Supes “Free Willi”-ams to continue business as usual

At Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, the Orange County Board of Supervisors chose to do nothing about the problems raised regarding the management problems of the Public Administrator/Public Guardian office lead by John Williams. The position of Public Administrator is a constitutional position that the Board combined with the Public Guardian in an effort to consolidate and save funds. Since then, the department has been plagued by allegations of mismanagement, as highlighted in a recent Grand Jury report.

CEO Tom Mauk recommended to the Board that they split the two positions back to the way they were and returning the Public Guardian position to an appointed one under the control of the CEO’s office.

OCEA General Manager Nick Berardino encouraged the Board to take immediate action to address what he termed “critical.”

As the Orange County Register’s Jennifer Muir reported; “This is a renegade department,” Berardino said. “We’re facing layoffs at a time when they’re management heavy … The tax payers deserve much better than they are getting.”

I’m sure that the fact that Williams personal attorney Phil Greer has represented all of the sitting members of the Board of Supervisors except for John Moorlach couldn’t possibly have played a role in the decisions of Supervisor’s Bates and Nguyen to oppose the solution recommended by CEO Tom Mauk (snark). Bates proposed looking into the matter further when the Board discusses the next County budget in May. In the mean time it looks like the Board has chosen to “Free Willi”-ams to continue to hire more managers he doesn’t need, and waste more and more money.