wier, the state is making about $700,000 available to communities. The city is pursuing about $675,000 — the most it can apply for, he said.

“We’ll be looking at that corridor itself,” he said of the Redwood Highway through Crescent City. “We’ll be looking at traffic calming, we’ll be looking at how can we have that experience as people are coming through town trying to navigate that S Curve … and have them realize that they’re coming into a town where they can stop.”

The Redwood Highway Multi-modal Transportation Plan will encompass the entire corridor from Citizens Dock Road and Anchor Way to Northcrest, Wier said. There will also be community engagement, traffic counts and traffic engineering.

Before Wier spoke, District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey said she, too, wasn’t sure if the coastal resiliency plan had to do with the Elk Creek Watershed restoration or not. She said she wasn’t comfortable “blindly supporting something” and had texted Wier to ask him to come and explain what the city’s project was.

Inpatient Psych Services in Sac: One of several consent agenda items related to the Department of Health and Human Services, DHHS Director Ranell Brown offered insight into an agreement with Sacramento Behavioral Healthcare Hospital.

According to Brown, the agreement is for “acute placement services” including crisis intervention, counseling, individual therapy, education for adults and adolescents. There’s a closer facility in the Redding area, she said, but inpatient psychiatric services aren’t available in Del Norte County.

The cost of the agreement with Sacramento Behavioral Healthcare Hospital is not to exceed $150,000. State and federal funds are being used for these services, according to Brown’s staff report.

“This is required by our Department of Health Care Services contract,” Brown said. “And we need to make sure we have facilities in place to do that.”

Brown said DHHS seeks out other facilities that may better serve the needs of their clients. She added that the department cycles through about 250 contracts a year, though Board Chairman Joey Borges pointed out that it doesn’t mean those contracts are being used.

Brown added that all the agreements go before the Board of Supervisors and have “very specific details about what services they provide.”

Other DHHS items on the consent agenda Wednesday include an amendment to an agreement with Crestwood Health for mental health rehabilitation services, an annual report from the Local Behavioral Health Board for the 2024-25 fiscal year and an appointment of Thelma Tomlinson to the Local Behavioral Health Board for a three year term.

OPEB Benefits: Supervisors adopted a Del Norte County Other Post Employment Benefits Management Policy without comment.

However, Norma Williams, president of the Del Norte County Employees Association SEIU 1021, said that the administration will have to negotiate any proposals with the county’s bargaining groups.

OPEB can be any retirement benefit that doesn’t include pensions, such as dental, vision and healthcare, County Administrative Officer Neal Lopez told Redwood Voice Community News in a Feb. 13 article. At the time, the Board of Supervisors had approved establishing a trust with Public Agencies Retirement Service to try to meet its pension and OPEB obligations.

The OPEB Management Policy lists several strategies aimed at reducing the county’s OPEB liability. One proposal is to create employee cost-sharing initiatives “through negotiations.” Another is to contribute annually to the OPEB trust as well as allocate portions of one-time revenues to the trust.

On Wednesday, Williams said she was “surprised and disappointed” that representatives from the county’s two other bargaining groups hadn’t attended the Board of Supervisors meeting.

“They should be well aware and concerned about what your intentions are already signaling (about) what you’re going to propose.”

Lopez said Williams was right about negotiations being needed, but county administration hasn’t yet made a proposal on any of the strategies included in the management policy. Bringing it to the board was intended to make employees and the county’s unions aware of them.