FAQ: The Most Important Election Race You've Probably Never Heard Of
A deep dive into the low-visibility, but highly important, campaign for (takes breath) Clerk Recorder, Assessor and Elections chief of Santa Barbara County.
(Editor’s note: A version of this story is also published in this week’s edition of the Montecito Journal. /jr).
Memo from our Department of Eternal Mysteries and Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: Whew, I just finished checking out all 61 candidates for governor and I’m leaning towards the guy who traces his lineage to the Mayflower and sold his pest control company to become a chaplain. Now what else do I need to know about the June 2 primary?
A: Have you cast your ballot for Clerk, Recorder, Assessor and Elections chief yet?
Q: Is that an elected office or a Rube Goldberg machine?
A: It’s one of those things you don’t really notice, like sewer pipes or silicon chips, that’s actually important. The office collects and chronicles the basic records on which our economy runs — business filings, mortgages, deeds, liens, births, deaths, marriages — and documents the market for our most important local industry: real estate. Oh, and they also run free and fair elections.
Q: That sounds like more than a full-time job.
A: Well, yes and no. The man who currently holds it, in office since 2002, hasn’t actually gone into work for a couple of years.
Q: WTAF?
A: His name is Joe Holland and, sadly, he has a chronic illness and stopped showing up. It took a while to notice — probably because he was first elected five years before the iPhone came out and had been re-elected like clockwork ever since. This year, though, people began to notice.
Q: Which people?
A: Notably, the Board of Supervisors, which oversees his $22 million budget. All five members have endorsed his opponent.
Q: All five? When did they last agree on anything?
A: There was that time they unanimously passed a resolution commemorating the contributions of dirt, water and sunlight to Santa Barbara County agriculture.
Q: Who are they endorsing?
A: A woman named Melinda Greene, whom Holland hired 12 years ago to run the Clerk-Recorder division. She’s kept things running smoothly while he’s been, um, working from home.
Q: Is she qualified?
A: She’s a technocrat who gets visibly excited about “increasing efficiencies,” “reducing redundant data entry” and “automation process interfaces.” She is not, however, much of a politician — she’s so nice that, despite being prodded by a trouble-making reporter, she wouldn’t utter Holland’s name, let alone mention that he works from home.
Q: Define “working from home.”
A: Joe says he’s available 24/7 — “I’m available by phone, they can call me and I’m on it in a heartbeat,” he told supervisors at a recent, cringey budget hearing. When a couple of reporters checked in with him via Zoom, though, he seemed to be using a dial-up modem of 1995 vintage with what appeared to be car wax smeared on his camera lens.
Q: Seems like a sad situation.
A: As a personal matter, it is. He has MS and is no longer the high-energy presence from his salad days of BlackBerries and flip phones. As a public interest matter, it’s a tougher call: he oversees a staff of more than 100, a voter roll of 250,000, hundreds of thousands of document transactions and 140,000 property assessments.
Q: How much does he get paid?
A: Also a sore subject. Holland earns $275,511 in salary and $48,677 in benefits, for total compensation of $324,188. He also collects an additional $43,000 in pension benefits from his pre-election years working in the office.
Q: Wait, what?
A: All perfectly legal, though some supervisors have grumbled about “double dipping.” In their wisdom, the Legislature and governor decided years ago it would be unfair to prevent public employees from collecting a pension from a department they later got elected to run. Once elected, of course, they begin accruing additional pension benefits based on their highest-ever salary — payable when they finally retire. Or, in Joe’s case, if they ever retire.
Q: How much does Greene make?
A: $220,205 in salary and $117,762 in benefits — total compensation of $337,967.
Q: Those numbers make my head hurt. Why do I need to pay attention to this again?
A: You may have heard that Donald Trump has threatened to federalize elections, dispatch the National Guard or ICE agents to polling places, or otherwise disrupt the midterms. Some supervisors question whether Holland can manage elections in this charged atmosphere while checking in by text a couple times a day from home.
Q: Is that a real concern?
A: Greene and the supervisors seem to think so. She argues that Trump’s threats may confuse or frighten voters away from the polls and believes the office needs an aggressive communications and social media campaign. Holland seems to feel less urgency: “This is nothing new with regard to what Trump or anybody else might do in this election,” he told reporters, having skipped the supervisors’ special hearing on the subject entirely.
Q: How did we end up with an office with so many words in its name?
A: It started with the Assessor. The old boys who wrote the 1850 California Constitution figured it was wise to have someone other than the Board of Supervisors — who set the tax rate on real property — also determine the value of said property. As government grew more complicated, Sacramento required counties to have a Clerk and Recorder for the paperwork. Elections got folded into the Clerk’s office. Then in 1993, amid the Newt Gingrich government-is-bad revolution, a young conservative supervisor named Mike Stoker consolidated the whole jumble into one office — to save money, naturally.
Q: With all that power, must be fierce competition for the job.
A: Um, no. Holland is only the second person to hold it in 30-plus years, having succeeded the legendary Ken Pettitt, who served from 1994 to 2002. Since then, Holland has cruised to re-election every four years with little or no opposition.
Q: Haven’t we seen this movie before?
A: It does call to mind Joe Biden, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Senator Dianne Feinstein — all of whom spent decades assuring everyone they were as spry as ever and could handle things just fine. Until they couldn’t.
Q: All right, guess I better make a choice. Where can I learn more?
Also, check out our interviews with the candidates: