While more than two thirds of Orange County voters resoundingly reelected Shari Friedenrich for Treasurer/Tax Collector in the June primary, she’s increasingly protesting being shut out of her office by county supervisors.
Just this past week, as county budget deliberations got underway in public, supervisors didn’t allow Friedenrich to finish her public remarks about her concerns on proposed budget cuts to her office after they limited public comment on the budget to one-minute, given an unusually large amount of speakers.
It’s the first time I can remember watching that happen to an independently-elected official addressing colleagues during a public supervisors’ meeting.
It’s especially odd given that Friedenrich – a Republican endorsed by the county GOP, who has now been re-elected to her post four times over the past decade – was raising critical budget issues about losing 15 staff positions, which she argues threatens the stability of her office.
It’s a far cry from the attention given to the office after bad management and oversight triggered a county bankruptcy filing back in 1994, at the time, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
“I want to be clear for the record,” Friedenrich warned county supervisors, “In my professional judgment as the elected official charged by California law with core mandated services of safeguarding, managing, collecting, accounting for and disbursing every dollar of the billions in public funds, these reductions will materially impair my ability to fully perform the statutory core duties assigned to this office.”
Friedenrich warned that the core duties she’s highlighting include collecting property taxes, which brings in over 90% of the county’s discretionary revenue.
A name plate at the Treasurer-Tax Collector service window at the OC CIvic Center on Fed. 27, 2025. Credit: ERIKA TAYLOR, Voice of OC
“The consequences of these staffing reductions are not theoretical,” she warned. “They increase the risk of delays in treasury operations, financial reporting, reconciliations, tax administration, collections and other essential functions while increasing inefficiencies and costs.”
Ironically, stability is the very reason why county supervisors voted to take away management authority of the county’s $16 billion investment pool away from Friedenrich last year, arguing that her tightly-wound management style and high office staff turnover rate created the specter of instability in the office, seen largely as the county’s banker.
[Read: OC Supervisors Break Silence; Publicly Blast Treasurer’s Alleged Workplace Hostility]
While Friedenrich has admitted she needed work as a manager in the past and accepted management coaching from the CEO’s office, she also points to a record of high returns on investments amongst California treasurers, something backed up by the former chairman of the citizen oversight panel that used to oversee Friedenrich’s work – a reform implemented after the county bankruptcy.
Over the past year, county supervisors have dismantled most of those 1994 reforms, including moving investment powers to their own CEO’s office, which recently changed the investment mix.
Supervisors also set up their own Investment Oversight Committee to oversee investments but make all the appointments themselves and don’t offer taxpayers much information about the panel or its members.
At the last Investment Oversight Committee, Friedenrich blasted supervisors’ moves to take over investment power as illegal, an allegation supervisors deny, arguing state law gives them authority to delegate investment authority or not.
Currently, Orange County is the only county in California that does not delegate investment authority to the treasurer.
Dana Schultz, Friedenrich’s former deputy who is now in charge of investments under the CEO’s office just challenged her former boss directly in the June primary with the backing of the county general employee union and a direct endorsement from Republican Supervisor Don Wagner.
Friedenrich got the endorsement from the OC Republican Party and former Treasurer/Tax Collector John Moorlach.
Before the election, I wrote a column interviewing both candidates and detailed their different views toward county investments, allowing them both to answer written questions in their own voice.
[Read: Santana: Who Should Be Managing OC’s $16 Billion Investment Pool?]
Friendenrich overwhelmingly won re-election on June 2 – with voters seemingly rejecting the thesis put forth by top county officials about Friedenrich, which was clearly reported out in the local press.
Yet ironically, that now leaves her in a very strange position.
After Friedenrich was publicly shut down last week, I asked her about what she was trying to communicate in public to county supervisors and she sent me a written copy of the remarks she intended to give at the meeting.
You can read her perspective directly here.
Not one county supervisor said a word in public about the concerns and contentions that Friedenrich was able to say publicly before her mic was shut off.
At the supervisors meeting, the outgoing County CEO, who spearheaded the shift to remove Freidenrich’s control of the investment fund, didn’t comment on any of Freidenrich’s public comments over cuts to her department or respond to Voice of OC questions about it afterwards.
The Treasurer/Tax Collector announced that the 15-position cut she’s been asked to manage in the budget is unmanageable and will threaten core functions of her office.
According to her, the cuts represent about a 20% reduction in her staff of 78 workers.
Most shocking to me was that Friedenrich accused county supervisors of hiding the trims to her office.
“I am also concerned by the lack of transparency in this year’s budget process,” she wrote, adding “Unlike prior years, the budget materials do not fully present the TTC’s s requested staffing and budget recommendations in a manner that allows the public to evaluate the differences between the Department’s request and the CEO’s recommendation.”
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