The BCC Weekly – Taking the “Blind” out of the BCC
It was announced last week during the first meeting of the temporary board of six County elected officials that this temporary Board will be selecting both Commissioners to fill the two current vacancies. This is because the 30 days to appoint per the Charter has already passed for position #1 and there is no quorum of the BCC to appoint position #2.
The County has opened up a new round of Commissioner applications for a period of about 10 days and has asked applicants to submit details about their skills and experience in a variety of areas. Predictably recalled Commissioner Chris Barnett and some political allies of the recently recalled Commissioners were out objecting to both the plan and process.
In my opinion, because of Josephine County’s form of government, the Commissioners effectively act as CEOs of Josephine County. They have oversight over almost all policy and administrative areas of the County, including budget, personnel, law changes, and so much more. Why certain politically active residents would object to asking Commissioner candidates about their skills and experience in these areas is bizarre to me. These folks “doth protest too much, methinks.”
The two Commissioners that will be appointed later this month will end up serving as Commissioner for approximately 10 months until January 2027 when the newly elected commissioners will take office. In my opinion, given all the messes certain previous Commissioners made over the last two years, I say kudos to all those applying to fill this role. There is a long list of actions that may need to be taken in 2026 to right the BCC ship as well as some extraordinary circumstances that will end up circling back in front of the BCC during 2026.
Even some of the chaos that began 2-3 years ago while former Commissioner Herman Baertschiger and recalled Commissioner John West were in office still needs to be addressed. As an example, right at the end of 2024, an attorney that used to work in the County’s legal department sent out a memo saying that a third-party internal investigation that took place during 2024 upheld allegations that Commissioners Baertschiger and West retaliated and bullied two department directors. Those two department directors were fired a few months later by former Commissioner Andreas Blech and Michael Sellers who briefly held the title of Interim Director of Operations after being promoted by Blech. This has resulted in BOLI claims and the former directors hiring attorneys to go after the County for wrongful terminations, given these two directors were fired right after an internal investigation found that previous commissioners retaliated against them and bullied them.
And then of course around the same time (March 2025), former Commissioner Andreas Blech promoted Michael Sellers to Director of Operations for a total compensation package cost of about $388,000 per year. Two inside whistleblowers confirmed this through both providing public budget documents showing the projected cost of this new position as well as testifying to have signed the personnel action form which authorized this promotion.
And then public records requests relating to these topics submitted by yours truly were illegally denied, and the records that were eventually provided after an appeal to the DA were incomplete, according to the two inside whistleblowers. A state DOJ investigation into Commissioner Andreas Blech and Michael Sellers ensued about destroying public documents and other matters (because County law enforcement can’t investigate their own).
Even if DOJ declines to bring criminal charges, the 2026 BCC will likely need to do an internal investigation at some level to determine what administrative policies or county code provisions were broken during various hirings, firings, and promotions that took place in 2025. Readers may recall that elected legal counsel Wally Hicks was forced to send out a memo in October 2025, warning the BCC and department heads about the consequences of not following law and policies in hiring and firing actions.
If you’ve been following along, you know there were other layoffs that happened in 2025 without explanation. The entire code enforcement staff were let go, director positions overseeing Public Health, Public Works, Community Development and Juvenile Justice were eliminated without public explanation. The staff manager currently overseeing planning and code enforcement has confirmed that while he is still taking code enforcement complaints, there are no staff that have the capacity to go out in the field to investigate and there are hundreds of complaints outstanding.
And code enforcement often works with law enforcement on certain problem properties. Law enforcement has not had this support over the last year and has had to decline to investigate code enforcement issues because law enforcement doesn’t even have the capacity to investigate all the criminal incidents that it should be pursuing.
Sheriff’s office staffing levels are still far below what was promised when voters approved the new Law Enforcement Services District in November 2023, despite the County’s budget having more than enough financial surpluses to meet these promises. The majority of the BCC, in my opinion, didn’t understand the County’s true financial position in each of the last two annual budget processes because they claimed to support law enforcement but didn’t do so when it came time to vote on the budgets.
And on the normal schedule, the County would be going out for a renewal vote for the Josephine County Jail and Juvenile Justice levy in November of 2026. This 93-cent temporary 5-year levy expires at the end of next fiscal year. This means that during the annual budget process this summer, Commissioners will need to decide the term of the next levy measure to be placed before voters and decided by voters in November 2026. Levies can be anywhere from one to five years in term, and the property tax levy rate can be adjusted during each renewal process. I tend to think the County has the financial flexibility to renew the levy without an increase to the levy rate, but we’ll see how this critical discussion goes this summer.
An issue that was instigated largely from Commissioner West’s time in office during 2023-2024, two lawsuits were brought against Josephine County last year alleging that the BCC didn’t follow the County Code in relation to a mining lease application on one of the County’s Forestry properties. In full disclosure, I’m the CFO of the company that brought these lawsuits. The first lawsuit was settled with the County effectively admitting that it erred and didn’t follow the code when it denied giving the applicant a public hearing and making a decision on the application. And in the second lawsuit that is outstanding today, the company has claimed millions of damages by the unnecessary 2-year delay in acting on the application and by the Commissioners not following the County Code when they finally made the initial decision on the lease application. The 2026 Commissioners will eventually need to decide how to proceed on this newest lawsuit. As the company claimed before the Commissioners original 2025 decision, millions and millions of royalty revenues are on the line by granting the lease and these revenues could help support County Law Enforcement. In my opinion, it really is as simple as deciding between millions of revenue for the county or millions in costs for not following the County Code.
And let’s not forget that around March of 2025, the County suspended its media policy because the 2025 Commissioners did not want to allow the Grants Pass Tribune staff to be able to sit in executive sessions of the BCC like various other local media outlets get to do. The media policy should be reinstated immediately by the 2026 BCC so they can have sensitive legal, property, and personnel discussions in private executive sessions. Not having these discussions in executive sessions unnecessarily increases the risk to the County when dealing with these matters. There will be many such sensitive legal matters to discuss throughout 2026.
Former Commissioner Chris Barnett had 17 internal investigations outstanding at the time he left office last week. Most of these related to allegations of improper social media activity, including but not limited to defamation, bullying, retaliation, and doxing of citizens. Barnett even participated in the BCC discussion of how to investigate these allegations, which seemed inappropriate at the time and the 2026 BCC may want to have a third party brought in to help wrap up these investigations since a couple of them deal with complicated laws related to social media use by public officials. The status of these investigations is uncertain, and the only apparent action taken by the County was to temporarily suspend Barnett’s access to official County social media accounts in November 2025 while the investigations were going on.
The County’s Finance Director has confirmed to the media that any questionable personnel actions that took place in 2025 will be reported to the County’s auditors. Last fiscal year’s financial audit is not yet complete, largely due to the treasurer’s office falling behind on their workload during the first 6 months of 2025. The newly elected Treasurer in November 2024 stepped down from the job last year after only about 6 months on the job.
And the 2026 BCC would be wise to revisit a few other policy decisions made by the BCC in the last few years. The airports manager was given unilateral authority to execute leases at the airports without needing BCC approval. While records requests are outstanding, from what we’ve seen so far there are a huge number of airports leases that have expired years ago without being timely renewed. And in some cases, the properties have been used without even having a signed lease in place. Two former Commissioners, Blech and Baertschiger, had expired airports leases or held leases with “no lease on file” as of July 2024 according to a records request recently fulfilled.
Previous Boards have also given the Forestry Director the unilateral right to purchase forestry properties without any decision or oversight by the BCC. Last year the Forestry Director made a $6 million purchase of forestry properties on the opposite end of Oregon in the Astoria area without any discussion by the BCC. During recalled Commissioner John West’s time in the BCC office, he helped spearhead a plan to sell all of Josephine County’s timber properties owned in Josephine County and replace them with forestry properties closer to the coast. No financial plan has ever been presented as to why and how this pencils out as an advantage for Josephine County. And as advised by the County’s Mining Advisory Committee, a review of the potential of mineral deposits should be done before selling any County owned forestry property. Because Josephine County is literally rich in mineral values, ignoring those values when selling a property is like ignoring the value of a building on a property when selling a property.
There are several other controversial issues that will need to be tackled by the 2026 BCC. Kudos to all those applying to fill the two interim Commissioner positions and stepping forward to help tackle these issues in 2026.