The county’s longtime purchasing and contracting chief has sued the county, alleging he was fired based on his age and race.
Jack Pellegrino is a 65-year-old White man. In his March lawsuit, Pellegrino revealed that Chief Administrative Officer Ebony Shelton terminated him with no explanation last September and alleged that he was discriminated against “based on his race and/or color” because the county planned to replace him with a person of color.
Pellegrino’s replacement, however, was not a person of color. The county appointed Pellegrino’s deputy Allen Hunsberger, who is White, to serve first as the acting director and then the permanent leader of the county’s purchasing and contracting department.
County spokesperson Tammy Glenn declined to comment on Pellegrino’s lawsuit or claims, citing the pending litigation.
Pellegrino’s discrimination lawsuit comes at the same time as another by former Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Michael Vu, who claimed he was passed over for the county’s top unelected post after former supervisor Nora Vargas allegedly claimed he didn’t have the right racial background for the post. Vu is Asian American.
Pellegrino’s attorney Michael Conger alleged that County Assessor Jordan Marks told him at a Jan. 12, 2024, Martin Luther King Day breakfast that he had heard that powerful county officials were going to “replace (Pellegrino) with a person of color.”
Marks denied that claim in an interview with Voice of San Diego and noted that there has been a years-long push to make it easier for local businesses and nonprofits, including those led by people of color, to contract with the county. Marks said he was simply offering to help Pellegrino when he spoke with him early last year.
“I’ve encouraged our contracting department to make sure we’re reaching all the communities of color, and I offered to be a resource for Jack Pellegrino and the contracting department,” Marks said.
Conger said Pellegrino was so unsettled by the conversation that he complained to Vu and Shelton, who would later become the county’s top bureaucrat, the next day.
County insiders and outsiders have long urged reforms to the county’s contracting process.
As she prepared to depart county government, former interim chief county bureaucrat Sarah Aghassi suggested in a memo last June that the contracting department “should undergo a robust process to evaluate areas ripe for improvement” with the help of a consultant and input from other county departments. She also urged the county to explore how to “map out bottlenecks” and make “the $2 (billion) purchasing power of the county more streamlined and accessible to local and small businesses.”
Conger said Pellegrino supported efforts to diversify the county’s roster of contractors but was stymied by county ordinances and rules that would need to be updated by elected county supervisors to ease existing requirements that direct awards to the competent lowest bidder.
Months after the January 2024 event, Conger said county leadership fired Pellegrino despite his positive performance reviews. He was fired three months after Shelton took over as the county’s top bureaucrat.
“It had nothing to do with his performance,” Conger said. “It had to do with the county (not) throwing enough contracts to the minority community and he wasn’t a good face to the minority community because he’s white.”
Then and now, Conger said, county officials and attorneys for the county have been unwilling to clarify why the county fired Pellegrino.
In a May 15 filing, attorneys representing the county objected to Conger’s requests for a deposition with a knowledgeable county official and documents he hoped could explain who decided to fire Pellegrino and why.
The attorneys for the county described Conger’s requests as “vague, ambiguous, overbroad, burdensome, and oppressive” – and argued that he sought protected information.
“If the county has a non-discriminatory reason for terminating this 11-year good performer, we’d like to know it,” Conger said.
Based on personal experience, this news is very, very surprising.
I met Jack Pellegrino during design and construction of the Southeastern Live Well Center. From the very beginning, Jack was hyper focused on the provision of employment opportunities to construction workers that lived in the adjacent communities. The County’s Purchasing Department set goals for neighborhood involvement that were more ambitious than any other major public works project that I know of.
At Jack’s insistence, the design-build team made a commitment to spend $6 million with contractors from the specific zip codes in the neighborhoods served by SELWC. Under his supervision the builder ended up spending over $8 million – about 11% of the total construction cost!
Similarly, Jack set a goal to hire no less than five percent of the project’s workers from the surrounding neighborhoods. Under Jack’s watch, the total ended up at almost 14 percent!
Achieving these goals required extraordinary community outreach, partnership with Black IPO Inc. and the BCA, and the establishment of construction job-training and apprenticeship programs for local neighborhood residents.
The project’s extensive public art program was similarly focused on community participation and the building features over 30 separate artworks created by residents of the surrounding neighborhoods.
The project’s extraordinary community participation goals might have been first established by the County Board, and there were many people that deserve credit for the accomplishment of those goals, but Jack’s role in achieving this success was pivotal.
Protection by AGE?