3 conservative SLO County supervisors want more clerk-recorder choices, upending search
In a surprise move, San Luis Obispo County’s three conservative supervisors now want to interview more interim clerk-recorder candidates — even though a selection committee found only three applicants out of 44 are qualified for the job.
The Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 on Tuesday to pursue additional candidates after the clerk-recorder selection committee picked three finalists on Sept. 20. Supervisors Bruce Gibson and Dawn Ortiz-Legg cast the dissenting votes.
The move upended a process that called for supervisors to interview candidates at a special meeting on Oct. 12.
Instead, the board on Oct. 5 will provide further instructions to staff on how to go about selecting the additional candidates, said Wade Horton, county administrative officer.
That development could alter the timeline to fill the opening, he said.
Supervisors debate expanding field of clerk-recorder finalists
Supervisors in July gave instructions to create the five-person committee and asked members to bring back as many as seven candidates.
The county is seeking an interim clerk-recorder after former office-holder Tommy Gong resigned to take a new job in the Bay Area. Gong’s term ends in 2023, and voters will elect a new clerk-recorder in November 2022.
At issue on Tuesday was whether the selection committee was to forward exactly seven candidates, or no more than seven candidates.
The committee interpreted the supervisors’ instructions as asking them to select up to seven candidates, not telling them they had to pick that precise number.
After reviewing the 44 applicants, the selection committee opted against advancing any more than the three because those were the only ones who had elections experience.
So the panel picked these finalists: current interim San Luis Obispo County clerk-recorder Helen Nolan, former Yolo County chief deputy clerk-recorder Jeffrey Barry and Santa Barbara County elections division manager Elaina Cano.
On Tuesday, however, Supervisor Debbie Arnold said the committee was directed to pick seven finalists, and she wants the chance to interview more candidates.
Arnold said this would give her the opportunity of “meeting the person and listening to the person,” rather than making a decision based on a paper application.
Gibson strongly objected to considering additional candidates without election experience.
“I’m astounded this motion even got a second,” he said.
Gibson said interviewing more applicants would be for no other reason than to “install an unqualified candidate as our clerk-recorder ... to appease those who came pushing the big lie of election fraud.”
How the committee selected the clerk-recorder candidates
Throughout September, the selection committee vetted the full field of 44 candidates, most of whom had no government clerk-recorder or elections experience. Aside from the three finalists, applicants had wide-ranging employment backgrounds and had worked in fields ranging from babysitting to graphic design to hotel management.
The wide range of candidate backgrounds may have resulted from the supervisors laying out only a short list of qualifications: Candidates must be at least 18, they must be California residents and they must live in San Luis Obispo County and be registered to vote in the area at the time of the appointment.
However, in order to narrow the list to well-qualified applicants, the committee — along with Horton — suggested also considering candidates’ experiences with leadership and elections.
“This is not a position for somebody to have their first experience with leadership,” Horton said. “I think it’s very important that whoever the board selects has a proven track record of leading a team.”
“I also think it’s important that this person has established experience in a clerk-recorder’s office,” he added. “This isn’t a time to learn on the job; this should be a subject matter expert. It’s a working department head. It’s down in the trenches with their team. And in order to be successful in this role, experience in the subject matter expertise and also leadership is absolutely essential.”
Candidates lobby for supervisors to expand field
Ahead of the motion on Tuesday, attorney Stewart Jenkins, one of the candidates for the clerk-recorder job, asked the board to consider more applicants and not limit the finalists to just those with election experience. He then passed out his application materials to each of the supervisors on the dais.
Jenkins and Chuck Bell — Supervisor Lynn Compton’s representative on the selection committee — worked together in 2018 to sue Gong and stop him from “accepting corrections of vote-by-mail ballot envelopes with mismatched signatures,” a previous Tribune story said.
At the time, the two were representing Compton, who was in the midst of a close re-election bid against current Arroyo Grande Councilman Jimmy Paulding.
Bell attempted to advance Jenkins as a clerk-recorder candidate during the Sept. 20 meeting. However, committee member Ken Hampian, a former San Luis Obispo city manager, told the group Jenkins’ application was “highly political” and called it a “big red flag.”
“To me, that reflected poor judgment, which then, I think, gives us some insights into (his) leadership and leadership temperament, the kind that we’re (not) looking for in this interim appointment,” Hampian said. “You know, it was (a) strategy that one might deploy in a political campaign — that’s fine, but not for something like this.”
This story was originally published September 28, 2021 at 3:11 PM.
