Housing Commission Ousts Montijo : Council Must Also Agree; Vote Will Be Today
Citing damaged leadership and a “breach” in communication, the San Diego Housing Commission voted 4-3 Thursday against renewing the contract of its embattled executive director, Ben Montijo.
The vote, which must be ratified today by the City Council, came after Montijo, plainly under pressure, offered a lengthy and sometimes rambling public defense of his performance and the way his staff handled the Island Gardens Apartments deal. That transaction had raised questions of irregularities and “extraordinary assistance” to the developers of the project.
Normally such personnel matters are discussed behind closed doors, but Montijo exercised an option in state law to have his case heard openly, before reporters and a crowd of his supporters. A spokesman said Montijo will repeat his defense today when the council, sitting as the Housing Authority, holds an emergency meeting to make the final decision on his fate.
“I want to appeal to you not to do what sounds to me like a way of saying, ‘Well, we’re not going to renew this contract for no reason at all, we’re just not going to do it,’ ” Montijo said Thursday to the seven commissioners, five of whom are City Council members.
“That is not fair, that’s not constitutional, that’s not moral, that’s not right,” he said. “I have worked as hard as anyone else, probably harder, to contribute a lot to this community. And whether somebody is a police chief or a city manager, whatever, a housing director ought to get the same level of respect and dignity that any public servant ought to have. And I’m appealing to you to be fair in that area.”
But Councilwoman Judy McCarty, who made the motion to let Montijo go, said the issue of whether to keep the executive director had moved “beyond a point of fairness.”
“It is a question of can Mr. Montijo effectively lead the housing program for the City of San Diego? I regretfully have to say no,” she said.
Councilwoman Celia Ballesteros, who also voted to oust Montijo, said there was a communications gap between Montijo and his bosses, and she said an internal investigation of the Island Gardens deal showed that the independent-minded executive director and his staff were engaging in transactions without fully informing commissioners.
“It’s a matter of management’s ability to work together” with the commissioners, Ballesteros said. “And I think once there has been a breach so severe--and it is certainly very obvious to us, obvious to me and obvious to the rest of the community that the breach is so severe--it cannot be healed again.”
Joining with McCarty and Ballesteros in voting to dump Montijo were Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer and Mayor Maureen O’Connor. Those voting to keep Montijo were Councilwoman Gloria McColl and the two tenant representatives on the commission, Ivary Williams and Carl Winsjansen. Whether the commission’s vote will be upheld today by the council is still open to speculation. O’Connor called the emergency meeting because, if Montijo is to be let go, he must be officially notified by Saturday or his contract automatically renews.
A council majority--or five votes--is needed to remove Montijo. Three council members--Mike Gotch, William Jones and Bill Cleator--will be missing for today’s meeting. So it appears that O’Connor, who chairs the Housing Commission and has been leading the drive to oust Montijo, will have to depend on potential mayoral challenger Ed Struiksma to give her the necessary fifth vote.
Struiksma, through an aide, declined comment Thursday on which way he might vote.
Dogged by persistent controversy in recent months, Montijo found his job on the line Thursday after The Times, in a story last month, revealed that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is investigating the Island Gardens deal for improprieties and possible criminal wrongdoing. A HUD official once wrote to the Housing Commission and warned that the deal appeared to display “favoritism” to the developers, a partnership that includes state Coastal Commissioner Gil Contreras.
The Times investigation of the transaction, in which the commission helped developers purchase and renovate the 122-unit project under a federal rehabilitation program, revealed that Montijo and his staff violated federal regulations by failing to properly advertise the availability of the program to other property owners. It also revealed that Contreras hired Montijo’s teen-age son to work briefly on the project for $600 a week--an arrangement that Montijo denied posed a conflict of interest.
Spurred by the revelations, commissioners initiated their own investigation of the deal, and the agency’s attorney reported last week that Montijo and his staff committed several irregularities and gave “extraordinary assistance” to the Island Gardens developers.
The attorney concluded that there was no favoritism in the project, but pointed out such problems as Montijo’s failure to seek final and binding approval from commissioners to buy and hold the property for the developers, to give the partnership a $700,000 loan, and to back the project with $1.3 million in commission letters of credit. The findings prompted O’Connor to call Thursday’s meeting.
When opening the meeting, O’Connor emphasized that Montijo’s contract allows the commission to let him go “without cause” if it gives him 60 days’ notice before the contract automatically renews on April 30. No finding of wrongdoing by Montijo is necessary, commission counsel Larry L. Marshall said.
O’Connor also told her commission colleagues that she had received a letter from HUD officials in Los Angeles saying they were holding up rehabilitation program funds until the Island Gardens issue is resolved. The letter is dated Feb. 24 and is signed by HUD area manager Benjamin Bobo.
Yet during his nearly two-hour monologue, Montijo disputed Bobo’s authority to hold up the allocation and branded the letter “stupid.” Montijo said he believed that HUD headquarters in Washington would let the allocation go through.
Sitting beside his attorney, Shirlyn P. Daddario, Montijo defended the Island Gardens deal by saying renovation of the 122-unit complex removed a blight.
“Single-parent women would walk to the mailboxes and stand there with a Crip gang member with his cigarette lighter, holding her check saying, ‘Give me 10 bucks or you don’t get your check,’ ” he said. “She knows how much trouble it is getting that check reissued. There was a lot of gang activity. A lot of drug activity.
“The units were dilapidated. We targeted that effort. There wasn’t any favoritism.”
Montijo also tried to refute the findings of irregularities in the deal, often pausing to shuffle through a stack of papers and files in front of him. At one point, he argued that the commission indeed gave him final and binding authority to proceed with the Island Gardens deal, and at another point he argued that it was the commission attorney’s fault if the approval was not given.
During his speech, Montijo objected when the commission’s attorney asked a question, and he complained about the distraction of newspaper and television cameramen taking his picture. On several occasions, he stopped his defense and muttered to himself about where he had placed papers he wanted to refer to.
He invoked the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which deals with citizenship rights, and asked the commissioners not to use a contract provision to behave like “Pontius Pilate” and wash their hands of him. He likened his management team to a football team that keeps blocking and scoring touchdowns despite the critics’ boos from the sidelines.
Montijo also said that, as the agency’s first and only executive director, he felt “like a mother who has given birth to a child. That’s not just another organization. I care very deeply about the Housing Commission.”
Then, his voice cracking with emotion, he pleaded with commissioners to keep him on.
“It’s my community, too, and I want to contribute to it, and I care very deeply about the community,” he said.
“I grew up with a poor family, migrant farm workers. I know what shanties are like, I know what affordable housing is when it can’t be found. I know what it’s like to feel homeless, to sleep in the back of a pickup, to sleep on the ground. And my career started in the 1960s, doing housing, self-help housing, for migrant farm workers.
“I care very deeply about the families, the elderly, the homeless, the low-income and I’m interested in contributing to my community, to those people, and continue to provide leadership to the housing commission.”
McColl, citing Montijo’s past record for building housing, said she could not vote against the executive director because the current controversy is still “cloudy” and she wanted to learn more about Bobo’s letter.
But the majority turned deaf ears to Montijo. One of those, Abbe Wolfsheimer, said after the meeting that Montijo looked “stressful” during his speech, and that at one point she thought he was going to “abandon the presentation and leave.”
Wolfsheimer said Montijo’s speech convinced her there was a credibility problem with the executive director.
“We went in with a credibility gap and I think it widened as the proceedings went on,” Wolfsheimer said.
Montijo was clearly surprised during the meeting that O’Connor was able under the law to call the special council meeting today with only 24 hours notice. Gambling on a procedural maneuver to save his job, Montijo said he had figured that it would take at least 72 hours to call the meeting--thus putting the final vote on his contract past the deadline when it automatically renews.
O’Connor was able to call the meeting in such a short time by getting every council member to agree to the emergency circumstances.
