Supervisors choose interim CEO, location for puff

January 26, 2022 — The Board of Supervisors unanimously selected Assistant CEO Darcie Antle to serve as interim CEO following Carmel Angelo’s departure in March, praising her fiscal acumen and thanking Angelo for her fourteen years of service to the county. The Board also made a long-awaited unanimous decision about the location of the puff, or psychiatric health facility. After a presentation from Eric Fadness of Nacht and Lewis, the firm that drew up plans for the new jail and the Crisis Residential Treatment facility, the board chose to spend just over nineteen and a half million dollars to demolish the building at 131 Whitmore Lane, which is just outside Ukiah city limits, and build a new facility on that location. Fadness said that the building, which was once a skilled nursing facility, has a lot of deficits. In addition to a badly designed flat roof, the windows are breakable, the fixtures and wall-mounted air conditioning units pose a suicide hazard, and the building is not entirely ADA accessible. The county bought the building at a deep discount using state money at the beginning of the pandemic. The original plan was to use it as an alternate housing site for people who didn’t have anywhere else to quarantine. It was also eyed briefly as a recovery and wellness center. Fadness estimated that it would take a little over three years to build the sixteen-bed facility, which will be staffed by a company called Telehealth. The construction and a portion of the operational costs will be funded by Measure B. Covid numbers are higher than they have been at any other point during the course of the pandemic, though positive results from rapid antigen tests are not always included in the official tally. There were no ICU beds available in local hospitals yesterday, and Public Health Officer Dr. Andy Coren told the Board of Supervisors that nursing registries have few available people to send to hospitals in need. One hundred thirteen people in the county have passed away from covid, and Coren expects the number to rise in the next few weeks. There are currently seven outbreaks in the county. None of them are at schools, though absences of students and staff have mounted, due to community transmission.