Clark County council Chair Marc Boldt said he regularly shows up at the Dragonfly Cafe on the ground floor of the county’s Public Service Center to get some face time with county employees. For much of May, he got an earful.
Earlier that month, the council unexpectedly voted to oust Mark McCauley as county manager. McCauley had started working at the county in 2001 and had developed a close bond with the rank-and-file while working his way up to the county’s top executive position.
“ ‘We’re shocked,’ ” Boldt recalled hearing from employees about McCauley. “They didn’t understand why we did this.”
The council has only offered generalities about firing McCauley, the first county manager under the recently implemented Clark County home rule charter, saying they wanted a new “direction” and a different kind of leadership.
But after a few weeks of these meetings, Boldt said things got back to normal.
“I think we’ve withstood the test,” Boldt said of the county’s ability to remove the unelected county manager under the home rule charter. But three years after Clark County voters approved the charter, the county is figuring out what normal means in other ways.
In 2014, when Clark County voters were considering the charter, critics worried about concentrating too much executive power in the county manager, an unelected official who could prove difficult to remove. Proponents argued that the county commission form of government gave then-Commissioners David Madore and Tom Mielke too free a hand, giving rise to cronyism and bad policies.
After voters approved the charter and elected a new council, it began undoing much of what the former board of commissioners, dominated by Madore and Mielke, had done. Councilors began winding down a fee waiver program for developers, reinstalled parking fees at county parks and directed McCauley to dissolve the Department of Environmental Services. To outsiders, it appeared as if the council and manager were working in harmony.
“(McCauley) was changing the direction,” said Ed Barnes, a retired labor leader who was appointed as a county commissioner in 2014 to fill out the term of former Commissioner Steve Stuart. Barnes said he’s bothered that McCauley dutifully did what the council asked and was still fired.
“I think it’s trying to work, but it’s not there,” said local activist Chris Prothero, who runs a Facebook page on Clark County politics. He said he worries the council is still reluctant to hand over power to the county manager.
“The challenge we have to work through is how to work as a purely legislative body,” Councilor John Blom said.
Before his dismissal, McCauley was using the calmer post-Madore and Mielke atmosphere to implement an initiative to improve employee morale. He also was working on a “customer bill of rights.”
Just days before county employees packed the council chambers for his emotion-laden dismissal, McCauley and the council began an informal meeting by joking about how a can of Coke can be used to clean a toilet bowl.
“I had no idea the council was not satisfied with me or my performance,” said McCauley, who has since taken a department head position with Jefferson County on the Olympic Peninsula.
Momentous meeting
Then the five councilors — Boldt, Blom, Jeanne Stewart, Julie Olson and Eileen Quiring — held a closed-door meeting to discuss personnel matters. McCauley later said it became clear to him during this meeting that he would lose his job for reasons that remain unclear to the public.
A public records request turned up no evidence of harassment or misconduct by McCauley and councilor emails reveal little more about their decision.
However, McCauley’s most recent performance evaluation provides a clue. The evaluation, conducted in 2016, was based on survey of council members, county employees and managers as well as “external partners.” The survey asked respondents to rate McCauley on 15 aspects of his leadership on a scale of 1 to 5. McCauley scored highest on operational excellence (4.35) and county mission (4.25) but scored lowest on council relations (3.68) and innovation and change (3.93).
“We continued to be concerned about some of the same types of things we were concerned about last year,” said Stewart, who added that if manager-council relations aren’t successful, “it’s not going to work.”
McCauley said he had frustrations with the council, specifically how he couldn’t get the members to agree to a strategic direction.
“I think the councilors would do well to evaluate how they deal with county staff and how they deal with the county manager,” he said, adding that the councilors were the “wild card” in implementing the charter.
Nan Henriksen, the former Camas mayor who chaired the Board of Freeholders that wrote the charter, said that McCauley’s removal was “a bit strange.” She added that Boldt’s remarks that the council was looking for a “leader” on intergovernmental matters and not just a “manager” were confusing. She pointed out that the charter does not assign that role to the manager.
Seven of Washington’s 39 counties have passed home rule charters. King, Whatcom, Snohomish and Pierce elect their executives.
Clark County Assessor Peter Van Nortwick, and others, have called for an elected executive. Van Nortwick said that because an appointed county manager can be removed with three votes they are essentially tasked with keeping three councilors happy. The county charter gives the council chair very limited authority, and Van Nortwick said there’s no one person who is charged with setting the council’s tone and voice.
“I’ve always been under the feeling that if you have five people in charge you have no one in charge,” Van Nortwick said.
But Craig Pridemore, a former Democratic state senator and county commissioner, said that a truly dysfunctional council probably couldn’t muster three votes to oust a manager.
Boldt also added that although it’s not needed, the council would be unlikely to do something as significant as removing a manager without an unanimous vote.
‘Starting from scratch’
Quiring said she opposed the charter when it was introduced partly out of concerns that there wouldn’t be the political will to remove an ineffective manager.
“I was proven wrong,” she said.
Despite her misgivings about the charter, she said it does have positive aspects. Specifically, she said she appreciates how the charter allows councilors to have one-on-one discussions with each other. Under the previous form of government, commissioners were essentially prohibited under the state’s Open Public Meetings Act from discussing county business outside of a public meeting. She also said she likes how four councilors represent districts instead of all three commissioners representing the county at-large.
However, she still has concerns about the charter. The county manager is the sole employee of the council and has extensive authority over staff. She said that she worries that councilors will have a harder time ensuring a policy is followed. She also worries that county bureaucracy will become entrenched and will wait out an elected official’s term before a policy can be implemented. She also said that sometimes the “borders just aren’t super clear” between the manager and council.
An idea that’s been floated by councilors is creating a policy analyst position that would report to the council. Boldt said the idea would give the manager and the council more independence. He said that the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has advised the council that these positions are permissible under the charter.
“It’s different looking at (policy) as an elected than from staff,” Olson said.
However, Vancouver City Council member Jack Burkman cautioned against the idea, saying that the idea could end up building an institution around individual councilors.
Blom said he’s open to the idea but he’s worried one analyst won’t be enough and that hiring more could impact the budget.
Either way, Blom said the council’s actions during this period will have a lasting impact.
“That will be a really important legacy,” he said. “We’ve created from scratch how the county is going to operate going forward.”
