While Orange County Democrats control a majority of seats on the Orange County Board of Supervisors and one of their colleagues is facing a contested reelection this year, the next board chair will likely be a Republican.
Supervisor Janet Nguyen – a Republican who came back to the county board last year after spending nearly a decade in the state legislature – is the likely next board chair.
County supervisors are expected to vote on the chairmanship on Tuesday, their first public meeting of the year.
From my vote count, Nguyen is the likely candidate largely because Supervisor Doug Chafee – a longtime Democratic county supervisor – dislikes his Democratic colleague, Katrina Foley.
By most accounts, Foley should be in line as the next board chair given that she was elected in 2021 and the fact she’s been passed over as chair and vice chair several times.
Chafee has been a board chairman twice, serving in that role in 2022 and 2025.
Supervisor Don Wagner, a Republican, is running for CA Secretary of State and just served in the chairman role for a rare stint of two years in a row in 2023 and 2024.
Foley finally got her colleagues last year to back her as vice chair – a position that usually precedes appointment as board chair the next year.
That pattern has held for many years.
But this year could be an exception.
Chafee – who often clashes with Foley on the supervisors’ dais – has endorsed Foley’s Republican opponent in this year’s upcoming county supervisors election, Assemblywoman Diane Dixon.
While Chafee is a Democrat, party officials didn’t endorse him in his last election.
He has often voted with Republicans and while his integrity has never been questioned, he was a board ally of convicted former Republican Supervisor Andrew Do – who last summer started a five year prison stint for taking bribes.
Republican operatives have told me to expect to hear a lot about Foley’s inability to garner her colleagues’ support in her re-election bid against Dixon.
Foley’s colleague, Democratic County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento told me he would support Foley based on her time on the board noting, noting “it’s her turn.”
“Most boards and commissions base leadership on tenure,” Sarmiento told me last week.
Every other supervisor I reached out to via text is staying mum on who should be the next board chair, except Foley who said she’d vote for herself.
While the Supervisors’ board chair is largely a ceremonial post, it does carry certain power as the spokesperson for the county as well as influence over setting biweekly meeting agendas and running public meetings.
In addition, the supervisor’s board chair makes the appointments to regional bodies, like the Air Quality Management District, which often carry per diem perks and in some cases like the air quality district, even a free car in the past.
Nguyen was first elected to the board of supervisors in 2007 after a wild special election featuring a tough series of recounts that eventually put her over the top in a crowded field of candidates.
Before her first term on the OC Board of Supervisors, Nguyen served on the Garden Grove City Council.
Her career is full of firsts.
She’s the youngest person ever elected to the county board of supervisors and the first Asian American and Vietnamese American elected to the board. During her first term on the OC Board of Supervisors, Nguyen also became the first woman to serve as vice chair and later became chair of the board in 2010.
Her tenure also triggered significant controversy over her attempts to exert control over the county’s health insurance plan for the poor and elderly, CalOptima.
Orange County’s Grand Jury issued a scathing report on her influence at the agency with a report titled ”CalOptima Burns While Majority of Supervisors Fiddle” that enraged supervisors.
Despite the controversy, Nguyen would stay in her seat until 2014, when she was elected to the California State Senate – becoming the first Vietnamese American to do so in the country.
She lost her re-election bid to that seat in 2018 but later won a state assembly seat in 2020. The next year, she successfully won a state senate seat in a special election. Then, in 2024, she won election back to the county board of supervisors.
While Do was a mentor of sorts for Nguyen, helping guide her through her tough special election in 2007, serving as her chief of staff and partnering with Nguyen’s husband in a failed Lee’s Sandwich franchise, the pair eventually became bitter political rivals after Nguyen mentored Do through his 2015 election to succeed her as county supervisor.
Do himself would go on to serve the remainder of Nguyen’s term and then serve two more terms until pleading guilty to bribery charges connected to federal COVID bailout funds in 2024 just before terming out of office.
In the wake of the Do corruption scandal, Nguyen has been among the loudest voices for a tough prison sentence for Do and also was critical of a CalOptima investigation of Do’s influence at the agency, saying their report didn’t go far enough, noting “they have no subpoena power and no witnesses who were interviewed under oath.”
County supervisors themselves have never initiated that kind of formal investigation of their own on Do’s influence inside the county government, only authorizing a series of contract audits.