County supervisors are about to decide whether or not their family members should be able to get contracts without more disclosure after learning one supervisor sent over $3 million to a nonprofit run by his daughter.
An investigation by LAist reporter Nick Gerda found that Supervisor Andrew Do, who’s entering his eighth and final year on the board, voted on contracts that included $3.1 million to the nonprofit Warner Wellness Center, where Do’s daughter is listed in tax filings as president.
Do never publicly disclosed his daughter’s role leading the organization when he voted to send the money to the nonprofit.
This all comes after numerous questions over Do’s governance in the past few years, including fines from state regulators over pay to play politics and his recent resignation from the CalOptima board after questions were raised by state auditors about high executive salaries.
[Read: Top Official Resigns From OC’s Health Plan for the Poor Following Revelations of State Probe]
Do has denied any wrongdoing, accused Gerda of forging the documents in his story in a press release over the holidays and called for his firing from the LAist, at which point both the OC Register Editorial Board and OC Press Club verified the documents and called on Do to apologize, with the Register calling for him to resign.
Do did not respond to requests for comment on this article.
While county supervisors have yet to publicly discuss Do’s actions, County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento is now pitching new rules that would limit supervisor’s ability to unilaterally send money to their family members without disclosing it first.
While supervisors were originally set to discuss the issue last month, Sarmiento pulled the item off the agenda and reintroduced it with several revisions to reign in how many people needed to disclose conflicts of interest.
Originally, any member of the supervisor’s staff and the supervisor would have to announce if they had a family member involved in a contract.
Now, just the supervisor and their chief of staff would have to make a disclosure.
The proposal also limited conflicts to immediate family of siblings, spouses and children, instead of including grandparents, in-laws and a series of other connections.
Sarmiento defended the revisions in an interview, saying the goal was to keep the law “narrow,” and ensure no one was accidentally caught up.
“If we start casting this net a little too wide it could have an unintended consequence of making it more confusing,” Sarmiento said. “It could get clumsy and could undermine the purpose and intent, which is to make sure people’s close family members are disclosed.”
The revisions also will require the county CEO to bring any future spending from supervisors’ discretionary funds in front of the full board of supervisors if it flies over his spending authority of $50,000.
“I don’t think it was previously required for these funds,” Sarmiento said. “There were very little reporting requirements for these discretionary funds.”
But not all the other supervisors are on board, with Supervisor Doug Chaffee saying in an interview it shouldn’t matter who’s related to a supervisor when it comes to deciding a contract.
“It looks like it’s not focusing where I want to be, which is at when we have a vendor coming in, is the contract proposal fair, does the vendor have a good reputation, are the services to be provided actually performed?” Chaffee said. “I don’t care who’s running it as long as the contract is fair and we get the services people need.”
He added that there might even be a benefit to have a supervisor’s child overseeing a project because of their connection to the county supervisors.
“I would expect (my sons) to do a better job cause I brought them up to have a social conscience and to excel at what they’re doing,” Chaffee said. “If you have a son or a daughter, maybe they can do a better job. But it goes back to what the entity is actually doing.”
Supervisors Katrina Foley and Don Wagner did not respond to requests for comment on Friday afternoon.
The supervisors will be discussing the issue at their meeting on Jan. 23 at their 9:00 a.m. meeting.
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
