Enholm takes on Grilli, again
- September 12, 2010
Greg Enholm, the Bay Point resident running against Sheila Grilli for the Ward 3 seat of the Contra Costa Community College District Governing Board, said this week it is about time voters elect a candidate with clear financial experience.
“No one on the Board has the financial background I do, they are not asking the right questions and demanding the data,” said Enholm, 56. “I will do that, it’s the only way to avoid financial disaster.”
Asserting that the District currently has a $4.8 million deficit, up from $3 million in 2009, Enholm said the District is heading in the wrong direction.
“I videotaped the entire discussion of this [current] budget, and only one [Board member] pointed out, ‘hey we’re running a deficit.’ That person was basically ignored. I will not be ignored,” said Enholm. “[My] kind of financial experience is needed on [the Board] especially this one which has issued $400 plus million of bonds and has $350 plus million in annual revenues.”
In a telephone interview on Friday, Enholm detailed his work and life experience, starting with his birth in Washington D.C. and childhood in St. Petersburg, Florida.
At 21 he earned a B.A. in Business Administration, and subsequently was awarded a fellowship to earn a Masters in Economics, both from the University of Florida.
He said he was then accepted to a Ph.D. program in Economics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but ended up switching to Finance instead.
Before finishing, he was offered a job as a financial economist with the State of Wisconsin’s utility regulatory commission, where he worked for three years as a key staff person dealing with utility diversification issues.
“As a result of that national exposure, I was hired by Merrill Lynch in New York, where I worked, oddly enough, not in utilities but in mortgage-backed securities,” said Enholm. “I was present at the start of the disaster that hit three years ago when the mortgage market went haywire. I was there in 1984 when Merrill Lynch first got into mortgages, and quite frankly, it was boring work. I was happy to be hired by Salomon Brothers to work again in utilities.”
Enholm said he was hired at Salomon Brothers in 1985 in an entry-level position but left seven years later as a vice president and senior electric utility common stock analyst.
“It meant I took care of institutional clients; I advised clients across the U.S., Europe and Asia in electric utilities.”
By 1992, Enholm said he could foresee “that difficulties on Wall Street were going to occur and I wasn’t willing to lie to my clients.”
As his wife’s father in California was ailing at that point, the Enholms moved to Oakland to be near him. Enholm proceeded to set up his on own company, entitled Electric Utility Research Inc., advising “mutual and pension funds across the U.S.”
When a larger firm bought out his company, Enholm took stock of his career and decided he wanted to teach.
“I decided that I had enough money to be able to do what I wanted, and I wanted to teach,” said Enholm. “At that point there was a tremendous shortage of math and science teachers so I went to CSU Hayward [now CSU East Bay] and got my teaching credentials.”
Instead of securing a position at one school and staying for years, Enholm said he tried a variety of classroom situations over the subsequent years.
He’s taught math at Liberty High in Brentwood, a private middle school in Walnut Creek, Orion Academy in Moraga, Springstone High School in Lafayette and Carondelet High School in Concord.
“I am Catholic and when I learned there was a one-year position available at that school, I could not pass up the opportunity,” Enholm explained. “At Orion, I was teaching kids with emotional difficulties who needed an intensive amount of psychological counseling. I was there for five years, and I discovered it is infinitely better to have the same math teacher for all four years. That’s why you go to the same dentist year after year, the same doctor. I was able to take students who were barely functional as ninth graders and have them doing calculus by twelfth grade.”
In 2002, Enholm forayed into politics when he was elected to the Ambrose Recreation and Park District.
“It was the same type of elected position as the College Board, the Brown Act applies just as much to the Park Board as the District,” said Enholm.
In 2006, Enholm lost out to Grilli in his first attempt to earn a District Governing Board seat.
“At that time, the District had made the very bad decision to set up the regional training center [Brentwood Center] that ended up with pay cuts for faculty so the budget could be balanced,” said Enholm. “The District’s faculty had to take pay cuts because of decisions they had not effected.”
As he is now, Enholm was then a member of the Democratic Central Committee and said he was asked by a Los Medanos faculty union member to consider running for the District Board.
“They knew I had 17 years experience in finance and six years, at that point, as a teacher,” said Enholm, adding that the 16,235 votes he earned would have got him elected to every city council in the County, but Grilli’s 21,000-plus votes won out.
Taking this school year off in order to focus on his political aspirations, Enholm said if he wins the election, he will also push to change the way the Board conducts its regular business.
“It is much better to operate with committees rather than try to do everything at the Board level. Each meeting they have hundreds of pages they have to look over. They can’t see the forest because of all the trees, they never get the big picture,” said Enholm. “Resignations, transfers, sabbaticals … hello? Those could be handled at the committee level.”
For more on Enholm and his platform, see www.GregEnholm.net.
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