After 27 years at the helm of Deschutes County, former County Administrator Mike Maier was intimately familiar with nearly everything that went on in the government. He was so involved in its operations, he personally reviewed every one of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of spending vouchers the county generates each week, according to new Administrator Dave Kanner.

But as the county grew from 62,000 people in 1980 to more than 140,000 residents when Maier retired earlier this year, some of the old ways of doing things didn’t work as well, especially without Maier’s years of experience.

When Kanner started in May, he discovered that forms authorizing spending only needed one signature, a practice that was in place in Culver when former City Recorder Jeri Jones embezzled more than $18,000 by writing herself duplicate checks.

Although Kanner found no deliberate wrongdoing, he said personnel rules were out of date and, in some cases, didn’t comply with state rules.

In addition, the county had no central clearinghouse for contracts for millions of dollars worth of services, or even a basic list of the agreements.

Maier did not return three messages, left through county employees, or respond to a certified letter sent to his home seeking comment.

With no one clearly responsible for overseeing contracts, the agreements were spread throughout county departments, Kanner said – and some may have never gone to the county administrator. Compiling a list of contracts for a two-year period took nearly 21 hours, County Counsel Mark Pilliod wrote in a letter to The Bulletin.

The county didn’t keep separate track of personal service contracts – deals for jobs, such as consulting, that county employees don’t normally do. They are also the contracts with the least oversight, according to Pilliod. But a review of 2005 personal contracts by The Bulletin found that the county spent $3.5 million on the deals that year.

Kanner has promised to overhaul the county’s contracting system, along with the personnel rules and spending vouchers.

”A copy of every contract will come from now on to the county administrator’s office,” Kanner said. ”I’ve made it clear to department heads that I want a copy of every contract.”

Kanner doesn’t blame his predecessor. The system worked, according to Kanner, thanks to Maier’s intimate knowledge of Deschutes County.

”Mike knew every contract, every contractor and where every penny was going,” Kanner said.

Still, in a review of personal service contracts from 2005, The Bulletin found two questionable deals.

* The county legal department awarded at least one $50,000 contract to a company co-owned by a county department head.

* It employed a hearings officer – the person who hears initial appeals of land use decisions – who also represented developers with cases that came before the county commission.

Scattered contracts

Personal service contracts are deals for jobs that county employees don’t normally do. Consultants, engineers and smaller construction jobs fall into the category.

For contracts less than $150,000, Deschutes County doesn’t require competitive bids. It also isn’t required to hire the lowest bidder. Instead, state law lets the county hire the firm that best suits its needs after asking for informal bids.

The contracts can be approved by the county administrator or department heads without a vote of the county commission.

When Kanner arrived in Des-chutes County, he noticed his office saw far fewer contracts than he had in Jackson County, where he served as deputy administrator.

”I think in the past, that not all contracts came into the county administrator’s office and that’s something we’re trying to change,” Kanner said. ”Some of the smaller contracts were being filed with the department heads.”

In Jackson County, the administrator’s office kept a central contracts file, but department heads were responsible for ensuring contracts were fulfilled.

Until recently, the county didn’t keep a list of personal service contracts, Pilliod wrote in a letter to The Bulletin. Because the deals were spread out among different county departments, it would cost $1,035 to obtain copies of the deals from 2004 to the end of 2005, Pilliod wrote. Merely to look at the contracts would cost $893.

The Bulletin complied a list of personal service contracts in 2005 from records at the Des-chutes County Clerk’s Office. The 51 contracts are scattered among 321 electronic files from that year categorized as contracts or agreements.

In that year alone, the county authorized $3.5 million of spending without county commission oversight, part of its roughly $225 million budget.

Group W

In March 2005, Deschutes County Counsel Pilliod awarded a $50,000 contract for general investigation services to Group W LLC, a private investigation firm registered to Peter Wanless and his wife, Becky Wanless. A county employee since 1989, Becky Wanless is well known in county offices as the head of Deschutes County Parole and Probation.

It was the second time Group W won a county contract, both times without a formal bidding process. Maier awarded the company’s initial contract in 2001, county records show. The county paid Group W $14,877 of the $50,000 between 2001 and 2005, according to county records.

During that time Peter Wanless performed a number of small investigations, said Deputy County Counsel Mark Amberg. The exact nature of the investigations is protected by attorney-client privilege, Amberg said. None of the investigations included the Parole and Probation Department, he said.

”It was for general investigative services,” said Amberg, who added that he was unaware Becky Wanless was a co-owner of Group W. ”It was nothing specific.”

According to the Oregon Association of Licensed Investigators, 18 private investigation firms operate in Deschutes County.

Peter and Becky Wanless married two years ago, after Group W won its first contract, Peter Wanless said.

Being married to the head of a county department had nothing to do with getting the second contract, Peter Wanless said. More likely, he said, county officials hired him because they knew him from his time as a captain in the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office in the late 1990s.

”I certainly knew the commissioners and the people in legal counsel and Mike Maier, and a number of the other department heads,” said Wanless, who is a former chief of Sunriver police and a Secret Service agent. ”I have a pretty good reputation.”

Peter Wanless added Becky as a co-owner of the business at the beginning of this year for tax purposes.

”Part of the reason we did it was from a tax standpoint to add her as an owner in case something happens to me,” he said.

Don Crabtree, the interim director of the state Government Standards and Practices Commission, declined to comment on the Group W contract. But Crabtree said counties can award contracts to their employees or relatives of employees as long as those employee-owned firms don’t have an advantage over other companies.

”(If) the business competed for a bid against all other businesses on an even playing field, then I don’t believe it would be prohibited,” Crabtree said.

Kanner said he doesn’t have a problem with awarding contracts to businesses owned by county employees, as long as the contracts follow state law.

”I would certainly not allow an employee to contract with a company or to influence someone else to contract with a company with which that employee had either an ownership interest or a financial interest,” Kanner said. ”But the fact that a county employee has an interest in a noncounty company should not in and of itself preclude the county from contracting with that company.”

Other systems

Kanner’s last employer, Jackson County, didn’t have a rule banning contracts to county employees.

But other counties do. With a population of 302,000, Marion County is about twice the size of Deschutes County, and its contracting system is comparatively beefed up.

Three full-time Marion County employees track spending and assure companies fulfill their side of the bargain. The county had about $430 million in contracts in 2005, according to Peggy Mitchell, the county’s contracts compliance analyst.

”It’s been a practice of Marion County not to enter into contracts with county employees,” Mitchell said. ”We kind of go back to ethics (rules).”

The city of Bend’s budget is about $60 million less than Des-chutes County’s budget, but Bend has an employee whose main responsibility is overseeing contracting, which the county does not.

Bend Purchasing Manager Bob Griffith has tracked the city’s contracts for the past 17 years. Griffith has a spreadsheet of all open deals and keeps records of contracts going back 15 years. Last year, the city spent about $3 million on personal service contracts, Griffith said.

Although the state and county don’t require formal bids for deals less than $150,000, Bend requires competitive bidding on contracts of more than $50,000. Under the competitive process, contractors must submit sealed, written bids to the government. The government must take the lowest qualified bidder.

”Our policy is a little bit tighter than state rules,” Griffith said.

Kanner said he has no plans to create a position to administer contracts.

Potential conflicts

Deschutes County didn’t renew Group W’s contract this year, but it did extend another deal that raised conflict of interest questions.

Community Development Director Tom Anderson said he had no choice but to renew a hearings officer contract with attorney Isa Taylor, of the Bend office of law firm Schwabe, Williamson and Wyatt.

Taylor has been a backup hearings officer for Deschutes County since spring 2005, according to county records. At the same time she served as a hearings officer, Taylor also represented Trail Crossing Trust, which owns most of the land slated for the Thornburgh destination resort.

The Deschutes County Commission approved the 2,000-acre resort, which would be north of Tumalo, earlier this year in an appeal. A hearings officer had rejected the resort’s application.

An attorney for Tumalo resident Nunzie Gould has said she plans to appeal the decision to the state Land Use Board of Appeals.

Taylor said she didn’t hear cases where she had a direct conflict of interest. She also was bound by the Oregon State Bar to disclose any conflicts of interest in cases she decided. Taylor didn’t hear any cases involving her clients, including Thornburgh, said Anderson.

Taylor has heard 10 cases since 2005, according to county records. Most of the cases involved a single home or building.

Even so, having attorneys who represent developers serve as hearings officers doesn’t look good, said Paul Dewey, an attorney who heads Central Oregon Landwatch, a land use watchdog group.

”That’s something that I’ve objected to for a long time,” Dewey said. ”There’s some potential conflicts there.”

Anderson acknowledged that some people could see Taylor as favoring development interests.

”That’s precisely why we tried to hire someone else,” he said. ”The public perception is important to us.”

The market for hearings officers is so tight, however, that the county could not find another qualified person for the position, Anderson said.

The county uses three hearings officers, Anderson said. The job requires a detailed knowledge of state and local land use laws and officers are often, but not always, land use attorneys, Anderson said.

”We’ve struggled handily over the last several years to find hearings officers,” Anderson said. ”We can’t afford to let her go.”

Confident in Maier

When asked about oversight of county contracts, County Commissioner Mike Daly said he is confident Maier kept close watch on the county’s finances.

”Mike was a very competent administrator, and I had no qualms about his oversight,” Daly said. ”We’re not talking about a whole lot of (problems).”

Commissioner Dennis Luke agreed.

”Mike had a very good handle on the money that was spent in the county,” Luke said, adding that Maier hired business managers for several county departments. Luke said he had no problem with either of the two contracts.

But Daly said the Group W and Taylor contracts could raise concerns.

”I guess the perception might be there,” Daly said. ”That’s something maybe we should discuss.”