Times Running Out for Graves : County Administrator Likely to Get the Ax

When the San Diego County Grand Jury issued a blistering report last week on problems in county government, all but calling for the firing of Clifford W. Graves, one question probably popped into the minds of many county residents:

“Who is Clifford Graves?”

Graves, 46, is the county’s chief administrative officer, the man atop a sprawling, 12,000-employee bureaucracy.

When a county road has a pothole or is overburdened with traffic, when the poor collect their welfare checks, when a developer applies to build a subdivision in a semi-rural area, when an accident victim is taken to a hospital trauma center, the problem ultimately lands on Clifford Graves’ desk.

Paid $78,000 annually, Graves is responsible for making sure the county spends wisely the nearly $1 billion it gets from taxpayers every year. His job is to oversee 21 departments delivering regional and municipal services to the county’s 2 million residents.

According to the grand jury, Graves, after seven years on the job, is failing.

After examining the way the county government has been operating since last summer, the jury Tuesday unleashed a blunt, two-page missive that cited a litany of problems and said they added up to a county in “disarray.” The advisory report urged the Board of Supervisors to put Graves on notice that “a change in administration will be necessary.”

But interviews with supervisors, their aides and others in county government show that the grand jury’s report has done no more than focus public attention on a process that has been ongoing behind the scenes for months.

Although the board voted in closed session Wednesday to evaluate Graves as scheduled June 19, his fate seems all but sealed. The timing of his departure and whether he is fired or forced to resign are all that’s left to be decided. The only other question is whether Graves’ demise was inevitable or could have been avoided.

The three new members elected to the five-member Board of Supervisors last year came into office promising a shake-up. Sworn into office Jan. 7, Supervisors Susan Golding, Brian Bilbray and George Bailey proclaimed an end to “business as usual” in a county plagued with problems, scandals and a generally weak public image.

Along with holdover Supervisors Leon Williams and Paul Eckert, the new board entered 1985 with high hopes and, apparently, an open mind toward the retention of Graves as their top administrator.

But the honeymoon ended quickly.

The beginning of the end for Graves came just two weeks into the year, when he went to the board with a proposal to implement Proposition A, the county charter reform measure approved by voters in November, 1984.

Proposition A was meant to make the county’s top administrator more like a city manager. It gave Graves the power to hire and fire department heads without consulting the Board of Supervisors and prohibited board members from interfering in the day-to-day operation of the county.

The measure also made Graves more accountable to the board by requiring only three, instead of four, votes to fire the CAO.

In January, Graves submitted a $400,000 proposal to hire more staff and buy the equipment he said was needed to put Proposition A in place. Graves brought the proposal to the board as a last-minute “off-docket” agenda item, and it was approved unanimously without discussion.

Within minutes, however, the new board members began backtracking, telling reporters that they had been misled by Graves in private sessions to believe they were approving only a concept for implementing Proposition A, not the entire package.

By the time the mess was unraveled three weeks later, Graves had been publicly scolded by the board and had rewritten his proposal, attributing a much smaller portion of the staff expansion to Proposition A. Later, Graves had to back down from an edict he issued to county staff ordering that they document every contact with a board member’s office. The rule, designed to prevent meddling by board members, resulted instead in a process so regulated that supervisors complained it took weeks to get an answer to the simplest of questions.

Graves’ handling of Proposition A made a bad first impression on the new board members that he has not been able to shake.

“They were embarrassed by him their first week on the job, and you just don’t do that,” said one longtime observer of county government. “He made them look foolish.”

But disagreements over Proposition A were only the beginning of Graves’ troubles with the board. In the months since, Graves and his staff increasingly have become the target of the supervisors’ frustration and, sometimes, their anger.

Golding, who had, just three months into the year, urged her colleagues to evaluate Graves, complained publicly that she found the county staff wanting. A former San Diego City Council member, Golding time and again cited the City of San Diego’s example as the way the county should be operating.

She complained that the county’s contracting and purchasing procedures were inadequate, and she expressed frequent disappointment at the staff’s failure to keep supervisors informed on various issues ranging from the progress of bills in the state Legislature to events taking place at the county’s troubled Edgemoor Geriatric Hospital.

Bilbray, though pleased with the staff’s quick response to his request for action on the Tijuana sewage problem, has said repeatedly that the county staff did not seem bold enough to fulfill his wishes.

“I would rather have mistakes committed in being pro-active than from a lack of action,” Bilbray said during an interview in May.

Of the three new supervisors, only Bailey seemed willing to grant Graves a full six months to show the new board what he could do. But even Bailey had strong disagreements with the staff, mainly with the Department of Planning and Land Use. Bailey complained that the county staff was ignoring grading violations by developers and he called one planning department report on the unincorporated areas “completely fallacious.”

Against the backdrop of his already tenuous relationship with the board, the mounting crises in the Department of Health Services have all but assured Graves’ demise.

The health department’s latest troubles began almost as soon as the new board was sworn in, when state inspectors visiting the Edgemoor Geriatric Hospital found hundreds of violations and declared the hospital in danger of losing federal Medicare and state Medi-Cal funding.

In late January, the state fined the county $20,000 for inadequate nursing care in connection with the drowning of a paralyzed woman left unattended in a bathtub and the death of a legless patient who fell out of bed and later suffered a heart attack. In all, the state has fined the county $40,000 during the past year for violations at Edgemoor.

In May, state Assemblyman Larry Stirling released a package of documents detailing allegations of mismanagement and shoddy care at the county’s Hillcrest mental health hospital, prompting state and federal investigations into at least two deaths at the facility. One involved a man who died, apparently of a drug overdose, four hours after being placed in an isolation room. The other case involved the strangling of a patient by his roommate, who was later found innocent of manslaughter by reason of insanity.

Although the administrator at Edgemoor and the medical director at the mental hospital have since been reassigned, Graves may have sealed his fate when he declined to fire James Forde, director of the Department of Health Services since 1979. Graves’ support for his longtime aide in the face of the supervisors’ growing frustration made him appear as a weak administrator, a charge that has dogged Graves since he took over as CAO in 1978.

But firing Forde would not have been Graves’ style.

Often described as urbane and articulate, Graves is a soft-spoken man known for the calm manner with which he handles crises.

In the days when Mayor Roger Hedgecock and Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego) were county supervisors, Graves was often criticized for failing to stand up to the pair of caustic politicians, whose verbal attacks on county staff were legendary.

“I know I’m seen as Mr. Cool,” Graves said in an interview in 1981. “My job on Tuesdays (board meeting days) is to be seen and not heard.”

In the end, Graves may have been just too cool for the activist board to which he answers today. Many observers believe Graves’ had little chance to survive in his job once the new board was elected and Proposition A was approved.

“The die was cast,” said an aide to one supervisor who asked not to be identified. “You had a new board who basically got a mandate from the voters to change county government. Cliff was very much a part of that government. I’m not sure there was anything short of a miracle that would have turned things around.”