Ukiah Residents Still Waiting for a Real Say in Annexation Process
No Ukiah Annexation is sounding the alarm over the City of Ukiah’s continued attempt to fast-track annexation without the transparent, community-driven process residents were promised.
From the beginning, our position has been simple: any annexation must be an annexation of the willing, shaped by the people who will actually live with the consequences, not dictated by City Hall.
Instead, the City appears determined to push forward first and ask questions later.
The City has now filed a Notice of Preparation (NOP) with the State Clearinghouse to begin work on a Supplemental Environmental Impact Report, with a scoping session scheduled for June 1 at 5:00 p.m. at the Conference Center. These are significant procedural steps that move the annexation process further down the road before residents have been given any meaningful opportunity to actually shape it.
This is exactly what the community has been concerned about for months: a process driven by presentations and political messaging rather than genuine public engagement.
In fact, the one major public workshop the City has held only highlighted concerns that residents were not being meaningfully heard. By many accounts, the overwhelming sentiment in the room was opposition or deep skepticism toward annexation. At one point, when attendees called for a simple show of hands to gauge public sentiment, City staff quickly backed away from the idea and instead directed residents to submit comment cards. Those comments have still not been publicly released or meaningfully shared with the broader community. That lack of transparency has only added to growing distrust around the process.
The City keeps talking about community input, but at the same time, they continue to move the process forward before the community has really had a chance to weigh in. Filing the NOP and advancing the environmental review process before building real public consensus has only added to people’s concerns that this process is moving too fast and in the wrong order.
The financial impacts also deserve a much more serious conversation. Mendocino County is already struggling financially, and annexation will have major long-term effects on county revenue, services, and infrastructure responsibilities. Despite that, the County is not exactly negotiating from a position of strength, even though it could end up carrying some of the biggest impacts if this moves forward.
Residents are still asking basic questions that have not been clearly answered:
What will this cost in the long run?
Who financially benefits from annexation?
And most importantly, do the people living in these areas even want to be annexed?
Those answers should come from the community, not from presentations or talking points.
That’s why No Ukiah Annexation will be working to conduct a broader public poll in the affected areas so residents can directly share how they feel about both annexation and the process surrounding it. If the City is confident the public supports this effort, then there should be no problem with getting an honest read from the community itself.
We encourage residents to attend the June 1 scoping session and continue making their voices heard. Decisions this significant should be driven by the people most affected by them, not rushed through before the public has had a real seat at the table.
