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I’m going to write up some more detailed thoughts about last Monday’s special meeting called by the HCBOS to have AC Karen Paz DomÃnguez listen to their selection of Department and Service District representatives complain about late reimbursements and postings with the state and federal government. KPD has demanded supporting documentation so that she can sign off on the costs to be posted for reimbursement, but the CAO doesn’t want to provide it. Anyway, it’s complicated, but some major funding was at issue and so rather than simply order the CAO to submit the documentation, the meeting was intended to pressure KPD to post the costs without the opportunity to verify their accuracy and appropriateness – because past Auditor-Controllers have simply rubber stamped whatever the CAO handed them.
There are other issues and KPD and her staff have taken the position that the office has been understaffed long before she was elected, and she is simply unwilling to cut the corners to make things happen in the way they are used to.
Anyway, most of the morning was spent having the department and district reps berate her. She had been hit with the notice of the meeting late Friday afternoon and spent the weekend preparing a very detailed response. Her presentation was about 40 minutes long. Of course, the response wasn’t to the substance of her presentation, but to what county people perceived as attacks from her. More on that later. It’s like that old Far Side cartoon where the dog owner is chastising his dog for getting into the garbage and all she hears is “blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah.” Well all they heard was what they took to be personal attacks.
The discussion did improve by the afternoon and the Board actually passed a five point reasonable measure which involved the Board members signing their names to the postings so that they could join with her in the responsibility for the inevitable audit findings. She will also be provided the supporting documentation in the future – at least some of it. And the Board will revisit an increase in her staffing at a later date.
I posted a link to the full six plus hours of the hearing last week. Ryan Hutson has taken some of the videos out of the Access Humboldt recording. This is Karen’s presentation.
The rest of the clips are much shorter. I’m going to put them in chronological order here, but you may find the two afternoon clips more interesting.
But first, while the bulk of hearing was spent complaining about the AC office’s performance and pushing her to post the cost allocation reports to the state and federal agencies (and in particular, Public Works was up against a pretty strict deadline – I’m not indifferent to the panic), there was input which took a more nuanced view of the situation. KPD had invited several of her staff to the Zoom panel so that they could testify to their experiences trying to meet the needs of the county during a pandemic and their own experiences with the county administration. But they were relegated to the public comment portion and thus limited to three minutes each. But they made good use of that time, with one staff member explaining that the staffing problems long predate KPD’s presence in the office. Contrary to what you might have read in anonymous comments on Lost Coast Outpost, her staff is fully in support of her. They wanted to make that very clear.
The following is the rest of the public comment section. The first two callers were very critical of KPD, with one of them even calling for a recall election. But the rest were supportive of her, including the union representative of her staff. I suspect that they asked him to be present. How often do you see a unionized work force ask their union rep to support their boss? It was an extraordinary moment. Of course he reiterated that his members have expressed the need for additional staff.
The Supervisors then chimed in and they all expressed their panic that if the books for the last fiscal year weren’t closed, at least for Public Works, the County would lose millions in grant money. Even Fifth District Steven Madrone requested that this be done, though he offered a more nuanced account as to how the county had reached this point. It was one of the most eloquent statements made all day long – yes, I watched most of it. The public input and Supervisor Madrone’s comments actually changed the tone of the meeting and the discussion would become more productive and solution-oriented rather than one-sided pressure on an elected official to, in her view, compromise on the integrity of her office. This will give you an idea of why Supervisor Madrone was elected.
Before I post the last two clips Ryan made, I want to say that the Board did come around to at least acknowledging the difficult situation that the AC office faces, not just due to the pandemic and understaffing. They did at least instruct the County Administrative Office to provide the AC with the grant confirmation letters containing the funding criteria so that her office could verify whether the sought cost reimbursements are legitimate. To be clear, it’s not about “trust.” She is putting her name onto documents generated by other people. She has every right to be able to confirm to her satisfaction that what is being requested is legitimate. As mentioned above, the Board did agree to spread the potential liability around, and she was fine with that even though she expressed that it’s injudicious.
So I post the following clips not to trash the Board or CAO, but rather to point to a couple of occurrences which illustrate what she is dealing with. I get that they want to continue the practices as they have always been and don’t appreciate a young women telling them that they need to do it differently. Legally.
At one point in the discussion after certain questions were raised by certain Board members, KPD wanted to provide an illustration by selecting a couple of issues she has with the report as they want her to post it. She asked if she could share a chart of some sort with them and promised that it would be very quick. But the CAO objected on the basis that, apparently no matter how brief the illustration, it would be “getting into the weeds” and not productive for a Board discussion. I don’t know what her motivation was, but it really looked like she just didn’t want the Board to know what KPD has been talking about. Unfortunately, KPD was prevented from presenting any of the numbers with brief explanation of the “challenge.” The exchange is really quite extraordinary.
There is one more video, but apparently it’s not uploaded just yet. I will add it to this post later.
The point of all of this is that Karen Paz Dominguez was elected Auditor-Controller in a landslide win promising that she was going to clean up the way the office is run. She has the support of what appears to be a very competent staff which needs a couple of additional accountants to meet the growing and changing county needs. She is young and comes from a cultural milieu which is in some ways at odds with the established county government culture and there is some clear resentment. Some on the Board and in the administration also seem to forget that her office is Constitutionally independent. They cannot “direct” her to do anything. They must work with her on an equality basis.
The hearing really came off like an ambush. She was notified of it late afternoon on Friday and was forced to spend the better part of the weekend preparing a response to a very one-sided and agenda-driven report. And she ran into resentment on Monday morning when she pushed back.
I’m not indifferent to the emergency the county was facing with regard to the roads report and funding for Public Works. But I’m not certain the AC office was even bound to appear at the hearing. She showed up ready to discuss the issues and propose solutions.
I will credit all involved with working through the antagonism to reach at least a partial understanding in a way which would preserve the Public Works grants and move the county forward. But she was elected on a reform platform and she should be allowed to reform, particularly if it means keeping the county out of trouble with state and federal agencies.
Even these reduced clips hardly do the ongoing discussion justice. I will confess that much of it is out of my experience and above my head. But you have to give the person in the room the benefit of the doubt until you have reason to doubt, and you have to work with that person. That is not to say that her responses have always been productive. She is young and she is stubborn. But does have the county’s interests at heart and she has not been given a chance because the Board seems intent on indulging the administration’s resistance to providing her with the documentation she needs to do her job. That changed somewhat last week.
Even the less friendly Board members have acknowledged that other aspects of her modernization efforts have paid off. And there are department heads and services districts who were curiously absent from the hearing.
Please, take some time to understand the very complex situation and do not let petty politics turn this into an unproductive wedge.
That’s all I have for now.
Addendum: Two more videos of the late afternoon and Supervisor Wilson’s 5 point motion. A bit of drama which I was going to comment on, but after watching this when I’m not taking calls and waiting I did notice a couple of things. First, the CAO did actually, once the issue was clarified, say that it would be no problem for the departments to get her the grant confirmation letters. I would ask why it had been such a big deal in the years before that, but she was clearly working with the process. Also, I had missed theTax Assessor/Collector Bartholomew’s reversal of the adversarial stance he had taken in the morning, and expressed a new understanding of the AC’s need for additional staff. Then a little bit of drama from Supervisor Bohn before he voted for it – 5-0 vote.
I was less than impressed with the meeting early on, but everyone did their job to bring it to a reasonable conclusion. Hopefully she does get the staff in the follow-up.
As you’re aware both the regular and special Senate races in Georgia are set for a special election on January 5 because nobody in either race received more than 50 percent of the votes. Republican George Perdue almost had it, but fell just short and 1.7 percentage points ahead of challenger Jon Ossoff. Meanwhile about a dozen or so candidates ran against incumbent appointee Kelly Loeffler who came out of the race with 26 percent of the vote. Raphael Warnock, Pastor of Dr. Martin Luther King’s church, came in first with 33 percent.
Normally I would say that the Republicans are a sure win as Democrats have an history of lower turnouts in the special elections. But this is a different election, and there are some factors which might alter the outcome. But it’s uphill and Georgia may be purple, but despite the Biden win it’s still an uphill battle for both Democrats.
For one thing, Ossoff is Jewish and Warnock would be the first black person to be elected to a statewide position since Reconstruction. And racism doesn’t necessarily hurt Republicans with their base. Perdue depicted his opponent anti-semitically and dogwhistled racism by mocking Kamala’s name during the primaries and still he took more votes than Ossoff. And the third party who collected over two percent of the votes is Libertarian and presumably (though not certainly) his voters tend more right than left.
Basically I give Warnock a 45 percent chance of winning and Ossoff a 40 percent chance.
Warnock came in first, but well below half and well below the 46 percent of votes taken by Loeffler and her primary opponent Doug Collins. However, if you total up all the votes, the eight Democrats and one Green candidate collected somewhere between 48 and 49 percent. The five Republicans and one Libertarian collected a similar amount. The remaining votes, just over 1 percent, were independents of unknown (to me) ideologies.
You can view all the results here.
Of course, the exact same voters will not all show up for the runoff. But the two polls for each race so far pretty much reflect the election result, with Warnock actually ahead of Loeffler in one of them.
Perdue and Loeffler were both implicated in a kind of insider trading scandal in which they (and some other Senators including Diane Feinstein) were accused of taking advantage of information obtained as Senators to avoid the market collapse due to the pandemic. But whatever toll that was going to take, it probably played out in the first election. It’s unlikely to change any more minds at this point unless new revelations break.
Both of them immediately called for the Republican Secretary of State’s resignation after Georgia was called for Biden, but they didn’t really provide any reasons. Now “the Kraken’s” insane lawsuit remains Trump’s only vague hope in Georgia and it implicated Governor Kemp who appointed Loeffler and used his power as Secretary of State to win the election against Stacey Abrams two years ago. Will the Republicans turn on Kemp as they turned on SOS Brad Raffensperger? They probably have to walk a tightrope, especially as some Republicans are threatening to boycott the special election.
Meanwhile, Stacey Abrams and the Democrats are working hard to register new voters (something like 25,000 minors turn 18 before election day) and get the vote out – particularly the African American vote who represent nearly a third of the voters.
So we’re about a month and a half away. These races will determine who controls the Senate and can have a huge impact on who gets selected as judges and Cabinet members. And so far Ossoff and Warnock are running disciplined campaigns focused on health care and the pandemic, since Mitch McConnell has indicated that with Biden in office Republicans will become deficit-obsessed again now that Trump is out of office. If Georgia’s voters want a significant stimulus bill passed, they will have to make the right choices here.
Below is an interesting analysis of the polls in Georgia. Georgia is apparently one place where polls have been successful in recent years.
Strong Netflix recommendation. Sorkin did a very good job with the script. Yes, it takes some poetic license, but most of it is historically accurate and the license was taken mostly in the interest of effective storytelling in the limited time space of a movie and to hook the history with issues of modern importance. If you want the pure history, you can find the trial transcript online or read the abridged version in the excellent Tales of Hoffman. But this is a great film and the performances of all of the actors – even the minor characters – were truly inspired. Particularly impressive were Eddie Redmayne and Sacha Cohen as Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman respectively. Both British had two American accents down perfectly.
There are more than two exactly, but definitely two predominant political cultures based upon completely separate realities with balkanized media. We discuss the divide, and what can be done about it. Among other topics.
Hmmm. Maybe this message got to the Midwest come the election.
Still, for many, LBJ’s famous quote remains true to form.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
– Lyndon B. Johnson
Lesson – don’t be a Republican Secretary of State in a state Trump doesn’t win.
I wonder how long he stays in the party with the two inside-trading Republican Senators calling for his resignation.
But that’s not enough for Roger Stone. He wants Trumpers to write-in Trump in the Georgia Senate run-offs. More power to him!
I had the meeting on for it’s full seven hours as I worked today. I missed portions when I had to take phone calls, and much of what was discussed is out of my realm of experience and over my head. There was the issue of why some reports have been late and a dispute between the Auditor’s office and the County CAO about what the Auditor needs in order to sign off on cost reports for reimbursement from state and federal funding sources. Basically the Auditor-Controller is vouching for the accuracy of the costs, some of which are based on estimate projections rather than any clear-cut expenditures. The AC has been requesting data, specifically letters from the agencies which specify which charges are reimbursable. The CAO has refused to provide them in the past, expecting the AC to simply sign off on what the administration presents as apparently they have done in the past. The AC request to be able to personally verify the costs with the information is apparently interpreted as a lack of trust or something.
But she was elected on a platform of transparency and accountability and she cannot in good conscience simply rubber stamp and post the costs with the agencies as that would amount to attesting to the accuracy of numbers she isn’t being allowed to confirm. So the AC has been at an impasse with the CAO and the costs haven’t been posted with apparently will put some funding in jeopardy if the deadlines aren’t met. A couple of the supervisors noticed the AC on late Friday afternoon of a special meeting today to discuss it – releasing a lengthy staff report which pretty much slammed the AC for the delays and risks to funding. The AC spent the weekend preparing a response to the report, and logged on to the meeting this morning which began with a reading of the report followed by a litany of department and local agency heads pretty much complaining about the delays and blaming the AC (some of the departments missing were notable – more on that another time) .
It really looked like an ambush, especially when the AC asked for allowance of her staff to address some of the claims, but they were relegated to the public comment section after the AC was allowed to present her case – which was taken as personal attacks rather than simply a response to the personal attacks delivered on Friday.
Anyway, the staff and some community members, including a union representative, made some strong defenses of the AC and eloquently clarified some of the issues. And then the supervisors discussed the various issues, and concluded with what was mostly a very eloquent summary by Supervisor Madrone. Things were looking up for a productive afternoon session and the meeting broke for lunch.
The afternoon was actually fairly productive, but it got bogged down at one point when the AC attempted to illustrate some “challenges” to the cost projections. The Board chair had allowed the AC to present, but then the CAO interrupted and said that it was inappropriate to get into “the weeds,” and so the AC was not allowed to explain the problems she had with the cost report she was being asked to sign off on. Basically at that point the CAO was running the meeting. I was astounded!
So they were at an impasse until Mike Wilson proposed that the Board basically sign off on the costs to be posted to basically spread the liability around in the event that an audit showed the reimbursements to be inappropriate. The AC agreed although she tried to warn the Board that they were pretty much signing off on it blind.
Eventually there was a five point motion passed (with a reluctant yes vote from Supervisor Bohn) which included the spread of responsibility for the posting of costs, and agreement from the AC to close out the year for Public Works prior to a November 30 deadlines, an agreement to close it all out for December 18, instructing the CAO to provide the funding source letters which specify appropriate reimbursements (the CAO objected to it several times as “redundant” but the Board moved forward anyway) so that the AC could evaluate future cost reports, and a process was established for potential increases in AC staff.
I was really impressed with Karen Paz Dominguez’s professionalism through all this. She answered every question as thoroughly as she was allowed and stated her positions with soft firmness. The old boy network ways of doing government business (or “lax” to quote Supervisor Madrone) simply do not apply to her ethics, and she is emphatic that she is trying to keep the county out of trouble. She is not indifferent to the funding needs of the agencies, but she simply needs to be given the information to do her job in evaluating the costs to be posted. It really doesn’t sound to me like too much to ask.
If you have between 6 and 7 hours to spare, this hearing is a fascinating watch.
At this point I don’t even blame Trump. He’s mentally ill. I blame senior Republican enablers like McConnell and Cruz.
I took a break from election politics last night to interview several Plowshares activists about their recent convictions for their protests at Kings Bay U.S. Naval Base which among other things houses about half the Trident submarine fleet. I haven’t had direct contact with many faith-based progressive activists in a long time, and despite my personal secularism I’ve always been impressed with the humility and compassion of people like this. Margaret is Dorothy Day’s granddaughter (Dorothy was a communist-converted-Catholic who co-founded the Catholic Worker newsletter intended as an alternative to the Communist Daily Worker and was just as radical if not more so). Anyway, they’ve been sentenced to months in prison varying based upon their protest rap sheets. It’s a good listen I think.
And yesterday over 1800 died in one day – an amount we haven’t seen in months.
It’s getting bad, and Trump’s refusal to transition is going to kill people.
Sohum Parlance II 
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