The BCC Weekly – Taking the “Blind” out of the BCC
As regular Grants Pass Tribune readers know well by now, County insiders, namely former contract budget officer Simon Hare who resigned in a blaze of press glory, exposed some of the corruption and costly personnel decisions that have been made by the Commissioners in recent months. Many of the revelations in Simon Hare’s dramatic resignation letter were items we had been reporting on for months.
Mr. Hare should be commended for doing the right thing, exposing a costly dirty deed that was almost executed. According to Simon Hare and former Commissioner John West who according to their testimony accompanied Simon Hare in a meeting with BCC Chair Andreas Blech, the County was on the verge of signing a contract with Michael Sellers to be the Director of Operations, overseeing many County departments (despite lack of experience doing so), getting paid way higher than any County manager in our peer Counties, and likely would have included a very costly contract cancellation clause if future Commissioners were to terminate Mr. Sellers’ employment with the County.
But because recalled Commissioner John West was involved in “outing” this corruption, something doesn’t smell right in River City. Former Commissioner West supported in the strongest of terms the candidacy of all three current Commissioners. And all it took was this one incident and former Commissioner West is all of a sudden calling for a recall of at least one of the Commissioners, Ron Smith. West quickly called out “the four of them” in a statement sent to the Bill Meyer radio show and has sent threatening recall messages to Ron Smith.
The funny thing is from everything we’ve seen, Ron Smith had nothing to do with this corrupt hiring fiasco. And here’s a little inside baseball that we’ll be reporting more on in coming weeks and months. According to insiders that know best, recalled commissioner West is the one that came up with the plan to get Michael Sellers a big employment contract with a multi-million-dollar termination clause. West privately discussed a multi-million-dollar employment contract with Sellers while he was a commissioner because he didn’t want future commissioners to be able to fire him without a severe consequence. And now today West is blaming the current commissioners for attempting this. And just like that, the current commissioners are learning the hard way why Josephine County voters voted yes for the recall of John West by nearly a 2 to 1 landslide margin.
By all accounts I’ve seen so far, Ron Smith had nothing to do with this fiasco. Although right about now both Ron Smith and Chris Barnett are likely regretting their decision to give one commissioner the power to make any personnel changes as he saw fit. They won’t make that mistake again, and community members are so upset about what happened during this 55-day dictatorship that we’re hearing several community leaders call for a Charter Change ballot measure to prevent something like this from happening again.
Simon Hare testified that he spent nearly an hour with Chris Barnett before he resigned, asking him to rectify the situation. When a couple of BCC meetings came and went without any action by Barnett, Simon Hare had no choice but to resign in dramatic fashion and publicize the corruption and bad financial and personnel decisions. But Commissioner Ron Smith seems to be out of the loop on these shenanigans.
Commissioner Ron Smith hasn’t been perfect in his first five months in office, but he did the right thing and voted no in a 2-1 vote to fire the former BCC secretary Wendy Watkins. In my opinion, the County didn’t have anything close to an appropriate reason to fire Wendy, and she was likely fired illegally. And Ron Smith has already issued a couple public apologies for some mistakes, which is also commendable. We’re all human and we all make mistakes. A true leader apologizes for those mistakes when they inevitably happen.
After so much of the nonsense from the BCC was so publicly exposed, it appears the three current commissioners have finally turned the corner, and the expensive disaster recovery process has already begun. Commissioners restored normal powers to the full board, and Michael Sellers voluntarily stepped back into his previous job of Director of IT and Emergency Management. Mr. Sellers also resigned as the vice chair of the Josephine County Republican Party executive committee.
Several of the 20 questions I asked in last week’s BCC Weekly have either been addressed or actions are beginning to start to address them. One citizen even complained in last week’s weekly BCC business session about something that the Commissioners should have taken action on months ago, and that item is on the BCC’s discussion agenda this week. Most of those significant questions from last week remain unanswered, but it feels like the healing and recovery may have begun in recent days. It’s unfortunate that most of the monetary and citizen trust damage has been done and it’s well past time to turn the ship around.
But the John West threats loom large. All of a sudden John West is threatening the leaders of the local republican party and current commissioners, all over inappropriate actions that began with West himself. It only took a matter of a few days after the recall election when voters ousted West with a large percentage vote for West to say that he was going to run for a commissioner seat again. And now you have a glimpse of why West is now trying to play the hero along with his longtime good friend and political ally, Simon Hare. It’s dirty politics that I wish I could unsee.