Orange County Register, Metro
Section November 18, 1997
From the Register web site at http://www.ocregister.com
Mittermeier's Arrogance
It had the whiff of arrogance for Jan Mittermeier, the county's CEO, to refuse last week to turn over to an elected county supervisor, Tom Wilson, some details he requested about county officials' upcoming travel and meetings in conjunction with the El Toro reuse project.
But worse than that, it was bad execution of policy.
``The idea behind having a strong chief executive officer, in the wake of the county bankruptcy, was to get a firmer, more consistent execution of policy,'' says Bill Mitchell, former director of Orange County Common Cause and a member of an audit committee that examined the functioning of county government after the bankruptcy. ``But the arrangement only works if you have oversight --and how can elected officials conduct oversight when they're denied information about how money is spent and officials are discharging their duties?''
To be sure, Supervisor Bill Steiner cautioned against the board ``micromanaging'' by seeking to second-guess every policy decision of the CEO. But keeping abreast of details of how policy is executed is not the same as micromanaging. It is just what Mr. Mitchell termed it: oversight. It is not merely a legitimate function of elected representatives, it is an essential one. It is a function that the board notoriously failed to carry out in connection with Bob Citron's mismanagement of the county treasurer's office.
Supervisor Tom Wilson told us yesterday that he had found himself over the months being asked by constituents about county trips or meetings related to El Toro that he knew nothing about. ``I couldn't answer questions,'' he said. ``It's called being blind-sided.''
His own background in business shapes his thinking on this matter. ``I was a program manager at Rockwell,'' he told us. ``I always kept my boss advised about any information he asked for on a program I was directing. I don't think the county staff should become paranoid about why a supervisor should be asking about spending on a program of this magnitude. Quite the contrary. All supervisors should be monitoring spending. And it doesn't matter what the policy area --jails, landfills, El Toro: If a supervisor asks for information, it should be shared willingly.''
So he put his request to Ms. Mittermeier: Would she please supply information on travel, past and future, related to the airport project?
And she responded, ``I will not be providing such a schedule.'' ``The Board involvement you are requesting is unnecessary for the formation of good policy decisions,'' she wrote in her memo to Mr. Wilson.
It is rather breathtaking that she should thus inform an elected policy maker --the representative of a fifth of the county's population --about what information is, and is not, relevant for him to perform his job. This is so especially in light of the spotty record of her own office in its ministerial functions. A multi-million-dollar overrun in planning costs for the El Toro airport was attributed by Courtney Wiercioch, a top aide to Ms. Mittermeier, to administrative inexperience in dealing with airport issues.
Isn't her admission reason enough for watchful oversight by the supervisors? Mr. Steiner pointed out to us that Mr. Wilson is an airport foe, and might use the information he was requesting to somehow subvert the airport effort. But the same information could be used by airport supporters on the Board to help ensure that resources are being used to promote the project effectively. The point is, this information --and everything else relating to county spending --should be available to all the elected officials, whatever their persuasion on a particular issue, so they can best perform their duties.
Supervisor Todd Spitzer told us that the issue transcends El Toro. He cited several other examples of what he considers the CEO's tendency to avoid scrutiny by the board --such as her failure to inform the supervisors of a 1996 letter from the sheriff's office alleging lax management of a redevelopment and housing program that might trigger legal liability for the county. But whatever merits of his bill of particulars against Ms. Mittermeier, his larger point hits home: ``Bob Citron had a practice of giving supervisors only the information he wanted to give them --and too many board members went along with that secretive process. Let's not go down that road again.''