YourPublicMoney.Com
Introduction

What Are This Website
and Newsletter About?

Last update - 6/14/10

This website and newsletter are addressed to three primary audiences:

We believe there are four key financial duties of County officials:

We believe County Officials spectacularly failed to live up to these duties.

We also believe these duties aren't "left wing" or "right wing" ideas. We believe most people active in local politics agree with these values.

In the past 16 years the County of Mendocino built up about $300 million of unfunded retiree pensions and healthcare.

But these real past expenses and the debt they created were never reported to the people. The County has still not disclosed this past expanse, and they only reported the debt when forced to by reform of government accounting standards.

The County's total debt as of June 2009 was $350 million plus. Annual expenses are really about $10 million more than reported.

If all the County's debts and obligations were paid over the next 30 years a half billion dollars would be extracted from our weak local economy. Not one minute of public services or a dime's worth of infrastructure would be produced. Future generations would pay hundreds of millions of expenses - plus interest - that was our responsiblility.

We believe that RIGHT NOW County Officials are greatly increasing our County's debt. We believe politically active citizens have a duty to stop it and change the direction of the County.

YourPublicMoney.Com takes no position on what employee benefits or County programs should be.

We absolutely take the position that whatever benefits and programs the County provides it must fully disclose their expense to citizens and properly fund them.

The most important change needed is to build a consensus across the political spectrum of people active in local politics that County officials are expected to fulfill these duties and will be held accountable if they don't.

YourPublicMoney.Com's mission is to help citizens understand the County's finances and debt and help create such a consensus.

This Website

This is a quick tour of the website.

If you see this Icon in the website click it to see more information for that topic.

Sections in the Website (See menu at top)

Mendo County Debt: (click title to go to section) This section summarizes the County's debt: What it is, Where'd it come from, What are it's effects, What went wrong, and What needs to be done.

It's 9 pages - think of each page as being worth about $40 million - that's the total County debt divided by 9.

Archives: Previous issues of our email newsletter and home pages tied to those newsletters.

Reports & Video: This section presents several types of information - Reports and Memos we've produced, videos, reports from other entities such as the Grand Jury, and our data sources.

You are in the "About Us & Website " section.

Sign up for our Newsletter by clicking here. Contact Us tells you how to do that. We'd like to hear from you.

Donations and Sponsors: Finally, if this work seems worthwhile to you, your donation helps to sustain our work.