Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Preparation

The question was how deep the firings would go. Of course, WAB thought they should go very deep. Clean house.

Menlow, however, was a nice guy. He didn’t want to fire everyone. He was a politician; why make enemies he didn’t need to?

“If we fire everyone, who will run the agency?” Menlow asked them in one of their meetings. “Now that I’m the Auditor, if this place screws up it’s my fault.” In hindsight, this should have been a clue to Grant that Menlow wasn’t a reformer but rather just a new bureaucrat.

Ben could see what was happening. He dealt with politicians all the time. “Yeah, but you ran for this office to change things. To start doing good things. Remember when we asked what you’d do different and you said, ‘my job.’ Well, your job is to fire these corrupt shitbags.”

Menlow frowned at the “s” word; he didn’t like swearing. He regained his composure and said, “Yeah, I guess you guys are right. But let’s leave the rank and file workers. They didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Yes, they did,” Grant said. He retold the story of rank and file State Auditor’s employees not doing anything about Sellarman at the Real Estate Board. Grant gave other examples of State Auditor’s employees who hadn’t lifted a finger even when irrefutable evidence of corruption was presented to them.

“Besides,” Grant said to Menlow, “even if the rank and file didn’t personally do bad things, they have loyalties to the people who made the decisions.”

“And,” Brian added, “Because so many illegal things have happened in the State Auditor’s Office, the rank and file have a motive to help cover it up since they were involved, too.” Good point. All the rank and file employees were accessories to the misconduct and would act like accessories by trying to thwart the investigations.

Menlow was silent, thinking about what he should do. The silence continued. Tom could see that Menlow was reluctant to fire people and that WAB couldn’t force Menlow to grow a pair of balls.

Finally, to let Menlow save face, Tom said, “The people elected you, Mr. Auditor, not us. It’s your office. It’s your choice on the rank and file.”

After some more discussion, Menlow said he wouldn’t fire the rank and file. “Or some of the mid-level managers,” Menlow added. So Menlow had gone from wondering if he should fire the rank and file to now thinking he should keep some of the mid-level managers, who were definitely guilty in all the corruption of the State Auditor’s Office.

Menlow said, “One more thing, guys. I need someone to go after agencies on behalf of citizens. Grant, you want a job here?” What? Working for the government?

“Yes,” Grant blurted out. It surprised even Grant that he said that. “What, exactly, would I do?”

“Take in citizen complaints about state and local government and then use the full power of the State Auditor’s Office to investigate the complaints.” Menlow was smiling, knowing that Grant wanted to do this. Menlow was also smiling because he knew he could leverage WAB’s credibility with the right wing and never have to worry about being thought of as too soft on state and local agencies when he had hired a WAB pit bull like Grant.

“Special Assistant to the State Auditor?” Menlow said. “How does that sound?” Menlow knew what Grant would say.

“The full power of the State Auditor’s Office?” Grant asked. After Menlow had just gone soft and decide to keep most of the old employees, Grant was wondering if Menlow would really do any reforming.

“I get free reign to go after people who broke the law?” Grant asked. He needed this authority to do his job.

“Yes. Full authority,” Menlow said. This was the political compromise Menlow was making; keep the old employees, but hire a pit bull to go after corruption. It seemed like it would work, at least everyone in that room hoped it would.

“Done,” Grant said and extended his hand for a handshake. “So, boss, when do I start?”

That was it. Government-fighter Grant Matson had just become a government employee. For a good cause, of course.

Why in the world would Grant want to be a government employee? Grant loved WAB, but he realized that he could do more of what he was meant to do— fight government corruption — at the Auditor’s Office. Work the problem from the inside. Tom, Ben, and Brian understood. They were happy for him. They knew that they would still see him all the time.

Work at the State Auditor’s Office was great. Grant actually got paid to help people who were getting screwed by the government. And he didn’t have to send them a bill. And Grant had the authority of the State Auditor’s Office behind him so he could do great things for people from the inside. Grant was now a white-collar sheepdog fighting back against bullies. It was pure heaven.

The first few months of work at the Auditor’s Office were the “honeymoon period” when everything was wonderful. One of the people Grant got to help was Joe Tantori.

Joe ran a firearms training facility for military and law enforcement. It was a compound; secure as hell. It looked like a mini Blackwater facility. The military didn’t want onlookers seeing how they trained.

Joe’s facility was about two hours north of Olympia on the Puget Sound. There were numerous Navy bases in the Puget Sound and they did not have training facilities for firearms, which seemed weird. One of those bases was the Naval Magazine Indian Island where they stored munitions for the various naval installations in the Puget Sound. The second base was the Bangor nuclear submarine. Both bases needed a place to train. So did all the various local law enforcement agencies and even the federal law enforcement agencies on the Sound like the Border Patrol and Coast Guard at Port Angeles. Joe’s range was it.

Joe constructed an extremely safe complex of shooting ranges and located it far from any neighbors so they wouldn’t be bothered. He had a few hundred acres of buffer.

But that wasn’t good enough. One of the distant neighbors was one of the three elected county commissioners. A few days a year, when the air temperature was just right and the winds were perfect, the commissioner could hear the faintest sound of gunfire. This was unacceptable. The commissioner started his quest to shut down Joe’s facility.

The county, without a warrant, “inspected” Joe’s facility. The Sheriff, who knew that the search was illegal, would not go along with it. So the county’s land use enforcement officer, who was part of the county environmentalist clique that had elected the complaining county commissioner, conducted the search. The county land use department then ordered Joe to close it based on a repealed version of the land use ordinances. That’s right; a repealed ordinance. Just like the Board of Real Estate tried with Ed Oleo. When the law won’t allow what the government wanted, why not just use a repealed version of the law?

Joe brought it to their attention that the ordinance had been repealed and that the county had given him a building permit to build a shooting range exactly where he did and to the exact standards they specified. That wasn’t good enough. Joe’s lawfully permitted facility did not fit the land use department’s “vision” for the area; a “vision” which did not include “violent” things like a shooting range and men in military uniforms. The hippies who dominated the county didn’t like the “militarization” of Joe’s land even if it was completely legal. Law and property rights needed to yield to the community’s “vision.”

This started five years of litigation, which cost Joe almost a million dollars. The land use department enforcement officer would periodically appear at Joe’s range and inspect it, despite the fact that he had no warrant. This was completely unconstitutional. But Joe’s remedy was to go to court — expensive and time-consuming court. An elected judge, who knew the “community’s vision,” did not include Joe’s lawful and harmless use of his own property, sided with the county over and over.