Civil Grand Jurors' Association of California

3 weeks ago

Grand jury advocates new agency for climate
Panel says Marin lags on greenhouse gas cuts
By Adrian Rodriguez, arodriguez@marinij.com

Marin County needs to create a new department or agency to lead climate initiatives across every city and town to drive down carbon emissions, according to a new report.

The leading causes of greenhouse gas emissions in Marin are gas-fueled vehicles, accounting for more than 50%, and burning gas for heating and cooking, at 27%, according to the Marin County Civil Grand Jury report.

“Marin has made important strides to reduce GHG emissions in some sectors. However, Marin is not on track to meet the 2030 goal,” the report says. “Why? Largely because residents of Marin need to change their behavior. To reach the goal, we must significantly reduce burning fossil fuels in vehicles, homes, and buildings.”

To address the climate crisis, the county created the Marin Climate and Energy Partnership in 2007. The MCEP is comprised of the county, its 11 municipalities and three other public agencies.

The MCEP has played a leading role in creating strategies for electric vehicle adoption and electrification in Marin’s homes and buildings. The group also tracks emissions inventories for each agency.

Each member agency enacted climate plans that share a common goal of reducing emissions to a level 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, the report says.

According to the 2024 inventory, Marin’s countywide greenhouse gas emissions were reduced 18% below 1990 levels. To achieve its 2030 goal, the county needs to decrease emissions another 22%, the report says.

The report says efforts to reduce how many cars are on the road and the distances they travel has had only marginal gains, but efforts to switch residents from using gas-powered cars to zero-emission vehicles has been more successful.

Changing from gas-powered appliances to electric ones has proven difficult, the report says. For one thing, more than 70% of the county’s residences are single-family homes and 94% were built before 1980. That means most will need to go through all-electric upgrades costing $3,000 to $25,000, the report says.

Another challenge is the federal administration. The Trump administration has announced plans to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement and has reversed climate policies. These actions can deliver a blow to California’s policies on air and water quality standards, electric vehicle initiatives and efforts to curb emissions, the report says.

The county-sponsored partnership only has one paid staffer and a third-party consultant, which needs to be addressed, the report says.

“A larger, dedicated team of experienced people should enhance Marin’s chances of reaching the 2030 goal,” the report says.

“We appreciate that the Grand Jury recognized the work and successes that have been accomplished to date,” Dana Armanino, the county’s sustainability planning manager, said in an email.

The partnership has helped achieve emissions reductions, Armanino said. She agreed that “it will take all of Marin’s agencies, businesses, community members coming together to make significant changes if we are to achieve our goals.”

The grand jury recommends that the new department or agency to lead the climate initiatives is formed by the end of the year. The grand jury recommends that the new climate team present a plan to achieve the 2030 goal for the entire county by April 2026.

The panel also recommends that the county Board of Supervisors publish an annual greenhouse gas inventory with the most up-to-date data on the county’s website starting July 2026.

County Executive Derek Johnson said staff is preparing a comprehensive response to the grand jury report.

Johnson said next month the county executive office plans to recommend that the Board of Supervisors approve a budget investment in a new leadership team and structure “designed to bring both urgency and action to the implementation of our climate action plan.”

“We have been actively working to align our leadership structure with the realities our residents face,” said Johnson, adding that climate change “requires dedicated leadership, sustained resources, and a laser-sharp focus on measurable outcomes.”

“Marin residents are counting on us — not just for plans, but for results and we are up to the task,” Johnson said.

More will be presented in May, he said.

Bill Carney, a board member of environmental groups such as the Marin Climate Action Network, said the grand jury got it right, and Marin needs to “scale up its funding to reduce the causes of climate change.”

“The report is right that the main way to reduce greenhouse gas pollution is to simply stop burning fossil fuels in our cars and buildings by switching to electric whenever an old car or furnace needs replacement,” Carney said. “For that to happen systemwide, local government needs to set the rules, educate people, and offer incentives to narrow any cost gaps.”

Carney said the grand jury points to the dismemberment of federal climate programs as the main challenge to meeting Marin’s goals.

“That’s all the more reason for amping up local funding and coordination of climate action,” Carney said.

The grand jury report — titled “Can Marin Achieve Its Climate Action Goal By 2030?” — is online at bit.ly/3EwPXjg. ... See MoreSee Less

Civil Grand Jurors' Association of California

4 weeks ago

Revisiting the Civil Grand Jury Report That Warned About Santa Cruz County’s Wildfire Risk
San Jose Inside, Saturday, April 19, 2025, By Jacob Pierce
Gov. Gavin Newsom (left) stopped by the Santa Cruz Mountains on Tuesday to survey the damage from the CZU fires. (Photo courtesy of Office of the California Governor, via Twitter)
Rich Goldberg has several air filters running at full blast in his Santa Cruz Mountains home, but that hasn’t been enough to stop him from developing a cough from the CZU Lightning Complex fire burning nearby.
Goldberg, foreperson for the Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury, predicts that people will be talking about how to reduce fire risk long after crews extinguish the current blaze.
In June and July 2020, Goldberg and his fellow grand jurors released 10 reports, including two about fire safety, as previously reported by San Jose Inside’s sister publication, the Santa Cruz Good Times. One of those reports highlighted reasons the county was at risk for a serious wildfire.
Goldberg will be the first to admit that it’s too early to know whether the issues highlighted by the grand jury contributed to the devastating CZU Lightning Complex fire.
“I would never engage in ‘I told you so,’” says Goldberg, who watched the evacuation orders closely and was relieved not to be one of the 77,000 forced to leave. “But clearly, these issues are going to be top of mind going forward.”
So far, firefighting crews have contained 43 percent of the CZU Lightning Complex fire, which has charred 85,218 acres as of Tuesday morning. The fire has burned 1,453 structures, making it the ninth-most destructive blaze in California history, and investigators are still surveying the damage.
Hot Seat
In an era when hot temperatures and drought conditions are spreading wildfire more rapidly than ever, fire departments are relying on new technology for a helping hand.
Wildfire detection cameras can keep an eye on forests, often catching fires as soon as they start. One problem, as noted by the grand jury report, is that the Cal Fire San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit (CZU) only had one such camera for Santa Cruz County. Perched in Bonny Doon, the camera faced toward San Mateo County, not Santa Cruz County, and it was incapable of rotating to scan the area.
Cal Fire CZU Chief Ian Larkin says he isn’t sure if the crews got any good information off the camera in the early days of the current conflagration, while the fire started and spread. That fire quickly destroyed the camera on Aug. 19. The last image it took was a red blur, as flames engulfed the tower where the camera stood.
Since then, Cal Fire has added two new ALERTWildfire cameras, and Larkin says he can rotate them remotely to scan the mountainside. Plus, he says Cal Fire has initiated conversations with the city of Santa Cruz about placing a wildfire camera on the Municipal Wharf, facing back toward the mountains, to watch for future incidents.
The grand jury report also revealed that many local fire districts need to improve their response times, and additionally, it laid out the ecosystem of 10 separate fire districts in Santa Cruz County—home to about 273,000 residents. Other counties, such as Contra Costa and Los Angeles, have a unified fire chief for their entire region.
The report argued that Santa Cruz County’s framework creates a confusing web of bureaucracy, unclear chain of command, various inconsistencies and little accountability.
Larkin, who disagrees with those findings, says there are many ways to organize fire departments, and he doesn’t believe Santa Cruz County’s arrangement is problematic.
He stresses the unprecedented nature of the situation.
The state of California saw more than 10,000 lightning strikes—many of them unaccompanied by rain—over the course of three days, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The strikes started several large fires on the Central Coast and in the Bay Area. (The second- and third-biggest wildfires in state history are still burning in counties nearby.)
Firefighters were already fighting a fire in southern California, leaving them thinly stretched across the state. “It delayed us getting any resources to us because they simply weren’t available,” Larkin explained.
The grand jury requires written responses from 16 government agencies, officials and elected bodies. It’s requesting responses from nine more.
A report from Joe Serrano, executive officer of Santa Cruz Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo), agrees with many grand jury findings about the inefficiencies and limited oversight among the county’s fire agencies. LAFCo is planning a comprehensive service review of all fire districts in Santa Cruz County due in October of 2021.
Burning Point
The grand jury report didn’t lay blame solely at the feet of public officials. The general public in the county, the report argued, was woefully unprepared for the fire risk and did not show an appropriate level of concern about the havoc that wildfires can wreck.
It’s a topic that Cal Fire officials, like Larkin, have hammered home over the past two weeks. Larkin says it has been much easier to save houses where residents cleared dead brush and flammable objects from being anywhere near their homes.
Larkin says he’s seen homes where the owner took proper precautions to protect their homes interspersed with those that did not. Oftentimes, he says, those who protected their homes also protected their neighbors. But at the same time, those who ignored rules about clearing flammable material, he adds, endangered the homes of their neighbors.
“You have the house that didn’t do defensible space burn down; it burned down the house that did all the work; and the house that did all the work protects the house next to it that doesn’t have the defensible space,” he says. “And there are many examples of that throughout the community that are affected by that now.”
California’s defensible space laws are especially strict for the 10 yards surrounding each home. For starters, California law requires that homeowners remove dead or dry leaves and pine needles from your yard, roof and rain gutters, and within 30 feet of their houses, homeowners should remove dead plants, grass and weeds.
To firefighters, all this is considered fuel for a potential blaze. There are many other regulations, some of them extending to a 100-foot radius surrounding each house.
Cal Fire CZU, in its capacity as the Santa Cruz County Fire Department, does local defensible space inspections throughout the year. Larkin says he and other local Cal Fire leaders have determined that it’s best to deal with violations by working with the homeowner. Issuing citations doesn’t do much good, he says.
“If you look at the areas that don’t have defensible space, I think it would overwhelm the DA’s office with a bunch of misdemeanor fines,” he says. “We try to just gain compliance through the inspections and working with the communities. But I’ll be honest, I think we can do a better job. And after this incident is done, I think it’ll be a rude awakening for a lot of folks. We have fire here. We have a history of fires here.”
Many observers over the past couple weeks have pointed out the perfect storm of fire conditions—dry lightning strikes accompanied by heavy wind. But lest anyone assume this is a once-in-a-generation event, it’s worth considering that recent fire conditions could have been even worse—or at the very least that Santa Cruz County could be primed for a perfect storm of entirely different conditions in the future.
For instance, although the initial days of the CZU fire were hot and free of fog, a heavy marine layer did eventually set in, helping with the fight against the fire on the ground—a cooling event that can’t always be counted on.
Not only that, but the Grand Jury report notes that most Santa Cruz County residents live in what’s known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI), which is at particular risk for wildfire. That means that wildfire risk isn’t confined to Bonny Doon and to Boulder Creek, where much of the current CZU fire is burning.
The WUI stretches throughout the entire region. Santa Cruz County is the only county in the state with the majority of its land in the WUI.
Also, according to analysis by USA Today and the Arizona Republic, several local communities have high wildfire risk—the highest among them being Lompico, which was spared from the nascent flames and which recently had its evacuation orders lifted.
Even the city of Santa Cruz—most of which is not in the WUI—is not immune from threat. It is home to several large groves of non-native blue gum eucalyptus trees, known to be particularly flammable, as noted in the report.
The city has, however, made investments in clearing out fuel buildup in overgrown areas, like DeLaveaga Park, in recent years.
In general, Larkin says, Santa Cruz County remains fire-prone.
“We don’t have that frequency of large fires—we have a lot of small fires that we’re able to contain,” he says. “We meet our mission of keeping them under 10 acres 90 percent of the time. We get the nice Mediterranean climate. We get the cooling coastal influence, but people don’t realize that this area is primed to burn.”
www.sanjoseinside.com/news/revisiting-the-civil-grand-jury-report-that-warned-about-santa-cruz-co... ... See MoreSee Less

Civil Grand Jurors' Association of California

4 weeks ago

Revisiting the Civil Grand Jury Report That Warned About Santa Cruz County’s Wildfire Risk
San Jose Inside, Saturday, April 19, 2025, By Jacob Pierce
Gov. Gavin Newsom (left) stopped by the Santa Cruz Mountains on Tuesday to survey the damage from the CZU fires. (Photo courtesy of Office of the California Governor, via Twitter)
Rich Goldberg has several air filters running at full blast in his Santa Cruz Mountains home, but that hasn’t been enough to stop him from developing a cough from the CZU Lightning Complex fire burning nearby.
Goldberg, foreperson for the Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury, predicts that people will be talking about how to reduce fire risk long after crews extinguish the current blaze.
In June and July 2020, Goldberg and his fellow grand jurors released 10 reports, including two about fire safety, as previously reported by San Jose Inside’s sister publication, the Santa Cruz Good Times. One of those reports highlighted reasons the county was at risk for a serious wildfire.
Goldberg will be the first to admit that it’s too early to know whether the issues highlighted by the grand jury contributed to the devastating CZU Lightning Complex fire.
“I would never engage in ‘I told you so,’” says Goldberg, who watched the evacuation orders closely and was relieved not to be one of the 77,000 forced to leave. “But clearly, these issues are going to be top of mind going forward.”
So far, firefighting crews have contained 43 percent of the CZU Lightning Complex fire, which has charred 85,218 acres as of Tuesday morning. The fire has burned 1,453 structures, making it the ninth-most destructive blaze in California history, and investigators are still surveying the damage.
Hot Seat
In an era when hot temperatures and drought conditions are spreading wildfire more rapidly than ever, fire departments are relying on new technology for a helping hand.
Wildfire detection cameras can keep an eye on forests, often catching fires as soon as they start. One problem, as noted by the grand jury report, is that the Cal Fire San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit (CZU) only had one such camera for Santa Cruz County. Perched in Bonny Doon, the camera faced toward San Mateo County, not Santa Cruz County, and it was incapable of rotating to scan the area.
Cal Fire CZU Chief Ian Larkin says he isn’t sure if the crews got any good information off the camera in the early days of the current conflagration, while the fire started and spread. That fire quickly destroyed the camera on Aug. 19. The last image it took was a red blur, as flames engulfed the tower where the camera stood.
Since then, Cal Fire has added two new ALERTWildfire cameras, and Larkin says he can rotate them remotely to scan the mountainside. Plus, he says Cal Fire has initiated conversations with the city of Santa Cruz about placing a wildfire camera on the Municipal Wharf, facing back toward the mountains, to watch for future incidents.
The grand jury report also revealed that many local fire districts need to improve their response times, and additionally, it laid out the ecosystem of 10 separate fire districts in Santa Cruz County—home to about 273,000 residents. Other counties, such as Contra Costa and Los Angeles, have a unified fire chief for their entire region.
The report argued that Santa Cruz County’s framework creates a confusing web of bureaucracy, unclear chain of command, various inconsistencies and little accountability.
Larkin, who disagrees with those findings, says there are many ways to organize fire departments, and he doesn’t believe Santa Cruz County’s arrangement is problematic.
He stresses the unprecedented nature of the situation.
The state of California saw more than 10,000 lightning strikes—many of them unaccompanied by rain—over the course of three days, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The strikes started several large fires on the Central Coast and in the Bay Area. (The second- and third-biggest wildfires in state history are still burning in counties nearby.)
Firefighters were already fighting a fire in southern California, leaving them thinly stretched across the state. “It delayed us getting any resources to us because they simply weren’t available,” Larkin explained.
The grand jury requires written responses from 16 government agencies, officials and elected bodies. It’s requesting responses from nine more.
A report from Joe Serrano, executive officer of Santa Cruz Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo), agrees with many grand jury findings about the inefficiencies and limited oversight among the county’s fire agencies. LAFCo is planning a comprehensive service review of all fire districts in Santa Cruz County due in October of 2021.
Burning Point
The grand jury report didn’t lay blame solely at the feet of public officials. The general public in the county, the report argued, was woefully unprepared for the fire risk and did not show an appropriate level of concern about the havoc that wildfires can wreck.
It’s a topic that Cal Fire officials, like Larkin, have hammered home over the past two weeks. Larkin says it has been much easier to save houses where residents cleared dead brush and flammable objects from being anywhere near their homes.
Larkin says he’s seen homes where the owner took proper precautions to protect their homes interspersed with those that did not. Oftentimes, he says, those who protected their homes also protected their neighbors. But at the same time, those who ignored rules about clearing flammable material, he adds, endangered the homes of their neighbors.
“You have the house that didn’t do defensible space burn down; it burned down the house that did all the work; and the house that did all the work protects the house next to it that doesn’t have the defensible space,” he says. “And there are many examples of that throughout the community that are affected by that now.”
California’s defensible space laws are especially strict for the 10 yards surrounding each home. For starters, California law requires that homeowners remove dead or dry leaves and pine needles from your yard, roof and rain gutters, and within 30 feet of their houses, homeowners should remove dead plants, grass and weeds.
To firefighters, all this is considered fuel for a potential blaze. There are many other regulations, some of them extending to a 100-foot radius surrounding each house.
Cal Fire CZU, in its capacity as the Santa Cruz County Fire Department, does local defensible space inspections throughout the year. Larkin says he and other local Cal Fire leaders have determined that it’s best to deal with violations by working with the homeowner. Issuing citations doesn’t do much good, he says.
“If you look at the areas that don’t have defensible space, I think it would overwhelm the DA’s office with a bunch of misdemeanor fines,” he says. “We try to just gain compliance through the inspections and working with the communities. But I’ll be honest, I think we can do a better job. And after this incident is done, I think it’ll be a rude awakening for a lot of folks. We have fire here. We have a history of fires here.”
Many observers over the past couple weeks have pointed out the perfect storm of fire conditions—dry lightning strikes accompanied by heavy wind. But lest anyone assume this is a once-in-a-generation event, it’s worth considering that recent fire conditions could have been even worse—or at the very least that Santa Cruz County could be primed for a perfect storm of entirely different conditions in the future.
For instance, although the initial days of the CZU fire were hot and free of fog, a heavy marine layer did eventually set in, helping with the fight against the fire on the ground—a cooling event that can’t always be counted on.
Not only that, but the Grand Jury report notes that most Santa Cruz County residents live in what’s known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI), which is at particular risk for wildfire. That means that wildfire risk isn’t confined to Bonny Doon and to Boulder Creek, where much of the current CZU fire is burning.
The WUI stretches throughout the entire region. Santa Cruz County is the only county in the state with the majority of its land in the WUI.
Also, according to analysis by USA Today and the Arizona Republic, several local communities have high wildfire risk—the highest among them being Lompico, which was spared from the nascent flames and which recently had its evacuation orders lifted.
Even the city of Santa Cruz—most of which is not in the WUI—is not immune from threat. It is home to several large groves of non-native blue gum eucalyptus trees, known to be particularly flammable, as noted in the report.
The city has, however, made investments in clearing out fuel buildup in overgrown areas, like DeLaveaga Park, in recent years.
In general, Larkin says, Santa Cruz County remains fire-prone.
“We don’t have that frequency of large fires—we have a lot of small fires that we’re able to contain,” he says. “We meet our mission of keeping them under 10 acres 90 percent of the time. We get the nice Mediterranean climate. We get the cooling coastal influence, but people don’t realize that this area is primed to burn.”
www.sanjoseinside.com/news/revisiting-the-civil-grand-jury-report-that-warned-about-santa-cruz-co... ... See MoreSee Less

Civil Grand Jurors' Association of California

4 weeks ago

Wharves posing growing safety risk

A Monterey County Civil Grand Jury report warns that serious structural issues are mounting on Monterey’s wharves. MONTEREY HERALD ARCHIVES
By Kyarra Harris
kharris@montereyherald.com
While Monterey’s iconic wharves bring in residents and tourists from all over year-round, the Monterey County Civil Grand Jury warns that serious structural issues are mounting and are calling on city leaders

The wharves — Old Fisherman’s Wharf and Commercial Wharf — have been rated in “poor” condition since at least 2017. Despite multiple inspections and reports from licensed engineering firms over the past seven years, many recommended repairs remain unaddressed, the report found.

The investigation revealed widespread deterioration of timber, steel, and concrete supports, exacerbated by storm damage and seawater corrosion. Some portions of the wharves are in “serious” condition, with visible cracks, rusted reinforcements, and weakened structural components supporting walkways, buildings and public access areas.

“The City of Monterey has failed to maintain the structural integrity of its wharves for many years,” the report states, warning that the ongoing neglect poses risks to public safety, tourism and the city’s historic legacy.

A key obstacle, the report notes, is a patchwork of outdated lease agreements that complicate repair responsibilities.

Leaseholders operating under contracts from 1991 are required to conduct structural inspections every three years — but they’re not obligated to make repairs recommended by city-commissioned reports unless their own engineers agree. More recent leases place the burden entirely on the city.

Meanwhile, regulatory red tape further delays action according to the report. Permits must be secured from a range of agencies, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, California Coastal Commission, and the Regional Water Quality Control Board. The report criticizes the city for not informing leaseholders about a 2020 Mitigated Negative Declaration, which could have helped streamline the permitting process.

Adding to the challenge: money. The city’s Tidelands Fund — fed primarily by wharf lease revenue — took in $3.3 million in 2024, but projected costs for necessary repairs over the next five years total at least $17 million.

City staff acknowledged the funding gap at a council meeting last June. While capital improvement programs have been created for both wharves, they fall well short of what’s needed according the report.

The Civil Grand Jury issued nine recommendations, including publicly reconciling conflicting engineering assessments, updating maintenance timelines, and identifying new funding sources. Responses from the Monterey City Council are required within 90 days. ... See MoreSee Less

Civil Grand Jurors' Association of California

2 months ago

Mendocino County Board of Supervisors honors Civil Grand Jury’s oversight work
Mendocino County News, March 31, 2025
Mendocino County Board of Supervisors honors Civil Grand Jury’s oversight work

On Tuesday, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors acknowledged the important work of the Civil Grand Jury by issuing a Proclamation Recognizing March 2025 as Civil Grand Jury Awareness Month. Most of the members of the current Civil Grand Jury and Judge Ann Moorman were in attendance at the Board meeting. Judge Moorman is responsible for impaneling, supervising and providing guidance, to the Grand Jury.

Civil grand juries are included in the California Constitution and have been in existence since California became a state in 1849. They perform a vital function in a democracy. They review the operation of local government, including the County, cities, school districts and special districts. They perform investigations of local government programs, and they make recommendations to those agencies on their findings with a goal of improving government operations and making government more responsive to the communities they serve. Each year the court solicits volunteers for a new civil grand jury. Jurors are impaneled to serve a one-year term, beginning July 1st of each year.

Mary Littem Thomas, current foreperson of the Civil Grand Jury, spoke about the important role it serves in the community. She stated that the Civil Grand Jury’s charge is “to provide oversight, mainly for the taxpayers and how their money is spent but [also] to work for the betterment of this county.” She added that the proclamation and Board recognition will help recruit members of the public to join the Grand Jury. “It’s a noble effort. We work tirelessly.” She noted that an added benefit is that grand jurors form friendships that outlast their tenure on the Grand Jury. “We build bonds and excitement in all the interests and investigations we do.”

Board Chair John Haschak thanked the Civil Grand Jury for promoting “transparency, accountability and efficiency in the County and all the other governmental agencies in Mendocino County.”

Mendocino County residents interested in joining the Civil Grand Jury for the 2025-26 term are invited to complete an application at Grand Jury (ca.gov) on the court’s website. Applicants must be US citizens, at least 18 years old, reside in Mendocino County, and be fluent in English to communicate both orally and in writing.

Press release issued by the Superior Court of California, County of Mendocino:
mendofever.com/2025/03/31/mendocino-county-board-of-supervisors-honors-civil-grand-jurys-oversigh... ... See MoreSee Less