Last year, a top county official made a career move that nearly a dozen former county employees before him had also made: lobbying his former employer on behalf of private interests.
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Jeff Toney, who oversaw emergency services for the county, now works as a lobbyist for Bodewell Group, a powerhouse San Diego lobbying and public affairs firm formerly known as Southwest Strategies. And within months of leaving the county, he put his know-how of his former employer to work for his new firm.
Toney contacted a former subordinate to gather information that could help a client seeking a no-bid contract from the county, according to county emails obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune through a records request. He also asked his successor to meet about it, according to a voicemail he left her obtained by the Union-Tribune.
Toney’s lobbying efforts do not appear to break any county rules or other laws.
“This work was done in coordination with our attorney and in compliance with all local laws and regulations,” Toney said.
The so-called revolving door lobbying done by Toney is a practice that’s banned in other large California jurisdictions, yet permitted by San Diego County.
At the county, former employees are allowed to immediately start lobbying any part of the county, whether it be supervisors or their former colleagues, superiors and subordinates.
Other jurisdictions have far stricter rules.
At the city of San Diego, former staffers are banned from lobbying the city for one year after they’ve left their city job.
Los Angeles County places a two-year ban on former staff lobbying the agency or department where they worked. The city of Los Angeles has a similar ban that’s for one year.
San Francisco, which has a joint city-county government, has even stricter rules. Former staff are barred for one year from working with contractors to whom they helped steer government business and from lobbying the department where they previously worked. Former employees also have a permanent ban on being privately involved in court proceedings or other regulatory decisions that involve their past employment.
“The County of San Diego is ridiculous in how loose the regulations are,” said John Dadian, a county lobbyist since the 1990s who worked for former supervisor Susan Golding before becoming a lobbyist.
For now, the Board of Supervisors appears to have no interest in stopping the revolving door.
In recent weeks, supervisors placed on the November ballot a controversial package to rewrite the county’s charter. Its lead sponsor, Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, has billed it as a good-government and ethics-reform package.
Internal county polling shows her office gauged public support for including in the package a two-year lobbying ban for former county staffers.
But even though respondents were overwhelmingly supportive of a ban, it never made its way into the charter rewrite that Lawson-Remer ultimately asked her colleagues to place on the ballot.
In a statement, Lawson-Remer did not elaborate on why a two-year cooling-off period was not included in her package but said she was supportive of the reform.
“The charter reform package focuses on structural reforms that require voter approval,” Lawson-Remer said.
The Union-Tribune reached out to the other four supervisors on whether they’d support a cooling-off period for former staff.
Supervisor Joel Anderson said he supported a one-year cooling-off period for former staff. “I support policies that remove undue influence,” he said in a statement.
Anderson introduced his own ballot measure to counter Lawson-Remer’s. Anderson’s ballot measure did not address county lobbying rules, as it was largely responding to elements of Lawson-Remer’s package that handed more power to supervisors and extended their terms.
Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe said she supports the county’s current rules and would evaluate the merits of any future proposals.
The other two supervisors — Paloma Aguirre and Jim Desmond — did not respond.
‘An unfair advantage’
A Union-Tribune review of county lobbying disclosures found at least 10 former county employees are currently registered with the county as lobbyists. Their clients range from real estate developers and local nonprofits to AT&T and Axon, which makes body-worn cameras and other police technology.
Of those, at least seven became lobbyists within two years of leaving the county.
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Davina Hurt, director of government ethics for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, noted the intention of lobbying bans isn’t to prevent former public officials from ever working in the private sector.
“We want talented people to serve in the government, in private organizations,” Hurt said. “At the same time, that’s why we have a cooling-off period and transparency requirements, so that the public’s interest is protected and it’s not just transferred over to private interests.”
Bryn Kirvin, executive director of the city’s Ethics Commission, said the city’s lobbying ban is aimed at curbing undue influence on city government and safeguarding public trust.
“Without a waiting period, a city official could leave government service and immediately capitalize on relationships with elected officials, city staff and insider knowledge to influence municipal decisions for the benefit of themselves or a new private employer,” Kirvin said. “This creates an unfair advantage in access and influence.”
San Diego County code does prohibit any contract from being awarded to companies that had a former county employee work on developing the contract. But it has to be with a part of county government where the former employee held “substantial responsibility.” The rule applies if the employee left the county within the last year.
County spokesperson Tammy Glenn declined to say whether that rule applies to lobbyists, saying county staff review potential violations on a case-by-case basis.
Substantial differences also exist in what the city and county publicly post about lobbying activity. The city posts on its website lobbyists’ quarterly disclosures. Those disclosures include how much the lobbyist was paid by a client and what city officials they contacted.
The county only posts on its website the names of lobbyists, their firms and what part of county government they’re lobbying.
In quarterly reports, lobbyists have to report how much they were paid by clients and what county officials they contacted, though those forms are only posted publicly on Board of Supervisors agendas in a lengthy list of other communications the county has received.
But lobbyist Victor Aviña cautioned against assuming even the best-connected lobbyists always get what they want from the county. Lobbyists still must navigate the public process and regulation, Aviña said.
Had a cooling-off period been in place, Aviña would have been unable to do the kind of work he did after leaving county government. Throughout the 2010s, he worked for former Republican Supervisors Greg Cox and Ron Roberts, mainly specializing in land-use policy.
In 2020, Aviña left county government to work for lobbying firm Falcon Strategies before opening his own firm, Ironwood Public Affairs, last year.
“It’s healthy for people to have conversations about ethics and transparency,” Aviña said. “I’d say most people who work in public service and public affairs care deeply about maintaining that public trust.”
Even with Toney’s connections, his efforts to get his client awarded a no-bid county contract fell short.
Weeks after Toney’s outreach to his former office, Anderson introduced a plan to award a $2.5 million no-bid contract to Toney’s client, Infrastructure Documentation Solutions, a Nebraska company that relies on truck-mounted cameras and drones to map and record imaging of infrastructure prone to damage from natural disasters.
Supervisors ultimately balked at backing the no-bid contract during a meeting in October and voted to send the work to a competitive bidding process.
Anderson declined comment on his pursuit of the no-bid contract, and his office has yet to respond to a records request filed by the Union-Tribune in October asking for emails between his office and Toney.
Even strict lobbying rules don’t fully stop former government officials from getting jobs in the private sector that can raise eyebrows. For example, those bans don’t stop former staff from doing with business with the local governments where they worked in ways other than lobbying.
Such arrangements have been seen recently at the city.
Last year, former city police Capt. Jeff Jordan took a job with Flock Safety — months after he helped steer a multimillion-dollar contract to the controversial maker of automated license-plate readers. And former fire Chief Colin Stowell now works for American Medical Response, which helps run the city’s ambulance system.
City rules bar officials from using their positions to influence a city decision involving an entity or person with whom they or an immediate family member are seeking or negotiating a future job. Otherwise, city rules only restrict lobbying activity, not other work in the private sector.
“When the government proposes rules such as this, it’s like a balloon,” Dadian said of cooling-off periods. “When you poke your finger on one side, it bulges out on the other. The best intentions have unintended consequences.”
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Staff Writer Jeff McDonald contributed to this report.
