Board of Aldermen 04-09-2019 Page 29
Chicago some has some areas that are notorious for their crime so they've had an assessing structure that
has had a tough element to it because they Chief Assessor is an elected position. In the office over there,
they were willing to accept gifts brought right to the office and donations brought right to the office which
had just become a major issue among folks. So in comes February 21*' or February 19", a gentleman,
highly educated, had never run for elected office, he had an MBA out of Stanford and worked 5 years in
Russia as a financial analyst in a large mutual fund firm. He wins the election and he comes in and he has
three principals that are going to guide his tenure as Assessor: ethics, fairness and transparency.
He starts writing Executive Orders immediately and generates a 100 day plan which is moving along nicely,
| get an e-mail every day from them and he sets up a visitor's log, which we have done, so the public so
would be aware of any meetings with direct level employees or higher people in the office. He wanted to
end so-called access to preferential outcomes. He described his work as complex and difficult and the
referendum and reform of the Assessor’s Office would be objective of taking a complicated system and
making it better. Another policy he implemented on his first day in office was terminating any employee
who had been hired or who had any form of nepotism, he implemented a strict anti-nepotism policy. He
looked to eliminate many appeals and he introduced a number of new staff members, including outside
experts he hired from the IAAO, data scientists and assessing officials from other states.
He summarized it by saying the work isn’t sexy but it is very important. And | thought it was interesting
because | raised that issue regarding anti-nepotism in our policy and | know it struck a few notes but | think
it's very important especially in an Assessing Office, because they operate with standards, ethic standards
that are additional guidelines beyond an anti-nepotism policy that | think create a problem when there are
relatives in an office at that level.
| just want to let you know that | did reach out to Larry Budreau and he was the one who sent me the policy
and | wanted to meet with him to talk about what was going on. | received a response back that he did not
feel a meeting would be productive and he was respectfully declining any meeting. | do feel that you have
some issues with your Human Resources Department that you should address and the one issue or the
one item | raised with him is “do we know what other departments we have relatives working in or related
people”. The response that | got back is that we have documentation on that type of information and
because there is documentation there is no right under RSA 91:A to answer the question because nothing
is in writing. Really when you create an anti-nepotism policy or any policy and you are going to violate a
policy, you should do a manual over-ride. | have a friend whose been a Human Resource Director at a
company with 30,000 employees for 30 years. And they were the ones who said to me “you’ve got have an
over-ride, you can’t break a policy without an over-ride and the over-ride should be signed off by the
management chain and it should be fully documented”.
| believe in that; | think that’s good business and is good for the City and | am not certain we do have an
over-ride policy. | am not sure all hires are going through Human Resources so that the screening for
these issues can take place. You know if | had the chance to meet with him | would have said that | think it
is important to send a letter to all Department heads to understand who might be in your departments that
are related or have a relationship and identify them, identify what their titles are and do we have a conflict
here? And hiring that is handled that’s handled in non-public session that’s very typical for hiring to be
handled in non-public session, | understand that if you are discussing personnel matters. But! know when
| was on a Board once we discussed those matters and we knew the individual was going to accept the job,
we came into public session and put the nomination into public session and did our vote in public session
so that the public would know who we are hiring.
My opinion is that if you are going to break an anti-nepotism policy in public session you should identify that
and you should say “there is an issue here, we’ve over-ridden our policies, we have the proper sign-offs on
this and we are moving forward this is our decision”. My feeling is if you’re not comfortable doing that, then
you probably shouldn’t be doing the hire because if you want to keep it a secret and not say it, then maybe
it’s not the right thing to do. And | bring it up because | happen to have some information come my way that
other departments have had hires that are relatives or have relations that have made it into the system
