Commentary and Opinion by Samuel Strait – March 19, 2022 It is not often, at least in Del Norte County, that I get to witness two dumpster fires in the same day. How lucky am I? Following the agony of Friday morning's judicial stumbling's March 18th of the Del Norte Unified School District's legal team in stalling much needed reform of the district's $25 million Bond Citizens Oversight Committee (COC), I attended a scheduled meeting of that Committee. It commenced with an obtuse comment by the COC's chair, Steve Lyons, that with the mornings dismissal of a Writ of Mandate that the Committee had smooth sailing ahead. Unfortunately for Chair Lyons, he had little in the way of cognitive ability to understand that the COC's problems may just be beginning. The meeting itself was largely unremarkable as to content, with only the continued resistance to ideas presented by Committee Member Angelina Countess-Bieber to inject some sort of sanity into the activities of the Committee, largely ignored. I might add at their peril. What was of interest to the entire community was an address by Assistant Superintendent, Jeff Napier, who outlined just what he felt the responsibilities of the COC actually was. It was a rather interesting admission by the unelected bureaucrat, that most in the community have an entirely different concept of how "Oversight" actually is defined within the context of this situation. Nothing like a moving definition to end the day's proceedings. Seems when it comes to any government agency electing to utilize local Oversight Committees as a check on government spending, we are faced with an illusion designed to avoid the higher barrier of 55% voter approval which this particular bond measure failed to produce. In his remarks Napier went on to disclose that the power to check any expenditure of the Bond funds lay in the hands of the actual school board and the Committee's sole task is to transform information spoon fed by the district into a language that the community can understand. Yet even this simple task has eluded all previous COC's and the current one as well. The COC is not even a true "Oversight" Committee by any definition of the word "oversight". They may as well have been called the Del Norte Unified School District's "GO Bond" Translating Committee. CTC, it has a nice ring to it, but as to oversight not so much. In simpler terms, an oversight committee is simply bureaucratic speak for "the community's vision of how the money is to be spent is irrelevant". "Only the district's division of experts is allowed to form a vision and act on it with the blessing of a 'rubber stamp' from the actual school board." The school district can market any funding effort to the public, often utilizing misleading goals and objectives, while soft peddling actual intentions to create an entirely false narrative as to its intentions. More often than not, priorities expected by the public, are completely ignored in favor of the bureaucratic vision. Instead of the illusion that the district was "over crowded", and in desperate need of additional new classroom space as marketed by the district in the run up to approval of the 2008 bond money, the district quickly pivoted once the bond money was in hand and used it largely to paint over years of general neglect by the district of annual maintenance. Not that it wasn't noticed by maintenance staff, but lack of financial resources allocated to the issue when the district elected to address increasing staff wages and benefits was the key to this continuing build up of a general maintenance train wreck. Instead of unnecessary new classrooms, the district administration elected to use the funds on updated heating and cooling systems for every school, updated technology, fire suppression systems, carpets, new windows, painting, landscaping, fencing, and other features largely in contradiction to the community's vision of new classrooms and facilities. By in large most of the $25 million was spent in this fashion with only token nods to some of the more "popular" desires of the community. For me, the school district's behavior with the GO Bond funding was not unexpected, as governing agency's have a long established pattern of shading the truth when it comes to asking for voter approved additional funding. The suggestion of a "COC" to keep expenditures on track is a dead give away that things are not on the up and up, yet voters never learn from past experience with government deceit. We currently are juggling two additional "COC's" which have no power to protect the public from government adventures outside of what the public expects. Both governments and the school district have taken full advantage of that inability for a COC to have any effect on government policy when spending voter approved money for specific purposes. Money that very likely would not have been approved if it had to meet the higher 55% approval rung. The local school district has expended nearly $24 million of the $25 million Bond funding, most of it on painting over previous school board mismanagement of district facilities. Any surprises here that it has happened, comes not from me…. It is all a repeat like watching that rerun of a movie that you never liked in the first place…. Almost as if the local school district administration was perpetually starring in that awful rerun.