Board to oversee troubled agencies

In a move months in the making, a frustrated and divided Board of Supervisors voted to retake direct authority over the operations of two chronically troubled departments managed by the county’s chief executive officer.

Voting 3-2, the board majority on Tuesday took the first step in removing the Department of Children and Family Services and the Probation Department from the CEO’s portfolio. In the process, the supervisors erased any doubt about their willingness to modify a governance structure they created in 2007 to reduce their day-to-day management of the county’s vast bureaucracy of departments.

Voting in favor of the new structure were Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky, Michael D. Antonovich and Gloria Molina. Opposing it were Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Don Knabe.

Because the board’s action requires a change to a county ordinance, a second vote is required next week to add children’s services and probation to several other departments that were exempted from CEO oversight and report directly to the supervisors.

For months, board members had been growing increasingly concerned and vocal about worsening problems within DCFS and probation.

The tragic deaths of a number of youngsters had ignited an uproar over issues of competency and oversight of DCFS at all levels. Last December, the agency’s embattled director, Trish Ploehn, was removed and reassigned by the CEO’s office, headed by William T Fujioka.

The Probation Department, meanwhile, was grappling with everything from sexual misconduct of employees to an inability to track nearly $80 million allocated by the supervisors to hire personnel. An internal review revealed, among other things, that management was so loose that too many employees had been hired for the department’s youth camps—a problem now being corrected by a new management team led by former Alameda County probation chief Donald Blevins.

In the case of both departments, some board members came to believe they were not being provided information necessary to understand the serious and recurring lapses for which they—as the county’s top executives—were being held accountable.

The turning point came last month when DCFS’s interim director, Antonia Jimenez, openly defied a motion by the supervisors to sign a “memorandum of understanding” with the board’s special counsel for investigating child deaths and offering possible policy reforms.

The document, signed by the top officials of eight other county departments, established protocols to ensure that the Children’s Special Investigations Unit was able to independently and efficiently review child deaths and serious cases of abuse and neglect of children under the care and/or supervision of the county.

The document also stated that the unit’s reports, prepared solely for the board, were deemed attorney/client privilege to maintain their confidentiality and thus could not be given to the departments—a provision Jimenez found unacceptable, even though she’d be allowed to read them and be given copies of any recommendations. (While earlier overseeing DCFS in the CEO’s office, Jimenez had argued that she needed copies of the reports there, too.)

Jimenez’ intransigence led to an April appearance before the supervisors that left several of them clearly exasperated.

“The other departments didn’t have a problem signing the [memorandum of understanding]. You should sign the darn thing,” Yaroslavsky told Jimenez. “Why this had to get to this point and raised to this level is beyond me. It’s really a mountain out of a molehill.”

Molina agreed, saying: “It’s shameful that we have to go through this kind of a process for something that this board has found very, very helpful.”

The board concluded by passing a motion directing Jimenez to sign the document by 5 p.m. Instead, she resigned, returning to the CEO’s team to oversee children’s services from there—a move that Antonovich later called “a blatant act of insubordination.”

Three weeks later, Yaroslavsky, Molina and Antonovich would form the three-vote majority needed to reassume authority over DCFS and probation.

“These are the two most troubled departments in the county today, and the board majority wants a more direct role in overseeing them,” Yaroslavsky said after the meeting. “The CEO will continue to partner with us, but the board will be primarily responsible.”

Ridley-Thomas, who joined with Knabe in voting against the measure, was visibly angry when his effort to have the vote delayed was rebuffed. When asked how he wanted to vote, he shouted “No!” and then added just as loudly: “Ridiculous.”

Ridley-Thomas argued that he needed more time to study a Yaroslavsky amendment to the ordinance aimed at ensuring that the new management structure would not impede the internal sharing of confidential information among departments.

Ridley-Thomas called the reluctance of the board majority to reschedule the vote “a rush to judgment” and urged his colleagues to side with him as “a point of courtesy to allow everybody to come up to speed.”

But Yaroslavsky and County Counsel Andrea Ordin both noted that the amendment had been suggested by Ordin as one of two options in a memo she sent to the supervisors last week.

Antonovich, meanwhile, noted that Tuesday’s vote was just the first of two, suggesting to Ridley-Thomas that if his concerns weren’t addressed this week’s meeting, then he’d have a chance to address them before next week’s vote.

Posted 5/10/11