Orange County supervisors hotly debated whether to put in place new ethics rules Tuesday in response to LAist’s reporting on millions of dollars Supervisor Andrew Do directed to his 22-year-old daughter’s nonprofit without publicly disclosing the family connection.
The debate also featured disagreements on whether Orange County has a government corruption problem.
The nonprofit — run by Do’s daughter Rhiannon Do, who is a full-time law student — has not turned in required audits showing where millions in taxpayer dollars went, county CEO Frank Kim confirmed at Tuesday’s supervisors meeting. The first of the audits is over a year-and-a-half overdue, according to the timeline in a county contract with the group.
LAist first reported on the missing audits in December, and reported Monday that Do quietly awarded the group another $6.2 million after it failed to submit the audits.
The ethics proposal deadlocked among the supervisors 2-to-2, with Vicente Sarmiento and Katrina Foley in favor, Don Wagner and Doug Chaffee against, and Do absent. That means the reform proposal was not approved and is now officially dead.
The proposal, which was introduced by Sarmiento in response to LAist’s findings, would have required supervisors to disclose immediate family connections to contractors they’re awarding money to. It also would have required supervisors to hold public votes when such connections existed.
Currently, county policies let any supervisor award money to organizations run by their adult child without having to disclose the relationship.
Supervisors can also approve funds to their adult children without having to disclose the award on a public meeting agenda.
In government documents obtained through record requests, LAist tallied $13.5 million in county awards to Do’s daughter’s group, all of which Do had a leading role in awarding. Most of the money was never listed on public agendas before — or after — it was approved. And Do did not publicly disclose his family relationship before directing the money, according to three of his fellow supervisors and the county’s chief executive.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Sarmiento said the goal of his proposal was “to have disclosures so that the public knows when we, as public servants, approve millions and millions of dollars in contracts that we are not enriching ourselves or our family members.”
“It doesn't require anybody to abstain. It simply requires you to disclose when you have a family member that's going to be receiving some sort of” benefit directed by a supervisor, Sarmiento added. “I would like to know, for better or for worse, if somebody has a sibling, spouse, daughter, anybody that's immediately related, as defined here, that could benefit from a contract that I am going to be supporting.”
Wagner and Chaffee pushed back, saying the proposed transparency and disclosure rules were unnecessary. Wagner called them “unconstitutional.”
“It is a moving of the goal posts in the law,” Wagner said. He argued that changes to county policies would be a “bill of attainder” — government punishment of someone for an alleged crime without a trial — and that the proposal would be retroactive against Do.
He added that Do’s granting of millions to his daughter’s group should not be questioned or challenged.
“There are no, nor should there be, questions or challenges as to that particular grant of money, because there's nothing illegal about what was done,” Wagner said.
Seeing that the reform measure was doomed, Foley asked if county staff could put in writing for public transparency what their process is for awarding contracts at the request of individual supervisors, which often happens outside public meetings as Do did.
That process — known as “district discretionary” funding — currently is “informal” without a written procedure, replied Kim, the county CEO.
Foley’s request got no support from Wagner or Chaffee and did not move forward.
Wagner told LAist in an interview last week that the nonprofit should not get additional county funding when it fails to submit required audits.
As for the nonprofit’s long-overdue audits showing where prior millions went, Wagner said that’s “a fair question.”
“The fact that later they don't comply [with the audit requirements] says, OK, next time we don't give you anything,” he said.
Asked if he was concerned that Do gave Viet America Society an additional $6.2 million after it failed to submit the federally required audits, Wagner said: “I think that's the question that needs to be asked and answered. And I don't have an answer to that.”
As he described his ethics proposal, Sarmiento said there's a corruption problem in Orange County — a statement that sparked pushback from Wagner.
"There is a lot of corruption that is happening in our county," Sarmiento said.
"Unfortunately, there are abuses of power, abuses of authority, and we know that that's something that's, um, that's unfortunately existed within these offices and in other government offices."
Wagner took exception.
"I resent it," Wagner said of Sarmiento's remarks.
"I am unaware of none in my office," he said. At least two audience members then laughed audibly.
"The good news is none of you can be heard on the microphone," Wagner said to them.
"The casual charge of corruption is, frankly, false," Wagner said of Sarmiento's comments.
Sarmiento said the public should be able to know about these kinds of close family connections.
"I want to make sure that I'm on record in supporting open government, transparency, good governance, and a good ethical standard," Sarmiento said.
"More sunshine is better than less, right? More light on something, more disclosure, more information for the public is always better than less."
Do wasn’t present at the ethics discussion because he left Tuesday’s meeting early — about 45 minutes into the 3.5-hour meeting, long before the reform proposal was discussed.
He didn’t explain why he left, and didn’t return for the rest of the meeting.
The editorial board of the O.C. Register, the county’s largest newspaper, has called three times for Do to resign since LAist’s reporting uncovered the details of the funding to Do’s daughter’s group.
Do has told other news outlets that he did nothing wrong when he awarded the money. He and Rhiannon Do have not responded to multiple interview requests from LAist.
During public comments, five people from the advocacy group VietRISE demanded that Do resign, and called for an independent audit of where the money went.
“These allocations of funding need to be investigated, and the public needs answers to those backdoor dealings,” said Vincent Tran, organizing director at VietRISE.
“The lack of trust for our political institutions and elected officials stem from the decades of mismanagement, scandals, and corruption. And this is just another one of those blatant examples of corruption.”
Sarmiento said the lack of adopting the disclosure rules could come back to haunt the board.
That hesitance, he said, "unfortunately may bring us back sometime in the future to dealing with...some other issue in the future, where we might be saying we should have had this in place."
