SAN BERNARDINO >> The county’s chief administrator waited too long in telling the Board of Supervisors that the county’s human resources head pleaded guilty to agreeing to engage in prostitution, the board’s chairman said Monday.
Andrew Lamberto, the county Human Resources director, pleaded guilty Aug. 18 to a misdemeanor charge of agreeing to engage in prostitution. He was sentenced to 10 days of community service and three years of informal probation, as well as submitting to AIDS testing and education and a DNA sample.
But County CEO Greg Devereaux didn’t tell the public and county Board of Supervisors until last week.
“I was extremely disappointed that this situation was not brought to the Board’s attention earlier, given Mr. Lamberto’s position,” Chairman James Ramos said in a written statement Monday. “Immediately after receiving this notification, Vice Chairman (Robert) Lovingood and I decided that it was necessary to schedule time to discuss this with the CEO on Nov. 3, 2015.”
Ramos and Lovingood both declined to elaborate Monday.
Nonetheless, the county did take it seriously, Wert said.
“As Mr. Devereaux said in his statement (Friday), the matter was taken very seriously and these things are taken very seriously,” Wert said. “Personnel actions are confidential, so it’s unusual that the county would even disclose that. … The most significant was the last-chance agreement that was referenced in the statement, that any (further) transgression would result in termination.”
Wert was not authorized to disclose other portions of the discipline, he said.
He didn’t know whether “transgression” was defined in the agreement, but it certainly included any violation of county policy or law.
That’s stricter than the usual county policy, he said.
“If you violate a county policy, termination is an option, depending, and it depends on the type of crime,” he said. “But if it’s not a county-related offense, then usually even disciplinary action isn’t considered.”
Lamberto’s current salary is $191,073. That’s assigned to the position of human resources director — rather than to him as an individual — Wert said.
The disclosure came because a blogger revealed that Lamberto, a Mission Viejo resident, was listed on an Orange County District Attorney news release of men who approached a woman whom they believed to be a prostitute in areas known of Orange County for prostitution and agreed to pay for sex, according to Wert.
“(It was disclosed) because it had been made public, not by the county but by someone else, and the board had been notified,” he said.
Lamberto told Devereaux on March 30 that he’d been cited the weekend before, Devereaux said Friday.
