Decisions and priorities
As discussed here two weeks ago, at their kickoff meeting on Jan. 5, the Board of Supervisors — with the exception of newly seated 2nd District Supe Maureen Mulheren — high-handedly extended the contract of San Diego-based Medico Mimi Doohan to advise current Public Health Officer Andy Coren.
If Coren needs consultative assistance to do his job, why not employ a Mendocino County physician, many asked including Mulheren. The best answer the Board could conjure up was Doohan would provide some sort of unspecified “continuity.”
A recent item in the Anderson Valley Advertiser caught my eye because it provided an example of a local M.D. who would appear to be ideal to advise both Coren and Doohan, given that County Executive Officer Angelo said if she had her druthers, she’d hire three public health officers for our 90,000 residents. Well, what’s another hundred grand-plus in this county where at minimum several million dollars a year is spent on consultants and special advisors for mostly dubious purposes.
According to the Advertiser’s Mark Scaramella, Dr. Drew Colfax, Emergency Room Doctor from Adventist-ukiah (and homeschooled in Anderson Valley son of former Fifth District Supervisor David Colfax), said on KZYX Friday afternoon that vaccination “is going to continue to be fairly confusing and rumor driven, I’m afraid, for the next couple of weeks. I urge people to just relax. A couple more weeks of sheltering and doing what we’ve been doing is going to be fine.” We think Dr. Colfax is being very optimistic about the timeframe. At the rate Mendo is going on vaccinations it’ll take months, not a couple of weeks before things are “fine.” Colfax added that nobody knows when or how much more vaccination will arrive, nor even if the booster shots for the people who have been vaccinated will arrive. It’s unclear what the production rates for vaccine are nor when the state will get followon deliveries or in what quantities. “It’s a mess,” said Colfax, as Mendo tries to get people vaccinated to the extent possible. “There’s no top-down structure.” Colfax commented on one of the main reasons for “the mess”: “We have this completely discombobulated, for-profit disorganized health care system in this country that’s extremely expensive and frankly not very good. If we had a single-payer system like any other developed nation in the world, it would be much easier to have an organized vaccine rollout. We don’t, so we have various big hospital chains in the state of California and even in this county that are working in a different parallel universe for their vaccine roll-out. There’s no transparency about how much each hospital chain — Sutter, Kaiser, the big ones — has or where it’s going or how much the state of California has or where it’s going.
It’s an incredibly complex, poorly designed system that is unbelievably poorly suited to a pandemic like this.”
I believe Colfax could potentially serve as a much-needed, professional-informational counterweight to how Pandemic policies and orders are now processed by the current Public Health Officer duo. Apparently, the CEO thinks three heads are better than two, right? Makes sense to me.
Supes Say They Need Help In Setting Priorities
Interesting discussion at that first Board meeting of 2021.
Fifth District Supe Ted Williams’ first thought was demonstrably better than his second thought on the subject of priorities and so-called strategic planning.
The agenda item up for talks was, “Discussion and Possible Action Regarding Board Priorities, Roles and Responsibilities and Development of a Long
Term Strategic Plan for Mendocino County. Action: Discuss options and provide direction to staff to work with supervisors to focus on board priorities, roles, responsibilities, and develop a long-term strategic plan for Mendocino County.”
Initially, Williams recommended that the supervisors themselves do the actual work of determining priorities and developing a strategic plan, instead of relying on outside assistance (from consultants).
But he quickly capitulated when 1st District Supe Glenn Mcgourty countered with the well-established precedent of putting out the call for the expertise of consultants and facilitators. And, of course, it was soon decided by unanimous acclamation to bring in the outside hired guns, after all everybody knows that elected officials aren’t competent, knowledgeable, or even aware of these mysterious intangibles known as “priorities” and how to put them