Bailing Out Bad Policy with Your Backyard: #OnlyInUkiah

I’m going to say what a lot of us are thinking but too few in power are willing to admit: we are broke locally, regionally, and nationally. Not “tight on funds” or “navigating fiscal challenges.” We’re maxed out. Stretched thin. Buried in obligations we keep pretending we can manage. And yet, in the middle of this mess, the City of Ukiah thinks now is a good time to expand its footprint through a massive annexation plan that reads more like a bailout-by-annexation scheme than any kind of thoughtful governance.

Let me be blunt: we are not building back better, and we sure as hell aren't building anything big or beautiful when it's built on a foundation of debt. What we’re doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul, all while Paul is planning his next bloated budget and Peter’s house is being foreclosed. This annexation attempt is a perfect example of that broken cycle. The City of Ukiah has mismanaged its own finances, racked up over $216 million in debt, and is now looking outward not for collaboration, but for a cash grab (California Policy Center, 2023).

They want the unincorporated areas of our county not because it benefits the region, but because they need more revenue to plug their self-inflicted fiscal holes. In recent fiscal years, the City of Ukiah ran deficits where expenditures exceeded revenues by over $14 million (City of Ukiah Budget Report, 2024).

This is not responsible growth. It’s a panic move dressed up as policy.

And let’s be honest the services they promise can’t be delivered. Ukiah has struggled for years with staffing shortfalls, permitting backlogs, and community complaints about crime, homelessness, and property damage (Ukiah Daily Journal, 2024). Expanding the city’s jurisdiction won’t fix those problems. It will spread them. Adding more land to govern will only dilute resources further, and there’s no financial plan in place to scale city departments accordingly.

What’s most offensive isn’t just the math, it's the mindset. Somewhere along the way, our elected officials forgot who they work for. They stopped seeing themselves as stewards of public trust and started acting like executives trying to grow their fiefdoms. They spin data, sidestep transparency, and treat public input like a box to check off instead of a core responsibility. This annexation process has been riddled with confusing reports, half-answers, and a suspicious lack of straightforward financial disclosure (The Mendocino Voice, 2025).

In fact, when the city hosted a so-called “public workshop” to explain the plan, they removed the Q&A portion prompting over half the room to walk out in protest (NorCal Public Media, 2025). That’s not community engagement. That’s manipulation.

And the timing? Don’t even get me started. In a county where families are struggling to make ends meet, where small businesses are already drowning in regulation and inflation, where public services are under strain this is when you want to impose new city-level fees, higher taxes, and stricter codes on people who deliberately chose to live outside your jurisdiction? That’s not governance. It’s exploitation.

The City of Ukiah claims zoning will remain unchanged, but what they don’t tell you is that city codes and interpretation of uses within those zones are dramatically different. For example, a business in the county pays a flat license fee. In the city? It’s a percentage of gross revenue. That shift alone could bankrupt small, rural business owners (Mendo Matters, 2025).

We’ve reached a breaking point. We cannot afford to shuffle money from one set of books to another and call it a solution. We cannot let municipalities solve their debt by expanding their tax base through forced annexation. We cannot keep ignoring the simple, sobering truth: we must learn to live within our means.

Our country, our state, and our county are all being crippled by the consequences of chasing unsustainable growth. Nationally, our federal debt is projected to exceed GDP for the next 30 years. Locally, we’ve already blown through our rainy-day funds, and now we’re mortgaging the future of unincorporated communities for the sake of short-term budget balance (Congressional Budget Office, 2023).

Here’s the irony: the City of Ukiah’s 2040 General Plan talks about “collaboration” and “regional partnership.” Yet the city quietly negotiated a tax revenue-sharing deal with the County based on the 1984 annexation map all while preparing an entirely different, much larger plan behind closed doors (Mendocino LAFCO, 2025). Where is the collaboration? That’s bait-and-switch politics.

So here’s my message, not just to the City of Ukiah, but to every official flirting with these kinds of decisions: stop pretending you’re entitled to more when you’ve proven you can’t manage what you already have. Cut the waste. Respect the people. Honor the process. Because trust, once lost, is hard to rebuild and this annexation proposal is burning through it fast.

No more blind spending. No more government overreach. No more hiding the truth behind “public benefit” language. It’s time for real accountability and it starts with stopping this annexation in its tracks.

Sources:

• California Policy Center. “Comprehensive City Fiscal Grades – 2023.”

• City of Ukiah Budget Reports, FY 2023–2024.

• Ukiah Daily Journal. “Delays and staffing gaps plague City departments.” December 2024.

• The Mendocino Voice. “Supervisors question annexation process, transparency.” May 2025.

• NorCal Public Media. “Annexation workshop ends in public frustration.” June 2025.

• Mendo Matters. “Annexation Letter to City of Ukiah.” June 2025.

• Mendocino LAFCO. “Annexation Proposal and MTSA Documents.” April 2025.

Congressional Budget Office. “Long-Term Budget Outlook.” September 2023.