In 2005, the Supervisors changed from a “Chief Administrative Officer” (CAO) to a “Chief Executive Officer” (CEO) on the theory that a CEO would be able to hold the County’s many non-elected Department Heads accountable in a way that the unengaged and detached Supervisors could not. Exhibit A for the utter lack of accountability under the old CAO system at the time was Ray Hall, who served 30 undistinguished years as Director of Planning and Building Services. Under Mr. Hall there was no actual planning. None. Mendo has always been whipsawed by the winds of whatever came its way, despite all the high-minded “planning” they frequently talk about. This explains a lot about the way Mendocino County is today.
Then-Supervisors Jim Wattenberger and Michael Delbar recruited a man named John Ball from the Portland area in 2005 as Mendo’s first CEO under the new system. He quickly demonstrated that he took the power to hire and fire department heads seriously. For doing that — i.e., his job — the Supervisors fired him. Ball had a habit of firing people without first making sure he had the support of a majority of the Supervisors. (A tradition which not only continued but increased after Ball’s departure.) But Ball’s final and fatal mistake was crossing the famously self-interested Fourth and Fifth District Supervisors, Kendall Smith and David Colfax who later distinguished themselves as being the only Supervisors to adamantly refuse to take even a one percent pay cut when they were eagerly imposing ten percent pay cuts on the rest of the County’s workforce. (For pure, grasping hypocrisy, Mendocino County’s “liberals” are in a class by themselves; Colfax and Smith, any other place, would have been looking at jail time for stealing public money via their relentless chiseling on their travel reimbursements as documented by the County Grand Jury. The late Colfax got clean away with his thefts because the Grand Jury couldn’t precisely quantify them, and it took a serious threat of prosecution from newly elected DA David Eyster in 2010 to convince Smith she’d better cough up.)
Supervisor Smith, always looking to augment her taxpayer funded travel budget, had ordered CEO Ball to add another $100,000 to the Supes budget, half of it earmarked exclusively for additional travel for Board members. When Ball refused, saying there was no money and that a majority of the Board had to approve it, Smith immediately turned to her colleague, the late Supervisor David Colfax, urging him to use his power as Chair of the Board to straighten Ball out. Within an hour Colfax was on the phone to Ball, invoking his authority as Board chair, ordering Ball to “do what Kendall says.” Ball replied that he would be happy to do that as soon as he was directed by three votes of the Board in open session. But Smith and Colfax wanted Ball to take the fall for doing their dirty work. When Ball refused, the writing was on the wall.
Mr. Ball had had the foresight to write into his CEO contract that as long as he survived one year in Mendocino County, he would be entitled to one year’s severance pay. Because he had served just over a year before being canned, the County was forced to fork over another $130,000, courtesy of Smith and Colfax, clearly two of the most self-aggrandizing individuals ever to serve in public office in this county.
After sacking John Ball, the Supervisors, led by Smith and Colfax, immediately changed their new CEO ordinance to require that the CEO first had to check with the Board before hiring or firing department heads. This meant that the CEO no longer had the power of a CEO. It also explains why Ray Hall, widely rumored to have been next on John Ball’s hit list, was able to finish out his long tenure of unrelieved incompetence. The Board then convinced Al Beltrami to come out of retirement to fill-in as the interim CEO (CEO in name only), thereby assuring that the County would instantly return to its familiar, rudderless mediocrity.
The proclamation announcing the employment of Mr. Beltrami made the inflated assertion that “Al (sic) served as a stabilizing presence, demonstrating leadership, accountability, and teamwork in restoring a sense of unity throughout an evolving organization as it endeavored to chart a new course.” Leadership? Accountability? Please. In 2006 and 2007, when Beltrami served as caretaker CEO, the County was still in the pre-financial crash mindset of business as usual. The pension fund was being steadily milked for its imaginary “excess earnings”; the overdrawn Teeter Plan was tottering; the preposterous Slavin Study, pushed by Supervisors Colfax and Smith, found that top-tier local management like — surprise! — Colfax and Smith, needed their pay doubled, although the raises were undermining the fiscal solvency of the County; and incompetent department heads were insulated from any and all accountability as the County stumbled towards the fiscal cliff.
Beltrami, out of public employment at the time, had been a co-founder and the first Executive Director of the Employer’s Council of Mendocino County, which lobbied local government on behalf of the private business interests of local moneybags. The rich irony that Mendo was being run by a guy who spent much of his life on a government payroll was lobbying for third-tier outback tycoons probably had to be spelled out for the people issuing Mandela-like superlatives in Beltrami’s memory when he again retired a couple of years later. But Beltrami did do one good thing in the end when he established a nursing scholarship at Mendocino College which has produced uncounted benefits for Mendo’s over-stressed medical system.
In a future column we will recap the CEO position post-Beltrami.
Mark Scaramella is the Managing Editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, and a long-time Observer of Mendocino County operations.
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