New leadership at troubled public guardian.

When Deputy Public Guardian Diana Midkiff first visited 91-year-old James Green in a Santa Clara nursing home in March, Green weighed just 112 pounds, had dirty fingernails, scaly dandruff and was only half-shaven.

“He is very emaciated, looks skeletal,” Midkiff wrote in her event report about the visit. “Mr. Green is demented. He was friendly, and happy to have a visitor.”

Decisions about Green’s life and welfare are made by the Monterey County Public Guardian’s office, which filed for conservatorship over Green in 2007, when he was 83. While medically stable, he was already suffering from dementia, according to court papers.

The public guardian has the power to take over the rights—and oversight of financial assets—of certain mentally ill or demented individuals who are deemed by the court to be incapable of making decisions and managing their own money.

In the intervening years, there have been concerns about whether the public guardian’s office has adequately protected Green. At the most recent hearing on his case Oct. 7, Assistant Public Defender Don Landis represented Green in court and spoke up about a lack of visits (before Midkiff was assigned to Green's case, he hadn't been visited for two years) and that his room smelled terrible, according to court papers.

Now there’s new leadership at the public guardian’s office, which is managed by the County Health Department. Since July 2011, County Health Director Ray Bullick served as public guardian. Attorney J.B. Robert became interim public guardian Nov. 16, and Bullick says headhunting firm Avery & Associates will start recruiting for a full-time position.

Robert retired in 2012 after 12 years as a Monterey County public defender. He sometimes represented clients who were being conserved – sometimes at odds with the public guardian’s office in court. Partly to avoid any conflicts of interest, and partly because his role is managerial, Robert will not take on any cases himself.

He arrives to a full plate of management issues: Chief Deputy Public Guardian Teri Scarlett at first embraced Bullick’s plan to finally hire a public guardian, but says she was publicly demoted as an act of retaliation when Bullick announced Robert would come on. (Manny González, interim county HR director, says that’s untrue.)

Deanna Gunn, former finance manager, says she resigned last month, due to concerns about her health if she continued working in a hostile environment. Former Deputy Public Guardian Jennifer Empasis, who was assigned to Green’s case, was fired Oct. 21; she and Gunn have hired Visalia-based law firm Melo & Sarsfield to represent them.

Gunn says she was regularly putting in 12-hour days to conduct three internal audits. Duplicate accounting entries, discovered by a court investigator in five guardianships, make it looks like county staffers were taking double credit for their time. That’s been attributed mostly to a software glitch.

By August, Gunn found the court had approved some $4,000 in erroneous fees to the public guardian’s office, some payable from clients’ estates. (Those fees were never actually collected.)

“There’s an extremely high standard for integrity and credibility,” Bullick says of the public guardian. “We need to conduct ourselves with the utmost care.”

Clarification: This story has been updated regarding the period concerning a lack of public guardian visits to a client, James Green, in a Santa Clara nursing home. He was visited three times in six months, as previously stated, but had not been visited for two years prior, the time period at issue. The three visits by Deputy Public Guardian Diana Midkiff in that six-month period remedied the previous lack of visits.