The Interns

Recap: Before we jump into this week’s post, a re-cap of what we have learned about the office of Ventura County Supervisor Jeff Gorell:

• Gold Team Initiative: Launched in 2023 by Gorell and without approval of the Ventura County Board of Supervisors. The most visible outcome of the still unapproved initiative is the loss of 3,000+ high‑paying biotech jobs in Ventura County with your tax dollars.

  
  

• Transparency: Gorell failed to report multiple behest payments and was warned by FPPC. His office delayed our PRA responses during his re-election campaign, despite required timelines. Gorell's office has failed to retain required public records via non county issued technologies.

  
  

• County Leadership Oversight: While Gorell was chair of the board of supervisors, they pretended (or worse, just did not care) they were unaware that 25% of Ventura County residents were slated to lose non mandatory services provided by the Area on Aging (VCAA). (They will likely be lost in 2027.) The VCAA is managed by the supervisors' only employee, the CEO of the county. They absolutely knew.

  
  

• Questionable Employee Conduct: Gorell's field representative, Israel Rodriguez, patrolled a recent 805 Speakeasy event. Rodriguez also received an FPPC reportable loan of up to $10,000 from a Thousand Oaks business owner connected to Gorell’s 2022 campaign. We have conflicting information on the loan but believe Gorell may have influenced the timing of the loan repayment.

  
  

• Silence: We have not seen or heard anything from Ventura County Public Integrity Unit (PIU) on our reporting. The PIU is overseen by Ventura County Assistant District Attorney Paul Nunez, under the direction of Ventura County DA Erik Nasarenko. The PIU exists to investigate public corruption. Hi Paul!

The Executive Directors

Public records have offered little clarity on how a man named Ping Fang became the first Executive Director (ED) of Gold Team. There is no evidence he was vetted by the county, no county issued email to Fang for communicating about Gold Team, no county employment records, and no vendor contract for his role on Gold Team. We don't even know if Fang knew that he we would be subject to our PRAs. The scant records we did receive however, revealed that we did not receive the full records, as required by California law.

At some point in 2023, Fang began signing his personal emails as the Gold Team ED, though nothing in the record substantiates that he was awarded the title. What the documents do reveal is that Supervisor Gorell seemingly considered Fang for a position because he requested his curriculum vitae. Yet that job does not seem to have materialized. Instead, Fang appeared to function as an unpaid intern that was doing work for a project that was not formally approved by the County of Ventura. Then Fang's written communications went silent by 2024.

Fast forward to 2025, after months of electronic silence, Fang applied for a field representative position. Gorell did not hire him. Below is the rejection letter form Gorell's chief of staff, Ashley Bautista:

We found another public fingerprint for Fang. In March 2023, he appeared at a Board of Supervisors meeting (around 7h35m) to speak about green technologies. We believe those were a personal interest of his based on his comments and pre meeting emails he sent to Gorell. What he did not disclose when as he spoke at the meeting was just as important. He never identified himself as Gold Team’s ED, nor did he acknowledge any conflict of interest between his public testimony and his affiliation with Gold Team in terms of seeking green technologies through a program that is supported by your tax dollars, that may have benefitted him personally.

By 2024, Fang was gone. We found no communications that highlighted his departure. Fang just seems to have vanished into thin air.

Totally normal for an office that is subject to transparency and record retention laws.

Local real estate agent Tim McDougall emerged next as an unexpected figure in the Gold Team ED saga. His name appeared on the county’s official Gold Team webpage until our reporting prompted its quiet disappearance. Yet as recently as last week, his LinkedIn profile continued to identify him as the Gold Team ED.

But Gorell's office claims there are zero records for McDougall. He didn't just disappear like Fang. McDougall is our Ventura County Schrödinger's cat - he was both ED and never ED.

Whether McDougall, is or truly ever was. the current ED is left to the public to decipher. What’s clear is that transparency is not exactly a hallmark of Gorell’s operation, despite his active license to practice law in California and the professional obligations that come with such.

Here's the only public record we have for McDougall:

It's rather strange Gorell's office claims there are no records for McDougall. A claim contradicted by the fact that one of our investigators emailed the address on the now updated website, earlier this year. Thus, there is in fact at least one document (our email) that should have been handed over in a public record request.

Alas, it was not.

Once again, we are left with little insight into a man publicly representing taxpayer dollars through Gold Team as the ED. How did he and Supervisor Gorell know each other? Was there a quid pro quo? We may never know, because Gorell’s office insists there are no emails, no documents, nothing memorialized despite our own firsthand knowledge of this falsehood.

Ventura County residents are being asked to swallow a narrative that doesn't pass muster. We’re left to believe that neither ED was copied on official communication about the trade mission to India in 2024 by the lack of such in the responsive record requests. Major initiatives generate paper trails, especially when meetings are involved. Scheduling emails, agenda drafts, confirmations, follow‑ups, these are the mundane blueprints of planning. Yet none of those appears in the records provided, even though we received hints within what we did receive of other meetings occurring as you'd expect.

We were fortunate to have multiple sources in this reporting. One of them provided the name of the individual at Amgen with whom Supervisor Gorell may have first discussed Gold Team. We'll have more details in a future post.

Please come back next week, we'll dive into Gorell's relationship with Amgen.