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New details emerged last week about alleged misuse of discretionary funding by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors that is targeted in a State Senate bill from Sen. Aisha Wahab.
In a press conference hosted by Wahab’s office Thursday, a Livermore woman detailed her experiences with the county in a push for the bill’s passage.
Kiersten Skov, an unincorporated Livermore resident, was the sole speaker at the June 25 event outside the Livermore Public Library in which she shared the events leading up to an allegation that she believed the chief of staff for the District 1 supervisor’s office had implicitly offered to funnel money to her through a local nonprofit as recourse for an error from the office.
District 1 Supervisor David Haubert and his chief of staff Shawn Wilson have denied any allegations of wrongdoing.
While Skov classified a conversation she’d had with Haubert earlier that day as “productive” and expressed confidence that he would work to address her concerns, Haubert told the Pleasanton Weekly in an interview Friday that he was skeptical of her account and believed it was publicized only to garner support for Wahab’s senate bill, as well as other critiques.
“The state of California seal appears on the podium of a community member who’s not a member of the State Senate, and the State Senate isn’t even there to participate – it’s a little confusing to me, and I think to the public,” Haubert said.
Although there was much for the public to be confused about Thursday – specifically, how a hyperlocal issue such as Skov’s relates to the state and national political landscapes that Wahab is operating in – those were not among the questions raised following Skov’s account.
Wahab’s press secretary Joe David said that while the senator had wished she could be in attendance, she was busy with legislative work in Sacramento that day. Skov said that Haubert, who sent members of his staff to the event, had told her he was also preoccupied with other business in Oakland that afternoon and regretted not being able to attend.
Skov’s saga began in July 2024, when unincorporated Livermore residents received a notice from Haubert’s office that they would be required to have curbside garbage pickup service from Livermore Sanitation Inc. – something that frustrated Skov and other rural residents, who typically self-haul their trash. However, she complied for fear of a penalty from the county.
More than a year later in January, Skov said she learned from a neighbor and correspondence with the sanitation company that the message from Haubert’s office was sent in error to unincorporated Livermore residents who, in fact, did not fall within the area required to have curbside garbage pickup.
Haubert confirmed Friday that the message was sent in error, and said that his office has since sent out a correction to the residents impacted. In a June 10 settlement offer to Skov, Interim County Counsel Andrea Weddle said the correction had been sent May 16.
From there, Skov began seeking recourse from Haubert’s office later in January for the more than $1,000 she had paid over the course of approximately a year for service from Livermore Sanitation that she did not want, and had been falsely told she was required to have.
As an initial proposal, Skov alleged Wilson offered to recoup her financial loss by directing the office to distribute discretionary funds to a nonprofit of her choice – or one suggested by the office – implying that it would in turn provide the money to her, in order to bypass a public recognition of the erroneous message. The in-person meeting between the two occurred Feb. 2 at the district’s office in the Scott Haggerty Heritage House at the Alameda County Fairgrounds, Skov said.
Wilson did not provide a response to the Pleasanton Weekly, but challenged Skov’s characterization of their interactions in comments to Bay City News as “borderline defamation of character”, adding that he was consulting legal counsel over the matter, and that the payment had never been conditional on her keeping the matter quiet, but that he had asked her to stop “blasting Facebook” about it as a “courtesy to the office”.
Meanwhile, Wahab’ Senate Bill 1193 was giving way to ongoing outcry from the board of supervisors and local nonprofits, alleging that the county was being unfairly targeted by the measure, contending that sufficient safeguards and transparency measures are already in place, and accusing Wahab of political retribution as motivation for the bill
Under the county’s Fiscal Management Rewards Program (FMRP), each supervisor who ends the fiscal year under budget can keep the remaining funds for use at their direction, pending approval of a four-fifths majority of the board, generally in the form of donations to local nonprofit organizations.
Under SB 1193, that funding would require approval from the full board, as well as a public record of the grants to be made available online. It would also prohibit supervisors from issuing discretionary fund awards within 90 days of an election in which they’re on the ballot.
As the bill continued advancing in the state senate this year amid an ongoing battle to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell – with Wahab coming out with healthy leads in both June primary votes for the seat, trailed distantly in second place by Melissa Hernandez, the former Dublin mayor and current BART board president who is on Haubert’s county staff as healthcare director – it came under fire locally in the Tri-Valley, with both Haubert and District 4 Supervisor Nate Miley, along with several local nonprofit leaders, serving as some of its most vocal critics in recent months, despite a strong showing of support in the state senate.
That timing dovetailed with Skov’s concerns over interactions with the District 1 office earlier this year.
Although Wahab’s senate district does not represent Skov’s neighborhood in rural, southern Livermore, Skov was spurred by local media coverage and debate over SB 1193 to contact the state senator’s office with her concerns, which she said ultimately gave way to even wider concerns as she learned about the array of issues that had been documented on the county’s discretionary funding process and were being scrutinized by Wahab.
“The Board of Supervisors have aggressively opposed SB 1193 stating there’s no need for the bill, and it makes it more difficult to direct funds to where the cause is and actually result in less rigor, which is simply not the case,” Skov said. “I have read the full text, and it does nothing to make it harder to allocate funds for proper purposes, and everything to ensure the public can see where our money is going, prevent county staff from directing funds unethically, and require county staff to disclose potential conflicts of interest, including consulting payments received.”
Skov pointed to a grand jury report from 2015 that alleged “a culture of political interference,” by the board’s staff, specifically from the chief of staff for one of the districts who was identified as Wilson in reporting from other media outlets including the East Bay Times and Marin Independent Journal.
The grand jury investigation was spurred by a complaint that the staffer was “inappropriately pressuring county departments to influence administrative decisions on behalf of a favored constituent”, and concluded that political interference by county officials is “not uncommon”.
Like Skov’s account, the initial complaint that gave way to the investigation related to a waste management company in Livermore, an unnamed woodchipping and recycling business that occupied a privately owned lot and a sliver of county land in east Livermore from 1991 until 2013, when it was forced to exit the site amid a legal battle with the property owner.
According to the grand jury, that company set its sights on another piece of county-owned property, which county staff were not interested in accommodating due to existing plans for the site from the public works department and the company’s reputation. That allegedly changed under pressure from one supervisor’s chief of staff, despite widespread concerns from county employees about the business’s operations at its previous site, as well as previous efforts to advocate for the company’s expedited approval on other sites.
While the grand jury found no evidence of involvement in that deal or other impropriety from the supervisor himself – Haubert’s predecessor, Scott Haggerty, was representing District 1 encompassing Livermore at the time – it found that the recycling company had donated $5,000 to his reelection campaign, three years before the seat was coming to a vote in 2016, and at least one other contribution, after which the public works department reversed its previous decision not to allow the company to occupy the site.
The report concluded with findings of “unethical and persistent interference by a supervisor’s chief of staff” that improperly influenced staff decisions, compromised the county’s integrity and wasted its resources.
In its response to the grand jury report in 2015, the board of supervisors disagreed with all of the findings, saying it had already implemented an investigation into allegations against the chief of staff with no findings of wrongdoing, and that it would consider the adoption of a code of ethics and anti-interference policy.
The report was preceded by a lawsuit in 2013 from Haggerty’s former chief of staff Chris Gray, who alleged that he was illegally pushed out of his position in 2012 and replaced with Wilson – who had worked for the county as a professional technician specialist in 2011, according to data from OpenPayrolls – in retaliation for reporting his suspicions that county resources were being misappropriated for a variety of improper endeavors, including personal enrichment and political interference. The case was settled months later.
Haubert declined to comment on the grand jury report or the lawsuit, noting that they were well before his tenure on the board, which started in 2021, but confirmed that Wilson is still serving as his chief of staff with no substantiated findings of wrongdoing.
“I have been told that corrective actions have been taken; that if somebody did something wrong they know they did something wrong, and it has been addressed,” Haubert said. “Investigations have been made and completed without any additional action.”
But those measures have been insufficient, according to Skov.
“Continuing the culture of complicity, hiding behind lawyers, is a black spot and our county should do better,” Skov said. “SB 1193 represents a golden opportunity for county officials and elected representatives to stand for progress and restore faith and local government. To the Board of Supervisors, your constituents are compelling you to take action to improve and engage with us in good faith.”
According to Haubert, however, Skov is the only constituent to have contacted his office over the trash pickup miscommunication or any other complaints about the county’s use of discretionary funds, a concern he said he believes is spurred by Wahab’s bill, which he characterized as “political retribution.”.
“Wahab’s office contrived this, I believe, and put her up to having a press conference specifically for this support,” Haubert said. “How else were they there with a podium emblem and a press kit?”
Wahab’s press secretary David told the Weekly that while her office had not “contrived” Skov’s media appearance, they took her account seriously and were supporting her, adding that this was something they believed Skov’s own local representatives such as Haubert should have done in the first place.
For her part, Skov said that her reasons for pursuing and publicizing the garbage pickup issue and allegations about the response from Haubert’s office were myriad.
“Besides the perimenopausal rage and general dissatisfaction with the government at many levels – and I told this to Supervisor Haubert this morning – I don’t have any loyalties to any organizations or associations or officials here,” Skov said. “I just know what’s right. My husband and I have always wanted to support what’s right, and I can’t do anything about whoever is in Washington, but I can do something about who is in Oakland.”
SB 1193 is headed for an assembly vote Wednesday, with Haubert and the rest of the board continuing to advocate against it.
“She’s got billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse in this state, and she wants to focus on small discretionary grants that we make, when we make it with full transparency? Ridiculous,” Haubert said.
David reiterated that Wahab’s bill was about “basic transparency,” not retribution, aiming to address recommendations in previous grand jury reports, audits, and other documents on the county’s operations going back years.
“Alameda County has a long track record of refusing to police and control itself,” David said. “The state legislature is using its authority to say if you won’t do it, we will. That’s what it comes down to.”
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