After moping over the loss of Measure E for 10 months, the Lake County Board of Supervisors finally stopped ignoring lake-related issues and instructed Public Works Director Scott De Leon to come up with an improved half-percent countywide sales tax measure to be put on the June 2014 ballot.

De Leon assembled a small group to lend their advice, and in October he presented their plan to the Board of Supervisors and public, where it got mixed reviews.

The good news was it did not have a nine-person “citizens oversight committee” comprised mostly of elected leaders, but beyond that it didn't have much else in it that was new, except for an even more vague expenditure plan.

The citizens oversight committee had now been replaced by an even larger 11-member group, but this time the three citizens and six politicians had been traded away for a mob of special interest groups, almost all of whom had a financial stake in the condition of the lake. The group's role had changed as well; now they were to form policy instead of simply seeing that the expenditures added up, and they were apparently in charge of policing themselves.

After it became clear that an almost nonexistent expenditure plan was certain to doom the new ballot measure, the Board of Supervisors instructed De Leon to come back with more financial details, and the newest expenditure plan was revealed at the Nov. 5 board meeting.

The latest problem was that the new plan showed only the first year costs, which would be nothing remotely near to what the average costs would be since they included large sums for infrastructure that were one-time expenses.

So when $1 million was budgeted for the quagga program and another $275,000 for water quality monitoring it reflected costs that would drop by well over $1 million in the second and all subsequent years – and this was nearly half of the total yearly budget!

With the measure projected to raise $24 million over its 10-year duration, this meant that no one could explain where nearly half the money was going, something the supervisors seemed content with, as none questioned it.

Another worrisome aspect was that the $24 million estimate was based on sales tax revenue from the near low point of the recession plus the assumption there would be zero inflation for the next decade, a more reasonable estimate would be closer to $30 million, meaning that so far around $15 million dollars in this plan seems to have no purpose-though there is no guarantee it won't be spent!

Surprisingly, the Board of Supervisors never seriously considered a quarter-percent increase instead of the half-percent, even though the former seems better scaled to the actual needs. This is probably because the supervisors told De Leon to figure out how to spend $2.4 million every year rather than to ask what a comprehensive plan might cost, which explains why the reverse-engineered version makes so little fiscal sense.

The other issue being studiously ignored is the Konocti Harbor factor; if the resort gets back on its feet as planned it would mean at least $500,000 per-year in renewed transient occupancy tax funds, which until the resort's closure had provided the bulk of the weed and algae program's funding.

So the reopening of Konocti Harbor may be another big reason to either scale back or abandon a new tax measure, but there is yet one more powerful argument for not asking for more assistance from the taxpayers, and that is the fact that Lake County Vector Control has several million dollars in the bank it doesn't need and that cash can be used to deal with both the quagga and algae problems according to the legal definitions in the California Health and Safety code of the term “vector.”

The Board of Supervisors appoints a controlling interest in the board of Lake County Vector Control and can change those appointees at will, those millions could be available for use in a couple of weeks if the right people were selected for those three positions.

Board of Supervisors Chair Jeff Smith earlier this year publicly promised to bring the glaring problems with Lake County Vector Control before the board, but that promise has so far not been kept.

So as it stands today the Board of Supervisors has a “healthy lake” plan without any idea at all of where half the money is going, it ignores all other possible revenue sources and uses absurdly unrealistic revenue projections to hide the true amount of money likely to be collected, it has no meaningful oversight of anything, and all this is headed for the lower turnout June primary ballot where it will certainly be a harder sell than in the November general election. Is the outcome even in doubt at this point?

Phil Murphy lives in Finley, Calif.