An administrative investigation commissioned by the Board of Supervisors in January should be complete by the end of the month or early May, and a criminal investigation by the District Attorney's Office is ongoing.
Assessor Bill Postmus and and his top lieutenants have all been arrested as part of the ongoing probes.
Former Assistant Assessor Adam Aleman, 26, has been accused of destroying evidence sought by the grand jury and charged with six felonies.
Assistant Assessor Jim Erwin, 46, was arrested in March and charged with perjury for misreporting or failing to report gifts he received from a Rancho Cucamonga-based developer in return for his assistance in settling a landmark lawsuit the developer had filed against the county.
Postmus himself was arrested on suspicion of possession of methamphetamine in January. He has not been charged with a crime, but in February, he resigned from his post and Friday he announced he was entering a lengthy drug treatment program.
County officials have stressed that the investigations are ongoing, and authorities have questioned other former top staffers of Postmus' now defunct executive support staff on the work they performed and the nature of that work.
Friends and allies
Postmus established the executive support staff when he took office in January 2008, hiring a slew of political allies from his days as a county supervisor and as chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Party.
Among them were Erwin, 46, Aleman, 19-year-old Joshua White and 32-year-old Greg Eyler. Erwin made about $130,000 a year, Aleman about $124,000, White about $40,000 and Eyler about $65,000.
The grand jury questioned their lack of experience and training related to property assessment and appraisal, including Aleman's lack of an appraiser's certificate, which is typically mandatory for such a position as he received.
Erwin had been a staunch supporter of Postmus' when he was president of the county's public safety union.
Erwin and the union campaigned heavily for Postmus during his run for county supervisor in 2000 and assessor in 2006.
The union contributed more than $100,000 to Postmus' campaign for supervisor and $50,000 to his campaign for Assessor.
Postmus supported the union's push for better retirement benefits for sheriff's deputies.
Erwin resigned after less than a year in the Assessor's Office and received six months severance pay. He has since become one of the most outspoken critics on the way the office was run.
Postmus gave a no-bid $49,200 contract to his former campaign consultant, Mike Richman, owner of the political consulting firm MPR Strategies.
Postmus also hired Rancho Cucamonga City Councilman Rex Gutierrez as his intergovernmental relations officer.
None of these executive staffers still works in the Assessor's Office.
Absent without leave
According to Erwin, as many as seven of Postmus's executive support staff failed to regularly show up for work, time sheets were falsified and signed off on to show they had worked a full 40-hour week. Erwin said that may have cost taxpayers up to $1 million.
He said he refused to partake in that activity.
Aleman denied the allegations, and said he often worked more than 40 hours a week.
"The scope of work and the amount of projects we were working on called for more than 40 hours a week," Aleman said.
Ted Lehrer, former spokesman for Postmus, said he too often worked such lengthy hours.
"I would not claim hours that I didn't work. I would work 10 to 12 hours a day, five days a week, and I'd work weekends as well," said Lehrer, who said he earned about $80,000 a year while working for the Assessor's Office.
Gutierrez, who made an annual salary of about $67,000 at the Assessor's Office, acknowledged that during his time in the Assessor's Office he attended at least 20 meetings in Rancho Cucamonga during county work hours.
Gutierrez, who as a councilman sits on numerous city subcommittees and ad hoc committees, said it was his understanding that he could attend meetings or conduct other non-county business if he made up the time for the county.
He said he always received approval from Potmus or the assistant assessor to do so and would make up the lost hours at home or on the weekend by doing work for the county on the computer such as tracking legislation online.
"I never took advantage of being paid for one job while working another," Gutierrez said. "I look forward to presenting all of my information to any investigator, including the D.A. I'm very offended by the notion that Rex Gutierrez is known as a slouch. I'm a very hard-working person."
Gutierrez said he has been questioned by the county's commissioned attorney, but not by county prosecutors.
He said he doesn't have anything to hide.
"I'm a little bit bewildered, frankly," he said. "It's not a huge deal."
Lehrer said executive support staff was comprised of exempt employees, meaning they didn't have to keep time cards. Instead, employees logged their hours on a computer and didn't receive any overtime for the hours they worked.
"This is exactly the system currently used for the exempt staff of other county elected officials," Lehrer said.
Benefits and duties
Assessor's taxpayer advocate Greg Eyler was reimbursed $1,000 for history and sociology classes he took at U.C. Riverside, apparently during regularly scheduled work hours.
"The use of such leave time regularly reduced the employee's work attendance to almost half a forty-hour work week," the grand jury found in its report.
Reached Friday by telephone, Eyler declined to comment.
"I don't want to discuss anything that has to do with the assessor's office," he said.
The grand jury was also critical of Postmus' reimbursement of $8,280 to Aleman for college courses at the University of La Verne for an undergraduate degree, including a class in ornithology, the study of wild birds.
County policy, in essence, allows employees to be reimbursed a portion of their college tuition if they are pursuing masters degrees or doctorates, but the policy isn't intended for undergraduate programs.
Postmus's hiring of Joshua White, a 19-year-old whiz kid from Upland who had worked as a volunteer coordinator on the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, also raised some eyebrows.
But what White lacked in years he made up for with innovation and technical aptitude, Aleman said.
"Joshua was an outstanding individual. He worked hard and he was a perfectionist," said Aleman, who served as White's boss at the Assessor's office and recommended him to Postmus for the job.
Aleman also recommended White for the paid job on the Republican Central Committee in 2006.
The grand jury noted in its report that Postmus' executive support staff spent the bulk of its time planning and implementing projects such as the Assessor's Office annual report, Web site links and planning outreach meetings. It was work the grand jury noted as "public image" related and peripheral to the core activities of the Assessor's Office.
White played an instrumental role in producing the annual report and updating the Assessor's Office Web site and building links for it.
He also put together a Power Point presentation on the office budget for the Board of Supervisors and worked with the office's IT staff in developing complex algorithms and queries for the office's annual report, Aleman said.
"I was very pleased with the quality of the annual report, I feel the consistency of the data between the various sections of the report was top notch," said White, 20. "I was also pleased to be able to help implement tax savings programs, such as the Proposition 8 reassessment request form on the county assessor's Web site."
White said, to his knowledge, that San Bernardino County was the first county in California to implement an online Proposition 8 reassessment request form.
New and improved
While Lehrer, who still speaks on Postmus' behalf, says Postmus did not get credit for the good he did do at the Assessor's Office, other county officials say things have taken a dramatic turn for the better since his departure.
Interim Assessor Dennis Draeger has earned praise from county supervisors and rank-and-file employees of the assessor's office as well.
"I think Dennis Draeger has successfully restored confidence, not only to the board, but to the Assessor's Office," Third District Supervisor Neil Derry said. "He's a first-class individual with 30 years of experience in both the Assessor's Office and the Tax Collector's Office."
At a Board of Supervisors meeting about two weeks ago, a petition signed by more than 100 Assessor's Office employees requesting Draeger be appointed the new assessor was presented to the board, Derry said.
"I think that says quite a bit," Derry said.
Mark Kirk, chief of staff for board Chairman Gary Ovitt, said all six of the grand jury's recommendations to address the problems at the Assessor's Office under the previous regime have been implemented.
"Dennis and his team have done a great job of picking up the ball and running with it," Kirk said.
He said the board will likely not appoint the new assessor until after the completion of the Hueston investigation, expected to wrap up later this month or in early May.
Ovitt "would rather get through the Hueston investigation and wrap up any questions before bringing a board item to start the appointment process," Kirk said.
Lehrer maintains that Postmus fulfilled his campaign promise to modernize the Assessor's Office and move the department into the 21st Century by assembling an executive support staff reflective of the county's diversity, including three Latinos, a black and a near-equal ratio of men to women, Lehrer said.
And, he said, all were qualified for the jobs they were appointed to do.
"Simply, the executive staff possessed the skill sets necessary to complete Mr. Postmus' stated intentions to make the office more efficient for taxpayers, and in many respects, the executive staff succeeded," Lehrer said.
He said Postmus supported every recommendation by the grand jury.
http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/sanbernardinocounty/ci_12073221
1 comment:
Grand Jury should look into what the guidelines assessors office currently uses to determine the value of raw land in San Bernardino County...Residential raw land is about $5 per square foot and commercial raw land is about $17 per square foot...a lot higher than Paul Biane's Low ball Estimate of the land being Valued at $25 - $50million per acres(which sets it at $25-45 thousand dollars an acre)....even using the County's current guides that had not change as of Yesterday(4/23/09)...the lowest cost per square foot would have it coming in well over $200,000 an acre
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