S.B. County Board Clerk Quits

The San Bernardino County supervisors’ clerk resigned Tuesday after an internal investigation found she handled staff in a “demeaning, controlling, condescending, critical and retaliatory manner.”

J. Renee Bastian, 45, will remain on administrative leave until September, ending her 24 years with the county. Supervisors in closed session appointed Dena Smith, the county’s chief learning officer, as interim clerk.

Bastian had managed a 12-person staff that maintains the board’s official records. Employees said she threatened and demeaned them, prompting 29 people to leave the department during her four-year tenure.

The county placed her on administrative leave in April after its human resources department investigated the high turnover.

In the report, employees accused her of snapping at them, creating an environment so stressful that it affected some workers’ health. One woman said that when she asked for time off to care for her sick mother, Bastian chastised her and suggested that the woman’s 13-year-old brother quit playing baseball to do it.

Bastian denied the employees’ accusations. “I am honest and direct if the work is poor,” the report quoted Bastian as responding. “Some people don’t know how to take it.”

Bastian’s lawyer, Michael Balaban, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Local clergyman Ray Turner had called the board’s hiring practices racist at an April meeting, and defended Bastian, who is black.

“We are concerned by what we perceive to be in this county’s employment system, an infestation of nepotism, favoritism and other skisms and ‘isms’ that I choose to leave unnamed,” published reports quoted him as saying.

He declined this week to comment further.

Bastian, who makes $91,807 annually, has worked as an analyst for the county’s administrative and social services offices. She managed a department with a $930,000 budget and is treasurer of the California Clerk of the Board of Supervisors Assn.

“She’s very poised, very enthusiastic, very positive,” said Humboldt County Clerk Lora Canzoneri, who recommended Bastian for an officer position. “I was impressed from the moment I met her, and I remain impressed.”

The San Bernardino Public Employees Assn. began hearing complaints about Bastian in 2002 and first asked for an investigation last year. Tom M. Ramsey, supervisor of field services for the union, came to Tuesday’s meeting with a dozen people who had worked for Bastian. He told supervisors that the complaints “can’t be brushed aside as sour grapes.”

“This has nothing to do with race,” he said after the meeting. “It’s a very rainbow type of workforce, and she pretty much abused everybody.”

Employees painted Bastian as a boss whose “eyes bug out” and whose tone turned aggressive when she was upset, said the report, which became public when Bastian requested a public hearing. She later asked for the hearing to be closed.

Workers said their colleagues would leave her office in tears and endured a work climate “so tense and thick you can cut it with a knife.”

“I was fearful. You never knew when she would snap. My last week there, I was really afraid it would turn physical. I didn’t think she could control herself,” said Patty Davis, the department’s former chief deputy who requested a transfer after seven months.

“I think all her employees are breathing a sigh of relief,” Ramsey, the union official, said Tuesday. “They can just go back to work.”