Officials Question In-House Hiring : Personnel: The Civil Service Commission hires its own chairman as an analyst, exacerbating a feud with the district attorney over nepotism.

A Ventura County Civil Service Commission decision to forgo county recruiting procedures and quickly hire its own chairman as a staff analyst has prompted a letter of concern from the county’s personnel chief and a sharp rebuke by the district attorney.

The commission hired Chairman Robert C. Embry on July 26, shortly after veteran staff member Ray Charles died suddenly. It conducted no search for applicants and considered only Embry and another member of the five-person commission for the $15,298-a-year part-time job.

“As soon as these two people declared themselves, we figured that either one would be an excellent staff representative,” Vice Chairman Edward Flores said Friday. “We didn’t think we’d ever get another candidate as qualified.”

So instead of taking at least a month to recruit applicants, Embry and Commissioner Carolyn Goldsborough dismissed themselves from the closed-door deliberations, and the other commissioners picked Embry to work 60 hours a month researching county employee appeals, Flores said.

Ratification of Embry’s contract will be on the Sept. 4 agenda of the County Board of Supervisors. In a letter, Personnel Director Ronald W. Komers recommends approval of the contract but told the board that he was concerned about the procedure used to pick Charles’ successor.

“I have no knowledge of the criteria involved” in Embry’s selection, Komers said in an interview. “I am concerned that there was not a formal process so everybody would know what the criteria was.”

Reacting to Komers’ concerns, the commission has agreed to work with him to create a procedure for future hirings, he said.

Komers said he was bothered by how Embry was selected, not by his qualifications. Embry, 55, is a professor of business management at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

“I think Dr. Embry is a fine person and will make a fine staff representative,” Komers said.

A key Civil Service rule requires competition for vacant jobs, which in Ventura County usually includes advertising openings in a newspaper, he said.

Civil Service commissioners and their staff adviser are technically not county employees and do not have to follow that guideline, even though their salaries are paid by the county, Komers said.

Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said Friday that he agrees that no law was broken when the commission chose Embry.

“But it strikes me as a little incestuous to have two members of the commission ask for the job and the remaining members make the decision,” Bradbury said.

“I think the public should expect more from a commission that is the gatekeeper of the merit system. If there’s such a thing as institutional nepotism, this is it.”

Bradbury’s comments represent a continuation of his long-running feud with the commission and with Embry.

The commission found in April that the district attorney had violated county nepotism rules by allowing a division head to keep his new wife on his staff. Embry, who called the situation “blatant nepotism,” abstained from voting after Bradbury accused him of prejudging the issue.

Bradbury rejected the nepotism finding, saying that the commissioners were irresponsible, incompetent tools of the county employee union. County lawyers said they found no violation of county work rules in the district attorney’s office, but Bradbury eventually agreed to move the employee from her husband’s office.

r Embry, who also directs the Center of Management Development at Cal Lutheran, said Friday that he warned his fellow commissioners that they should not hire anyone at their July meeting and instead should ask the Personnel Department to recruit candidates.

“I strongly advised them that they should go through that process,” Embry said. “I anticipated that there may be some people who would view this as being incestuous.”

Embry said, however, that the commission’s decision made sense because members had been told by at least one top county administrator that there would be little interest in a part-time job that paid only $15,000 annually.

Komers said Friday, however, that he thinks there would have been other applicants for the job.

“I know there are a number of people in the community interested,” most of them retired administrators, he said.

In addition to his new county job and his full-time post at Cal Lutheran, Embry is the bargaining representative for an association of civil engineers and technicians employed by Santa Barbara County, he said.