But the same can't be said of the Mayor and City Council. Although she's not their employee, the Mayor recommends and the Council ultimately decides Ms. Doud's self-proposed salary and raises. That process has brought Ms. Doud a current salary of $219,649 (source: FY19 budget, Sept. 2018 Council vote.) Some of the same incumbents who stand to benefit from Measure BBB erasing LB's write-in requirement for their third terms will decide her future salary and pay raises. And if Ms. Doud retires at the end of her current term, some of the same incumbents could vote on her final salary that will decide her lifelong taxpayer-paid pension.

In our view, these amount to conflicting interests. A City Auditor deaf to this is itself alarming.

And there's more.

[Scroll down for further.]

Three of the Garcia-Doud measures amount to pretextual political fakery. Measure CCC's "ethics commission" would create a Mayor-Auditor chosen majority body, approved by the Council, whose favored foxes would guard the hen house in administering and implementing matters of campaign financing, lobbying, conflicts of interest and ethics. Measure BBB, marketed as "strengthening" term limits, would let LB's two-term incumbents avoid LB's current write-in requirement for their third terms. Ms. Doud could have stayed silent on BBB and CCC; they are completely unrelated to her elected auditing duties.

Measure AAA purports to affect her office by authorizing "performance audits" but it's also mainly political fakery. Ms. Doud's office already conducts performance audits (LBREPORT.com coverage here. ) Pretending AAA prevents imagined future interference with this is at the level of arguing an asteroid may land on your house. In our view, bundling the substantively empty AAA with the incumbent-serving BBB-CCC amounts to low-brow political chicanery.

In addition to the fakery underlying AAA-CCC, it's also fair to consider Ms. Doud's record on big-ticket taxpayer items (not simply overdue parking tickets.) During her watch, City Hall's Queen Mary operator(s) managed to pile up roughly $20 million in now-urgently needed repairs, leaving taxpayers holding the bag. That was revealed by news outlets, not by the City Auditor.

Ms. Doud hasn't explained how years of these now-taxpayer costs accumulated on her watch. At a recent management-run "study session," Ms. Doud voiced concern about City liability for some repair items, and when the Mayor and management said the City continually monitors liability issues (a ludicrous response since the City let the issues pile-up in the first place), Ms. Doud shrank away as the Mayor adjourned the meeting.

Ms. Doud was also oddly mum about taxpayer costs ($45,000 per measure at minimum) of conducting special November 2018 citywide election for the Mayor-desired Charter Amendments. Only two are time sensitive: BBB (that incumbents want to avoid the write-in requirement before their third term elections) and DDD (redistricting.) BBB is conspicuously self-serving to the incumbents, but DDD is less so because it has real equities behind it. However DDD's initial text that Doud applauded was a hasty glue job that angered LB's historically gerrymandered Cambodian community. Of course Garcia let Cambodian community reps re-write it because its specifics were less important to him than cynically using DDD to produce a large Cambodian turnout to help his desired measures AAA-CCC. (See LBREPORT.com coverage here.)

We are saddened to write all of this. LBREPORT.com was present on the historic April 2006 night when Ms. Doud jumped to an early lead over an incumbent Auditor supported by LB's establishment. We greeted her by saying "You won. You're the new Auditor-elect." Visibly stunned, she replied "I am?"

We're not the only ones in Long Beach disappointed in what Ms. Doud is doing now. LB voters voted her in and voted her predecessor out (who carried the same "independent" title Ms. Doud has) in part because he appeared too deferential to LB's then-Mayor/Council. In our opinion, Ms. Doud's choice to become a robotic cheerleader for ballot measures serving the political interests of the incumbent Mayor/Council doesn't display independence. In our view, it gives LB voters good cause to question her judgment now and in the future.

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