Six Months After State Audit, County Departments Report Uneven Progress on Reforms
Assessor Katrina Bartolomie said she has not yet completed the required six-month update
Last December, when the state auditor ordered Mendocino County to clean up its management of public funds, it gave the county three deadlines. The offices with noted deficiencies were to report back on their progress at 60 days, six months and a year. The six-month deadline landed June 18.
Three department heads appeared before the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors on July 21 to provide their updates, but only two were able to point to written responses to the state auditor.
Auditor-Controller Megan Hunter told the board her office had submitted its responses to the state’s recommendations on time in June. She then walked through the work behind them: a full policies-and-procedures manual she expects to finish in June 2027, a new electronic journal-entry workflow, completed countywide trainings and a continued contract with Regional Government Services on new accounting standards. A steering committee, Hunter added, is working with the CEO’s office and information services on a Munis finance-system overhaul she said would take three to four years.
It was Hunter’s first appearance before the board since the county split the auditor-controller-treasurer-tax collector’s office in two on July 5 and she took the helm of the auditor-controller’s office. The office is on schedule to publish its annual financial report by Dec. 31, Hunter said.
Chamise Cubbison, who ran both offices until the first week of July, marked the change as she introduced herself: “Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison,” she said. “First time I’ve had to leave the first part off. A little bit hard for me.”
Cubbison addressed the auditor’s finding that the county had not collected some $30.6 million in taxes, penalties and interest owed on defaulted properties. The audit had told the county to resume auctioning those properties by October; instead, Cubbison said, the auction will not resume until the spring, “hopefully sometime between January and March.”
In a memo four days before the meeting, her office had formally reported that the auditor’s recommendation was “not fully implemented,” with the auction now expected in March 2027 — about five months past the deadline. The remaining holdups, she said, are “personnel related, but they are not performance related.”
Cubbison also said the $30 million is not headed to the county’s general fund. “It is money that is for the Teeter plan,” she said. Under the Teeter plan, a state-authorized accounting method, the county advances local schools, cities and special districts their full share of property taxes every year — including the taxes owners haven’t actually paid — and in exchange keeps the penalties and interest it later collects on those delinquent bills. The county covers the shortfall up front and recovers it over time, through payment or the eventual auction of a defaulted property. If the county recovers everything, Cubbison said, the amount that would reach the general fund “might be a couple million dollars, but it is not $30 million.”
Separately, Cubbison said she was exploring whether to hand the county’s transient-occupancy-tax and business-improvement-district collections, and possibly business-license renewals, to an outside vendor. She said the change could require raising the county’s flat $40 business-license fee, which she called too low to be worth the staff time it consumes.
There was no report from the assessor. “I do not have my state audit report done yet,” Assessor-Clerk-Recorder Katrina Bartolomie told the board, adding that she expected to submit it “within the next couple weeks.” She attributed the delay to a strained office: her assistant registrar of voters has been out on medical leave, and staff spent days preparing for a potential hand recount of the 61-candidate governor’s race — an effort estimated at roughly $3,250 a day for about 27 days. The recount was called off because the person who requested it never put up the money.
The state auditor had directed Bartolomie to build “aging reports” by March to flag unassessed properties at highest risk of going untaxed, and to document formal assessment policies by June. No supervisor pressed her on the missed deadline; instead, they thanked her office for running the June primary.
For now, the progress reports from the county’s department heads are unverified. The state auditor’s office has not yet reviewed the six-month responses. Its public recommendation tracker still reflects the earlier 60-day round, in which the auditor confirmed only one of the recommendations the county had reported as fully implemented — an elections contract with a ballot-printing vendor. Two other recommendations, out of the 18 recommendations the audit made, were downgraded to “partially implemented,” with the auditor rejecting the county’s “fully implemented” claim. The other recommendations are listed as “pending.”
In one of the downgraded recommendations, the state auditor had told the county to produce a single document spelling out when a sole-source contract — one awarded without competitive bidding — is justified. The county reported the task complete. The auditor found that the county had circulated guidance to staff but “has not yet created the expectations document” the recommendation required. The other downgraded recommendation involved tracking contracts repeatedly awarded to the same vendor. The auditor said it wanted evidence that the county has fully implemented the necessary processes before crediting the change.
The board accepted all of the reports as informational, without objection, on a motion by Supervisor Madeline Cline seconded by Supervisor John Haschak. There was no public comment.