Blog note: this editorial calls for the civil grand jury to file an accusation.
Retaliation against an employee that cost taxpayers $1 million. Questionable private land deals. Sexual harassment of his workers. Fined by the Fair Political Practices Commission. And by the Bay Area air board.
Enough.
It’s time for Contra Costa County Assessor Gus Kramer to go. The civil grand jury should file an accusation of willful or corrupt misconduct in office, a finding that would lead to a jury trial to decide whether he should keep his job.
It’s time to put an end to this tenure of arrogance that has been going on for nearly a quarter century, since Kramer first won election in 1994 by literally defeating a dead man. His opponent suffered a fatal heart attack during the campaign.
Contra Costa needs an assessor, the person in charge of setting the value for more than $211 billion worth of property in the county, who is above reproach. Clearly, Kramer doesn’t meet that criterion.
Kramer, dubbed “The Bad Boy Assessor” in his own office, has kept his job all these years because other county officials have looked the other way – or worse.
As we learned this month, in 2011 then-District Attorney Mark Peterson, over the objection of two of his deputies, killed an investigation into Kramer’s real estate deals.
Peterson, now a felon after his perjury conviction last year, insists there was insufficient evidence to proceed. But, according to reporters Nate Gartrell, Matthias Gafni and Thomas Peele, the two deputies say the investigation hadn’t been completed.
The real estate deals were first uncovered by Peele in 2010. He reported that Kramer had used an arcane transaction known as a gift deed that allowed him to avoid paying transfer taxes when acquiring millions of dollars of property in the county. Ethics laws limit gifts to public officials to a few hundred dollars a year.
After news stories about those transactions, Kramer amended years of state ethics forms because he had failed to disclose ownership of millions of dollars of property in the county and loans of hundreds of thousands of dollars to friends and associates.
News of the quashed investigation follows disclosure earlier this summer that Kramer’s sexual harassment of his workers, about which complaints were first filed in 2015, wasn’t investigated for more than two years.
Even after an outside investigator concluded that “more likely than not” he sexually harassed subordinates, most county supervisors were uninterested in a public airing until we started probing the issue.
To this day, the county Board of Supervisors shamefully continues to withhold an investigation report about how he treated workers.
That’s all on top of a $1 million settlement the county paid after a jury’s 2009 findings that Kramer had retaliated against another employee who had complained of discrimination and sexual harassment.
Kramer has displayed a continuous pattern of indifference to the rules. He demolished an asbestos-laden house he owned in Bay Point without notifying air board officials, resulting in a $5,000 fine.
He didn’t disclose ownership of rental properties in Martinez when he was that city’s clerk, resulting in a $4,000 fine from the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
One of Kramer’s own properties was underassessed, allowing him to avoid paying more than $21,000 in property taxes, until one of our reporters started probing. Suddenly the valuation was corrected.
The abuses never seem to end.
The purpose of a civil grand jury is to serve as a government watchdog. If ever there was a need for a check on the outlandish behavior of an elected official, this is it.
If grand jurors don’t do it, apparently no one else will.
September 14, 2018
The Mercury News
By East Bay Times Editorial
No comments:
Post a Comment