DISCORD AT CULTURAL AFFAIRS

I was very, very happy in my job. I was probably outgrowing it and would have left anyway, but I’m not certain I would have left when I did. I suffered terribly when I was there, and I paid for it . I came out stronger, better and happier. . . . I talked my head off in Los Angeles and nobody would listen.

--A former high-ranking Cultural Affairs Department employee

I know a lot of people are talking. There’s a kind of a brush-fire complaint that has been created, and it occurs, and people feed on each other, and what I’m assuming will happen is that the broad-range investigation will include people who have something decent to say.

--Fred Croton, general manager, Cultural Affairs Department

Is this the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles--or a war zone?

Visit Fred Croton, the 50-year-old general manager of the department whose personnel policies are now under investigation by order of the City Council, and he is so affable, so nice. He pulls his chair close to his guest, ready for questions. Coffee, soda perhaps? He seems disappointed when it’s just water.

Croton has suggested that the investigation is a “non-story,” at least until the Personnel Department issues its report. “From my point of view,” he said in his City Hall office overlooking downtown, “you have an employee of the department who wasn’t retained, who is now pursuing every opportunity he has to hang onto his job, or hang onto a job with the city. So he’s got a right to appeal . . . .”

The employee, 31-year-old Rod Sakai, who had worked nearly eight years for the city, was an art curator on a 240-day emergency appointment. He was dismissed March 18 with one day’s notice as his appointment was about to run out. He was directing the city’s murals program, the Bridge Gallery in the City Hall complex and the city’s municipal art collection. He has charged discrimination--both in an interview and city documents. He also has claimed that there has been arbitrary treatment of individual employees.

As part of the Personnel Department’s wide-ranging investigation of Croton’s personnel practices, all current and former full-time employees during his 4 1/2 years as general manager are being surveyed.

“I have no problem about it at all,” Croton said. “I look forward to its conclusion, and I’m sure it will be demonstrated we are OK in regard to our practices.” And if not, “we’ll fix it.”

Besides Sakai, the names of 10 current and former minority employees have been given to city investigators by Samuel J. Sperling, an affirmative-action representative of the City Employees Asian American Assn.

Croton, whose 50 or so full-time staff manages a dozen programs and centers ranging from “cultural heritage” to the Watts Towers Arts Center, denied any kind of discrimination and disputed the idea of widespread discontent.

“I think the department is going through changes, and that’s always bound to surprise people,” Croton said. “We’re going through a reorganization of a variety that’s going to allow for the department to be more responsive to more of the arts constituency in the city.

“I would like to create a matrix of responsiveness in this department. At present what we have are good programs and effective programs, but they are more responsive to who comes to the building as opposed to what’s going on around it.”

Croton wants the department to be responsive to shifting populations, such as that around Barnsdall Park where, he said, 20 languages are now spoken. “I’m setting up things so that we can (shift), and that causes some dislocations.”

When Croton’s hiring was announced on Dec. 8, 1980, he said that Mayor Tom Bradley had “made a leap of faith” based on a one-hour conversation. Croton outpaced Rod Punt, acting general manager of the department, and Peter Clothier, former dean of the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. Croton noted that by picking an outsider--he had been director of the Bronx (N.Y.) Council on the Arts--the mayor was selecting someone with “a fresh point of view.”

Within six months after coming on the job in January, 1981, however, Croton lost support of several division heads. Before he was granted Civil Service tenure, they wrote letters to Bradley recommending against retaining Croton.

“He came in like a bull in a china shop,” said one division head. “It’s a year’s probation (for general manager), and once you pass probation you’re in there for life . . . but the mayor at the time was running for governor and nothing happened.”

“I have been with the city a long time,” said a second division head, who brought the letters to the mayor’s office. “It has taken many, many years with a lot of dedicated people to build up what I think is one helluva department of fine people. I hated to see it destroyed, not only the department but the people involved. . . .

“I think the one thing all of us were upset about was his pompous attitude,” the division head added. “He would go about doing (things) not exactly secretly but with no communication. . . . He just went arbitrarily in his own way and did what he damn well pleased. This was no way to run a department. I took the letters to Anton Calleia (Bradley’s chief administrative assistant). I said, ‘Anton, use your own judgment. I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to show them to Mayor Bradley or not.’ I told him I didn’t want to make waves that might interfere with the mayor running for governor.”

Croton acknowledged that Bradley called him into his office toward the end of his first year, prior to his receiving Civil Service status. Croton said they talked about the general manager’s need to “mend fences.”

“Such a regurgitation of old stuff,” Croton said regarding that period of time. “I want to go forward.”

Croton says he is unaware of any letters written against him. Those who say they wrote letters contend he found out who wrote what. “There’s always talk about the letters. I don’t know that they existed. If they wrote letters,” he said with a smile, “let them send me copies.”

Calleia told The Times: “Those letters are in our files and the mayor did see them.”

Both Rod Sakai and his former supervisor, Glenna Boltuch, suggest that Sakai was given only one day’s notice because of Croton’s experience in the summer of 1982 with Boltuch, who now runs the department’s Photography Center.

At the time, she was an art instructor who had been directing the murals program for six years and was acting as director of the McGroarty Arts Center in Tujunga for 2 1/2 years on a so-called “in-lieu authority.”

Boltuch’s and Croton’s versions are diametrical opposites.

Boltuch’s account:

Croton fired her with three weeks’ notice. She was reinstated at the last minute, thanks to Councilman Howard Finn and Bradley. Those three weeks gave Boltuch, who did not have Civil Service protection, time to marshal her forces.

“He was giving me three weeks’ notice and I think he learned he didn’t have to,” Boltuch said. “I was his first real battle. Well, I wasn’t going to lie down and die, so I started a letter-writing campaign to the mayor, beginning with the kids we were working with doing murals at Watts Towers.” (Her campaign ended with a last-minute media event at the Lockwood School in Hollywood to inaugurate the painting of the city’s longest children’s mural. Then-Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson painted the first brush strokes, and Boltuch told her story on TV.)

“When Cultural Affairs came into existence in July, 1980, after about a year of lobbying,” Boltuch said, “it was something we all wanted. I, Rod Sakai, there was quite a group of younger people--we all felt that this was the way the arts would be taken seriously and flourish.”

Four months after Croton came on the job, Boltuch became disenchanted with his leadership. He hadn’t visited McGroarty and didn’t answer memos, she claimed. “I felt there was a real lack of support for the center’s program.”

In 1981, Boltuch, who has a master’s degree in art, was one of three finalists for the McGroarty directorship. Croton picked the top scorer, Audrey Davis, who holds that job today.

Boltuch believes that she didn’t get the appointment because of a memo implying that Croton was taking undue credit for the city’s “photographic bus-bench murals.”

“Four weeks after I wrote the memo,” Boltuch said, “Fred called me up and said I was fired. He said there was no budget for my murals position. It was July 9, 1982, a Friday afternoon at 5 o’clock. He said he was giving me three weeks’ notice.”

Croton’s account:

He never fired Boltuch. “That’s her version. There was a two-week interim period. This story is so old I can’t remember the details. They dredge up this stuff and then you ask me to respond to something that’s at least three years old. There was a two-week period where she was going to be out of work and then she was going to be back on the payroll . . . which has in effect happened.”

The Times has since obtained copies of two memos from Croton to Boltuch--as well as a letter from Councilman Finn to Bradley--which appear to corroborate her story: On July 9, 1982, “as a follow-up to our conversation of this date,” Croton wrote . . . “The in-lieu authority, under which you have been employed in your present position, expired as of July 1, 1982. It is my intention to continue you on the payroll until Aug. 2, 1982.”

On July 22, in a memo which “supersedes my last memo to you dated July 9, 1982,” he wrote: “We have been advised by the CAO (city administrator’s office) that your in-lieu authority has been extended from July 1, l982, to July 31, 1982. Therefore, your last day with the department will be July 31.”

Asked about these memos, Croton said: “You’re dealing with some very technical stuff when people go off the payroll and then go back on again. In effect, what occurred was she had a very short gap, if she had a gap at all.”

Her last workday would have been Friday, July 30. On July 26, Finn wrote Bradley: “The only valid excuse I have been given for the replacement of Glenna Boltuch is that it can be legally defended. Since the same can be said for the retention of Glenna--that it can be legally defended--I can see little else to judge except the merits of the case.

“Glenna’s work at McGroarty has been outstanding, profitable for the city and popular with the center’s users and supporters. That should count for something. . . . “

Apparently it did.

“Finn called me at home (the last morning of her scheduled employment),” Boltuch said. “He said he had just spoken with the mayor, and that the mayor was contacting Fred in New York. . . . “

Boltuch was returned to the murals program, and in October took over directorship of the Photography Center. At the start of 1983, she got Civil Service tenure.

Croton said: “The final facts are she never lost a day’s work. It’s like beating on something that has no life to it. All of it is technical bureaucratic terminology. . . . “

In the summer of 1983, Paul Senia, now assistant director of the Performing Arts Division of Cultural Affairs, won a job arbitration proceeding. Just before Croton came into the department, Senia had been named acting assistant director, a post he had held about three years. When Senia was not given the appointment by Croton, he went to his union.

“Mr. Croton decided that use of the official procedure was inappropriate, and inefficient,” the arbitrator stated, “and substituted his own interviews (for) the officially adopted procedure. To the surprise of most and contrary to their expection, Mr. Senia was not appointed. . . . “

After the arbitrator prohibited Croton “from appointing himself to serve on the interviewing panel,” another exam was given and Senia came out on top. Senia, who believes that Croton was “almost forced” to appoint him, recalls the general manager telling him, “Don’t forget it was I who picked you.”

That summer, Claire Isaacs, director of the Junior Arts Center in Barnsdall Park, left the Cultural Affairs Department to become director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission--a job comparable to Croton’s.

After Isaacs’ departure, two other top Junior Arts Center officials--Vincent Veggs, director of education (now education coordinator at the American Craft Museum in New York City), and Jim Volkert, the center’s curator (now running his own design consulting business)--left the department. In March, 1984, Tom Mathews, who had been Isaacs’ administrative assistant and later acting director, also left. All four officials had been with the city before Croton’s arrival.

“About time (there was an investigation),” said Mathews, now assistant director of the Palm Springs Desert Museum. “There was continual nonsupport and haranguing. When positions became vacant, he wouldn’t fill them. In every way he could, he forced out the people who were there when he got there. He would do it by removing all your financial support.

“He asked me to assume the position of acting director of the Junior Arts Center,” Mathews continued. “He promised he would try to get me additional pay by getting me an emergency appointment, which he never did. . . . It’s the perfect solution--he promises something, you get more and more angry, you’ve had enough, you leave. It was mental games; he’d tell you he would do something, he wouldn’t do it. . . . It’s ‘see what I can do’--and you never hear from him again. After I left, he filled the positions immediately. . . .

“He wants ‘yes’ people, he wants control, he doesn’t deal well with people who know more than he. . . . “

“Name-calling is the easiest last refuge,” Croton offered. “Go ask them, ask them out there, ask anyone (about me). And they all hear me yell. They yell back. Just ask them. . . .

“And what do we have there (at the Junior Arts Center) now? We have a gorgeously running operation. We hired the best director for that place that you might.”

In April, 1984, he hired Harriet Miller (who holds a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University, a master’s in education from Columbia University and master’s degrees in painting and sculpture from the University of Wisconsin).

Croton readily acknowledged that he didn’t fill the positions that Mathews had wanted.

“I hire a director, Harriet Miller, and I say to her, ‘You’ve got the opportunity that everyone is looking for,’ that everyone (wants) and I wish I had, to fill a staff. Not filling a position had to do with me wanting to give the new director the opportunity to hire her own people. It’s a glorious thing.”

That ability, or inability, of an incoming executive to hire his own people--in a city agency where civil servants, but not exempt personnel, have tenure--could be at the heart of this personnel issue.

It appears that the principal employees in trouble--or troubled--have been pre-Croton personnel:

--Ileana (Sanchez) Welch, former cultural heritage coordinator, has been with the city since 1962. On July 26, she left to become executive secretary to newly elected Councilman Michael Woo.

Welch, 57, headed the cultural heritage section when Croton took over. She said that “problems with him started when he perceived that I was responsible for cultural heritage board members looking to move to the Planning Department. And that was not true at all.” She also blames Croton for the departure of her secretary, who was unable to obtain a higher classification.

“I have the feeling he would like to bring someone else in on his own,” she said before she got the job with Woo. “I am Civil Service; maybe he thinks I’m ready to retire. . . . Every single phone call that comes in I have to take--anything from a fourth-grade student collecting information for a homework assignment to a high-powered attorney for a big developer. My ears hurt at times. I’m dying to go anywhere. I am willing to go for a lower salary.”

Asked about an employee so unhappy that she’d be willing to take a lower-paying or lower-rank position, Croton responded:

“Wait a minute. She took a test to become an executive secretary to get an increase in pay. Whatever it is, she took a test for a promotion , to promote out of the department. We attempted to get that kind of promotion for her here, and we failed. This is kind of sad, to be couched in those kind of terms, that I am some kind of oppressor.”

In taking the job with Woo, Welch took a $20-a-week pay cut, although eventually she expects to earn $40 a week more than she did as cultural heritage coordinator. “I think it should be obvious I didn’t leave for higher pay,” she said recently. “I was terribly unhappy there.”

--George Milan, director of the department’s Performing Arts Division, who will have been with the city 35 years in October, hasn’t had a secretary for the last 3 1/2 years, although he had one for 20 years before that. He is about to get a clerk-typist but still feels that he needs someone to take dictation. “They’re trying awfully hard to force me to retire. They’re harassing the hell out of me by my having to do a lot of unnecessary reports, and I have to do my own typing to make up one report after another.”

“If that (the secretary) is all he’s unhappy about, we’ve fixed it,” Croton said. “Nobody does steno anymore; there’s a lot of arcana here.”

--Lena Brewer, a principal clerk for 18 years (with the city for 38 years), maintains that Croton wrote one of the two principal clerk’s positions out of the budget less than two months after they clashed over the meaning of a city regulation. As boss, Croton prevailed, but Brewer believes that he exacted tribute. She feels she has become “a taboo person” and that he is forcing her to retire. Brewer, who will be 70 in November, said that perhaps she would have retired anyway, but believes Croton left her “without any option.”

“There are two principal clerks. Both of us are black and female,” Brewer said, “and in this budget he has deleted one of the positions. The point is that I have seniority and if I don’t retire, that means the layoff of the other girl. I’m married, I have a home, I am well-fixed, but she is single and 60. . . . This puts sort of a moral obligation on me (to retire).”

While waiting for Brewer to retire, the second clerk was given a substitute in-lieu position.

Meanwhile, Croton said he “can’t imagine” what the clash could have been about, adding that Brewer has “been talking about retiring for the last five years . . . every day that I’ve been here, honestly. . . . So this is not about Lena Brewer; this is about a management decision in reference to making these 50 people more responsive to the city’s arts community. And let me tell you, you can’t do it with 50 people very well. . . . “Look, this is a department where 100 things are going on at once,” Fred Croton summed up. “And if all we’re doing is accentuating the negative through some comments people are making. . . .

“I’ve got to go over and take some people to lunch. . . . We’re closing a show of 48 artists downtown, 30,000 square feet of space. Across the street from the Temporary Contemporary we revived an old print shop. ‘Off the Street’ (a panoramic survey of the work of downtown artists)--that’s what we’re about.

“We’re not about a lot of people backbiting and arguing and debating and the like. We’re about making art in the city”--he paused, allowing the sunniest of grins to play across his face--”I hope.”