The Weight We’re Carrying:
A Look at Public Agency Capacity Across Northern California
Across Northern California, and I imagine in other rural areas and small public agencies, the lift of providing public services is growing steadily heavier and the path forward is steeper with each step.
The Pattern
Budget shortfalls, emergency loans and reserve drawdowns are becoming commonplace. This did not happen overnight and as John F. Kennedy famously paraphrased Tacitus “Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan.”
Few will own how we got here. But here we are.
Within the last few weeks there have been stories on Humboldt County tapping into its reserves to make up budget deficits, Shasta County filling a $10 million hole in its Health and Human Services department (normally a fully state funded enterprise) and over the last year the State of California assigned an administrator to oversee all of Plumas County’s school sites due to a $9.5 million structure deficit.
While each of these situations has its own creation story, combined I see them as an indicator of larger system challenges.
Small agencies across Northern California are being asked to absorb state and federal funding uncertainty, post-pandemic cost structures, workforce shortages, and deferred infrastructure — all simultaneously. The load is increasing as the foundation erodes. For small agencies already running at full speed — limited staff, lean budgets, and in many cases community volunteers serving as board members — predicting and preparing for these converging pressures would have been the exception, not the rule. Now that the increased weight is obvious, we need to be strengthening our skills, and our resolve. We also need to be patient.
The Limitations of Quick Fixes
Too often in these situations we run scared and grab onto the nearest handhold for stability. Local leadership understandably wants a solution they can implement and move on from.
The actual need is sustained capacity building — better systems, stronger governance, long-term financial planning, and recruitment and development of human talent. Using a physical fitness example, it’s the difference between taking a pill and committing to diet, exercise, and mental health over time.
The Hippocratic oath is worth invoking here as well — physicians are asked first, to do no harm. Outside intervention — consulting, state programs, federal mandates — applied without proper diagnosis of the patient carries the same risk. The pill that treats one symptom can compromise the whole system. The path through the challenges looks different in every community, and I’ve seen what it takes up close and in person.
Crossing the Rubicon
I was at the center of a similar situation in 2005 when I took office on the Trinity County Board of Supervisors. Elected in March of 2004, I had to sit on the sidelines and watch the decline of county government as leaders who had lost their elections struggled to find solutions for the county-owned hospital that had been on the decline for years. By the time I took office in January of 2005, the County of Trinity was on a week-to-week cash flow juggle, we had no CAO and the one re-elected board member had passed away between March and January.
We dug in.
Over the next 18 months we went through a process that required several pieces of special legislation, countless community meetings, the development of a Joint Powers Authority with a local electric utility to establish interim governance of the facility, and a 70% plus ballot box approval on two local taxing measures. The process was fraught with peril but ultimately successful. We had few guarantees of a positive outcome but knew that our only choice was to work diligently to ensure that the right conditions existed for that potential result. It took tremendous effort that included a strong commitment to effective outreach and, in some cases, the sacrifice of personal relationships in exchange for forward movement. Because of our efforts, a rural community hospital continues to save lives. The stakes were high for us then and are getting higher for all Californians every day.
What’s Ahead?
On his way out of office in 2018, Governor Jerry Brown was asked about the future and those coming after him to lead the way. His response was “What’s out there is darkness, uncertainty, decline, and recession.” It was a prescient statement that rural and small public entities are feeling right now and we cannot meet it with the same strategies that got us here. It doesn’t have to be that way — but it won’t fix itself either.
Rural communities have weathered darker forecasts than this and I’m hopeful that we can once again meet the challenges ahead before our foundations erode and our will disappears.
Jeff Morris is a former Trinity County Supervisor and a longtime student of rural governance. He founded Black Cow Advisors to help small and rural public agencies build stronger foundations for the work ahead.
