Ready, Fire, Aim
By Greg L | 5 June 2012 | Prince William County | 11 Comments
The Gainesville Times is first out of the gate on reporting the language on the amendments the Prince William County Board of Supervisors approved modifying Supervisor Candland’s motion to eliminate discretionary funds. This collection of items approved by the board, which the Washington Post characterized as “tangential weirdness,” is going to cause some massive headaches for each and every one of this bunch that couldn’t wait until the next board meeting to get this right.
Two of these items are of particular note.
Campaign Contractor Ban
No Board member will employ or retain any full-time or part-time employee on the County payroll who owns, is employed by, or is a contractor to any company which offers services for hire to any political campaign of that Board member
The only individual who I can see this applying to is Reece Collins. Reece worked on Supervisor Candland’s election campaign and now works as a legislative aid in Supervisor Candland’s district office. Reece spearheaded the effort to eliminate political slush funds as well as working on Supervisor Candland’s effort to reign in the budget this season. While other campaign workers have gone on to work in supervisor’s offices, the language here exempts legislative aides who haven’t directly worked for their supervisor in both a campaign and legislative staff role. The language here is a little vague, but it’s pretty clear the intent here was to punish Supervisor Candland for his efforts and remove one of his most valuable employees.
This vague language could also cause some rather troubling unintentional consequences. Any person who has a business relationship of any kind with an entity that provides political consulting services to a supervisor is now verboten. Are you a freelance CPA who happens to have the consulting firm McGuire-Woods as a client? You are now not able to work part-time for a county supervisor, since McGuire-Woods provides campaign consulting. Have you ever catered for a company that offers services to political candidates? You can’t work for that county supervisor who ate a snack. The overly broad language here needlessly restricts the ability of county supervisors to find lawful full-time and part-time staff to perform constituent services, and for no demonstrable reason. Why did anyone think this was a problem in search of such a solution? And why did all but one supervisor jump on the opportunity to put this crazy rule in place, unless the purpose was to exact political revenge?
Campaign Vendor Ban
No Board member will engage or retain any vendor services using County funds where the vendor has been retained or is currently retained by the political campaign of that Board member
This one is even more problematic. This is a lifetime ban on anyone or any company that has ever performed services for a campaign. Did a campaign obtain cellular phone service through Verizon? Then the supervisor cannot use Verizon cell phones in their district office without violating this rule. Did they buy gas at 7-eleven during their campaign? Then no 7-eleven for you after the election. What about the United States Postal Service? Every campaign buys stamps. Now a supervisor cannot buy stamps to send out mailings to their constituents, and must go elsewhere for postage? How about commercial property companies? Do they not offer to rent office space to both campaigns and Prince William County Government? Or electric utilities? Who is going to supply electricity to Prince William County Government now?
This is utterly insane. I can’t imagine what problem Supervisor Jenkins was trying to solve here, since no one has raised the issue of vendors to campaigns being a problem if they provide services to district offices. No one has explained why these proposals required immediate action without any opportunity for public comment and review, or even a chance for county staff to review them for potential unintended consequences for even the duration of the usual recess in between the afternoon and evening sessions of the board. It has every characteristic of an attempt to exact political revenge on someone for being pesky about political slush funds who might have an interest in providing services to supervisors, but I haven’t quite figured out who the target might be yet.
Supervisor Candland’s proposal was all about supervisors using taxpayer money to promote themselves and gain advantage in elections. These amendments to Supervisor Candland’s ban on slush funds have utterly nothing to do with that. This ham-handed and wildly inappropriate attempt to once again exact political revenge on troublesome parties that defend liberty fortunately runs afoul of the legal precept that the plain language of the law, rather than whatever the intent of it was is the rule. If the Board of County Supervisors wants to have district offices vacated from commercial properties, have the electric service for these offices cut off, and ensure that anyone who has demonstrated a keen understanding of public service cannot serve in a district office, than so be it.
Maybe these fools would serve us better if they were huddled around an open fire during the winter and writing legislation with charcoal. That should be fun to watch.
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Candland’s legislative aid should be grandfathered in.
Jenkins was on a witch hunt, probably to draw attention away from himself. Does Mrs. Jenkins work for free?
Typical slimeball political payback - good reporting!
Greg, could you please provide what the final vote count was on Candlands proposal, as well as the count on the short sighted amendments.
Thanks
Candland’s motion passed unanimously. Hardly a surprise given the public outrage.
All supervisors except Candland voted for Jenkins’ amendments, and each of the four was voted on separately. At each one Candland begged the board to slow down, allow the same level of public comment that was offered for his proposal, and the rest of the board ignored his advice.
I’m going to the registrar’s office today to pull the campaign finance reports filed by supervisors so I can provide each one with a list of vendors they can no longer do business with. I’m hoping to see expenditures for USPS, gas stations, commercial office space, Verizon, Comcast, accountants, lawyers and such. Should be fun.
It wil be interesting to see what the PWC Personnel Manual has “regarding nepotism”. Granted the amendment was addressing the hiring of the relative, but would have to look to see the Manual’s wording.
Reason I ponder is when a volunteer is appointed to something like the Supervisor’s Budget Committee. That becomes a direct work relationship involving supervision and reporting, and a volunteer is appointed providing a work product because there is not enough funding to hire a temp staff person to do the job.
This is one area where there may have been an unforeseen consequence of the haste to push the amendments through, depending of course on the Manual.
One of the many good things to come out of this effort is the revelation of what Jenkins is really made of, i.e., vindictiveness, impulsesiveness, and, judging from the language of these amendments, not much in the I.Q. department.
Interesting enough take a look at John Jenkins’ website and in particular “Neabsco District Staff” - http://www.johnjenkins.org/neabsco-district-overview/neabsco-district-staff
…but one must remember that all of the amendments to Supervisor Candland’s resolution were more, not less restrictive on all of the Supervisors. It certainly seems to me that the final resolution, with associated amendments, can be only good for the county budget and taxpayers.
Freedom is right except the amendment did not cover individuals, only company owners, company employees, or company contractors. So technically it would be okay for Joe Schmoe the individual to work for Supervisor Jenkins while simultaneously working on Jenkins campaign but it would NOT be okay for Joe Schmoe, owner and sole employee of One Campaign Advisor, Inc. to work for Jenkins. How stupid is that? Either both should not be okay or both should be okay. So Reece Collins would have to be let go but not any of the other supervisor’s aides who’d previously been paid for campaign work. Didn’t Candland hire his former campaign manager? So Reece gets let go because his company worked on Peter’s campaign but the campaign manager keeps a job because they weren’t part of a company? It seems arbitrary and makes no sense.
And why did they say services instead of political services? Greg is right that it could cover anything from Verizon to a caterer to Staples. They were so intent on attacking Candland that they were not thinking straight.
How could the county attorney sit there and not realize the ramifications of what they were saying? An attorney should have picked up on the problems right away. Isn’t that her job to play legal devil’s advocate when the board is contemplating a resolution?
The entire situation is almost as embarrassing as the slush funds were.
I usually disagree with about half of what Greg says and BTW think the Tea party is made of up of hypocrites who want to cut everyone ELSE’S socialist benefits, but this is one I think any rational person should be able to see through and agree on. Candland was right about the impropriety, ethical considerations and wasted funds, although he did spend some uneccessary $$ renovating an office that was OK to begin with. The supes in their effort to pay Candland back may have put themselves in a situation that will feed some lawyers and provide the rest of us with lots of laughs as they try to “splain” WTH they were trying to accomplish. Stewart’s claiming that it was about time the slush fund thing was remedied and then voting for the other things without allowing public comment only shows his true colors.
John Jenkins is a pompous self-centered libtard Democrap hack. He reminds me of Ed Schultz’s older brother. He actually thinks he is “President” of the BOCS due to his long tenure and the fact he is the last remnant of the corrupt Kathleen Seefeldt Democrap machine.
It’s about time someone on the BOCS had the courage to finally step on Jenkin’s fat toes and force him to show is true Democrap colors.