‘The buck stops right on my desk.’ ---- Ernie Schneider : New Director to Run EMA With Hands-on Approach

The last 12 months have been very good to Ernie Schneider. He finished his first marathon run, survived the running, bicycling and swimming for a triathlon and bench-pressed 300 pounds.

Then came the professional accomplishment, as he surged past 120 applicants and seven other finalists to be chosen Dec. 3 as director of the powerful Orange County Environmental Management Agency.

Not bad for a man who arrived in New York on Columbus Day of 1952, 2 1/2 months shy of his sixth birthday, as a refugee from war-ravaged West Germany and Austria, knowing not a word of English.

Now comes the hard part.

Although Schneider, 39, once worked for the Environmental Management Agency, he has been away from it since 1981, serving as an aide to Supervisor Bruce Nestande. Four of the finalists he beat out for the EMA job are assistant directors of the agency, men he must now supervise.

“I need these people,” he said in a recent interview. “I want their help, and I expect their help.”

EMA is the principal planning agency for unincorporated areas of the county and carries considerable clout, particularly in southern Orange County, where there still are large chunks of open space. It is one of the most powerful departments in county government, with 1,200 employees who also handle parks, harbors and beaches, planning for new freeways, and public works facilities.

One ranking county official said the Board of Supervisors chose Schneider with the idea that “the role of EMA director is going to be stronger in running the agency.”

The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said Murray I. Storm, the second director of the agency and the man Schneider will succeed, was “a delegator who had confidence in his assistants to get things done. But it left loose ends, and when it came to a tie (between divisions within the agency) no one seemed to be able to break a deadlock.”

The agency must be run with “the realization that there aren’t four or five fiefdoms that are without central organization authority or control from above those fiefdoms,” the official said.

For Schneider to leapfrog over his four older rivals, all of whom have had years of experience in EMA, was “like buying a young ballplayer and letting the 40-year-old with the bad knees go,” the official said. “You’re betting on the pennant in future years.”

Schneider, who brims with self-confidence and charges at projects with a full-speed-ahead manner, said that, as a manager, “I believe in delegating, too, but I also believe in retaining control. As far as I’m concerned, the buck stops right at my desk on this deal. Everybody has a different style, and I plan on retaining control.”

Besides imposing control on his agency, the EMA director must walk the line between developers and environmentalists.

Philip Bettencourt, a past executive director of the Orange County branch of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California and a real estate consultant, praised Storm at the time his resignation was announced in August, but noted that some developers were upset with the agency.

‘Lack of Urgency’

Some developers, Bettencourt said, had complained that EMA showed “a lack of urgency” in processing their plans for new buildings. The complaints involved “sometimes just the lack of responsiveness within the agency to individual problems,” he said.

His and other comments prompted the four assistant directors to complain that the remarks “have damaged staff morale and undermined the efforts and achievements of the past six years,” the period of Storm’s directorship.

Opposing the developers are environmental groups, upset about the bulldozing of hillsides for homes and disruption of the dwindling habitat for birds and wildlife. Their ranks are bolstered by residents of existing communities, who, when new developments are proposed nearby, become alarmed at the threat of increased traffic and encroachment on their semi-rural way of life.

Schneider agrees with other officials and developers that the key problem in the county is traffic. Jammed freeways and local roads, already snarled with tie-ups that seem to grow longer each day, will only get more crowded with future development.

Al Baldwin, president of the Baldwin Co., whose developments include a new group of condominiums and single-family homes on El Toro Road in unincorporated county territory, predicted that Schneider’s main challenge will be shepherding construction of three new freeways planned in the county.

Priority Outlined

“I think the challenge is to see they stay on stream and build the (freeway) corridors,” Baldwin said. Transportation is “the No. 1 priority.”

“You’ve got to maintain the fair-priced and affordable housing for people, and at the same time you’ve got to give them the infrastructure,” Baldwin said.

“People ask, ‘Can we slow down the traffic?’ You can’t slow it down; it’s here already. We’ve got to plan for it, and I think that’s probably (Schneider’s) main challenge. . . . They (the county supervisors) have established the Foothill Corridor fee program, they’ve got millions of dollars collected already. I think his challenge is seeing the funds are utilized and they start building it.”

Schneider knows the traffic problems firsthand. To avoid them, he leaves the Capistrano Beach home where he has lived since 1973 not long after 6 a.m. most mornings to get to his office in the county Hall of Administration in Santa Ana.

Schneider agrees that traffic is terrible and new freeways are needed, but he does not believe it will be a swift or easy process.

Long Delay Foreseen

“Just to do the federal environmental documentation (on the transportation corridors), estimates from staff (are) that it could take as much as four years from when you start, and we’ve just gotten going.”

Another problem facing him is housing.

The population is growing quickly, Schneider said, and a lot of the growth is internal.

“Demographics say 30% (of the county’s population) is under 18. What does that tell you? It tells you you’ve got a lot of people who want to move up, move out, get a home of their own.”

EMA was formed in 1975 from a collection of departments that dealt with roads, flood control, harbors, beaches and parks, housing and other matters.

Now, Schneider said, “the easy things have all been done--all that’s left are the hard jobs.”

“We used to have a lot more money available to us to do whatever we wanted to do--park acquisition, road construction, building capital projects that the county needs,” he said.

‘Scratching for Money’

But with tax-cutting initiatives and a dominant mood of fiscal conservatism, “we’re scratching for money. . . . The cost of asphalt has risen almost 300% over the last few years. These costs go astronomically sky high and our revenue stream stays about the same, or up a little. . . . It all goes back to money. There just isn’t enough money to do all the things that need to be done.”

Storm, who in 1980 became the second EMA director after a county career that began in 1957 as a solid waste engineer, said Schneider’s job will be to help supervisors “ensure a reasonable balance . . . between providing for the commercial, industrial and residential uses . . . (and) sensitivity to the environment.”

Storm said the county also must “recognize its social conscience” and provide housing for low-income people, looking for new sources of money to do so if federal budgets continue to be tight.

EMA has an existing housing program aimed at “service to low-income people of our county,” Storm said. “You and I know there are plenty of them in our county. . . . The outside world thinks we all live in Newport Beach.” In fact, he said, the county has 14 target communities where annual income is below the median county level.

Schneider, who will be paid $80,000 a year as the third EMA director, is a protege of the agency’s first director, H. George Osborne.

Fullerton Graduate

Schneider received a bachelor’s degree from Cal State Fullerton in 1971 and went to work as a systems analyst for one of the departments that eventually was folded into the EMA. He picked up a master’s degree in public administration from Cal State Fullerton and worked as Osborne’s executive assistant while EMA was being formed.

In 1981, after a year of travel through Europe and the United States, he joined Nestande’s staff, specializing in land-use issues and later becoming Nestande’s chief aide.

Schneider is known to his fellow county workers as a fitness fanatic, running at least four times a week, lifting weights, playing handball competitively and spending most of his lunch hours at the YMCA in Santa Ana.

He came to Orange County in 1960 as a teen-ager. His father, a professional soccer player who was studying to be a veterinarian in prewar Germany, was drafted into the army, fought in the North African tank campaigns and was captured and held as a prisoner of war in England.

Soon after Schneider’s birth, not far from Frankfurt, the family moved to Vienna. In immigrant style, his father came to the United States, saved his money, then sent for his wife. He saved more money and they sent for their son.

Schneider said he arrived in 1952 knowing “not a word” of English. “My first words were ‘stop it’ because I was getting beat up every day.”

The family moved to Los Angeles in 1956, and then to Orange County.

“I thought I was in paradise,” he said, recalling his arrival in Garden Grove. “After the streets of New York and the streets of L.A., this was paradise.”