When Supervisors Make Bad Decisions

Sheriff Matt Kendall, writing in response to my recent posting about Supervisor Williams reversing himself on Annexation, wrote:

“I usually let the supes fight their own fights and carry their own water. That being said, I’m not in agreement with the description of Supervisor Williams’ work in the article today.

No secret at all we have banged heads over various subjects. I’m certain we will bang heads in the future as well. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect him or the job he has to do. Hell, if we didn’t bang heads we wouldn’t be doing our jobs.

Confidence and arrogance are completely different things. An arrogant person can’t admit mistakes while a confident person can. Also a confident person will often throw the vehicle in reverse to go back and review decisions when new information is brought forward.

I live in a world where many decisions are made and moments later the conditions change. What began as a sound decision on Monday seems foolish on Tuesday. I have had to walk things back when conditions change, it’s hard to do while retaining trust.

Personally, that is what I see in this case. We were given a small amount of information which morphed greatly as this ball started rolling.

One thing I can say about Ted, is every conversation we have, we both work hard to hear what is said rather than just trying to win the argument.

At times we both leave the room unhappy, but that’s to be expected when we are forced to meet in the middle.

There will likely come another time when I ask the public to get their torches and pitchforks and follow me to the board chambers. I just don’t think that time is now.

Just my 2 cents, take it for what it’s worth.”

BANGING HEADS, aka disagreeing on issues that arise, particularly regarding law enforcement, is not the issue here. In fact, I don’t even recall any law enforcement issue that Williams and Kendall have seriously argued about in the Supervisors chambers. The issue is bad decisions. I simply pointed out a few of Williams’ major blunders, most of which he’s reversed himself on, one of which he doggedly holds on to. That issue is, of course, the Cubbison civil case, a case that has lately become so bizarre that the Board’s outside attorney actually filed a change of venue motion claiming that the public has been mislead by local reporting on the case. But “the public” isn’t even involved in the civil case. The case, if it isn’t settled, will be heard by Judge Moorman, not a jury. The Supes and their outside attorney also claimed that Judge Moorman was somehow “biased.” That was summarily denied, of course. Filing a change of venue motion not only doesn’t apply and isn’t based on anything valid, but makes no sense. The Board has met multiple times in closed session in recent weeks to discuss the Cubbison case, and they have not only raised the amount to be paid to their outside attorney, but they approved this costly and ridiculous argument.

In the case of Williams’ Annexation Termination proposal, the Sheriff says it’s just a matter of what looked good one day looks bad another day. But that’s not the case here. As Williams own resolution says, the Annexation proposal violates county policy. And when Williams asked Mulheren last June about whether she had run the tax sharing agreement past County staff during her secret ad hoc meetings, Mulheren rambled on incoherently about having “spoken to” a few (unnamed) staff members including law enforcement. All Williams had to do was suggest that Mulheren’s tax sharing agreement — a significant and potentially costly proposal that Williams and his colleagues knew nothing about at the time — should be reviewed by staff before they voted on it. They would have then learned, as they did when Supervisor Cline raised the question, that it not only costs the County significant revenue, but would be very difficult to implement.

Perhaps the Sheriff has forgotten that Williams not only was a co-leader of the failed Get Cubbison project that didn’t even get past a preliminary hearing, but also was the Board instigator of the misguided threat to charge the Sheriff for ordinary budget overruns: https://theava.com/archives/156136#15

At that time then-Assistant CEO Darcie Antle, presumably at the behest of then-CEO Carmel Angelo, reminded the Board that “California state government code and county policy — that the county has never enforced — puts personal responsibility on the official authorizing the obligation. It is in County Policy 1, section 1.1, Sources of Authority and Priorities and in the case of a conflict.”

And what was Williams immediate reaction? Instead of saying what a sane person would say: “That’s ridiculous,” Williams made it worse: “Can we decide today to follow this?”

And thus began a pointless, months-long and costly dispute about whether the County should pay for an attorney for the Sheriff and which attorney he could hire and whether the County could really charge a department head for ordinary budget overruns. (They can’t.) Instead, six months and almost $400k later, the issue was “mediated,” i.e., dropped, after the County hired another expensive SF attorney to “mediate” between the Board and the Sheriff at a cost of $150k to Kendall’s attorney Duncan James plus an additional $240k to the mediator.

Remember, this isn’t just about supervisors making bad decisions, it has significant impact on the County’s ability to raise revenue. The more the Supes make high-visibility bad decisions, the less likely it is that new tax proposals will be supported by county voters.

Instead of pulling his feet out of cowpies and bragging about how the stink is gone, Supervisor Williams should be more careful about where he steps.