Resignation or special election? All eyes on on San Mateo County Supervisor Mark Church

Midterm vacancy will force Supervisors to choose election versus appointment again

San Mateo County Supervisor Mark Church will most likely be successful in winning the seat for San Mateo County Assessor Clerk Recorder Office this June as there are no other candidates running, and according to the County Elections Office website–the office in which Church will oversee at his new post this coming November–he may just do so again as no one else has filed to run against Church for the seat. This could mean that the election will be over even before it began.

But with Church leaving for a new office, he will also vacate his seat on the County Board of Supervisors in the middle of his final four-year term, leaving his colleagues with a hard choice: to appoint a replacement or to call a special election in early 2011.

In 2008, following former Supervisor Jerry Hill’s ascendance to the State Assembly, the remaining four members of the board appointed former San Mateo City Councilmember Carole Groom to Hill’s seat. The appointment process–in lieu of a special election where people actually get to vote-drew howls of protest from many corners of the county, including many local newspapers: the San Mateo County Democratic Party, The Republican Party, the League of Women Voters, and the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club to name a few. Groom was appointed anyway and is at present running with only token opposition for election this June.

The primary rationale for the appointment was that a special election would cost approximately $1.6 million, funds the county did not and does not have to spare in a period when the county is struggling with a $150 million structural deficit.

In fact, many of the advocates for appointing Groom cited cost concerns over a special election as a major impetus for the appointment.

Local labor leaders such as Nadia Bledsoe, the union representative for AFSCME Local 829, which represents hundreds of county employees stated publicly and in the local labor newspaper that $1.6 million represents “enough medical staff to provide immunizations to guard the public health, enough Conservators in Aging and Adult Services to protect elders from abuse, and enough environmental and health inspectors to ensure food establishments are clean and serve safe food.” The $1.6 million represented “enough pediatric nurses to care for children in county clinics, enough psychiatric technicians to treat seriously mentally ill people in crisis, and enough social workers in Child Protective Services to protect children in the county,” she said. “We believe this is enough to justify the appointment process,” Bledsoe said.

Bledsoe and company won the day in 2008.

But since then, the San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury–a panel of 19 county residents annually charged with investigating, reporting on, and making recommendations for reform on local government agencies and policy issues–issued a scathing report on Groom’s appointment concluding that it should not have happened and that the County Board should consider changes to the County’s charter to prevent such mid-term appointments from happening in the future. Deliberations for implementing such a potential change are underway now.

With all of the public outrage over the appointment, it is unlikely that the remaining Supervisors wish to travel the appointment road again and would likely opt for a special election.

But a special election in the spring of 2011 will face the same test and cost the same amount of money in an even worse financial climate for the county than it faced in 2009—so, what will the board do?

There is one possible solution. If Supervisor Church can be convinced to resign his current post early, perhaps in June of 2010, a special election could be consolidated with the existing November 2010 general election. There would be little additional cost, democracy would be served, and everybody wins.

Even Church himself, in defending his vote to appoint Groom in 2008 stated in the local press that "Every million counts and every dollar counts," as his reason for balancing the county’s financial woes against holding an election.

Let’s see how the Supervisors handle the challenge this time around.

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