Tuolumne County Grand Jury
• 2025-2026
County of Tuolumne Grand Jury 12855 Justice Center Drive*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 13 findings
F1
1: Tuolumne County does not maintain or update safety documents in a manner consistent with prioritizing employee safety, and the lack of a document control system makes it impossible for a County employee to know if a particular copy of a document is the current release or an obsolete version.
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
1: Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors should mandate the CAO adopt a policy and a document control system (commercial, freeware, or manual) to ensure that safety documents are maintained, updated, and tracked. This should include the date of approval and date of updates with approval signatures. This should be implemented by December 31, 2022. (F1.1, F1.2, F1.6)
F2
1: The Grand Jury finds that the Board meeting rules and regulations adopted pursuant to Resolution No. 23-15 and the Code of Conduct are not consistently followed or well understood by Board members, contributing to inefficient and ineffective meetings.
Related Recommendations (1)
R2
1: on the Board Rules and Regulations and Board Code of Conduct and Code of Ethics. This should be implemented by December 31, 2022. (F2.1, F2.3) The Board of Supervisors should review, revise, and expand the Code of
F1.1
: Tuolumne County does not maintain or update safety documents in a manner consistent with prioritizing employee safety, and the lack of a document control system makes it impossible for a County employee to know if a particular copy of a document is the current release or an obsolete version. The County's failure to keep safety documents current have caused some
No recommendations for this finding
F1.2
: County departments to contract with outside entities to obtain current documents adding to County expenditures.
No recommendations for this finding
F1.3
: The Tuolumne County Administration Office does not effectively promote keeping safety documentation up to date with OSHA standards and best practices. Many shortcomings with safety document maintenance and management can be
No recommendations for this finding
F1.4
: attributed to the County lacking a Safety Management System that would mandate updating, maintaining, and implementing safety documents.
No recommendations for this finding
F1.5
: For many years Tuolumne County has not had a functioning and effective Safety Committee that enables County departments to react to new safety issues, to learn from near misses, or steer an improved safety culture within County departments.
No recommendations for this finding
F1.6
: The Tuolumne CAO has not followed through with the commitment to update by March 2021 the Personnel Rules and Regulations adopted in 1997, leaving them out of date compared with current human resource best practices.
No recommendations for this finding
F2.1
: The Grand Jury finds that the Board meeting rules and regulations adopted pursuant to Resolution No. 23-15 and the Code of Conduct are not consistently followed or well understood by Board members, contributing to inefficient and ineffective meetings. The Grand Jury finds that the County's Code of Conduct and Code of Ethics
No recommendations for this finding
F2.2
: are not specific enough to guide Board of Supervisors and staff behavior towards achieving excellence in governance and the omission of "Provide accurate and usable information" in the recently approved Code of Conduct is unexplained.
No recommendations for this finding
F2.3
: The Grand Jury finds that the Board of Supervisors does not have an adequate, structured training requirement for the subjects of ethics, Code of Conduct, or meeting rules of order.
No recommendations for this finding
F2.4
: The Grand Jury finds that Supervisors presented material during public Board Meetings without utilizing County professionals to vet the information, resulting in information being presented that was later refuted by the scientific community.
No recommendations for this finding
F2.5
: The Grand Jury finds that the draft Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors Governance Manual dated February 2021 has not yet been finalized leaving the Administration without an effective governance document.
No recommendations for this finding
Conclusions 1
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CL1In the response to COVID-19 there are questions that should be answered. Why has Tuolumne County had the second-highest death rate in the state from COVID-19? Why have vaccination rates lagged compared to the state overall? Why has there been so much discord and questioning of scientific information in the County with this pandemic? Was the early response adequately coordinated between elected leadership, department staff, and the community? Could we as a county have done better in the prevention of illness and death? The Grand Jury is not a scientific body whose role is to answer these questions or engage in these debates, but is concerned with the impact on our citizens. Being an elected official, whether a supervisor, council member, or member of Congress, does not guarantee expertise on every subject. One expects these officials to rely on staff who have more knowledge and experience and to trust their judgment and empower them by actively listening to their guidance and creating a forum for them to present their work. Failing to align presentations with expert input/guidance has an 28 opportunity cost (what is given up or the tradeoff of time, money, or resources when one choice is made over another). The Grand Jury believes that this failure contributed to the neglect of other important issues facing the County, including the attention to safety and personnel policies noted in Part 1 of this report. 29 FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Agency Responses 1
Government agencies' official responses to this report's findings and recommendations. Click on a response to see the structured breakdown.
No Responses Found 2
Government entities assigned to respond to this report. No response documents have been linked in our database.
Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors
Elected County Office
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.