L.A. County chief battles for his legacy

Four years ago, Los Angeles County supervisors embarked on an ambitious effort to streamline management of the nation’s largest local government, choosing an experienced public sector executive, William T Fujioka, to become the region’s most powerful behind-the-scenes bureaucrat.

Now, that bold experiment in improving government accountability has devolved into an ugly retreat and recriminations, with a majority of the county’s elected supervisors in effect kneecapping their top manager and stripping him of major responsibilities.

It’s the sort of insider political street fight familiar to Fujioka, who navigated around Eastside gangs as a kid and rose to the top rungs of Los Angeles’ downtown halls of government by bucking establishment heavyweights and cultivating key allies with his grit and finesse.

Fujioka’s mix of skills has flummoxed opponents, including former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who tried to fire him a decade ago from City Hall’s top administrative post. “When he cleverly undercut my abilities to get rid of him, then I began to respect his political abilities,” said Riordan, who saw Fujioka then as lacking the “backbone to get things done.”

As Los Angeles County’s chief executive officer, Fujioka is facing new foes and perhaps the biggest challenge of his 34-year career. The management structure he was hired to impose on an unwieldy array of agencies with nearly 100,000 employees is faltering amid claims that decision-making has become more — not less — sluggish.

This month, the board will take back control of two large, chronically troubled agencies, one responsible for abused and neglected children and the other dealing with juvenile offenders. And more reductions in his power and office budget could be in the offing.

At 58, Fujioka is battling for his carefully nurtured professional legacy and the historic reforms he was hired to implement. “This,” he said, “is more than a bump in the road. This is extremely frustrating to me.”

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When Fujioka’s grandfather, Fred Jiro Fujioka, was hauled away in the World War II Japanese internment, the family lost an Oldsmobile dealership, a trucking business and real estate holdings.

Fujioka’s father, William Sr., was forced to quit attending UC Berkeley and later settled for positions at a produce market, insurance company and trucking firm and in city government. When he came home from the war, the family struggled to reestablish itself in working-class sections of Boyle Heights and Montebello. Fujioka says his father and friends fell in with a neighborhood gang. “I was never jumped in,” he said.

Fujioka’s “first political lesson” came on the streets, dealing with gang leaders, said Los Angeles City Councilman Tony Cardenas, a friend. “He had to learn how to wade through that gantlet.... You can’t avoid them, and you need to figure out how to finesse your way out of there without offending anyone.”

As a young man, Fujioka embraced his grandfather’s desire to restore the family’s stature. After college, he cut his long hair and took a low-level county personnel job, beginning a steady, disciplined ascent. By the early 1990s, he was a top manager in the massive county hospital system. By 1999, he was at City Hall as chief administrative officer; the top fiscal and analysis post is regarded as one of the most influential in city government.

When Fujioka was named to the position, Riordan was eager to implement a City Charter change that would increase the mayor’s control over city operations.

But several months into the effort, Riordan aide Noelia Rodriguez told The Times that under Fujioka’s watch, the city had moved “much further away” from the kind of management changes envisioned.

Riordan and others criticized Fujioka as a broker of whispered side deals who was adept at deflecting blame.

But the council thwarted Riordan’s efforts to fire Fujioka. Councilwoman Jan Perry, who worked as a council aide at the time and admired Fujioka’s skills, said he “was always in the hot seat” but “did a great job for the city.”

County supervisors thought so too. In 2007, they hired him to implement their own management overhaul. Fujioka was seen as a seasoned leader with a knack for working behind the scenes to get things done.

In public, Fujioka moves deliberately and is soft-spoken and guarded. Out of the spotlight, he can be candid — and profane. At his installation ceremony, Los Angeles Councilman Eric Garcetti joked that Fujioka “has a vocabulary that would make a sailor, but not a [county] supervisor, blush.”

Even those close to him sometimes find they don’t know him well. Many attending his installation for the county job were surprised to learn he had married longtime City Hall lobbyist Darlene Kuba. He told The Times that the relationship became romantic after he left his city job and noted that his county contract prohibits Kuba from lobbying officials there.

The county plan to centralize authority was the brainchild of Fujioka’s highly respected predecessor, David Janssen. The new chief executive was to have increased responsibility over the department heads who guide the delivery of services for 10 million constituents, ranging from housing the skid row homeless to defending exclusive hillside neighborhoods from mudslides.

Fujioka was given more staff, and his office’s budget climbed 53% to $43 million in four years. Eventually, Fujioka was to have received greater power to hire and fire most agency chiefs.

Under the new structure, supervisors were to have taken a back seat in day-to-day operations. The structure presumed the high level of respect and openness Fujioka’s predecessor enjoyed. But most supervisors and their staffs have served for decades and developed expertise and deep interests in certain issues, and the transfer of trust did not come naturally.

Unlike his predecessor, Fujioka has kept closer controls on sensitive information, critics say. He ended weekly press briefings. During supervisors’ meetings, his aides sought to a ban reporters from an anteroom where department heads gather. A citizens panel found that decision-making had become more bureaucratic. Even supervisors began to complain that Fujioka was shutting them out.

“We just aren’t getting the vital information we need,” said Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who recently voted with board members Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky to strip the Children and Family Services and Probation departments from Fujioka’s control. Antonovich said Fujioka withheld names of candidates to lead the troubled children services agency and threatened to seek more reductions in Fujioka’s staff and power in the coming months.

Fujioka said it is “absolutely false” that he has hidden information from the board.

Yaroslavsky joined the criticism. Many county staffers suspect that his concerns have been intensified by Fujioka’s close political relationship with Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.

Ridley-Thomas began to challenge Yaroslavsky’s considerable influence after he joined the board in 2008. In public, they clashed over transportation projects and homeless services. In private, the enmity has required others to circle the pair warily. Molina had to take a seat far from the ladies restroom because Ridley-Thomas declined to sit next to Yaroslavsky, according to county staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Through a press aide, Ridley-Thomas declined to comment on their account.

While a majority of Fujioka’s elected superiors may be critical, his subordinates praise him. County managers have complained about pointed attacks and contradictory direction from board offices in the past. “It’s a very scary thing if you are a lowly department head,” said Janice Fukai, the county’s alternate public defender. “If you go in with the CEO, you feel a little more insulated and a little more protected.”

Fujioka’s backers say he has been particularly frustrated by some of the supervisors’ interventions in the children’s services agency, which has been grappling with child fatalities following errors in handling cases. It is one of the departments being taken away from Fujioka. Molina is especially hands-on, summoning top agency officials to her office to demand explanations. In one instance, she said she would like to cut the testicles off an executive because of problems in the agency, according to officials familiar with the exchange.

Molina declined to comment on the incident but said, “At the end of the day, we as supervisors are literally blamed and held accountable for the outcomes of these children.”

In other areas, Molina and others give Fujioka credit. His successful drive to reach a deal with UCLA to reopen shuttered Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center near Watts has won near universal praise.

Supervisors Don Knabe and Ridley-Thomas, who opposed taking departments from Fujioka, say he has been effective, providing department managers with a single, clear voice on important issues.

“He’s not a quitter,” said Fukai, who considers Fujioka a mentor. “If he goes down, he’s not going to go down voluntarily. He better not. I would hope that he would have to be dragged down.”

Cardenas, the Los Angeles councilman, says his friend has a savvy sense of survival. Fujioka and his brother learned long ago to talk their way out of fistfights “if they could,” he said. “If that didn’t work out, they were ready to defend themselves.... Now he’s outnumbered again.”

garrett.therolf@latimes.com

Los Angeles Times staff writer Jean Merl contributed to this report.