That would be me. I predicted it. And I didn’t have to be a fortune teller to know that Clerk Angela Guillen was going to dump Clarkston the second something better came along. You just needed to look at the employment records that I gave to city manager Jonathan Smith, the mayor, and every city council member before the city hired her.
If you’re not angry about this, you haven’t been paying attention. And if you aren’t primarily angry with Smith, the pied piper of city government who gets everything he wants by expertly massaging the city council until they believe the expense du jour he’s pushing is their idea not his, then you really need to take a second look at what happened here. And yes, of course, the individual council members also bear responsibility. Some council members are often unprepared, others are frequently absent, and many can’t remember what happened from one meeting to the next. Yet I can’t help but wonder what the city would be like budget-wise today if we hadn’t hired a spendthrift Stellantis retiree like Smith who had zero municipal experience and is still learning the job, making taxpayers pay for every misstep and mistake – including this one. I’d rather roll the dice with a recent graduate with a master’s in public administration because at least that person would know what Smith still doesn’t know.
Let’s recap and review Smith’s sleight of hand that got us to where we are today.
Smith convinced council to approve $3,500 to $4,000 for a salary study because “we need to do everything we can” to hire Guillen, who was working as a contractor, on a full-time basis. Smith even had the audacity to suggest that hiring Guillen has something to do with deciding “are we going to be a city or not.” (Drama, much?) Smith promised “[w]e’re not gonna raise taxes, I would never, ever, would ever propose that we raise taxes” to pay for hiring Guillen. When Mayor Sue Wylie asked how other employees would feel if Guillen was paid so much, Smith slyly suggested that this was where the salary study would come in because of course we needed to give everyone more money and that was the vehicle Smith planned to use to get it.
Smith said the salary study consultant would compare Clarkston’s job with cities of comparable size, though the proposal said the information would be drawn only from one source, the Michigan Municipal League (MML) database of municipal salaries which is limited only to public bodies that choose to participate (even though the money would have been better spent on a custom survey that included cities of similar size and budget to Clarkston). Thereafter, the consultant would provide updated salary ranges for the city to use (or at least that was the plan until the results didn’t give Smith what he wanted so he blew up the salary ranges – more on that later).
In the context of yet another $40/hour extension to keep Guillen on as a clerk even though the reason for hiring her as a contractor – the November election – was past, Guillen wanted the world to know that she received no health insurance or other benefits, holiday pay, or mileage to commute to work. (FYI, $40/hour annualized to $66,560 per year with every Friday off because she worked a 32-hour week.)
Alas, the long-awaited salary survey is delivered, and we learned that it compared Clarkston to cities with populations of 5,000 or less and budgets of $5 million or less. (Clarkston had a population of 842 as of 2023 and an annual projected budget of $931,668 from all sources as of the May 2025 budget presentation.) So, right out of the gate, we were using data that was limited only to voluntary participants in the MML database that were from larger communities, there was no attempt made to contact non-participating communities that were closer in size and budget to Clarkston, and the comparisons were obviously going to show that larger cities pay more (duh). Oh, and shocker, larger communities offered health insurance and better retirement savings matches to their employees (double duh). At least the consultant was honest enough to admit that “if you pin it down to your size, more precisely, you won’t have any communities in that [MML] database to use,” though he’d be more than happy contact similar communities to provide more accurate results – but we would need to pay him even more money to do that (and hello! that was not at all in line with Smith’s plans to blow up the budget so obviously, we didn’t do that). To make things more palatable, the consultant massaged the data and used the lower end of salaries from bigger cities and called it good.
The consultant prepared salary ranges based on these supposed market rates. Salary ranges are divided into four parts (quartiles). Based on many years of human resource experience, I can tell you that the midpoint (middle) of a salary range is supposed to approximate what your specific employment market would pay a fully qualified employee. You can hire someone at a higher rate than the midpoint if they have a lot of experience, but this isn’t ideal and the salary offered shouldn’t exceed the third quartile because anything over midpoint is paying more than the average qualified person is making in your employment market. (It can also affect an employee’s ability to receive future increases once they bump into the range maximum and that obviously makes employees unhappy.) Employees with little experience are usually hired at the minimum rate.
The consultant established the following range for Clarkston’s clerk position – $33,150 (minimum), $39,000 (midpoint), and $44,850 (maximum). The consultant recommended that his proposed salary ranges be divided into 11 steps between the minimum and the maximum, and he suggested that employees be placed at the next highest point in the 11-step range and given a one-step increase every year plus any cost-of-living adjustments. For the clerk’s position, each of the eleven steps was worth about $1,064 in salary (I got that number by subtracting the minimum salary from the maximum salary and dividing by 11). The then-current salary for the clerk was $38,220, so the clerk position should have been placed somewhere around $38,470 (calculated by repeatedly adding 1/11 of the range [$1,064] to the minimum of the proposed salary range until reaching the first 1/11 increment over $38,220).
In other words, Smith’s own hand-picked consultant told him the market value of the Clarkston clerk’s job was the $39,000 midpoint. If he were to hire someone with a lot of experience and wanted to place them in the third quartile, then he could suggest a salary between $39,000 and $41,925 (which is the top of the third quartile).
Do you think that’s what Smith actually did? Of course not! His goal was to hire Guillen at any cost to the taxpayers, and the salary survey we paid for was just a means to an end. When the results didn’t give Smith what he wanted, he just ignored the results.
Though Smith had never explored the cost of contracting with another city to handle our elections, he claimed we couldn’t afford not to give giant increases to the clerk and the rest of the office staff. In his May 12 budget presentation, Smith deceptively packaged the salary increases he wanted as one of five “budget challenges” and insisted that all salary increases must be paid at once. When examined more closely, it’s obvious that the “budget challenges” claim was merely an artifice. The other four “budget challenges” consisted of anticipated cost increases to obtain police, assessing, attorney, and building and inspection services for the 2025-2026 budget year. But half of the total imagined shortfall in the “budget challenges” related to the employee salary increases, and Smith later admitted that he anticipated no actual budget increase for assessing or attorney services making Smith’s employee salary demands far exceed 50% of the “budget challenges” total. But it’s better to claim there are five challenges rather than three to try to take the attention away from the cost and effect of the giant salary increases Smith wanted.
Ah, but where was the money to be found? Perhaps by reducing some of Smith’s pet projects? Heavens no! Smith decided the best way to accomplish giving employees a crap ton of money for providing no discernable services to the residents was to go after the annual .691 library millage reduction. Smith lied about why the .691 millage deduction started, alleging it was intended as a gift to taxpayers; urged the city council to break its forever promise to taxpayers and raise our taxes by that .691 mills without a vote; and then claimed he didn’t want to consider a tax increase to pay for the salaries (even though the .691 millage increase is literally a tax increase).
Smith gave himself kudos for suggesting we should be happy he wasn’t asking for more because he “only” increased the retirement savings match to 4% instead of the consultant’s 6% recommendation and he decided not to recommend that we gratuitously pay people money if they get their health insurance elsewhere. At least councilmember Al Avery was honest – no one would vote for this tax increase if asked (so it’s best to take it without asking). Gary Casey delusionally insisted the .691 library millage rollback, which allowed taxpayers to keep their own money, was a “gift.” Smith, Avery, and Laura Rodgers all admitted this whole outrageous exercise was being done to benefit one person – Guillen.
Because the consultant didn’t recommend what Smith wanted, he threw the entire salary range structure out the window and demanded a $50,000 salary for the clerk, which was significantly more than the $44,850 maximum of the salary range recommended by the consultant. That kind of stupidity is what happens when you focus on a person rather than a position when trying to fill a job. And Smith also blithely ignored a lot of red flags in Guillen’s employment history which included – wait for it – frequent job hopping.
While this post focuses on the idiocy in obsessively wanting to hire this particular clerk to the exclusion of every other qualified person in the universe (or contracting out some services), Smith also blew out the recommended salary range for the treasurer and greedily used the inflated amount he demanded for the clerk as the basis to extort the city and secure a giant increase for himself. After all, if we didn’t give Smith $13,000 more in salary (in addition to his 32-hour week, 15 vacation days, 6 sick days, and 14 paid holidays), he would feel disrespected and would have no other choice but to quit. The only office staffer of the four who didn’t get a windfall was the administrative assistant/treasurer assistant/deputy clerk (or whatever we are calling her these days) because Smith recommended only a modest increase for her, keeping her below the minimum range recommended by the consultant. The two Department of Public Works employees also received modest increases and weren’t part of the salary survey.
Smith hid the amount of the increased benefit costs from the public and refused to provide them to me in response to a FOIA request until after the budget was approved. Had he provided the information to the public and to me, everyone would have learned that in addition to a salary that far exceeded the top of the salary range the consultant recommended, Guillen received health insurance and retirement savings match eligibility valued at $10,000, bringing her total compensation package to $60,000 for a 32-hour week (which is the equivalent of $75,000 for a 40-hour a week job).
Raising our taxes by .691 mills generated only around $44,000 in additional revenue and that wasn’t enough to cover all the salary and benefits increases Smith demanded for our six employees. He said he anticipated the shortfall would be covered by property tax increases (which tend to naturally go up each year as homes are sold and property taxes are uncapped or due to new construction), so that additional property tax money that could have been used for infrastructure is also being sucked up by employee salary increases.
How bad is it? The city anticipates receiving $722,231 in personal and property taxes from Clarkston residents and businesses in the 2025-2026 fiscal year. When you factor in the additional costs of statutory employer payments for Social Security, Medicare, and worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance costs, we’re pretty darn close to paying almost $300,000 for six employees. It’s not a stretch to say that in a few years half of every personal and property tax dollar that residents and businesses pay to the city will go to pay employee salaries – yet we receive almost no city services. (When councilmember Forte recently suggested that our Department of Public Works employees could use the new piece of equipment we’d just given them to remove snow from the sidewalks, which would be a tangible benefit to taxpayers, Smith told her they were just “too busy.”)
I wrote about this salary nonsense several times, explaining why the salary survey shouldn’t be relied on, the basis for the .691 library millage rollback, and how Smith was blowing up the salary consultant recommendations that we paid him to make – here, here, here, here, and here.
After being concerned about her unexplained and abrupt departure from the City of Howell, I went to a good deal of effort to obtain Guillen’s employment records from her previous public employers using FOIA requests, something that I knew Smith would not do because he wasn’t interested in anything that might thwart his mantra that “we have to have her.” After reviewing the records, I identified a number of “red flags” that Guillen should have been asked to explain before the city made any offer to her. Most important to this discussion, Guillen had six jobs at six different employers within a four-year period after leaving Mundy Township – City of Howell, Davison Township, Howell Township, Rose Township, the City of Montrose, and the City of the Village of Clarkston.
I provided all the employment records I found to Smith and to Mayor Wylie, and I sat down with Wylie to discuss them. After learning that Wylie and Smith had done nothing more than provide an “oral summary” of concerns to the finance committee, I sent the records to the rest of the city council and I also published them here.
In the end, Smith got his giant raise plus the clerk he wanted, leaving us stuck with a tax increase and continued increased salary obligations that will go on forever unless a financial manager takes control of the city and cuts them down to a realistic size. And Guillen did exactly what I said she would do – she quit as soon as something better came along, working less than six months as our clerk. It’s not clear if she gave us the courtesy of a two-week notice, given that Smith’s most recent email communication – published after she left – advised Guillen notified him she was leaving in “late December” and starting her new job on January 5.
Rather than talking to the city council about whether it’s better to contract out election work (since throwing money we don’t have at Smith’s nirvana candidate didn’t work), Smith has already listed the job on the MML website at a salary between $46,000 and $50,000 which is higher than the maximum salary range cap of $44,850 recommended by the consultant Smith chose. How much more evidence do you need that the thousands we spent on the salary survey was a joke to Smith and nothing more than a means to overpay the clerk and treasurer and secure a giant salary increase for himself? But, moving on, Smith wants to hire another clerk. I can just hear the arguments when the advertised salary doesn’t turn up someone as wonderful as Guillen – gosh, we need to pay even more to get a good clerk! It’s all part of Smith’s continuing strategy to get a tax increase on the ballot later this year to continue to increase current salaries and get the best clerk money can buy, since the city’s current income is just not up to the task.
Apparently, we should all be deeply saddened by the loss created by Guillen’s abrupt departure after a mere six months of employment. I guess we can’t have elections in Clarkston anymore because Smith told us Guillen was the only person in the world who could manage them for us. And we need to alert the city lawyers that we’re going to receive a flood of lawsuits from the State of Michigan for election mistakes because according to Smith, only Guillen could competently do election work for Clarkston. We should heed also Smith’s warning and prepare for a day when we can’t be a city anymore simply because we no longer have Guillen.
Such a tragedy. We should all take a moment to grieve this incredible loss.
Sigh.
Oh wait. Maybe we can look at things differently. Since we “had to have her” – and now we don’t – perhaps we can have an intelligent discussion now about combining as much as possible with Independence Township since our city government is clearly incompetent and running us off the proverbial financial cliff. Or we could combine the clerk and treasurer positions (like we used to do not too long ago) and use the money to hire someone who can competently do both jobs (especially since the clerk’s duties really don’t fill her plate unless there’s an election). Or we could get estimates for contracting election work out and hire a clerk who could be paid less because s/he isn’t handling that very technical part of the job anymore. I’m sure you have your own thoughts, and they probably don’t involve throwing money at someone new. Is Smith thinking about that? No way. He’s setting this up for another tax increase, which is the only way he says we can continue to be a city, with ever-increasing salaries for our six city employees.
When is Smith going to be held accountable for laying waste to the city through endless profligate spending that has been rubber stamped by a gullible council for the nine years he’s been here? The rubber-stamping council won’t do it – they acquiesced to his extortion demand for an additional $13,000 in salary just because he said he would be offended and quit if he didn’t earn more than the artificially inflated clerk’s salary that he asked for.
Cry me a river.
Want another prediction? I expect Smith to resign after his 70th birthday in December because that’s the date he will have reached the absolute maximum Social Security benefit to supplement whatever generous benefits and pension he’s receiving after 35 years with a Big Three employer. After spending us into the ground – including his continued attempts to spend a million and a half dollars to rip out all the downtown sidewalks to please his fellow Clarkston Chamber of Commerce members (oh you weren’t aware of that conflict of interest?) and the businesses at a cost of around $300,000 to Clarkston taxpayers, most of whom would receive no benefit from it – it’s long past time for Smith to pack up his pony cycle and get outta Dodge (and yes, that was a call back to yet another waste of taxpayer dollars urged by Smith – the taxpayer money we were forced to pay to install a pony cycle in Depot Park memorializing a family-owned Clarkston business that treated its Clarkston and other employees like dirt, locking them out at Christmas and never opening the doors again because that’s history worth celebrating, right? ).
And that will be a glorious day for the city. Gosh, I might even send a birthday cake to city hall to help Smith celebrate.
Huzzah!