Shawn Vestal: Still time to rescue Spokane County CEO hiring process

There is, at this late and inconvenient date, one way for the Spokane County Commission to ensure that the public can trust its process for hiring a new county CEO.

Start over.

It would be a pain in the neck. It would mean the time and effort put into the current process would have been for naught. And, most difficult for the commissioners, it would be an acknowledgment that what they’ve done so far has been a roundelay of conflicts-of-interest dancing arm-in-arm. A mistake.

But if Commissioners Al French and Shelly O’Quinn select their fellow Commissioner Todd Mielke for the job – as their hiring committee recommends and as the conventional wisdom predicts – there will be no way to erase the taint. It will seem crooked, no matter what.

This seems to be OK with French and O’Quinn, who have run the process to very near its conclusion: All that remains is the announcement of a hire, expected by the middle of this month. But former Commissioner Bonnie Mager, who has asked for an investigation into the process, has now started a petition drive at www.change.org urging commissioners to bring in an outside firm to run a more independent, arm’s length process.

Mager does not believe the process merely seems crooked – she believes it was “rigged to give Todd Mielke the job of a lifetime.” We don’t need to know if this is true to object to this hiring method. It is so rife with conflicts of interest that disproving the most conspiratorial view would be impossible. That is the fundamental issue when it comes to conflicts of interest: It is impossible to tell if something was done right when it looks like it might have been done wrong.

French and O’Quinn decided to skip hiring a search firm to seek candidates, as is often done with such positions. They chose a seven-member panel to interview candidates. They then had to replace two of them who, it turned out, had contributed to Mielke politically. The panel made its recommendation – that two commissioners hire the third commissioner. The two commissioners have interviewed Mielke and the other finalist, Richard L. Davis, a former city manager in West Jordan, Utah. The only thing left to do is announce a winner. Wouldn’t it be interesting if it were Davis? If it’s Mielke, though, man, will that look bad.

Mielke has served on the County Commission since 2004, and his interest in replacing the retiring Marshall Farnell as CEO has long been rumored. He is completing a master’s degree program to meet the job requirements. Having worked to meet the qualifications, he applied for the job of county CEO upon the resignation of Farnell, who was given a big raise to stay on the job for an additional amount of time that – perhaps coincidentally – corresponded to the time Mielke needed to get qualified for the job. The rumors about the machinations behind this decision have been abundant for a long time, and many journalists, including myself, did not examine them sufficiently.

Defenders of the hire might point out Mielke’s long experience with the county. He may indeed be an excellent candidate for the job. But county residents deserve a clean process. We deserve to know that, if he gets the job, he got it for the right reason. This doesn’t mean that French and O’Quinn should do a really good job of explaining why they hired him. It means they should not make the decision themselves.

Why not? Aren’t the commissioners all honorable, honest people in whom we can trust? Should we not accept their explanations that everything is OK?

Of course not. Government is supposed to be a show-me enterprise, not a take-my-word-for-it one. It is an elementary and well-understood consideration that when people have a conflict of interest – when something in their personal lives might play into their decision-making on behalf of the public – that the ethical thing to do is remove themselves from making the decision. This is to avoid corruption, first, but also to avoid the appearance of corruption, which in itself is corrosive to the public trust.

This is why judges recuse themselves if they know one of the parties in a case. It is why responsible lawmakers don’t vote on matters that affect their financial interests. It’s why we’re troubled by coziness between doctors and drug companies. It is why journalists do not cover stories with which they have a personal tie. It’s why universities should regulate the relationships between tech companies and research grants. It’s why there are rules against nepotism. It’s why the public demands independent oversight of the police, and why we try – or used to try – to keep the flood of political contributions out in the daylight.

The conflicts in the CEO process have been apparent from the first hints that Mielke wanted the job. One suspects that if anyone was going to take them seriously, it would have already happened. But Mager’s petition drive provides the public a chance to demand, and the commissioners a chance to recognize, that it’s not too late to do it right.