Ventura County government pay practices benefited CEO employees, audit shows

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Employees of the top administrative office in the Ventura County government won substantial pay increases at disparate rates during the last few years of ex-CEO Mike Powers' tenure, an audit shows.
Ventura County Auditor-Controller Jeff Burgh released a report on the audit of pay practices in May, three years after ordering the investigation from the Washington, D.C., law firm of FordHarrison. He has tied the delay to the complexity of making comparisons between the County Executive Office and dozens of other county departments and more recently the departure of Consuela Pinto, the firm partner in charge of the audit.
Pinto informed him she was leaving the firm and that no other staff members were familiar with the audit, Burgh said. Reached via email, Pinto declined to comment.
The county paid FordHarrison $82,000 before the auditor's office took over the audit in April 2024 and completed it, Burgh said.
The audit examined a four-year period when Powers was the top executive for the county government, from January 2018 until he was forced out by the Board of Supervisors in March 2022 over a harassment claim filed by a female manager. Powers, who served as CEO for 11 years in all, denied any wrongdoing and filed a wrongful termination lawsuit that is still pending.
The audit looked at whether employees of the CEO's Office received reclassifications of their positions into higher paying ones more often, started employment at higher points on the county pay scale, and won merit raises above 5% at a higher rate than people in several other departments.
The query compared the pattern for employees of the CEO's Office with those in the General Services Agency, Information Technology Services, the Public Works Agency and the Auditor-Controller's Office. Burgh had initially said the analysis would compare compensation decisions for the CEO's Office with roughly two dozen other agencies in the large county government, but that it was narrowed down to four due to the volume of documents that needed to be gathered.
The findings showed:
Of 38 people whose jobs were reclassified, 20, or more than half, worked in the CEO's Office. Part of the paperwork was missing to support the reclassifications for 16 of the 20 CEO employees, but no omissions were cited for workers in the other departments. Typically, reclassification results in a 5% pay bump and a higher salary range. It's allowed for a variety of reasons including when someone's job duties change.
Significantly more employees in the CEO's Office were eligible for and received merit increases above 5% than employees in the other four agencies. Three received the highest possible merit increase of 10%.
CEO staff were hired above the midpoint of the salary range at a significantly higher rate than new hires in the other four agencies selected for the comparison. Almost half of 54 new hires in the CEO's Office got the benefit during the four-year period covered by the audit compared with a quarter in the auditor's and information technology offices and about 10% in the general services and public works agencies.
Neither Powers or an attorney representing him in his lawsuit against the county could be reached for comment.
In her response to the audit, current CEO Sevet Johnson said the audit report did not provide any evidence of preferential treatment, much less actual abuse of the personnel system for the benefit of the CEO's office.
Nor did it show any violations of personnel rules, regulations or policies, she said.
When he ordered the audit in 2022, Burgh said he did so after some county employees and managers expressed concerns about the appearance of disparate treatment for employees in the CEO's Office.
Burgh said staff in his office had previously considered doing an audit of personnel decisions in the CEO's office, but that the "tipping point" came when former CEO public information officer Ashley Bautista was promoted to senior deputy executive officer three months after being hired. At the time, county officials tied the promotion to an expansion in her job duties. They appeared to grow dramatically during the COVID-19 public health emergency.
Burgh said in 2022 that pay decisions benefiting other employees of the CEO's Office had also come to his attention. No specific employees including Bautista are mentioned in the audit report. Burgh said that's because they are personnel matters.
The county's human resources department is a division of the County Executive's Office, an arrangement that the report suggested was too cozy.
That structure and what was called "lack of independent oversight" appeared to result in more favorable personnel actions affecting compensation of CEO employees than the other four agencies reviewed, the report said. Reclassification of jobs in the CEO's office appeared to encounter fewer obstacles than in the other agencies, was not always supported with complete documentation, and was approved at a higher rate, the report said.
The analysis called for additional safeguards to improve accountability for salary and other decisions for positions in the office. Human Resources should report directly to the Board of Supervisors and be moved out of the CEO's Office, the report advised.
Johnson took strong exception to the audit findings even though she was not in charge of the CEO's Office at the time covered by the investigation.
Johnson said Burgh does not possess the necessary expertise in employment practices to perform the audit himself, questioned whether he could be impartial, wanted to know why the law firm was no longer involved in the project and faulted the sample of agencies in the comparison.
Still, she said the human resources division would endeavor to make improvements in cases where the findings clearly support such a change. Burgh said he expected any corrections to be completed by the end of next year.
Kathleen Wilson covers courts, mental health and local government issues for the Ventura County Star. Reach her at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Ventura County pay practices benefited CEO employees, audit shows