Madera Supervisor David Rogers
There are a plethora of honorable, positive actions that are proposed and completed by local government every year. There are, however, those moments where we stop and scratch our heads. Fortunately, there are far fewer of the latter than the former.

At PublicCEO, people routinely point out the lunacy or stupidity of some of our elected leaders. For instance, this year’s winner demonstrated such an overwhelming dearth of judgment, empathy, and consideration that one of our readers immediately forwarded on the story. After watching in disbelief several times, we wrote up the story and ran it.

Supervisor Dave Rogers might have been having a bad day. He might have been feeling ill. Or he might have just let slip the angst and anger that had been bottled inside of him since he was elected and discovered that the allure of running for office can differ greatly from the reality of responsibility. Whatever the case, on October 12, 2011, Rogers responded to a county employee who spoke during public comment in one of the most belittling, condescending ways caught on video. If you never saw the footage, you can view at in the PublicCEO article from the following day.

Supervisors Rogers went on to apologize to employees via a letter a short time later, and even made a public apology at the next supervisors meeting.

However, it remains impossible for the public and for PublicCEO to overlook the fact that he attacked his county staff for his own decision to run for office and spend $50,000 of his own money to be elected. It was a decision he made. And that he used that decision to justify not even discussing a reduction in supervisorial pay as part of fiduciary prudence or in solidarity for the cuts endured by the staff is ludicrous.

At the time, his comments were described as “monumentally stupid” and “mind-numbingly insensitive.”

Today, we describe it as the 2011 PublicCEO Blunder of the Year.