The Rood Center Elite Club: Visionary Kool-Aid, Power, Perks, and Pension Denial

Welcome to the Nevada County Government Center—where the conversations are casual, the compensation is astronomical, and the punch (and cookies) are taxpayer-funded year-round.

You might think your property taxes are paying for roads, emergency services, or fiscal responsibility. Adorable. In reality, they’re underwriting the most expensive small talk in the Sierra Foothills. When your average senior staffer ambles down the hall for a quick gossip session—exercising their jowls—you’re not just footing the bill. You’re sponsoring the show.

Let’s do the math. County Executive Officer Alison Lehman hauls in nearly a cool half million dollars in total compensation annually. That’s around $3.75 per working minute. Senior department heads and elected officials? It’s hovering a quarter million dollars annually—or $2.08 a minute. Your average County employee? About two times the county's median household income a year—$1.25 per minute.

So when a few of them cluster for a cheerful little chat about vacation plans or the latest office potluck? That’s $8 to $15 per minute in public funds—burning faster than the failed Measure V fire tax could’ve kept up with. Congratulations! You just bankrolled the government’s most expensive comedy minute.

And now that the FY 2025–26 budget is in the bag—passed 4–1, with Rob Tucker dissenting (and 24.5 shiny new full-time positions added because, clearly, efficiency was getting out of hand)—it’s officially party season at the County building.

Here’s the working calendar, as it currently unfolds:

- Extended Vacation Handoffs — because burnout is real… from walking Hirschman’s Pond Loop

- Retirement Parties — for those retiring from attending retirement parties.

- Baby Showers — for the future recipients of CalPERS.

- Maternity Leaves — that last longer than some County tenures.

- Fair Week — that magical time when County operations slow to a syrupy crawl. Staff either vanish entirely or reappear in cowboy hats, claiming their out-of-office reply is part of “community engagement.”

- Back-to-School Milestones — Full-day schedule adjustments for first day of school and eighth grade graduations. Remote work days for “ninth grade emotional transitions.” And entire departments go dark when Karen in Admin has a niece graduating. Somehow every academic milestone becomes a government holiday—with PTO, group cards, and a Costco sheet cake charged to “team morale.”

- Sick Leave Season — just in case someone caught a cold laughing too hard at a hallway joke.

- Halloween Treat Battles — judged like a Michelin-star bakeoff, and costume contests that rival Comic-Con.

- Thanksgiving Potlucks — with three kinds of stuffing and zero kinds of budget reform.

- Christmas Dirty Santa & Cookie Exchanges — bring two dozen, take a dozen excuses.

- New Year’s Office Bingo & Super Bowl Squares — gambling disguised as serious fiscal analysis.

- “Working from Home” Resurgence — for roughly 60% of staff, though no word on what the “working” part entails.

- Valentine’s Day — not so much about love, more about publicly funded breakroom candy exchanges and HR-approved flirtation.

- Easter Egg Hunt — high-stakes strategizing over who hid the CalPERS transparency report in one of the eggs.

- Fourth Thursday in April – Bring Your Kid to Work Day — where toddlers run laps around departmental efficiency and draft stronger policies before snack time. Bonus: they leave knowing every government meeting includes cookies and at least one acronym no adult can explain.

Now it’s time to start the whole cycle all over again, now it’s officially fiscal budget season, all hands on deck!

Spring to Fall — 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., you’ll spot herds of employees on “walkabout breaks” around Hirschman’s Pond—self-care at $3.75 a minute. Or hoofing it from the Rood Center to downtown Nevada City for an “express lunch” that lasts an hour—*not* counting the post-lunch dog sweater slideshow. That waste could’ve filled a pothole.

But let’s be fair. Most of Nevada County’s 900+ full-time employees are honest, competent public servants doing real work. The issue is structural—and cultural. A small elite club of highly compensated executives has cultivated an environment where workplace culture is more about party planning than pension planning.

And remember—every stroll, snack, and seasonal shindig is generously underwritten by the magic combo of vacation accrual, telecommuting perks, generous paid leave, and the mystical immunity from performance metrics. Honestly, the only thing missing is a County-sponsored mindfulness retreat in the breakroom. But hang tight—someone’s probably booking the Madelyn Helling Library for taxpayer-funded yoga, complete with lavender misting stations and guided breathing to soothe post-cupcake indigestion.

Here’s the kicker: with six-figure salaries, luxury benefits, and those home-office yoga mats you paid for, you’d think County execs wouldn’t even need a pension—their lack of action confirms it. And yet, while their total comp balloons to over $450,000 a year, Nevada County’s pension system is only 62.8% funded—with a $223 million unfunded liability swelling like a department head’s ego.

And the plan to fix it? There isn’t one. But don’t worry—there’s more Kool-Aid and cupcakes coming Thursday.

You can’t solve a quarter-billion-dollar crisis with potlucks and processed flowcharts. But don’t expect reform—because the Kool-Aid is flowing, and it’s being served cold.

Bonus Round: Try Building Something

And heaven help you if you’re actually trying to do something—like, say, build a home, split a lot, add a bedroom, or bring improvements into compliance. That’s when you enter the Bermuda Triangle of progress: the Community Development Agency’s black hole.

You walk in with hope and a site plan. You walk out with a three-ring binder of “requirements,” a six-month review timeline, and the creeping suspicion your great-grandchildren might have better luck pulling that permit.

Getting something approved when the department is fully staffed is hard enough. But during “holiday season” (which begins after the fiscal budget passes and ends… never)? Forget it. There’s a costume contest to plan, potlucks to prep, and more walkabouts than actual site walks.

Trying to work with the Planning Department—or navigating the Planning Commission—quickly reveals why locals call it the Community *Anti*-Development Agency. Every meeting ends with more conditions, another study, and just enough bureaucratic fog to keep your project eternally “under review.”

By the time you finally get that permit, your contractor’s moved to Idaho, your loan has expired, and your lot is underwater—literally, because winter came and you never got that grading permit.

So next time you’re at the Rood Center and see a gaggle of senior officials laughing in the hallway, don’t be alarmed. They’ve probably just left the CEO’s office, freshly refueled with cookies and another round of her signature “Kool-Aid Visioning” refreshment. Just remember: you probably paid $15 for that one minute joke too.

At that price, you ought to get a punchline—maybe even a cookie on your way out—and a teaser shot of the County Executive’s signature Kool-Aid Visioning Blend™. Served cold, with a splash of denial… and now proudly rebranded as:

Cabal-Aid.