[Noozhawk’s note: First in a series.]
Through a series of well-timed pre-election appointments and seven uncontested campaigns, Santa Barbara County has had — over a 47-year period — just TWO elected auditor-controllers, Robert Geis and Betsy Schaffer, the latter of whom will be seeking a third term in the June 2 election.
Serving a partial term between Geis and Schaffer was Theodore Fallati, who was appointed by Geis.
When Schaffer was first elected in 2018 she had high-profile individual endorsements, including from Third District Supervisor Joan Hartmann along with Geis and Fallati.
In her upcoming campaign against county chief information officer Kyle Slattery, things have changed dramatically.
Not only is Hartmann now endorsing Slattery but so, too, are Supervisors Laura Capps, Steve Lavagnino and Bob Nelson, who rarely endorses anyone.
To see our senior supervisors lining up against a longtime, elected department leader piqued my interest enough to file an omnibus public records request. This is what I learned:
Schaffer began her on- and off-again county career 35 years ago in 1991. She was appointed in 2016 as assistant auditor-controller by then-appointed (You can’t make this up!) Auditor-Controller Fallati.
Leveraging her title and “in the bag” endorsements in 2018, she won a mud fest of an election against Jennifer Christensen, the county’s then-chief investment officer and an attorney.
During the campaign, Christensen had made a series of deeply troubling, personal and by citing the California Government Code, legal allegations against Schaffer.
Ostensibly, Christensen claimed that Schaffer’s close relationship with local software company SimplerSystems didn’t reveal an appearance of impropriety but “even the more grim possibility of actual impropriety.”
SimplerSystems was founded by Schaffer’s ex-husband (married in 2000, divorced in 2013), Rick Schaffer, who is himself a former county employee. Betsy Schaffer’s various roles at the company reportedly lasted between 1998 and 2016.
“Santa Barbara County has become an outlier in what should be a standard modernization effort.”
Santa barbara county supervisor Bob Nelson
According to the public records request documents, between 1998 and 2025, across 12 different departments, SimplerSystems was paid $5.2 million by the County of Santa Barbara. The Auditor-Controller Department accounted for $3 million of the total.
Government Code Section 1090 prohibits public employees from benefiting from contracts that they develop. To avoid the appearance of impropriety the law is meant to be applied broadly, thereby assuring an uncompromised public allegiance.
Because Santa Barbara County has far too little political competition, elected officials go unchallenged for years.
Indeed, in 2022, Schaffer had no challenger, “won” the election and reaped the added benefit of keeping Christensen’s allegations mothballed.
Sad truth: Former Auditor-Controller Geis ran in six straight uncontested elections. Term limits!
The auditor-controller position is important as it ensures the financial integrity of the $1.7 billion county; determines the need for internal departmental audits; and manages a 55-employee, $12.5 million budget.
Public vigilance requires us to be certain we are choosing best-in-class partners and, if not, why not?
Legacy Platform
First developed in the 1990s, the county relies on some form of SimplerSystems licensed software for finance, human resources, payroll and more.
The backbone of the system was its financial information network (FIN), the efficacy of which exploded into public view in a scathing 2017-2018 Grand Jury report.
The jury’s investigation followed on the heels of a nine-year, $2.1 million embezzlement scheme by a Public Works Department employee.
The jury’s comments were shocking: “EVERY staff person interviewed acknowledged that Santa Barbara’s FIN does not meet the everyday financial needs of their department.”
The jury then outlined 14 material and often scary-obvious FIN deficiencies, at one point noting that FIN lacked “many modern capacities of enterprise resource planning software.”
The jury took the unusual step of not simply recommending that the Board of Supervisors direct a request for proposal but also that it limit the companies that could participate.
Specifically, the jury called for “an independent evaluation of the benefits and costs of acquiring, installing and maintaining enterprise resource planning software from a major vendor. The evaluation should be procured competitively and should EXCLUDE any firm or individual that has previously worked with the county to avoid conflicts of interest.”
So, for the county to move from its homegrown, 1990s legacy system, we needed a nine-year, multimillion-dollar embezzlement; a Grand Jury investigation; a Grand Jury recommendation and a Board of Supervisors-mandated RFP that specifically excluded the current vendor.
Wild guess: Perhaps this is the reason why four of the five supervisors are endorsing Slattery and not Schaffer.
Future Platform
Thankfully, the Board of Supervisors followed the Grand Jury’s advice, directing a robust RFP process and eventually choosing Workday for FIN, human resources and payroll.
Workday is a world-class, publicly traded enterprise software company with $9 billion in annual revenue.
The problem is that signing a contract is easy but energizing its implementation, well, not so much.
According to public records, board reports and county sources, the original Workday and implementation contracts were executed in May 2022 with $7.2 million devoted to implementation across all three modules: FIN, human resources and payroll.
The completion date — based on Workday’s more than 7,000 clients — was originally set for Dec. 31, 2024. To date, however, the county has spent more than $8 million, yet only the FIN module has been installed, with human resources and payroll lagging years behind.
With full-system subscription fees now being paid, it is estimated that the go-live date for HR/payroll and new implementation needs may cost the taxpayers millions of dollars more.
In short, we are paying for a three-module system, but with just one module up and running. Lovely.
Nelson, the current board chairman, took the rare step of speaking on the record, (yes, he cares!).
“The county has invested millions into modernizing its financial systems through Workday,” he said. “That effort has been marked by delays, friction and a lack of alignment that raises real concerns about whether the Auditor-Controller’s Office is contributing to or hindering forward progress.
“Santa Barbara County has become an outlier in what should be a standard modernization effort.”
These are nonpartisan races but politics is inevitably part of the picture, leading Nelson to make a further comment.
“I rarely endorse, particularly across party lines,” he said. “However, this is a position where competence, independence and execution matter far more than partisanship.”
Let’s just hope the voters agree.
Back in the days of hard news, our town had scores of reporters and investigative journalists. These were folks who were paid to dig, not cheer.
Today, our investigative ecosystem is far too thin and, when it’s coupled with a lack of political competition, darkness sets in, the mushrooms grow and things get very ugly.
Without competitive elections or investigative reporting, there is no accountability!
In Part II, we’ll explore the contours of our conflict laws and review certain vendor contracts.
It’s important to mention that no contract with SimplerSystems was ever executed without the authorization of the Board of Supervisors and the County Executive Office.
