This Time, the Watchdog Really Was Watching

A clear sign of the trouble facing Chief Administrative Officer Richard Dixon is the news that he is under fire from an organization that’s always been a lap dog of county government--the grand jury.

The jurors are 23 men and women, mostly retirees, who are selected by Superior Court judges from lists of volunteers or from among their acquaintances. In their year’s service, these part-time public servants, who are paid $25 a day plus parking, have two jobs. One is to hear testimony on criminal cases and indict accused criminals. The second is to serve as a watchdog over government, looking for inefficiency or corruption.

If you think about it, you can see the futility of the task. Twenty-three well-meaning lay people are supposed to serve as watchdogs over scores of public agencies run by masters of the cover-up.

It usually works like this: Bureaucrats and their elected bosses dazzle inexperienced jurors with slide shows and VIP tours or numb their minds with too many statistics. As a result, grand jury reports are notorious for their generalities and their approval of even the most suspicious government operations.

That is why it came as such a shock when the jury blasted Dixon last week in a report that systematically shredded the image he cultivated as a tight-fisted administrator. The jurors painted him as a spendthrift who underreported the cost of furniture for his plush office remodeling by $713,000. And this grand jury actually uncovered evidence of a cover-up. Most of the records of the remodeling job had been destroyed.

The reason for the surprise is that docility is built in to the grand jury system.

I have talked to a number of ex-jurors over the years and they tell me that the people who volunteer for juries tend to believe what they’re told. Jurors are not rabble rousers, revolutionaries, courtroom lawyers or reporters who assume everyone is lying until proved truthful.

Their term begins with a series of briefings by managers of county departments. The bureaucrats do the talking. And most new jurors don’t have enough background to ask questions. This goes on for a few weeks, until the jury has been given an overview of such county departments as welfare, the sheriff, mental health, the hospitals and the rest of the mind-boggling bureaucracy.

From this overly rich menu--enough to fill a graduate course in public administration--the jurors pick a few agencies for intensive study during the rest of the year.

Jurors tour facilities and have lunch with top county bureaucrats, who try to be charming. A department head who may treat his subordinates with vile contempt becomes a gracious host in the company of a few grand jurors.

Inevitably, the fake charm works, reinforcing the jurors’ tendency to accept things at face value. If a few skeptical jurors criticize the bureaucrats or ask tough questions, the majority accuses them of being rude and overly suspicious.

The supervisors have always appreciated and even fostered this live-and-let-live system. For it permits them to use the grand jury as a convenient dumping ground for scandals they want to ignore.

The Richard Dixon story seemed doomed to that fate.

Times reporters Fred Muir and Richard Simon had uncovered damaging evidence of Dixon’s high-spending ways. In addition, populist Supervisor Gloria Molina came up with revelations of her own, supplied by outraged whistle-blowers on the county work force.

Despite this, the story appeared destined to be forgotten, the usual fate of matters investigated by the grand jury. Dixon’s power to shape the county’s $13.1-billion budget is great. Using that power, he has won the supervisors’ affection by figuring out ways for them to fatten their pensions and expense accounts.

But this was different. The stories of high spending coincided with the wave of anti-government feeling sweeping through the electorate.

And the stories were easy to understand. Marble-topped tables. Fancy desks and chairs. Discarded records. A cover-up.

The story was too hot to bury. The jury hired the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse to audit Dixon’s books and gave wide latitude to the auditors.

Their findings weakened Dixon’s supervisorial support. “These are serious allegations and, if true, this is most unacceptable behavior for the office of the chief administrative officer, “ said Chairman Deane Dana, who faces a stiff reelection fight. “It cannot be left unanswered.”

The lap-dog grand jury had turned vicious. On July 21, at the Board of Supervisors’ meeting, Dixon will be forced to answer the jurors’ questions.