Go pound sand.
We stole our pay raise, fair and square.
Echoing President Theodore Roosevelt’s fabled response to concerns over his acquisition of the Panama Canal, the same tone is adopted in the proposed response from county supervisors to the Orange County Grand Jury’s scathing criticism of the raise supervisors gave themselves last year.
I’ve been waiting on this response since I wrote my original column last July about the secretive pay hike.
[Read: Santana: Who Spearheaded OC Supervisors’ Pay Hike?]
It was inspiring to see the grand jury report dropped on the issue just before the end of last year during the winter holidays.
Click here to read the Grand Jury report.
At tomorrow’s 9:30 a.m. OC Supervisors meeting, elected officials are expected to consider a meek response to the harsh grand jury report about their raises.
Grand jurors got it essentially right that during the county’s laughable public budget deliberations – which has morphed into an unveiling of official priorities as opposed to really seeking public input – there was no serious talk of raising county supervisors’ pay during hard economic times.
But grand jurors missed their mark by saying that county supervisors didn’t advertise what they were doing or that they minimally met state transparency standards.
They clearly did – as noted in their draft response.
“The County disagrees that the action occurred with minimal public notice and limited discussion. The item was posted publicly, published on the Internet, and processed in accordance with all applicable Government Code noticing requirements, which provided two separate opportunities for public review and comment over a four-week period. As the Grand Jury acknowledges, one member of the Board spoke in favor of the item, while another member dissented and voted no on the salary increase.”
Click here to read the draft response.
Voice of OC wrote about the proposed changes ahead of the final adoption of the pay hike – an important point that the grand jury missed.
The media wasn’t asleep on this one.
We advertised it.
Our county reporter Noah Biesiada did his job, writing a daily about the proposed pay hike just before the second reading of the proposal at the supervisors’ meeting in late June.
[Read: OC Supervisors Set to Quietly Give Themselves a 25% Raise]
Orange County Supervisors are correct to assert in their draft response that they advertised their sloppy last-minute pay raise with what I call the BAM standard – the Bare Ass Minimum.
They met the state’s three-day noticing requirement under the state’s open meetings law to adopt their pay raise – twice.
But officials didn’t really advertise it, especially not during public meetings on the budget.
Yet the most glaring no-comment in local history is the proposed response to the grand jury’s damning allegation that county executives blew them off when they asked the same questions I asked in my original column on this issue.
Who’s idea was it to raise politicians’ pay?
Here’s what we know.
Democratic Supervisor Katrina Foley voted against the idea and was transparent when asked about it.
“I said, you won’t get my vote for that,” Foley said in a phone interview, last July on the issue, adding that she didn’t think the county staff were the genesis of such raises.
At the time, County Spokeswoman Molly Nichelson responded to my questions by saying, “We cannot confirm where the idea came from but know that we do ensure compensation is comparable and reasonable with our peer counties.”
“It had to come from a board office,” Foley said at the time, “It’s my understanding it’s Janet and Don.”
Two other Democrats – Supervisors Vicente Sarmiento and Doug Chafee – were so embarrassed by the ensuing media coverage of their pay raise vote that they later announced bids to donate their extra salary to local charities.
[Read: Two Orange County Supervisors Donate Raise to Charity After Backlash]
To his credit, the only supervisor to outright defend the pay hike – disguised as a peg to Superior Court judge pay – both in public and to reporters directly was Republican Supervisor Don Wagner, currently running for Secretary of State.
“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 last July.
Republican Supervisor Janet Nguyen – who Foley tagged as a key instigator of the raise – only issued a meek comment on the vote last July through her official spokeswoman saying, “I joined my colleagues in supporting this because it hasn’t been looked at since 2005.”
The Orange County Register Editorial Board also took notice of the pay hike, raising concerns about just exactly where the idea came from.
“If supervisors believed they deserved a big raise, they should have been transparent,” reads an editorial published last July. “Supervisors undermined public confidence in their leadership. Since taxpayers learned about the vote, the blowback has been intense,”
Credit to Orange County grand jurors for pushing for an answer to the question of who cooked up the idea of hiking politician pay.
And kudos to them for letting us know that everyone in the county bureaucracy keeps running from this question.
The proposed answer to the grand jury report on the agenda for tomorrow’s county supervisors’ meeting is a no-comment on the biggest question facing county supervisors this year and one that should rightly dominate any campaign debate in the upcoming races for county supervisor.
Grand Jurors noted that their “investigation was impeded by repeated meeting postponements, the invocation of attorney-client privilege, and a lack of cooperation from some executive and support staff, who were unable or unwilling to recall key events.”
The official draft response to the chilling concerns highlighted by grand jurors is even more disturbing.
“Due to the confidentiality surrounding Grand Jury investigations, the County is unable to respond to the investigative process and does not have insight into the level of cooperation of individuals during the Grand Jury investigation. The County values the role of the Grand Jury and remains committed to cooperating with its proceedings, consistent with applicable legal requirements.”