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March 21, 2022 \u2014 Today is the first day on the job for interim CEO Darcie Antle, whose one-year contract for salary and benefits totaling $338,000 was approved unanimously at last week\u2019s Board of Supervisors meeting. Former CEO Carmel Angelo\u2019s last day on the job was Friday.\nThe board also discussed crafting an ordinance or revitalizing existing rules to regulate water hauling in a way that would ideally curtail diverting water to illegal pot grows while not preventing access to drinking water.\nAnd, in an effort to transition away from fossil fuels, the board agreed to start the process for a pilot program to enter a master equity lease plan with Enterprise Fleet Management to replace some of the 55 vehicles in the Social Services Department with hybrids by next year. Staff analysis projects a savings of about a million and a half dollars over the next ten years.\nTwenty-three of the department\u2019s vehicles are currently eligible for the new lease program, which will consider hybrid options whenever possible. The final draft of the plan is expected by July of this year.\nThe board has directed staff to transition to an all-electric fleet, but more charging stations will be necessary to run all of the county\u2019s nearly 400 vehicles on electricity instead of fuel.\nAt this time, the county government has installed three charging stations with four working chargers at two locations. According to the staff report accompanying the item, it cost $36,000 to install two stations at the jail, both of which are expected to be out of commission for most of next year as construction on the new jail gets underway. The third station, at the crisis residential treatment center in Ukiah, cost about $20,000. Yearly maintenance and data storage at each station is estimated at about $3000. \nCounty staff estimates that it would take three to five years to have charging stations at all county offices.\nWater was also top of mind. Tomorrow\u2019s forecasts for inland Mendocino County are creeping into the eighties, hinting rather broadly at a long, hot, dry summer. Supervisors John Haschak and Glenn McGourty, who are on the drought task force, agreed to form an ad hoc committee dedicated to figuring out how to re-establish a stand-alone water agency. Supervisor Ted Williams emphasized the main lesson from the morning\u2019s budget presentation. \u201cThere\u2019s no way to bring this back without a funding plan,\u201d he pointed out. \u201cAnd I think today we have negative general fund\u2026and you could either propose making some cuts, adding an assessment or a tax, or finding another creative means to source revenue. But I think that the logical next step is, before we can say yes, we need to see where the money is going to come from.\u201d\nThe board agreed to add members to a steering committee to work out how to fund the agency\nMcGourty and Haschak also presented the outlines of an idea to regulate water hauling, a water policy that Haschak explained residents of Covelo and Redwood Valley especially have been calling for. \u201cWe\u2019ve heard about these water trucks going at all times of the day, all times of the night,\u201d he reminded his colleagues. \u201cExtracting from sometimes legal sources, sometimes illegal sources, but a lot of times, it\u2019s just unregulated.\u201d\nThe county already has ordinances regulating water extraction and the sale of drinking water.\nMcGourty proposed requiring water sellers to meter their wells and document water sales. Haschak also suggested hefty fines for violations, starting with $1000 for the first violation and climbing to $5000 after three violations. \u201cBecause we want to make it so people don\u2019t just say it\u2019s the cost of doing business and continue on,\u201d he explained.\nHoward Dashiell, the director of the county dept of transportation, assured the board that there is enough money left over from last year\u2019s state grant to haul residential drinking water from Ukiah to Fort Bragg. Private haulers can then carry it to other communities on the coast. State-funded water haulers have to adhere to strict permitting standards. But Williams worried that even enforcing the ordinances that are already on the books could prevent children in his district from having enough water to practice proper oral hygiene. \u201cWe may put drinking water companies under,\u201d he opined. \u201cOn the coast last year, we had water hauled from inland. I feel pretty bad about the line items for that. It was expensive. And I feel bad about the carbon footprint of hauling water across the county. This year, fuel prices may be double, and we may be looking at more wells going dry\u2026I think what you\u2019re proposing may fix some illicit cannabis nuisance problems in Covelo, but may punish Comptche...I know everybody should be following the books and have a well and maybe a use permit and so forth, (the) reality is that\u2019s not where we\u2019re at. We probably have a lot of water hauling, in the millions of gallons, that\u2019s keeping kids brushing their teeth with drinking water, that could be impede...