Martinez is final pick as President

Dr. Ted Martinez, Jr. may be the next College President within the next few weeks as a result of recent board decisions that apparently realigned the boards hiring process with the original plans they gave the Presidential Selection Committee. The trustees have chosen a final candidate, one of the committee's two finalists, Martinez (no relation to Board President Martinez) and they approved the original plan for a site visit to his last place of employment as President of Grossmount College.

The trustees will base their final decision to appoint Martinez as President of the college on the results of the site visit, where trustees and other Rio representatives will gather information and conduct interviews with staff, faculty and students at Grossmount regarding Martinez' performance there according to college officials.

If the site visit's results are acceptable to the trustees, they said then Martinez will be the next president of Rio Hondo, but if not, then they will start the search over.

Rio's Faculty Association President Jim Newman has recommended that the Rio community support the site visit by participating and said he believes faculty and students will benefit.

Newman's recommendation of support is vastly different from what the campus experienced a few weeks ago when the four main governing bodies on campus formed an Alliance of No Confidence.

The No Confidence statements were issued and delivered to the board by each group when a frenzy of outrage occurred on campus as a result of the board's decision to derail the selection committee's recommendations to the board and what many on campus considered a violation of 'shared governance.'

The problems on campus peaked when the committee submitted two candidates as finalists for the board to review and they deemed the rest of the 10-candidate pool unacceptable as president of Rio.

The board's response was to reject one of the two finalists and choose four more candidates from the pool plus they reportedly canceled the open forum and the site visit, and then conducted interviews without an equal employment opportunity monitor.

This occurred behind closed doors and then the board president reported no action taken at the board meetings when it appeared they had taken action.

Outrage was expressed by the four groups including both senate bodies, the Associated Student Body Senate and the Academic Senate, plus both unions, the Classified School Employee Association and the Faculty Association.

All the statements implied that they believed the board had violated several laws governing the board.

Violations of such laws as the Brown Act could possibly have led to a lawsuit against the board decision that would have nullified the board's vote.

According to Matthew F. Jaksa with Holme Roberts & Owen LLP general counsel for the California First Amendment Coalition, "Under this (Ca. Gov. Code 54957.1) section only the final selection of a candidate for a position of public employment, and not nominations of candidates, must be reported to the public as "action taken" in closed session."

Usually these types of lawsuits involving open meeting laws are filed by members of the public such as unions, open-government activists and other community members but rarely by government prosecutors.

Without such a suit, whether or not the board violated the law will go undetermined, but many on campus said they just wanted the board to do the right thing by sharing in the process with all those affected by their decisions.

One student said, "It's not a matter of whether the board has the legal right to do what they did because that really doesn't justify their actions, it's a matter of whether they made the right decisions for the Rio Community. Why can't they understand that?"

Then a few days before the forum the trustees met with Academic Senate President Carrolyn Russell, ASB President Jennifer Marquis, CSEA President Greg Garza and Newman on April 30.

As a result of this meeting Newman said, "Our efforts fell on deaf ears!" and concluded that no agreement could be reached, which resulted in the Day of Silence at the Presidential Open Forum.

The day of silent dissent was recommended by Newman to encourage the board to reconsider their actions, which were not acceptable to most on campus.

During the Forum, which was scheduled by the trustees in order for the public to ask questions of the three finalists, many faculty, students and classified wore black and remained silent at the event on May 2.

Only two of the three finalist appeared at the forum. The two were Martinez, one of the two candidates the committee chose, and Monte Perez, the one the board chose but the committee deemed unacceptable.

The missing candidate, Daniel Castro was also one chosen by the board and deemed unacceptable by the committee and he was not present because he withdrew for unknown reasons according to college officials.

But this occurred shortly after Castro's wife, Consuelo Rey Castro, board president at Pasadena City College, made comments that appeared in an article in the Whittier Daily News. She spoke in support of Rio's trustees' decisions, but failed to disclose that she was married to one of the candidates as stated in a follow-up article by the newspaper.

Then at the Board Meeting the evening of the forum, the board apparently had a change in attitude, after a three-hour closed session, they announced their final choice as the candidate approved by the committee, their plan for a site visit that had previously been canceled and the possibility of starting the search over if this candidate is not hired as the committee had previously requested when the process initially derailed.

Also during the frenzy before the latest board decisions, emails where flying as many on campus where discussing and debating the issues and several of these contained insults towards the board, faculty and even students thus displaying the intense emotional outrage of many on campus.