County Planning Director Resigns for New Job, as Grand Jury Report Faults Her Department
Chief Building Official Richard Angley to Lead the Beleaguered Department
Mendocino County’s director of Planning and Building Services has resigned to take a job elsewhere — a departure she says is unrelated to a civil grand jury report, published two weeks earlier, that accused her department of operating for more than a decade without adequate written policies and of failing to enforce state fire-safety rules on homes built in high fire-hazard areas.
Julia Krog told MendoLocal.News her resignation is “completely unrelated” to the grand jury’s findings and is “the result of me accepting employment elsewhere.”
At the board of supervisors meeting on Tuesday she said that she notified the CEO’s office in mid-June and that her last day will be July 17, 2026. “I was offered an amazing opportunity to grow my knowledge and skill set with the county of Marin,” she said.
Richard Angley, the county’s chief building official, will be filling the role in an interim capacity.
The report, “From Policy to Practice: Digging Deeper into the Board of Supervisors Oversight of Planning and Building Services,” was published June 24. It was the grand jury’s second look at the department in as many years, prompted after the Board of Supervisors rejected nearly all of the recommendations from the panel’s 2025 report, “Exposing the Cracks.”
The grand jury found that Planning and Building Services — known as PBS — has lacked comprehensive written policies and procedures since its last thorough review in 2015, leaving day-to-day decisions to the “discretion” and “institutional knowledge” of individual staff members.
The most serious concern the panel raised was wildfire safety. It said PBS has issued building permits for illegally constructed, post-1991 homes in the State Responsibility Area and Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (SRA/VHFHSZ) without ensuring compliance with Public Resources Code section 4290 and related Title 14 fire-safe regulations — standards that govern road access, water supply and signage so fire crews can reach and defend properties.
The grand jury also flagged an eight-foot-long plan-review workflow diagram, created after its earlier investigation began, that referenced no county policy and “gave the Grand Jury the impression that it was created to conceal the gaps” in the department’s rules.
Notably, the panel aimed most of its criticism — and all of its recommendations — at the Board of Supervisors and the county’s chief executive, faulting them for failing to give the department clear direction. It praised PBS staff as “dedicated” and held up the county’s Cannabis Division as a model of the clear procedures the rest of the department lacks.
Krog was appointed to lead PBS in March 2022, roughly seven years after the last comprehensive policy review the grand jury cited. Krog started working for the department in 2013 with the rank of “planner one.”
The Board of Supervisors has strongly disputed the grand jury’s conclusions. In an August 2025 response, the board disagreed with all 15 findings of the earlier report and rejected every recommendation but one. It argued that responsibility for section 4290 compliance rests with CAL FIRE — not the county — through the agency’s Defensible Space Program, and that PBS requires a CAL FIRE inspection form before finalizing permits. The board also said the grand jury’s data was wrong, putting the share of “Class K” rural-dwelling permits at roughly 6 to 9 percent rather than the “record high of 44 percent” the panel reported, and it rebutted, point by point, five properties the grand jury cited as examples.
The follow-up grand jury report concluded that the board’s response itself fell short of the law — that under Penal Code section 933.05 the board was required to explain its rejection of each recommendation and did not, and that no supervisor verified the response’s accuracy before approving it.
At the center of the dispute is a technical but consequential question: whether a CAL FIRE defensible-space inspection satisfies section 4290’s separate development standards for roads, water and access. MendoLocal.News asked CAL FIRE’s Mendocino Unit who is responsible for section 4290 compliance on existing structures; the agency did not respond by press time Wednesday.
Krog’s resignation and the grand jury report also came amid other scrutiny of the department. On June 22 — two days before the report was published — three Redwood Valley residents filed a lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Act challenging the adequacy of the department’s environmental review of a proposed Faizan Corporation gas station that the Board of Supervisors approved in May.
Interim Chief Executive Officer Sarah Pierce did not respond to questions about the resignation.
The board now faces a deadline of its own: under state law, it must formally respond to the new grand jury report within 90 days. Whether it will revisit the recommendations it rejected a year ago — this time without the director who ran the department at the center of them — remains to be seen.