SLO County supervisor said she was bullied by colleagues. Here’s what we know
San Luis Obispo County Supervisor Debbie Arnold said Supervisor Bruce Gibson and late Supervisor Adam Hill bullied her in an elevator soon after she was elected — but Gibson said the claims are a part of a Republican smear campaign against him.
So what really happened?
Arnold said soon after she was elected in 2013, she entered a private elevator at the County Government Building which the supervisors used to take to their offices. While in elevator, she said Hill and Gibson loudly criticized her for a decision she had recently made on the Board.
”I feel like I was bullied,” Arnold told Dave Congalton on his KVEC radio show on July 6. “It would remind you of a third grade playground or something, just trying to intimidate me.”
Because the incident happened almost 10 years ago, Arnold said she doesn’t remember what issue they disagreed on.
“It’s hard for me to remember, exactly,” Arnold told The Tribune in an interview July 14 following the radio broadcast. “They were just loud and intimidating, so it was just uncomfortable for me.”
She said Hill, who died in 2020, was “more aggressive” than Gibson in the conversation.
”Adam was really the one who was a little bit louder and a little bit more aggressive,” Arnold told The Tribune. “But Bruce was standing right there too.”
In a July 12 article on the claims, Cal Coast News reported that Arnold “reported the altercation to SLO County Counsel Rita Neal,” but “Neal told her she could not make a complaint” because she was an elected official and not an employee.
Arnold told The Tribune a different story. She said that Neal didn’t prevent her from filing a complaint. Instead, Arnold said she felt generally discouraged to report the incident because she wasn’t a county employee.
“The way I understood it was, there are office protocol rules, if you will, for employees. But the electeds — when you’re elected — it’s a little bit of a different story,” Arnold said. ”I could complain alright — that was always an option.”
Arnold said she later filed a complaint about the “general atmosphere of the office,” but doesn’t remember if she included the elevator incident in the complaint.
Neal told The Tribune on July 14 that she had no documentation of a complaint related to the elevator incident.
Arnold said she chose not to speak out about the incident until now because she worried people would criticize her, especially as a female elected official.
”At the time, I was the only woman on the board, and always felt like if I start whining about how I’m being treated, everyone will think I can’t handle the job,” Arnold told Congalton. “So I just stayed out of the elevator.”
Before she was elected, Arnold served as a legislative assistant for Supervisor Mike Ryan for almost five years. Though the board was “divisive in their ideology,” Arnold said the office atmosphere felt professional and collegial.
“We all could joke around and visit with each other and actually be friends,” Arnold told The Tribune.
However, when Arnold was elected, she said the office became “a more hostile environment.”
“I was surprised when I got there that it was like that,” Arnold said.
Gibson calls claims ‘a political hit piece’
Gibson had a different take on the elevator incident.
He told The Tribune in an interview on July 15 that he did not berate Arnold in the elevator — he said he was merely an “observer.”
“Yes, there was an elevator ride,” he said. ”Yes, Adam indicated he didn’t agree with a vote that Debbie had just made in the chambers. In my recollecting, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I was merely an observer.”
In a Facebook statement titled “Firehose of Lies,” Gibson said the story was part of the local Republican Party’s smear campaign against him as he’s running against Republican Bruce Jones for the District 2 Board of Supervisors seat.
“I’d remind you that I’m in a runoff election this November that will determine the balance of power on the county Board of Supervisors,” Gibson wrote. “Debbie supports my opponent, so it’s not surprising that this nearly decade-old story appears at a time when she may believe it will harm my campaign.”
Gibson said the party is waging a smear campaign against him because Jones “has nothing else to run on.”
“Lastly, anyone who’s been around me over my many years as a county supervisor knows that I don’t badger, berate or scream at anyone,” Gibson wrote in the statement. “This story about me, as told by Ms. Arnold and CCN, is clearly a political hit piece and should be dismissed as campaign season gears up.”
Arnold, however, said she did not tell the elevator story for political reasons.
Instead, Arnold said she called into the Dave Congalton Show July 6 to talk about former Grover Beach mayor Debbie Peterson’s new book: The Happiest Corruption: Sleaze, Lies, & Suicide in a California Beach Town. While on the show, Congalton asked Arnold about the elevator incident, so she decided to tell the story, she said.
“It was just a conversation,” Arnold said. “The timing was just coincidental.”
This story was originally published July 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Cal Coast News falsely reported parts of San Luis Obispo County Debbie Arnold’s account of the elevator incident. The Tribune updated the article to reflect that Arnold shared different accounts of the incident with Cal Coast News and The Tribune. The error has been corrected.
