After Six Years of Watching, I’m Sitting This One Out; Supervisors Workshop

For the past six years, I have attended Nevada County’s annual three-day Board of Supervisors “workshop” as a citizen observer. I’ve sat through each day, listened to the presentations, reviewed the materials, and watched the same process unfold year after year — often in the same room, at the same venue, following the same script.

This year, I won’t be there.

Not because the issues don’t matter — they do — but because the workshop itself has become a staged exercise with outcomes largely predetermined long before the first slide appears on the screen.

The Nature of the Workshop

The County presents this workshop as a strategic planning session where Board objectives for the coming year are shaped. In practice, it is a tightly managed sequence of presentations curated by the County Executive Officer (CEO) Alison Lehman and delivered by a narrow group of senior department heads aligned with the CEO’s office. The objectives are already familiar and almost guaranteed to roll forward unchanged, emerging from executive framing rather than open Board deliberations.

The workshop is not structured to genuinely engage the public or to invite senior county leadership into an open, organization-wide discussion about what the Board’s priorities should be. Instead, the Board is effectively led through a predetermined set of objectives. That is not governance, and it is not why we elect supervisors.

Limitations on Public Input and Discussion

Public comment is technically allowed, but it is tightly time-limited and front-loaded, occurring before substantive discussion begins. Once that window closes, this procession becomes a closed-loop conversation among supervisors, senior staff, and consultants. By the time Day Three arrives, when the Board formally “revisits” the objectives, the scope of discussion has already been defined.

After six years of observing this pattern and offering public comment, I’ve concluded that my presence has never added substance.

That conclusion isn’t cynicism. It’s pattern recognition.

The Shift from Priorities to Perpetual Objectives

The County no longer calls these “priorities,” but “objectives.” The distinction matters. Priorities imply choice, tradeoffs, and sequencing — deciding what matters most and what can wait. Objectives, by contrast, can exist indefinitely. They don’t need to be completed; they only need to be discussed, tracked, and reaffirmed.

And that is exactly what has happened.

Year after year, the same objectives reappear: homelessness, housing, economic development, broadband, emergency preparedness, climate resilience, cannabis regulation. All are important. All deserve attention. Yet all remain perpetually “in progress,” with little indication that any will ever be declared finished, resolved, or substantially improved.

This year’s agenda follows the same trajectory. Homelessness remains central, now closely tied to the staff-proposed RV ordinance — a policy still burdened by unresolved questions about public safety, insurance impacts, fire risk, and enforceability. Housing is again described as critical, but without clear production targets. Economic development is reviewed. Broadband progress is updated. Emergency preparedness is reaffirmed.

None of this is surprising. That is precisely the problem.

Critical Gaps: Who Is Missing?

After reviewing the agendas for all three days of this year’s workshop, what stands out most is not what is discussed — but who is missing.

There is no presentation from the Sheriff’s Department, despite ongoing discussions about homelessness, public safety impacts, and emergency response. There is no representation from local fire districts or CAL FIRE, even as wildfire risk, evacuation planning, and climate resilience are framed as core objectives. There is no participation from Sacramento legislators or state departments, despite the County’s reliance on state funding, mandates, and regulatory frameworks for housing, homelessness, emergency preparedness, and fiscal policy.

These are not peripheral actors. They are central to the very outcomes the Board claims to be pursuing.

Equally notable is the absence of many core county departments: Public Works, Environmental Health, Behavioral Health, the Assessor, Auditor-Controller, Treasurer–Tax Collector, Clerk-Recorder, Elections, Library, Probation, Child Welfare, Animal Control, the Agricultural Commissioner, and cannabis enforcement functions. Collectively, these departments represent a substantial share of the County’s workforce, budget, and daily public-facing responsibilities — yet they have no voice in the County’s primary annual strategic forum.

Instead, the workshop relies heavily on executive framing by the County Executive Office, a narrow set of “priority objective” presentations, and contracted lobbyists speaking about Sacramento rather than policymakers speaking for themselves.

Strategic planning without operational input is not strategy; it is an abstraction—and abstraction is a poor substitute for informed governance.

The Need for Focus, Representation, and Accountability

What’s missing from this process is not effort or good intent, but focus, representation, and accountability. The Board is attempting to manage too many objectives at once, diffusing responsibility and making it nearly impossible for the public to determine whether meaningful progress is being made — or who should be held responsible when it is not.

Rather than continuing to maintain the same eight or nine objectives that repeat year after year, the Board should consolidate them into a small number of clear, countywide priorities that apply to all departments and employees. Calling them priorities again would restore the expectation of choice, tradeoffs, and completion.

This would not change how departments operate day to day. Planning would still plan. Public Works would still build and maintain infrastructure. Health and Human Services would still deliver services. Fire, law enforcement, finance, and administration would continue performing their core responsibilities.

What would change is clarity.

The Board would be unmistakably signaling what outcomes it expects the organization to prioritize — and what success actually looks like.

Proposed Consolidated Priorities

Those expectations could be summarized into four core priorities.

First: Economic Development.

Defined broadly, this should include business growth, workforce attraction, farm and agricultural production, airport development, infrastructure investment, and high-speed internet expansion; easily measurable by the number of businesses not closing and new ones opening.

Second: Housing, integrated as a continuum.

Homelessness, entry-level housing, workforce housing, high-density micro-housing (600 ft.² or less), and affordability should no longer be treated as separate objectives; we need clear housing unit goals annually; 1500 units minimum finalized by the end of fiscal year 2027-2028

Third: Emergency Preparedness.

This priority should integrate wildfire mitigation, early warning systems, evacuation planning, climate resilience, and the continued coordination and consolidation of fire districts, with progress easily measured by the number of miles of cleared evacuation routes.

Fourth — and most critical: Fiscal Sustainability.

The Board should require staff to bring forward a balanced budget for fiscal year 2026–27 that does not exceed projected revenues, along with a clear, measurable plan to reduce long-term pension liabilities, which are currently only 62.5% funded.

A Call for Meaningful Change

By consolidating objectives into true Board priorities and making them countywide, the annual workshop could shift from managing presentations to producing results.

This year’s workshop feels less like a forum for shaping outcomes and more like an exercise in checking a box.

That is why I’m sitting this one out.

Not because the issues don’t matter, but because the process — particularly as designed and managed by senior leadership — no longer reflects the complexity of the County it claims to govern.

Clear priorities.
Shared responsibility.
Measurable benchmarks.

Until then, the annual gathering will remain polished, predictable, and comfortably familiar — and increasingly disconnected from the realities it purports to address.

After six years of watching, stepping back feels like the most honest response.