Dropping The Ball; Setting The Stage For Carmel Angelo

In the summer of 2007 the Mendocino County Grand Jury released an unusual and barely noticed report about the fiasco surrounding the Supervisors’ firing of former CEO John Ball. (No other local news outlets made mention of the report.) Ball had been a reasonably successful municipal executive in Multnomah County in Oregon and somehow, by accident, this relatively competent manager ended up in Mendocino. It didn’t take the then-board of Supervisors long to get rid of him substantially, but not entirely, because Mr. Ball committed the sin of insisting that if the Supervisors were going to give themselves a much bigger travel budget they’d have to vote on it by the full Board in open session, not bury it in the Consent Calendar or the CEO report.

The Supervisors at the time had secretly demanded that Ball sneak their travel budget increase in via Ball’s back door — they wanted their travel budget jacked up and included as an incidental in a larger consent calendar package deal to cover such things as commuting to and from work, attendance at constituent meetings and award banquets, purchase and repair of their computers, internet hookups, phones and phone service, and other questionable and dubious outlays, unusual even for other highly compensated county officials. And they wanted Ball to give them cover and take the heat for what was essentially a gift of public funds to themselves.

When Ball wouldn’t play ball, if you'll excuse a bad pun, the supervisors bounced him on out the door, falsely claiming after the fact that they hadn't liked the way Ball had consolidated Mental Health, Social Services, and Public Health into the Health and Human Services Department.

That particular blunder was done at the behest of Carmel Angelo who had been initially hired by Ball as Public Health Director. She soon told the Board that they should combine the three separate departments into one large HHS Agency (department) to “save money” and put herself in charge of them. The Board obediently subsequently did that, but instead of consolidating anything, Angelo simply created a new management level Agency with a large staff for herself to be on top of and in charge of the three existing departments; no reductions were made in the management or staff of the three departments.

If this sounds familiar, it is. The same thing happened with the Auditor-Controller and Treasurer-Tax Collector which was biled as a cost savings, but did nothing but add an additional official while keeping two “assistant managers” in charge of the two offices.

After Ball was fired, the Board went through a short post-Ball temporary CEO assignment by retired CEO Al Beltrami followed by the legendarily moribund Tom ‘I’m Looking Into It’ Mitchell. During his tenure Mitchell had promoted Angelo to be his Assistant CEO so she was perfectly positioned to take the job when the Board declined to renew Mitchell’s contract for saying “I’m looking into it,” “we’re working on that,” or “I can’t answer that at this time” once too often. (Today’s board accepts such ridiculous answers as routine.)

We had already reported on many of the incriminating details which the Grand Jury summarized regarding the shameful dispatch of Mr. Ball — the dumbest and most costly of which was that the supervisors had let Ball’s fat executive contract roll over and auto-renew itself just a couple of months before they fired him, costing the County almost $170k in an unnecessarily large contract buyout and associated health insurance costs.

That costly decision came just two weeks after Ball made it clear to the Board that he wasn’t going to jack up the Board’s travel budget for them, and — this part was new — one day after the County’s Public Health Advisory Board asked the Supervisors for an opportunity/agenda item to criticize the HHSA consolidation decision.

As noted here at the time, the Supes could and should have put the proposed consolidation on their agenda the previous March (three months earlier) when Ball first presented it as a done deal. Instead, on June 28th, they suddenly fired Ball, saying they couldn’t talk about why they'd fired him because it was done in closed session. Ball himself had asked that his firing be discussed in open session, which was his right. But the supervisors knew they couldn't do that because the true reasons for Ball's shabby dismissal would have been exposed. To cover themselves and hide the facts, the supervisors gave Ball a big hunk of public money. Then they proceeded to quietly give themselves all the perks that Ball had balked about. The same perks that are now ensconced in Ukiah Officialdom as “that’s they we’ve always done it.”

Although the Supes bleated about possible problems with the mess of the consolidation, they went ahead with it after Ball was fired, with members of County staff telling the grand jury that the consolidation might take ten years or more! (Ten years later after finally realizing the consolidation was not only a bad idea but a huge waste of money the Board unconsolidated the offices but with a comparable lack of planning.)

Since the ill-conceived departmental consolidation wasn’t the real reason for Ball being fired, the only conclusion the public could draw was that he was fired because he wouldn’t jack up the Supes own travel budget.

A year after the firing, the Grand Jury discovered that:

• The supervisors expense budget jumped from $49,000 in the 2005-06 fiscal year to more than $100,000 in the next fiscal year.
• Supervisors travel reports had become mostly non-specific, containing few receipts and were authorized by the clerk of the board — the Board’s own employee, not the independent Auditor.
• Unlike other County employees and certainly unlike the average citizen, the Supervisors were now paid to drive to and from work.
• Supervisors were being reimbursed for attending events they would attend whether or not they were supervisors, such as retirement dinners and social events. “Claims for unreimbursable meetings, functions/events, and miles not actually driven, have occurred due to the failure of at least two Supervisors to adhere to the BOS travel policy,” noted the Grand Jury.
• “The Grand Jury found claims for reimbursement in the following areas: Cell phones; telephone and long distance charges; internet service; newspapers; Travel (in-county only).”
• “…some supervisors have a casual and loosely defined understanding of what is considered to be official County business, resulting in substantive travel policy abuse.”

The biggest travel account abusers were Fourth District Supervisor Kendall Smith who claimed $14,658 for Fiscal Year 2007, and Fifth District Supervisor David Colfax who claimed $14,315 for the year prior, even though Colfax lived much closer to Ukiah than Kendall Smith.

The report also detailed several cases of specific travel expense abuse (reimbursement claims for trips or expenses that didn’t occur) but, at that time, did not name which Supes did it. (They later named Colfax and Smith, causing yet another over-reaction toward the Grand Jury from the Board.)

This used to be called fraud and got people arrested, but in Mendocino County…

In summarizing the John Ball Firing Fiasco, the Grand Jury made several observations which don’t exactly portray the Supes in the best managerial light.

Some excerpts:

• When Ball specifically asked the Board for clarification of how department heads would be supervised under the newly created CEO concept, the Board refused to answer.
• “On more than one occasion Ball told the Board that they should act on things as a Board in open session and not give him ‘contradictory directives’ deriving from individual supervisors.”
• “The BOS could have terminated the CEO by majority vote anytime prior to February 8, 2006, with minimal monetary penalty to the county.”
• “The BOS did not employ the ‘30 day cure’ as provided for in the contract. This ‘cure’ period would have allowed the parties to resolve their differences.”
• “Some BOS members indicated they did not fully read the CEO contract, but instead relied on advice from others.”
• “Most Supervisors indicated they had no knowledge of the three-month termination clause in the CEO contract.”
• “Failure by the dissatisfied Supervisors [Smith, Colfax and Wagenet] to act prior to February 8, 2006, resulted in the automatic renewal of the CEO contract. This automatic renewal ultimately cost the citizens of the County at least $167,000 in termination penalties,” plus extended health insurance coverage after the termination. (In fact, they had no reason to fire Ball in February because he had not yet refused to sneak in their travel reimbursement scheme into the budget.)
• “Individual Supervisor’s directives, reflecting their personal desires, are often contradictory and are not directives of the Board.”
• “Under the terms of the CEO ordinance there was no longer a direct link between the BOS and department heads; a fact ignored by the BOS.”
• “Individual Supervisors do not determine policy. This is the role of the entire Board. A review of BOS minutes shows that this is a role they have failed to fulfill.”
• “A willingness on the part of some BOS members to accept the CEO form of management as defined by the ordinance passed by the BOS, was totally lacking.”
• “The termination of the CEO was a decision made without forethought, resulting from conflicting personalities, and originating within a period of four days.”

The Grand Jury then made several recommendations which are so simplistic and self-evident that they amounted to a declaration of complete supervisorial incompetence:

• “the BOS [should] educate themselves on the various forms of executive management.
• “the BOS [should] provide clearly defined policy direction by majority vote.
• “the BOS [should] put personal agendas aside for the good of the County and its citizenry.
• “the BOS [should] avoid taking on day-to-day managerial duties of staff or department heads.”

The Grand Jury concluded with this statement of the obvious:

• “Insistence by individual Supervisors that the CEO insert increased funds for Board use, has the appearance of an attempt to bypass the fiduciary duties of the CEO. The process of termination ‘had no process’.”

But in the few days after the Grand Jury report was released the Supes made it clear that these obvious and basic recommendations were not even going to be considered. The supervisors had already given themselves a huge pay raise, pegged to the regular cost of living raises superior court judges get so that supervisor pay will rise ad infinitum no matter what the County’s budget situation is. The supervisors had already changed their travel policy (since the Grand Jury report was released) to jack up their travel budget and allow exactly what the Grand Jury disapproved of, including travel to and from work, a generous combined computer, phone, newspaper and internet service reimbursement, and requiring no backup documentation.

To rub it in, the following week, the Supervisors increased County fees across the board — claiming that the fee increases had nothing to do with their own self-serving, spendthrift ways.

Supervisor Colfax then told Glenda Anderson, his stenographer at the Press Democrat, that “They (the Grand Jury) sure have made a mess of things,” neatly standing the true state of affairs on its head.

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Note: None of the current Supervisors were on the Board at the time John Ball was fired and in its immediate aftermath. But they are all happy to benefit from the hefty increased paychecks and perks fraudulently engineered by that 2007 Board which was made up of David Colfax, Michael Delbar, Jim Wattenburger, Kendall Smith, and Hal Wagenet. Colfax, Smith and Wattenburger (the “liberals”) constituted the 3-2 majority that voted Ball out.)