Super Agency Chief Storm Resigns, Cites Friction With CAO

The director of the Environmental Management Agency, one of the most powerful departments in county government, announced Monday that he is resigning because of friction with the county’s chief administrative officer.

Murray I. Storm, who began working for the county nearly 30 years ago as a solid waste engineer, said in a letter to the Orange County Board of Supervisors that in recent months “I have come cross-wise with our CAO.”

“When key advisers don’t get along,” he wrote, “it isn’t the No. 1 that leaves--it’s the other guy.”

Officials ‘Flabbergasted’

Top county officials, including supervisors and Chief Administrative Officer Larry Parrish, were uniformly “flabbergasted” by the sudden resignation of the 61-year-old EMA chief, who was a top runner-up among nine finalists for the CAO position last year.

But it follows more than a year of escalating tensions between the two men that knowledgeable sources say date back to Parrish’s first encounter with Storm in a closed-door session with selected county department heads.

During that meeting, held to discuss what each expected of Parrish and what he expected of them, Storm--who like other agency heads answers directly to the supervisors--told the board’s new chief adviser, “You leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone,” according to one official who was present.

Storm, who receives $90,251 a year, said in an interview Monday that he admired “just about everything” Parrish has done since coming to Orange County more than a year ago.

But Storm said he was unable to persuade Parrish “that the agency wanted to be a team player” in county government.

“I have to take the responsibility for that,” Storm said.

Storm, who has been EMA chief since 1980, declined to cite specific disagreements with Parrish, the top-paid county government official with a salary of $99,000 a year.

“I think probably Larry is the best one to tell you that,” he said.

He said there was “just a basic discomfort that I could see developing.” The situation would worsen if he stayed, he said, so he resigned to give his successor “a better opportunity to improve the relationship.”

Storm said he believed that Parrish felt the EMA was “perhaps more independent than (it) should be.”

“It was my failing that I just wasn’t able to convince him that wasn’t so,” he said.

Parrish said Storm’s action “caught me by surprise” but agreed that he felt the agency tended to act independently and did not keep the CAO, and sometimes the Board of Supervisors, informed of its actions.

Last of Super Agencies

Formed in 1974, EMA was one of the last of the so-called super agencies to be created by consolidating county departments. The agency operates the county road fund, flood control channels, the harbors, beaches and parks districts and housing and community development programs in unincorporated areas of the county. It plays a key role in planning and development decisions and has regulatory responsibilities, including enforcement of environmental rules.

It has enormous clout in the undeveloped parts of the county, most of them in southern Orange County. It provides many of the services for unincorporated communities that city governments do for their residents and oversees the activities of developers building housing tracts on vacant land.

Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose south county coastal district includes large areas of unincorporated territory, said he was “very disappointed, very shocked,” by Storm’s resignation. “I wish he’d come around and seen a few of us” to discuss his problems before acting, Riley said.

“He has had an environmental interest,” Riley said of Storm. “I felt his management style of his personnel was very good. I felt his response to the board at public hearings was very forthright.”

Supervisor Bruce Nestande, who also represents a southeastern district with large unincorporated areas where the EMA is active, said Storm has always “dealt fairly with the issues” and subjected proposals from developers and supervisors to the scrutiny they deserved.

Lot of Pressure

Being EMA director “is a very tough job, there’s a lot of pressure,” Nestande said. “I think he’s done a very fine job, and I think he’ll be hard to replace.”

Storm received a highly favorable performance evaluation from supervisors last month and a 2.5% raise, leading some officials to speculate that a controversial statewide initiative on the November ballot that seeks to limit government employee salaries and pensions may be behind the resignation.

But Storm said the initiative sponsored by Paul Gann played no role “whatsoever” in his decision. “I decided if I was going to go, this was the time to make it clear that any further discord would just be a disservice to the county,” he said. “The people in my agency didn’t deserve the kind of erosion.”

‘A Mattter of Health’

Storm joked that his retirement was “a matter of health--I want to retire while I’ve got it.” He said he hoped to help the supervisors pick his successor and noted there were “very well qualified” people already working for EMA.

Storm was one of four assistant directors of the agency when he was named to succeed its first director, H. George Osborne, in 1980. A Brooklyn, N.Y., native who settled in California after World War II and received a civil engineering degree from USC, Storm worked for the state agency that eventually became the Department of Transportation before joining Orange County in 1957.

Storm, whose artist wife, Mary, runs her own gallery in Laguna Beach, tendered a 90-day notice. With pending vacation time, he will not officially leave the agency until the beginning of next year.

Times staff writer Kristina Lindgren contributed to this story.