PORT ANGELES — The Clallam County commissioner assigned as board liaison to outspoken Treasurer Selinda Barkhuis said her public criticism of County Administrator Jim Jones has gone too far.
“It’s character assassination under the guise of political speech, which is just flat-out wrong,” Jim McEntire said.
“There’s no reason for it, no justification for it, and it damn well ought to stop.”
Barkhuis has published scathing articles about Jones on her website, www.patoday.com, that have appeared as guest columns in the monthly Port O Call newspaper.
Besides her stewardship of taxpayer money, Barkhuis says her overriding goal for her second four-year term as treasurer — she is running unopposed this year — is to end “the farce that now constitutes Clallam County government.”
“The first order of business is for the County Administrator to go,” according to her website.
“The reason: he lies. And no matter how you want to slice it, his lying violates every code of conduct and ethics that apply to him, and clearly fails to meet the ‘higher standard’ called for under his employment contract.”
Barkhuis, who canceled a Friday interview with the Peninsula Daily News, is one of 41 candidates on the ballot for the 15-member Charter Review Commission.
If elected to that commission, Barkhuis has said she would propose eliminating the $183,000-per-year county administrator position altogether.
In an August blog titled “The Case Against the County Administrator,” Barkhuis opined that her request for one additional staff member was rejected by commissioners because she refused to loan the city of Port Angeles $7.75 million for its landfill bluff-stabilization project.
Jones told commissioners last September that the county had the authority to loan the money and stood by that advice last week.
Commissioners last year denied the city’s request for money.
In a September blog called “At the County, Your Pay Depends on Which Elected Official You Work For,” Barkhuis accused commissioners of imposing “disparate pay cuts” through a “bad faith” process.
Hourly union staffers were reduced from 40 to 37.5 hours per week, and union-exempt staff took a 5 percent pay cut while being told to work “however long it takes to get the job done” in an acknowledged understaffed office, Barkhuis said.
“I think it needs to be stated that the board offered her a half-time position for 2014, and she turned it down,” Commissioner Mike Chapman said in a work session Tuesday.
In that board session, commissioners discussed a Sheriff’s Office investigation that found that Jones had broken no laws when he said the county could loan money to the city.
McEntire said he requested the sheriff’s investigation “out of an abundance of caution.”
“We have ample legal authority to make loans as a legislative body,” McEntire said in a Friday interview.
“It’s not just some attorney general’s opinion; there is explicit, bright, black-letter law that enables us as a commission to do loans.
“That’s not an issue.”
Barkhuis on Thursday said she intends to submit a report about the loan and other matter to the state Auditor’s Office and Attorney General’s Office for a review and opinions.
Barkhuis, who has a law degree, said the sheriff’s investigation did not contradict the facts she outlined in her report about the loan, noting that “lying in and of itself is not a crime.”
“I just believe we deserve better,” Barkhuis wrote in a Thursday email to the PDN.
Jones has shied away from making public statements about Barkhuis’ beef with him. He told commissioners Tuesday that Human Resources Director Rich Sill and others have “been in contact with her.”
“Obviously, they’re not keeping me completely in the loop, as I seem to be the focus of her ire,” Jones told the board.
“But I do know that there’s some concerns about county liability and other issues that are being addressed, or at least considered, by the prosecutor, by the risk pool’s contract attorney and HR.”
Jones said Barkhuis’ latest guest column contained misunderstandings and a “lot of misinformation.”
“The allegations are no longer criminal in nature,” Jones said.
“The sheriff took care of those. Now they’re just things that in the budget process, ‘if you don’t work for the Sheriff’s Office, your people don’t get paid appropriately.’ Those kinds of things. That was the newest allegation.”
Chapman said Barkhuis’ refusal to meet with Jones in the normal course of budget preparations is “a problem.”
He suggested a mediator to resolve the “failure at the leadership level of the county.”
“One style of mediation would be to ask the treasurer to list her concerns and take that list and work on solutions to address the list,” Commissioner Mike Doherty said.
“That way, she has to prioritize her issues, hopefully have a chance to expose whatever the concerns are, and then we address them and talk about them.
Doherty added: “There might be some judgment calls on interpreting something, but I haven’t seen that narrowing of the issues to see what the actual pressure points are.”
Barkhuis’ fallout with Jones has had an adverse effect on the board “to the extent that we’ve got to take up time to deal with this nonsense,” McEntire said Friday.
McEntire described Barkhuis as a “very intelligent person” whose accusations against Jones are unfounded.
“This is just character assassination, straight up, for no good reason,” McEntire said.
“All this stuff she’s bringing up is completely unfounded.”
Jones, a former executive director for business and operations at the Port Angeles School District, became Clallam County’s chief executive in May 2006.
“As a normal human being, he’s prone to error and mistakes,” McEntire said.
“But he’s a man of integrity. He does his very best for the citizens of this county.”
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5072, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
