No. 6: County roiled by internal, financial conflict
Humboldt County’s business carried on as usual in 2019, though tensions and lawsuits would stoke turmoil within the county’s department offices and compel numerous closed-session talks at the Board of Supervisors table.
It started in April, when the county’s chief attorney, Jeff Blanck, filed lawsuits against both the supervisors and two individual employees, alleging they targeted him for blowing the whistle on financial misuse.
Blanck also said the Board of Supervisors violated his 1st Amendment rights and even discriminated against his Jewish heritage when it voted to place him on paid administrative leave for two complaints against him that remain unknown.
As the year ends, some of Blanck’s legal claims are still in play, while others have been dismissed by judges. Blanck has made clear he intends to appeal the dismissals.
Meanwhile, the supervisors have taken actions to correct some of the financial processes that Blanck said the county was doing wrong. That includes ratifying, in reverse time, dozens of payments to an outside legal firm — bills that totaled thousands of dollars.
Just weeks after Blanck made his legal claims, another county department head spoke out about what she described as financial misconduct.
Karen Paz Dominguez, the county’s elected auditor-controller, said that she had been blocked from reviewing payroll for more than 1,000 county employees, leaving public money vulnerable to all kinds of fraud.
Specifically, Paz Dominguez said Human Resources director Lisa
DeMatteo had insisted that her own department’s payroll documents didn’t need the auditor’s oversight.
“What I’ve experienced in the auditor-controller’s office (with Human Resources) is a level of obstruction that I’ve never seen before,” Paz Dominguez told the Times-Standard at the time.
Later, a civil grand jury report would sharply criticize the county’s accounting practices, identifying an “opportunity for fraud” in local cashhandling.
DeMatteo, also the subject of one of Blanck’s lawsuits (which most recently was dismissed by a judge), would end up leaving her position in the summer. The county has not provided an official reason why she had left.
But a document obtained by the Times-Standard revealed that DeMatteo, in exchange for her resignation, had accepted $51,000 in separation pay. The document didn’t specifically indicate the nature of the parting money.
Reached earlier this month, DeMatteo declined to be interviewed about her time as the human resources director.
DeMatteo’s notice of departure came after the Board of Supervisors met in closed session to evaluate her job performance. In other closed-session meetings, the board has discussed the Blanck lawsuits at length, but rarely reported out any action.
In interviews, the supervisors have refused to discuss any of the county’s internal back-andforth conflicts or Blanck’s numerous claims. Instead, the county’s internal issues have largely played out through documents, emails and closed sessions — and almost never in front of the public. Blanck remains on paid leave.