Who proposed a 25% salary increase for the Orange County Board of Supervisors?
The answer says a lot about who’s really running the County of Orange.
I’ve been asking questions to supervisors and county officials about the raise after the board voted last month to boost their annual pay to more than Gov. Gavin Newsom’s salary.
Largely to the sound of crickets.
That’s until I called the one elected official who voted against the proposal, Supervisor Katrina Foley, who told me Monday that the idea of the pay hike came from the five-member panel’s two Republicans, Supervisors Don Wagner and Janet Nguyen.
Foley – one of three Democrats on the board of supervisors – said she first heard about the supervisors’ salary spike when she was briefed about the county budget package before the initial June 11 vote, an idea she told county officials she wouldn’t support.
“I said, you won’t get my vote for that,” Foley said in a phone interview, adding that she didn’t think the county staff were the genesis of such raises.
“It had to come from a board office,” Foley said, “It’s my understanding it’s Janet and Don.”
I reached out to both Nguyen and Wagner via text at the same time I reached out to Foley, to directly ask them whether they were the sponsors of the proposal that moved their salary from just under $200,000 to over $244,000.
At first, it was crickets.
But yesterday, Supervisor Don Wagner – who regularly engages with reporters and takes questions – answered back.
“Actually, the idea did come from the board,” Wagner wrote via text.
“One of us, not me, floated increases to staff and to our budgets. Then the idea expanded to include revisiting the Supervisor pay and I honestly don’t remember who or where it came from. There was never a discussion I had with a colleague proposing it, but I knew staff had discussed it.”
When I asked County Spokeswoman Molly Nichelson for a formal comment on where the idea to spike supervisors’ salaries came from, she couldn’t say.
“We cannot confirm where the idea came from but know that we do ensure compensation is comparable and reasonable with our peer counties,” Nicholson wrote me via text.
That line of reasoning was echoed by Wagner, who did publicly defend the raises on June 24 alongside Democrat Vicente Sarmiento.
“Bottom line, of course, is that I did support it for all the reasons I expressed at the board meeting,” Wagner wrote to me this week.
“While salary increases for electeds are never popular, we are paid significantly less than many of the folks under us in the organization, including other electeds. And the rate had not been revisited in 20 years,” Wagner argued.
“While we were increasing the CEO to be more competitive (remember, we have just come off two ultimately unsuccessful recruitments), had a raise for the sheriff on that agenda, and recently increased the DA (all well above where we were or will be with this raise), it seemed like the right time to revisit the question. Even with these raises, we come nowhere close to the CEO or many others for whom we have institutional responsibility,” Wagner said.
He acknowledged “the budget is tight,” but said the shortfalls are in areas mostly funded by state and federal grants, adding that the board shouldn’t make up those shortfalls with general fund money.
“Thus, the raises to the Supervisors, CEO, Sheriff, DA, etc., come from funds not challenged by recent state and federal cuts. That fact, because it is somewhat esoteric budgeting, is generally not acknowledged in any debate over government pay,” Wagner said.
Wagner also argued he paid for his raise by good budgeting.
“I had the money in my budget already to absorb this raise and to return over $260,000 to the general fund, because I had budgeted responsibly,” Wagner wrote, adding that his refund was somehow earmarked for the purchase of an upgrade of the Sheriff Department’s robotics system platform.
“The system is for the Hazardous Devices Section operations to render safe actions when dealing with improvised explosive devices,” Wagner added.
Nguyen’s response was one sentence and took days – increasingly the norm for the panel’s most experienced politician, who is also the least responsive to reporters, especially on tough questions.
“I joined my colleagues in supporting this because it hasn’t been looked at since 2005,” Nguyen wrote back through her spokeswoman.
So you tell me, does that sound straightforward to figure out who came up with the super controversial idea of spiking politician pay during rough fiscal times?
Finding the Spike On The Agenda
You have to use a huge magnifying glass – like the one carried by our county reporter, Noah Biesiada – to even catch reference to the salary spike buried within the official agenda for June 11.
Voice of OC was the only news outlet to focus on the mysterious appearance of the raises ahead of the final enacting June 24 budget vote.
[Read: OC Supervisors Set to Quietly Give Themselves a 25% Raise]
Our elected politicians made sure they weren’t the only ones to get a salary hike – also approving executive raises for top County of Orange leaders like CEO Michelle Aguirre and County Counsel Leon Page.
The same day they got their bump, supervisors approved a $50,000 pay bump for CEO Michele Aguirre, boosting her to a new salary of $460,000. Meanwhile, County counsel Leon Page got a $76,000 raise from his 2022 contract, bringing his total salary to nearly $363,000.
The pay spikes for all these elected officials and top county execs come right on the heels of a bribery scandal showcasing bad executive oversight, a billion dollar fire triggered by the public works department, budget woes and a host of critical grand jury reports aimed at key county operations in recent weeks.
All this leaves me wondering who’s running the County of Orange because the timing of raises couldn’t be worse.
I had the same feeling during the onset of the pandemic and the hundreds of millions that flowed from federal coffers to the board of supervisors, which in turn fast tracked Covid contracts – actions that eventually blew up on them.
That’s why it’s important to know who’s call this was.
Did a newly-appointed CEO with a year-long contract suggest to supervisors they give her and themselves a raise?
Or did one or more county supervisors work with the new CEO to put the item on the agenda in a way that it didn’t seem sponsored by supervisors themselves but instead gave the look of something staff-generated, an item they had to vote for?
All this seeming coordination – to place the item on the agenda without any fingerprints – also makes me wonder whether this vote may have violated the state’s open meeting law.
Now both Wagner and Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento publicly argued in favor of the raises when they were eventually taken up for a vote on June 24.
[Read:Orange County Supervisors Now Make More Than California’s Governor]
Yet to me, the lack of clarity on how the item was placed onto the agenda showcases the biggest drawback of the appointed CEO model – which in my opinion ran aground with the Supervisor Andrew Do scandal as it clearly illustrates how much influence each individual county supervisor can have in the background of the county CEO and government bureaucracy.
[Read: Santana: Orange County’s Bankruptcy of Oversight]
What is also clear is that the salary spike vote has triggered significant political blowback for county supervisors.
The county workers’ union – the Orange County Employees Association – issued a scathing rebuke to supervisors over the raises in a message to their 18,000 members, who are reportedly livid over the leadership message they just got.
“This decision is insulting, especially as the County tells its workers ‘to reduce costs, we need hard freezes and spending restrictions,’ and to ‘prepare for uncertain times.’ Front-line staff serve the most vulnerable with fewer resources (like eliminating desktop printers), while top officials reward themselves instead of prioritizing community needs,” reads a statement from the union sent out to members a week after the vote.
Union officials lambasted the raises for a board that meets biweekly.
“The ‘County family’ message rings hollow when executives put themselves first. OCEA members work around the clock for the public, yet the Board meets only twice a month. Rewarding such limited service with a 25% pay increase, on top of car allowances and huge staff budgets – while claiming budget woes – is pure hypocrisy,” reads the letter.
County supervisors are on vacation, according to records, from their biweekly meeting schedule until Aug. 12.
Union leaders also said OC Supervisors should meet with rank-and-file county employees.
“The Board must see how out of touch they are with those serving the community.”
Ironically, the panel’s two Democrats that voted for the salary hike – Sarmiento and Chairman Doug Chaffee – took the most immediate public heat, with both announcing within days that they would be donating their raise.
Sarmiento was the first to step up putting out a statement that he’d be donating his entire raise to help undocumented immigrants pay for legal fees to navigate immigration courts.
Shortly after Voice of OC sent him questions about Sarmiento’s action, Chaffee also announced he’d be giving his raise to a university scholarship fund that he and his wife set up previously at the University of Redlands for students in environmental studies.
Sarmiento’s donation also triggered a cynical public rebuke from one of the Santa Ana City Council members – David Penaloza, who is running for state assembly.
“Considering recent scandals facilitated by County leadership, including the $6.2 million in discretionary funds allocated to the Viet America Society, where millions went unaccounted for, the public deserves more than statements and performative virtue,” Penaloza wrote in an open letter to Sarmiento.
“We deserve transparency, oversight, and honest governance. Instead of using your raise as a personal donation pipeline, wouldn’t it make more sense to agendize the cancellation of the raises altogether? That would be a true act of public service, especially when county departments are being asked to do more with a lot less funding.”
The Orange County Register Editorial Board also recently echoed a similar sentiment.
“Maybe all supervisors can revisit the vote and donate the raises back to county taxpayers.”