THE COUNTY Board of Supervisors has started to add a little more public transparency to the "discretionary" grants - about $500,000 per year - that supervisors dole out to programs, projects and charities.

Those disbursements used to be buried deep in the board's agenda and were labeled in a way in which only someone who knew how to translate bureaucratic jargon could ever unearth them.

The IJ, in an editorial, once provided a step-by-step guide on how to dig for the details. It's your money, after all, even though each supervisor has the privilege of deciding how it is spent.

For years, supervisors have tapped that account for their pet projects. They didn't need the approval of any other supervisors or any public airing before the checks were cut and the money spent.

Last month, the report was listed as "the Board of Supervisors' Discretionary Fund for August 2009."

Supervisor Judy Arnold said the funding requests are now on the agenda so that anyone - another supervisor or a member of the public - can see them and ask questions before they are approved.

You had better be quick because they are on the "consent calendar" portion of the board's agenda, placed there to get speedy, debate-free approval.

Here are a few of the recent handouts the board approved:

- Supervisor Susan Adams - Miller Creek Middle School's creek stewards project, $2,500; Las Gallinas Lions Club community emergency preparedness project, $1,013 and Environmental Education Council

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of Marin's gardening and nutrition program at San Pedro School, $1,500.

- Arnold - Lynwood School's Family Literacy Program, $3,000; Downtown Novato Business Association's 4th of July parade, $2,000; Young Imaginations multicultural music and dance programs, $1,500; Novato Youth Football and Cheer youth programs, $3,000; and Novato Youth Center Latino Outreach program, $1,000.

- Hal Brown - Sustainable Fairfax's rainwater -conservation pilot program, $5,000; and Sir Francis Drake High School's Safe and Sober Grad Night, $1,250.

- Steve Kinsey - Dance Palace Community Center youth programs, $20,000; and the Homestead Valley Community Association's annual music festival, $4,000.

- Supervisor Charles McGlashan - Mill Valley's 142 Throckmorton Theatre scholarships for low-income youth, $1,000; Performing Stars of Marin's summer camp, $1,250; Marin City's Village Baptist Church food distribution program, $1,000; the Marin City Community Development Corp. solar-power training program, $6,000; Tamalpais High School Mock Trial team, $2,000; and the Tamalpais Community Services District Friday music series and farmers market, $4,000.


   

The Transportation Authority of Marin has a long-term strategy to prevent its new Highway 101 sound walls from becoming a canvas for graffiti taggers - vines.

"We'll have vines that we are going to grow on every foot of that wall that we can grow them on," said Dianne Steinhauser, TAM's executive director.

TAM has been meeting with San Rafael officials to come up with an anti-graffiti strategy, possibly including around-the-clock camera surveillance that might catch vandals in the act.

She concedes it may take years for vines to cover the walls.


   

IJ columnist Beth Ashley's Aug. 22 marriage to Rowland Fellows - 70 years after they met - was featured in Sunday's New York Times.

All About Marin appears on Wednesdays.