“Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.” ~ Malcolm Forbes.
Truer words were never spoken when, in secret meetings, the OI board decided to hire John Gibbs. Gibbs was hired without any public input. The position and his qualifications were never presented to the public. Gibbs was never vetted by the board or community, and a background check was never conducted.
Initially described by OI Commissioner Sylvia Rhodea as “way over-qualified and also much-loved by our county,” we quickly learned that neither statement was true. Less than three months into the job, Gibbs admitted that he wasn’t qualified for the job. He asked the commission for additional support. In his own words, he noted that learning the job was like “drinking from a fire hose.” As the experienced commissioners on the board noted, the prior two administrators did not need or request the additional help Gibbs stated he required.
By firing an experienced, competent administrator and hiring an inexperienced, incompetent administrator, the taxpayers of Ottawa County got to pay for two county administrator’s salaries. The taxpayers paid for the experienced and extremely competent county administrator to do nothing and for an inexperienced, incompetent administrator to continue the poor hiring practices of Ottawa Impact.
At the same time, in secret meetings, they made plans to fire experienced and competent legal support only to hire a legal team with no municipal experience. Historically, annual legal costs for the county ran a little over $200,000. In their first year, the Kallman legal group has been paid over $690,000.
The hiring of an inexperienced county administrator has led to a string of more inexperienced hires. The OI members of the board approved the hiring Gibbs requested, thus increasing the county spending even more. Gibbs and the hiring team set out to find the most qualified person available and presented the board and the community with five specific qualifications they felt were necessary to do the job.
Gibbs then went on to hire someone that only met one of the five qualifications required. At the time, we knew a little bit about the new hire. We knew that he (similar to his new boss) had no respect for women, and we knew that his most recent employer was an extreme-right Republican state representative.
It was when the OI board held its sham hearing to try to fire an experienced and fully competent Health Department director that we learned even more. We learned that this new hire wasn’t qualified or even supposed to make it past the first interview, but Gibbs forced the team to invite him to a second interview. We learned that this candidate refused to shake hands with any of the women on the interview team. We learned that the candidate was not selected by any of the members of the hiring team, but Gibbs forced his hire. We learned that Gibbs wanted him hired because he “could boss him around.” And finally, we learned that his new assistant’s “ethics depend on who you are working for.”
The result is that the county is once again being sued by the older, highly qualified candidate, for failure to follow the law. While we won’t know the actual cost for some time, we know that there will once again be exorbitant legal costs to fight a losing battle and that in the end the plaintiff will prevail costing the taxpayer (you) even more.
It was also at this hearing where we heard Gibbs state “dozens of times” under oath, that he “didn’t remember” or “couldn’t recall” discussions or actions he had taken in his first 10 months of employment. Between that testimony and putting the taxpayers at risk by his prejudicial hiring practices, a knowledgeable and experienced board would have fired him on the spot. That, of course, is presuming that we had a board that cared about the Ottawa County taxpayer.
While little is known about Gibb’s most recent hire, he certainly doesn’t appear to have any experience in county government. What we do know is that our new deputy administrator’s one claim to fame is that he “took part in several political stunts with James O’Keefe, the controversial founder of Project Veritas, a conservative nonprofit that uses undercover video and staged encounters in an attempt to reveal media bias.” As one might expect, this effort failed and his former partner is “under investigation in New York over allegations he mistreated workers and misspent organization funds.”
So how do you solve a problem where incompetent people hire more incompetent people? Gibbs has proposed a solution — take the hiring process away from those whose job it is. From those who have experience in hiring, who understand labor laws and legal hiring practices and transfer that process to him and the board!
And there are the ongoing malicious attempts to fire an experienced and qualified health officer and then replace her with an inexperienced and unqualified person who has zero experience in public health. This fiasco has and will continue to cost the Ottawa County taxpayers.
It’s not just the hiring of inexperienced people to staff roles formerly staffed by experienced and competent people; the exact same thing is happening at the volunteer level as the OI board begins its process of replacing experienced, qualified volunteers on various commissions with inexperienced candidates who’s only qualification is loyalty to OI, not to the Ottawa County taxpayers.
Less than 14 months ago we lived in a county we could be proud of. A county respected throughout the state, with a health department respected throughout the country. Now the state and the nation wonder what happened. The easy answer is that we took for granted what we had.
To repair this mess is going to take more than one election. It is going to take years to rebuild what has been destroyed in 13 short months.
Ottawa County can recover, but it will take each of us to pay attention and then to take action.
— Mark Smith resides in Grand Haven.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Mark Smith: Incompetent hiring practices just one way OI is wasting money